ENTER THE CLONES OF BRUCE

Enter the Clones of Bruce (director David Gregory, 2023) is a fascinating documentary about the Bruce Lee clones that erupted in a spate of films after the real Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong in 1973. 

Various martial artists not only from Chinese speaking countries, but also from Korea and Japan were positioned as the new Bruce Lee in what seemed to be an unending stream of low budget kung fu films. It was in effect, a market driven sub-genre in a supply-side film economy because in his time, the real Bruce Lee only made four and a half kung fu films which was obviously insufficient for the huge demand created during his action career and especially after. It was also an exercise in homonyms - Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lei for example.

 

Many smaller companies with Bruce Lee clones rushed to fill in the gap. For a while, the studio that discovered Bruce Lee – Golden Harvest – held off on releasing a posthumous Bruce Lee movie but eventually following the tidal wave of clone films, Golden Harvest finally put together and released THE GAME OF DEATH which contains the last sequences that Bruce Lee directed and starred in (the famous ascending fights in the pagoda - which was in Korea - that climaxes in the tournament with the 7 foot two inch tall Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. For linking sequences, Golden Harvest used doubles, matte process images etc. One could debate the wisdom and quality of all that but it’s true that some parts of the film are as cheesy as some of the clone movies. One wonders what the film would look like with today's technology.

 

What we learn from the documentary is somewhat tragic, if not sad. By becoming Bruce Lee clones, these actors sacrificed their own careers as themselves – many of them were good martial artists, and some of them had acting ability in their own right. But the need to survive in an exploitation film industry, and the need in some cases to feed families, led them to make a career being in essence someone else. 

 

A couple of them survived but more often than not, many of them disappeared. So it’s a great credit to this documentary that the Bruce Lee clones are given their due, and they turn out to be a sympathetic group. Of course the Bruce Lee clone tide ebbed once Hong Kong’s Jackie Chan appeared with a more action comedy kung fu style, and China's Jet Li with his wushu style.