Enter the Clones of Bruce
Directed by David Gregory
Unrated
Runtime: 94 minutes
Opens in LA April 12

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

"Bruceploitation" is a little genre that's very famous to very few people, and now, in the twenty-first century, you'd have to go far out of your way to find one. For a clutch of films initially based on and marketed with bait-and-switch deception, it's strange that nobody's accidentally sitting down to watch a Bruceploitation movie. Maybe they should. The new documentary Enter the Clones of Bruce is a hugely fun celebration of the genuinely strange movies that little studios slapped together in the years after Bruce Lee died and the kung fu throne was, sadly, vacant.

Hong Kong was already a cinema hub before Bruce Lee hit it big. As Enter the Clones of Bruce Lee explains, the local studio Shaw Brothers was already a powerhouse, cranking out martial arts movies on a factory schedule. There were famous performers and directors, but nobody was making much money. Quantity was king. San Francisco-native Bruce Lee, who had already acted in features as a child, moved to Hong Kong in the wake of his success as The Green Hornet's Kato and blew up. He was the big, international star the city needed, developing an archetype for the quick, scrappy, grinning badass.

What everybody interviewed here remembers, and what's obvious from every clip, is how much of a lightning bolt Lee was from the start. He was pure, intense charisma with a precision to his actions that's still dazzling to watch, no matter how many times you've seen him in action. Nobody's moved like that since. And plenty of the interviewees personally knew Lee back in his early days, a depressing reminder that–though he's been gone for decades–he would only be in his 80s now. This is not ancient history. So many of his contemporaries are still here.

Lee broke out of the Shaw system and made features with Golden Harvest, an upstart studio, in the process of establishing himself as a megastar. His work, especially in breakout hit The Big Boss, made him famous in places like Hong Kong and Singapore before he broke into bigger markets like Japan and America. To a person, every interviewee cites Lee as the reason kung fu caught on as hot as it did. He was undeniable.

And then he died in 1973, at 32-years-old. From here, Enter the Clones of Bruce branches off into the surreal. Lee was the biggest star his genre had ever seen and people wanted more. There were rumors of a lost film, semi-substantiated by the knowledge that Golden Harvest had filmed Lee fighting Kareem Abdul-Jabar for a production called Game of Death. Golden Harvest wasn't doing anything with that footage, though, and there was suddenly space for more unscrupulous studios to create a fake final Bruce Lee opus.

Talent scouts went to gyms to find people who looked like Lee and trained them to mimic his mannerisms. Bruce Lee was dead, but studios turned people like Taiwanese stuntman Ho Chung-Tao and Korean hapkido student Moon Kyoung-seok into Bruce Li and Dragon Lee, respectively. In the years immediately following Lee's death, people started making unofficial sequels to his actual hits, all starring actors with stage names like Bruce Liang and Bruce Le. More confusingly, Dragon Lee was alternately billed as Bruce Lei and Bruce Rhee. They came from places like Macau and Taiwan, but nobody in the international market (primarily represented here by people from America, France, and Germany) knew or cared.

Some of these films were biopics (i.e. Super Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story) released less than a year after the real man's death. Some marketed themselves with photos from Lee's funeral: one includes 30 minutes of footage from the event itself. Fist of Fury II, a bootleg sequel to one of Lee's final films, is about a fictionalized version of Lee's brother and was followed by Fist of Fury III about the brother of that brother. Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth starred Bruce Li and touted its star as Lee's "friend in life, his student," despite the two men never meeting in real life. In some of the films, he's born in Hong Kong and only visits America to fight racism. Some are compilations of Green Hornet fight scenes. One tells the "true" story of Lee's time in Rome (he is captured by mafiosos). Dragon Lee's The Real Bruce Lee was a 90-minute-long South Korean action film that was cut to 60 minutes, augmented with actual footage of Bruce Lee as a child, and marketed as a lost Bruce Lee movie that had been found in China's film archives. This isn't even really a case where every film is a different piece of the real story–you couldn't watch them all and come away with a Rashomon reconciliation of different viewpoints. Most are just bullshit.

Sorting through the fake Bruce Lees, the lookalikes with fake credentials and the real Bruce Lee works that were re-edited and sold as new movies must have been difficult, and director David Gregory does an incredible job streamlining the entire history so that it makes sense. At a time when news could move slowly, dozens of people were taking advantage of the confusion around Lee's death and what he left behind, and it's honestly incredible that Gregory has on-screen interviews with so many people, now spread across Southeast Asia, who were and are primarily known by obfuscating stage names. There is some irony when you get to the end of a movie about filmmakers stealing a man's image and history with fly-by-night operations and a big chunk of its credits thoroughly notes where every clip and poster actually came from.

