This movie is available from www.amazon.com

Rating:

5.5

AKA: The Young Bruce Lee, The Ultimate Lee, Bruce Lee: The Little Dragon

Year of release: 1979

Genre: documentary/clips

Director: Jim Markovic

Producers: Serafim Karalexis, Dick Randall

Stars: Bruce Lee, Bruce Li, Dragon Lee

Not rated; contains PG13-level violence

DVD Information

Company: Movie Classics

Format: widescreen

Languages: English

Subtitles: none

Extras: none

Notes: I got this DVD at the 99 cent store, which is about what it's worth. Horrible picture and sound quality - but hey, you also get a double feature of A Real American Hero, a crappy Brian Dennehy movie from the 70's.

Movie Review Index / Main Page

The Real Bruce Lee

The Real Bruce Lee is a bit of an oddity, even in the strange world of "Bruceploitation" movies. The first segment is a documentary about the early portion of Bruce Lee's career before he hit it big with The Big Boss. The highlight of this section is a selection of clips from four of Lee's earliest roles (Kid Cheung, The Bad Boy, Carnival and Orphan Sam). Since many Bruce Lee fans have not had the opportunity to see Lee's pre-Big Boss work, the clips are a hidden gem in the world of ultra-cheap DVDs - it's quite clear that even at an early age, Lee displayed the stoic charisma which would become his trademark in his "mature" period. Unfortunately, the film clips are not in very good shape at all, and for some unfathomable reason, they're also (very badly) dubbed in. Still, the first thirty minutes or so will hold the interest of most any Bruce Lee aficionado.

The "documentary" then skips all of Lee's major films. You might assume this is because the producers couldn't get the rights to any of the footage, but seeing as how Lee's movies are some of the most common in the "grey market", this argument just doesn't fly. At any rate, at this point, The Real Bruce Lee becomes a showcase of two of the Bruce Lee imitators who were under contract to producer Serafim Karalexis, Bruce Li (James Ho) and Dragon Lee (Gui Lung). Li's footage consists of a series of "homages" to Lee's The Big Boss, Fist of Fury and his role as Kato in the Green Hornet TV series. The action in these segments is alright, but the horrible production values (even when compared to Lee's originals, which were made on shoestring budgets to begin with) mar any sense of seriousness that one might expect from fight scenes in the tradition of Bruce Lee.

The Real Bruce Lee wraps up with its' focus on Dragon Lee. It is pretty obivous from the narration that this was an attempt by Karalexis to sell Dragon to foreign distributors, and so it makes sense that the footage here comprises the bulk of the film. Dragon's section is actually a edited version of Last Fist of Fury (aka The Ultimate Lee), and so if you've seen Fist of Fury or the myriad of ripoffs/homages/remakes, you know the basic plot. Some nasty Japanese kill a school's sifu, and the star pupil sets out for revenge. The edited version presented here cuts out any exposition (which is probably a good thing, considering the quality of the dubbing) and goes right to the fights. Dragon shows off some decent skills, but again things are marred by cheap filming techniques. Not only that, there are also some lame attempts at comedy and a strange synthsizer-based score, both of which feel out of place.

Even though The Real Bruce Lee is just about as cheap and exploitative as you can get with these types of Bruce Lee "homages", the clips from his early work are enough in my mind to at least warrant a viewing. But if you're not a huge Bruce Lee fan, you're probably better off letting this sit at the bottom of the bargain bin. There were dozens and dozens of "Bruceploitation" movies released, and most of them were just plain lousy. The footage here from Bruce Li and Dragon Lee doesn't do much to change that perception.