Bruce Lee imitators (Bruceploitation)

[GeneChing]

Danny Chan Kwok-kwan in The Legend of Bruce Lee (2008)



Even before he officially took the role of Bruce Lee in this CCTV TV series, Danny Chan was already known as someone who resembled the icon. This was thanks to his turn as Empty Hands, the lightning fast goalkeeper dressed in Lee’s signature yellow and black tracksuit in Stephen Chow’s 2001 hit Shaolin Soccer.
Seven years later, Chan took up the mantle officially. The Legend of Bruce Lee was a 50-episode affair that followed Lee from his early life until his untimely passing. Chan’s acting and likeness seems to have impressed members of the real man’s family (Shannon Lee helped produce The Legend of Bruce Lee) as he reprised the role in Ip Man 3 and the forthcoming Ip Man 4, set to be released in Hong Kong this December.

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[GeneChing]

Jason Scott Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993)



Born in Hawaii, Jason Scott Lee (no relation) played Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, the first Hollywood biopic about the man’s life. Although certain aspects of the film are fictitious – there was no fight on the set of The Big Boss, for instance – the movie received the blessing of Lee’s widow, Linda Lee.
Why Hong Kong star JuJu Chan gets a kick from Bruce Lee
Scott Lee prepared for the film in the best way possible – he learned jeet kune do, the martial art founded by Lee, under the tutelage of one of the master’s original students, Jerry Poteet. Scott Lee eventually became a certified jeet kune do instructor and continues to practise to this day.

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[GeneChing]

Danny Lee Sau-yin in Bruce Lee and I (1976)



Probably best known for starring opposite Chow Yun-fat in John Woo’s 1989 action classic The Killer, Danny Lee (again, no relation) portrayed Bruce Lee in one of the more sleazy productions based on the actor’s life. The film stars Betty Ting Pei as herself, a woman widely rumoured to have been Lee’s lover – a rumour the film presents as fact.
Given the extramarital nature of this relationship, this cannot count as one of the more positive portrayals of Lee. There are plenty of other salacious aspects as the film features significant nudity. Danny Lee does his best, though, and gives a fairly convincing portrayal despite not bearing a strong physical resemblance to Bruce.

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[GeneChing]

Bruce Li in Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth (1976)



Born Ho Chung-tao, Taiwanese actor Bruce Li made a career out of playing the real deal in films such as Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death, Super Dragon and The Dragon Lives. The most successful of Li’s biopics was Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth. The film had a decent budget, to the extent that it was able to shoot on location in Hong Kong, America, Korea and Rome (site of Lee’s showdown with Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon) and was directed by Ng See-yuen who would produce Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, helping to launch the careers of both Yuen Woo-ping and Jackie Chan.
Li retired from acting at the age of 40, disappointed that he had been pigeonholed into being a Bruce Lee imitator, reportedly saying in one interview, “I could act like him but I could never be him”.

I think this was in 'honor' of his birthday last week...

They missed Leung Siulung, who was also pigeon-holed as a Brucesploitation imitator. I mention him because he's profiled in our latest issue, the WINTER 2020 in an article I did: From Bruce to the Beast and Beyond

[GeneChing]

From Bruce to the Beast and Beyond
By Gene Ching



WINTER 2020

THREADS
Kung Fu Hustle
Bruce Lee imitators

[GeneChing]

THREADS
Winter 2020
Kung Fu Hustle
Bruce Lee imitators

[GeneChing]

Bruce Le, Bruce Li, Bruce Lei – ‘Bruceploitation’ martial arts actors tracked down for documentary about how they imitated Bruce Lee after his death

Film producers cashed in on Bruce Lee’s fame after his death, releasing dozens of low-budget kung fu films with lookalike actors like Dragon Lee and Bruce Li

David Gregory, who started filming his documentary Enter the Clones of Bruce in 2016, talks about making the film and getting the fake Bruce Lees to take part

James Marsh

Published: 4:15am, 28 Jun, 2023


After the death of Bruce Lee (above in a still from “Enter the Dragon”), film studios started cashing in on his fame, releasing low-budget kung fu films starring lookalike actors with similar names. Photo: TNS