Much of this can probably be credited to the other talking heads–fans who have written on and archived the history of a genre that, logically, could have disappeared once the jig was up and everybody knew there weren't going to be new Bruce Lee films. The beauty of the less-gatekeepery elements of genre fandom is an unabashed love of, say, watching a fake Bruce Lee fight Popeye and Dracula. They all acknowledge these movies are ridiculous, but almost every title mentioned gets some kind of praise.

These were, after all, real martial arts performers, even if they were styled to look like another person. Many of the Lee clones share hesitancy with their past lives–Bruce Li says he was "actually repulsed by the idea of acting as Bruce Lee”–but they also take pride in their work and recall how seriously they took the dozen-or-so fake Bruce Lee films they made. As Dragon Lee is interviewed in his present-day offices, you can see huge calluses on his knuckles and hands. He didn't fake that fighting in the 70s. He trained like a person given the impossible task of moving like Bruce Lee.

Many of them are practical about their work–it was a job. "You can call me whatever you want," the man once called Bruce Le says, "as long as you pay me." He ran two-and-a-half hours every morning and then trained for an average of six hours per day, but that doesn't mean he viewed his role as anything more than an employee. These films were shot on stolen locations, with skeleton crews and actual danger. Actors would film all day and then leave set at 3 am to film another movie across town. These people didn't want to be Bruce Lee, they just found niches in an unforgiving content machine.

The documentary follows the trend to its conclusion, as actors like Bolo Yeung, Angela Mao, and Jim Kelly made movies Bruce Lee could have made, without the marketing lie that Lee had been involved in any way. Jackie Chan effectively killed the Bruceploitation craze by introducing a funnier action archetype who would "do everything Bruce wouldn't." Once others had proved popular in different ways, studios didn't need to keep creating the same type of film for the same type of actor.

There's some discussion in Enter the Clones of Bruce around kung fu movies bringing new roles for Southeast Asian men in American theaters. Bruce was strong, sexy and cool, which demonstrably hit back against the racist screen depictions we'd been handed before, some around what all of this meant to Linda Emery, Lee's widow. We hear about the impact kung fu movies had on Black men and are assured that very few people who saw the Lee clone movies in theaters were dissatisfied after recognizing they'd been duped (I absolutely do not believe that claim). The world around the films, though, primarily exists here as context for how they got made.

As much as I'd like to see more about how these films existed on places like 42nd St, I would also have been happy to chill out and watch fight scene clips for another hour. Do I like hearing film history from a dude wearing the same Riki-Oh shirt I happened to be wearing? Of course. And if the movie drifts away from its Brucesploitation target and focuses more on the larger martial arts film industry for stretches, I'm still happy to take it all in. If somebody else ever wants to comb through the ethics of dressing a bunch of random strong guys up as an icon while his body is still warm, I'll be there in a second. That doesn't mean I'm in any way disappointed with Enter The Clones of Bruce. I didn't get to hear anybody discuss the psychology of making a movie where an actual man's lookalike is sent to hell, but I did get turned on to the fact that one of those lookalikes fought stuntmen in gorilla suits. That counts for a lot.

In one of Enter The Clones of Bruce's later scenes, Bruceploitation Bible author Michael Worth describes going to San Francisco's Market Street Cinema having been fooled by a poster for The Young Dragon and leaving the theater pissed off that he was watching a fake Bruce Lee after being promised the real one. I never went into the Market Street Cinema, but I grew up looking at its blue and red castle façade from the outside. My dad had seen The Road Warrior there in its initial American run. In the early 70s, the theater was bought by porn producer and transformed into a strip club that still showed movies, albeit "low culture" ones like The Road Warrior and The Young Dragon. By the time I was growing up, the grindhouse aspect was gone, and it was a strip club and porn theater 100% of the time. Now, it's a pile of condos. That's so much of this world, by which I mean the world of genre films and the world at large: the interesting stuff gets steamrolled and turned into whatever people think will sell better, and then that gets steamrolled. We're lucky people like Worth, Gregory, and Bruces Li, Lo, Le and Lei are documenting what happened before the media landscape became, for better and worse, too clean for a movie where an undead Bruce Lee kicks Popeye in the neck.