| All of a sudden Bruce Li, Bruce Le and Dragon Lee don't look so bad. As a matter of fact, those guys are all Oscar nominees when compared to this shit-smelly film called "Fist of Fear, Touch of Death". Basically, the film is set like a news-documentary being filmed during "The Madison Square Garden World Karate Championships". Adolph Caesar (who actually is a decent actor, only God knows what he's doing in here!) is the anchor man who does a number of interviews asking the question "How do you think Bruce Lee died?". The people he interviews include: Aaron Banks (who states that "Bruce Lee was murdered by the Touch of Death or Vibrating Palm"), Ron Van Clief (the only guy in the movie that says something true and smart: "Bruce Lee is the prototype, everything else is an imitation"), and Fred Williamson (who has no point to be in this film at all. They probably just threw him in because the 70's were over, and all the Blaxploitation film stars were getting turned down by Burger King for a job).
Other portions of the film include clips of the real Bruce Lee from early film roles that were re-dubbed to make it look like his life story. Scenes with Bruce from "Longstreet" were turned into black and white, and were also re-dubbed to make it look like Adolph Caesar was interviewing Bruce. The funny thing is, they kept on dubbing in the word "karate", a word Bruce would never use to explain his own style. At one point of the film, Adolph Caesar says "here is a scene from one of Bruce Lee's films...", then, instead of a clip of Bruce, they show a couple seconds of some unknown Chinese guy jumping off a pagoda!
The rest of the film explains that Bruce Lee's great grandfather was "One of China's greatest master samurai swordsman" (First of all, there were no Samurai in China, second of all, I'm pretty sure Bruce Lee's great grandfather wasn't a samurai). They use clips of some forgotten, boring, draggy, kung-fu flick to tell his "grandfather's" story. The film also tries to showcase Bill Louie as the "new Bruce Lee" by dressing him up like Kato in an action sequence where he saves some chicks from a bunch of thugs. Bill Louie doesn't even bother to shave his mustache off. |
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