As the 50th anniversary of martial arts icon Bruce Lee’s death approaches, a new documentary investigates a bizarre phenomenon that erupted in the wake of the Little Dragon’s untimely passing.
Enter the Clones of Bruce, directed by documentarian and film preservationist David Gregory, charts the wave of low-budget kung fu films that emerged from Hong Kong almost immediately after Lee’s death, starring a slew of imitators in a subgenre known as Bruceploitation.
At the time of his death, on July 20, 1973, Lee had completed just four martial arts films. The last of these, the US-Hong Kong co-production Enter the Dragon, would be released a month later and became a smash hit around the world.
The film cemented Lee’s status as the face of the genre, and created an unprecedented explosion of interest in kung fu cinema.
Now this new-found global audience demanded more, and as producers went in search of the next Bruce Lee, their less than scrupulous contemporaries took a faster and cheaper path: as-yet-unestablished martial artists were dressed up to look like Lee, and rechristened Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Dragon Lee, or Bruce Liang in titles that deliberately evoked Lee’s earlier hits.
While Lee’s family and Golden Harvest – the studio that made him a star – could do little more than stand idly by, a torrent of films were rushed into theatres.

Bruce Li in a promotional image for the film “Fist of Fury II” (1977).
Some attempted to process Lee’s death, others told heavily fictionalised biographies, often relocating the actor’s San Francisco birth to China. Some brought him back from the dead, while others merely dressed their stars to resemble the iconic leading man.
To this day, barely a year goes by without a character somewhere appearing in a yellow jumpsuit or emitting Lee’s signature shriek as he thumbs his nose.
That none of these cash grabs matched the quality of Lee’s cinematic canon goes without saying, and most have been forgotten in the decades since their brief release.

Bruce Le in a still from “Enter the Clones of Bruce”.
What Gregory’s film attempts to do, however, is reappraise these works, document the different ways they capitalised on Lee’s legend, and find value in them today. Crucially, the film also features candid, sometimes emotional conversations with the actors themselves, and how their time emulating – or ripping off – Bruce Lee has affected their lives.
Convincing Lee’s on-screen clones to participate wasn’t always an easy task, and required a good deal of persuasion from Gregory and his fellow producers, expert on Hong Kong cinema Frank Djeng, and Michael Worth, author of The Bruceploitation Bible.
Gregory spoke to the Post in an interview earlier this month about his labour of love, which he began filming in 2016.
“What took so long was that I was holding out for Bruce Le,” Gregory says, referring to Burmese-born martial artist Wong Kin-lung, whose debut in the genre was in The Big Boss Part 2 (1976), which continued the adventures of Lee’s character.
“He was the most prolific, and without him I felt it would never be complete. Eventually we started editing the film without him. When we showed him the cut, only then did he agree, so I hightailed it back to Hong Kong.”
While many different actors became Bruce “clones” or adopted roles that were seen as mimicking his style, Le was one of four performers responsible for the bulk of the output.

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[GeneChing]

Leung Siu-lung, who appeared as Bruce Liang imitating Bruce Lee in films including The Dragon Lives Again, in a still from “Enter the Clones of Bruce”.
Another notable impostor was Bruce Liang, aka Leung Siu-lung, whose credits include The Dragon Lives Again (1977), a wacky fantastical comedy adventure that follows Bruce Lee into the underworld, where he must battle such foes as Count Dracula, Zatoichi and James Bond.
More recently, Leung appeared in Stephen Chow Sing-chi’s Kung Fu Hustle and the low-budget hit Gallants, which respectively won best picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2005 and 2011.
South Korea’s Moon Kyoung-seok appeared under the names Bruce Lei, Bruce Rhee and most famously Dragon Lee during his prolific tenure as a Lee clone, which included The Real Bruce Lee (1977) that inserted documentary and early screen footage of the real actor into a heavily re-edited Korean martial arts film.

Moon Kyoung-seok, who appeared in films under the names Bruce Lei, Bruce Rhee and most famously Dragon Lee, in a still from “Enter the Clones of Bruce”.
Much like Le, he was initially reluctant to speak with Gregory’s crew. “When we got to his office, he apparently had no idea we were coming, and I got the sense he thought we were there to make fun of him,” Gregory says.
“But as time went on, and we obviously knew a lot about his career, he really warmed up to us.”
Bruce Li, the last of the big four, appears most openly regretful of his role in this exploitation movement. Born Ho Chung-tao in Taiwan, he came to Hong Kong to become a stunt man, before assuming the mantle of Lee in the likes of Super Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1974), Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death (1975) and many more such films.
“There seems to have been a lot going on that he was unaware of,” Gregory concedes. “Li would agree to do one project so that he could show jeet kune do and pay tribute to Bruce Lee, but it never seemed to turn out the way he envisaged.
“But he was in 40 of these movies, so it’s not like he was completely in the dark.”
This seems to have been a common issue within the movement – that even the actors and directors were being exploited by greedy producers who would recut and reuse in multiple films footage for which they had paid only once.

