They Call Me Bruce?
(aka A Fistful of Chopsticks)
1982; directed by Elliot Hong

Though it's not going to win any awards for originality, and the characters are more than a little politcally incorrect, They Call Me Bruce? is a fairly fun take on the Brucepolitation genre, at least if you dig some ultra-thick 1980's cheese. Oh, what a feeling.

If that phrase doesn't ring a bell, then most of the jokes presented here will probably fall flat. From Miller Lite commercial parodies to an assassin who rails against Jell-O Pudding Pops, the humor in They Call Me Bruce? is definitely deeply steeped in early 1980's US pop culture, to the point that if you're under thirty, you're probably going to be wondering what the hell some of the characters are talking about.

Even so, lead actor Johnny Yune's deadpan delivery of lines like "I'm a sex object -- when I ask women for sex, they object" makes the jokes much funnier than they have any right to be. If you are easily offended, though, the racial stereotypes presnted here are going to throw you into a tizzy. This is the sort of movie where a Chinese man has to use a jive dictionary to talk to a black man, and does so without any hint of irony.

As disjointed, offbeat, and dated as They Call Me Bruce? is, it still holds up well enough to still be worth a viewing. There is something refreshing about comedies from this period, where studios weren't afraid to release R rated pictures, to the point that many productions added in gratuitous nudity and drug use just to garner the harder rarting. Though it was in most cases a cheap ploy to get teenage kids into the seats, at least it's a better marketing gimmick than shoehorning in whatever Radio Disney kiddie-pop star the studios want to ram down the audience's throat nowadays.

RATING: 6