Fist Of Fear, Touch Of Death (1980)

Let me just start by saying that I, ladies and gents, am no stranger to the world of cheap movies. The cheap-o tape or DVD. Cheap-fu. In fact, it is the basis of my entire movie collection - and my collection is quite expansive, to say the very least.

Many of the ones I own are easily had in the $1.00 bins at Wally World or Dollar Tree; I even got a few good deals at Target in Chicago one time. And of most of those cheapies, 9 out of 10 of them have been outright ripoffs of far better films. But when you think about it, a film that is an obvious slap to the face of a previous success is very seldom going to be released by Criterion. And definitely not for more than a dollar or a dollar-fifty. And from them - let us speak of the kung-fu flick.

Ahhh..kung fu flicks - they can be produced cheaply, cast cheaply and more often than not, make a profit. Why? There are a ton of guys out there who live to bask in the warm glow of any type of karate/kung-fu/aikido/kick-to-the-head movie. And as long as the hero is Asian, cut and has the moves, people will watch. But no matter who you cast, even the cheapest of these heroes will be compared to the long-dead icon of the genre - Bruce Lee. And truth be told, he was a great actor as well as a superb athlete. No wonder others wanted to emulate him.

But then he died. Of a heart attack was the official story but you know how these urban legends get started. Anyway, no one wants to see a gravy train get stopped, and "they" (i.e. - money-grubbing producers) even went as far as to cast Bruce in a film after he was dead! Remember Game of Death? Cut scenes from previous films and a stand-in with his face pasted over theirs...real class act, this film was. But even Game of Death was Ben Hur compared to the absolute nadir of the films that featured our man Bruce.....

Fist Of Fear, Touch Of Death (1980)

Now this one is set up as a pseudo-documentary (heavy on the "pseudo") and starts off with Bruce already dead and the 1979 World Karate Championship tournament being held in Madison Square Garden to name his successor. Newsman/interviewer for this piece and greek chorus Adolph Caesar (better known as the murder victim in 1984's A Soldier's Story and Danny Glover's father in The Color Purple) is told by the tournament promoter (Aaron Banks) that Bruce was murdered (!) by a technique known as the "Touch Of Death", a.k.a. "The Vibrating Palm" (almost assuredly a popular item in the Red Light District, but I digress...). A word about this moment. The fact that Banks flat-out tells Adolph this in public, and in a crowd of onlookers no less, belies only one of this movie's (and director Matthew Mallinson's) tendencies to blurt out nonsense in order to create a furor for which there is no follow-up or even a satisfactory cut-away scene. The bulk of the movie then deals with Adolph's presentation of Bruce's legacy, with enough dubious facts and unfounded information to make a Senate hearing explode into orgasms.

And, just like any good pseudo-documentary, it rises or falls on the strength of its screenplay. And this script, written by Ron Harvey (who's also written...well...NOTHING), communicates only the ability of director Mallinson to connect disjointed scenes of Bruce from interviews (tinted purple so as to match it up to same-tinted cut-away scenes of Adolph "interviewing" him), minute scenes of Bruce from a completely unassociated soap opera wherein he was featured (and this is passed off as footage from his younger years), footage from another different kung-fu/samurai movie (supposedly featuring his great-great-something-or-other), footage displaying some Bruce wannabes (Ron Van Clief, Bill Louie, Louis Neglia) plying their craft, and poor Fred Williamson (mistaken for Harry Belafonte in one of the film's only good jokes) wandering around with his usual swagger and eventually proclaiming that the tournament (and most likely the film as a whole) is an insult to Bruce's memory and legacy, all clumped in at random to the pre-mentioned footage from the tournament; which looks as if it were filmed at least 45 rows back from the ring (almost as if they smuggled in the cameras for some unauthorized footage - which wouldn't surprise me in the least). And did I mention that every single fact presented in this movie is absolute bull-puckey? Just checking.

This is one of those films that really makes it hard to remember the kung-fu flick can actually be a high-end genre. Look at movies like Bruce's signature opus Enter The Dragon and even latter-day hits the likes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kung-Fu Hustle and practically anything from Jackie Chan (NOT produced in Hollywood, that is). It's not Bruce's fault that there are about 180 million-plus kung-fu films out there that are 200 million-plus times worse.

Fist of Fear, Touch of Death is a genre unto itself: BRUCESPLOITATION. These usually feature a wannabe under a ridiculously similar name (Bruce Li, Bruce Li Zine, Bruce Le, Dragon Lee), have a kinda-sorta ripoff name of one of Bruce's earlier films (Bruce Lee We Miss You, The True Game Of Death, Bruce Le's Greatest Revenge, Tower of Death, Bruce's Fists of Vengeance, Chinatown Connection, Bruce Takes Dragontown) and circulate around the fact that Bruce Lee was murdered by either a syndicate or a mystic black magic-dealing rival OR, better yet, that someone is possessed by Bruce's restless spirit (happens all the time, y'know...). And every one of them features fighting as their drawing card - kung-fu fighting - poorly-choreographed, badly-blocked, scene-stretching, insultingly ridiculous kung-fu fighting.

Rest assured, however, that since Bruce's death, this is definitely not the only example of this branch of exploitation film. There are many other examples of Brucesploitation...it's just that Fist of Fear, Touch of Death is the worst of them all.

But hey, at least it's cheap.

Oh! And I almost forgot a modern-day drawing card for this fiasco: a small role for George Lopez (from "The George Lopez Show") playing a character named "Tornado". Look out, AFI tribute!