Bruce Li in a still from “Enter the Clones of Bruce”.
Actors who bore no resemblance whatsoever to the late martial arts star were cast in Bruce Lee-like roles. Japanese actor Yasuaki Kurata was credited as Bruce Lo, apparently without his knowledge, while African-American fighter Ron Van Clief was branded the Black Dragon, a blaxploitation-style reincarnation of Lee.
Gregory’s biggest single challenge was tracking down the films themselves.
“There’s so little archival 35mm material of these films,” he explains. “The Hong Kong Film Archive had only The Dragon Lives Again. The Taiwan Film Archive in Taipei had a couple of prints, but they were in such bad condition it was unbelievable.”



After their original run in cinemas, the films were transferred to video, after which it seems that the prints were simply destroyed.
For Gregory, whose company Severin Films is dedicated to the preservation and restoration of grindhouse and genre cinema from around the world, this situation is difficult to accept.
“I asked pretty much everybody: why are there no film elements for these films?”, he says, referring to the physical films such as reels and negatives.

David Gregory, director of the documentary film “Enter the Clones of Bruce”.
The answers he got were less than encouraging. “Hong Kong is very small, film prints are very big. Once the films were transferred onto tape and they got their TV master, they threw that s*** in the water. It was gone. That shows you the value they held of these films.”
Fortunately, while the birthplace of these films may have failed Gregory and his team, usable prints have been discovered and acquired for a number of these underground oddities.
“I’ve no idea if there’s an audience for Bruceploitation,” says Gregory, after admitting that this is his most expensive documentary yet, “but here we are, 45 years later, still talking about these movies, so let’s give it a shot.”
Enter the Clones of Bruce has its Asian premiere at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival in South Korea in July 2023, alongside a new 50th anniversary restoration of Enter the Dragon.

Enter the Clones of Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee imitators (Bruceploitation)

[GeneChing]

The actors who have played Bruce Lee, from Jason Scott Lee, Bruce Li and Danny Chan to Mike Moh, in rip-offs, fantasies, and biopics fake and real
From the ‘Bruceploitation’ rip-offs that followed his death in 1973 to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, many films have portrayed Bruce Lee
Actors from Jason Scott Lee to Hong Kong’s Danny Chan, Aarif Rahman and Philip Ng have played the martial arts icon. Will Ang Lee deliver the definitive biopic?

James Marsh
Published: 4:15am, 19 Jul, 2023


Danny Chan as Bruce Lee in a still from “Ip Man 4: The Finale” (2019). A wide range of actors have portrayed the martial arts icon on the big screen in the 50 years since his untimely death on July 20, 1973. Photo: Mandarin Motion Pictures
The untimely death 50 years ago, on July 20, 1973, of Bruce Lee, the definitive screen icon of the martial arts genre, at the age of just 32, sent shock waves around the world.
Lee had single-handedly sparked global interest in kung fu cinema, and it was fuelled further by the one-two punch of his death and the release of his breakthrough Hollywood film Enter the Dragon just days later.
As the world demanded more Bruce Lee movies, unscrupulous producers scrambled to cash in on his fame, casting a swathe of unknown martial artists in films approximating those that had made Lee a household name.
And so the Bruceploitation genre was born, ushering in the likes of Bruce Le, Bruce Li and Bruce Lei among others. While some of these films were marketed as sequels or prequels to Lee’s hits, in others Lee himself now became the hero.
Ho Tsung-tao was perhaps the most prominent of the Bruce Lee imitators. Assuming the deliberately confusing mantle of Bruce Li, he starred in dozens of films during the 1970s and ’80s, and played Lee on no less than five occasions.
These supposed biopics played fast and loose with Lee’s life story, folding in elements from his film roles, as well as skirting over – or omitting completely – details of his life that didn’t align with the producers’ image of Lee as a proud Chinese hero.

Bruce Lee in action. Photo: SCMP
In Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth (1976), he is seen fending off mafiosi at the Colosseum in Rome while shooting The Way of the Dragon. In The Dragon Lives, released the same year, Lee is born in China, rather than San Francisco, makes only a brief visit to the United States, and his marriage to Linda Lee Cadwell is significantly minimised.
In reality, Lee spent a significant amount of time in America, going out of his way to teach martial arts and further Western understanding of its philosophies.
Also released in 1976, Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger casts Li as both Bruce Lee and his faithful disciple, who sets out to investigate his master’s mysterious death.

Bruce Li (right) in a still from “Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger” (1976).
The year 1976 also saw Danny Lee Sau-yin play Bruce Lee for Shaw Brothers, in the sensationalist tell-all biopic Bruce Lee & I.
Chronicling his extramarital relationship with actress Betty Ting Pei – who appears as herself – this is less a martial arts exploitation film than an attempt by Ting to exonerate herself in the eyes of the general public, but the results are no more honourable than anything else that emerged during this era.
The following year, Leung Siu-lung played the Little Dragon in the infinitely more entertaining The Dragon Lives Again.

Leung Siu-lung as Bruce Lee in a still from “The Dragon Lives Again” (1977).
The film follows a recently deceased Lee into the underworld for a fantastical supernatural odyssey battling bizarre characters like Clint Eastwood’s Man with no Name, James Bond, and Dracula, seemingly cementing Lee as a cinematic icon of comparable stature.
This otherworldly reverence for Lee is also evident in Corey Yuen Kwai’s No Retreat, No Surrender (1985). This schlocky slice of Cold War hokum stars Kurt McKinney as a karate student and Bruce Lee fanatic, who is tutored from beyond the grave by the ghost of the great man himself, played by Korean martial artist Kim Tai-chung.
It’s a ridiculous role in a pretty creaky movie, but was a telling signifier that Lee’s mythos lived on, over a decade after his death, in a whole new generation of aspiring martial artists.
Bruce Lee’s own son, Brandon Lee, was considered for the lead role in the 1993 biopic Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story, the first Hollywood biopic to tackle his father’s life. Brandon turned the part down, uncomfortable with portraying his own parents’ courtship on screen, and the role went to Hawaiian-Chinese actor Jason Scott Lee.
Adapted from Linda Lee Cadwell’s biography, Bruce Lee: The Man I only Knew, as well as Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse’s book Bruce Lee: The Biography, the film follows Lee’s misadventures in the United States, romancing Linda (played by Lauren Holly) and battling his own inner demons.
It’s a strange blend of traditional biopic and fantasy, as director Rob Cohen includes numerous mystical elements in an effort to emulate Lee’s own films.

Jason Scott Lee as Bruce Lee in a still from “Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story” (1993).
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story was a commercial success but, in an uncanny echo of past events, opened just weeks after the death of Brandon Lee at the age of 28 on the set of The Crow.
When Wilson Yip Wai-shun and Donnie Yen Ji-dan announced they were making a film about wing chun kung fu practitioner Ip Man, Bruce Lee fans rejoiced, as the man was one of Lee’s pivotal mentors.
The film, released in 2008, was a box office hit, but there was no sign of the Little Dragon. Fans would be gifted a glimpse of a pre-teen Lee in the sequel, but due to faltering negotiations with the notoriously uncooperative Lee estate, it would not be until 2015’s Ip Man 3 that Lee would play a significant role.

Aarif Rahman as Bruce Lee in a still from “Bruce Lee, My Brother” (2010).
In the meantime, 2010’s Bruce Lee, My Brother was released, adapted from the memoir penned by younger sibling Robert Lee.
Hong Kong actor Aarif Rahman was cast as Lee, and the film charted the fighter’s wayward adolescent years scrapping on the streets of Hong Kong. Directed by Raymond Yip Wai-man and Manfred Wong, the lush production proved a frustratingly dull affair and left the hunger of many Lee fans unsated.
For Ip Man 3, Wilson Yip cast as the hot-headed martial artist Danny Chan Kwok-kwan, who had previously played Lee in the 2008 CCTV series The Legend of Bruce Lee. He would go on to reprise the role in 2019’s Ip Man 4: The Finale, which again recounted Lee’s battle against racial prejudice during his time overseas.

Philip Ng (left) as Bruce Lee and Xia Yu as Wong Jack Man in a still from “Birth of the Dragon” (2016).
Lee would also appear, portrayed by Hong Kong action star Philip Ng Wan-lung, in the American martial arts drama Birth of the Dragon.
While the 2016 film was criticised for sidelining Lee’s story to chronicle the struggles of a white actor apparently based on Steve McQueen, Ng is not to be missed, standing as the most accomplished martial artist to assume the role in the modern era.
Mike Moh’s depiction of Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s Academy Award-winning 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood also drew criticism for portraying the then-struggling actor and action choreographer as not only arrogant, but also physically inferior to Brad Pitt’s ageing stuntman, Cliff Booth.

Mike Moh as Bruce Lee in a still from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019).
With the news that two-time Oscar-winning director Ang Lee is working on a new Bruce Lee biopic, with his own son, Limbo star Mason Lee, in the lead role, the definitive film version of the actor’s story may be imminent.
What is more evident than ever, 50 years after his death, is that the legend of Bruce Lee lives on, and has more strength and power than any character he played on screen.


James Marsh
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Originally from England, James is a freelance film critic and journalist who has been based in Hong Kong since 2001. In addition to writing for the Post, he is resident film critic on RTHK Radio 3’s Morning Brew, and Asian Editor of ScreenAnarchy.com. He serves as a consultant for Fantastic Fest, and has a problematic addiction to physical media.

Alright KFM fandom, who did they miss?

[wuxiaman]

Alright KFM fandom, who did they miss?

David Wu's portrayal of Bruce Lee from the 1992 ATV series Spirit of the Dragon, which also featured Lau Kar Leung as his father.

[GeneChing]

Enter-the-Clones-of-Bruce
Bruce-Lee-imitators-(Bruceploitation)

[GeneChing]

I'll be there.

FANTASTIC FEST PRESENTS
ENTER THE CLONES OF BRUCE W/LIVE Q&A
BUY TICKETS
Rated NR • Length 100 min • Year 2024
SEE THE HARD-HITTING KUNG FU DOC WITH A REAL-LIFE BRUCE CLONE

After becoming an international martial arts sensation, the death of Bruce Lee left a dragon-sized hole in cinema that was impossible to fill – not that people didn’t try. Whether you prefer Bruce Li, Dragon Lee, or Bruce Liang, there’s a clone for you. ENTER THE CLONES OF BRUCE is a love letter to the original icon, the badass actors tasked with filling his shoes, and the cinematic awesomeness that is kung fu movies. Our friends at Fantastic Fest will be taking it on tour with one of the most prolific Bruce clones, Bruce Le, joining us along the way for live Q&As.

What is a Live Q&A?
Live QA TT
Got a question for the director? Wanna meet the cast? At our special Live Q&A events, we follow the screening with an in-person discussion.

ABOUT

THE DEATH OF BRUCE LEE GAVE BIRTH TO A NEW FILM SUBGENRE: BRUCEPLOITATION

WHAAAAAA! WATAAAHHH! AAAAAYYYYYY!

You’d be hard-pressed to find another actor who could be identified based on just a few yelps, but somehow, immediately, you know the man I’m referring to here.

Although Bruce Lee’s best-known films – THE BIG BOSS, FIST OF FURY, and THE WAY OF THE DRAGON – weren’t produced for audiences outside of Hong Kong, his cool blend of rakish charm and unparalleled martial arts skill caught the attention of the global market and quickly established him as an international star. When he died in 1973, it left an indelible mark on a genre that was just beginning to establish itself, and film studios around the world jumped into the fray to capitalize on Lee’s incomparable presence, giving birth to a kung fu subgenre: Bruceploitation.

From spitting-image clones like Dragon Lee in South Korea and Bruce Le in Myanmar to spiritual successors like Blaxploitation icon Jim Kelly and the pioneering "Lady Kung Fu" Angela Mao, the ripple effect of the Dragon’s death lasted over a decade, spawning countless careers and hundreds of movies.

ENTER THE CLONES OF BRUCE tracks down producers, scholars, aficionados, and some of the movement’s biggest stars, all skilled martial artists in their own right, as they reminisce over a bygone era of gonzo plotlines, shoestring budgets, and questionable taste. (Lori Donnelly)

Enter-the-Clones-of-Bruce
Bruce-Lee-imitators-(Bruceploitation)