Enter the Game of Death (1978)

Enter the Game of Death (1978)
Chinese Title: 死亡魔塔
Translation: Death Tower

 

Starring: Bruce Le, Park Dong-Yong, Nick Cheung Lik, Lee Hoi-Sang, Bolo Yeung Sze, James Nam Gung-Fan, Chiu Chi-Ling, Sim Sang-Hyeon, Kim Wang-Kuk, Yeo Su-Jin, Yoo Seong, Kim Ki-Bum, Samuel Walls
Director: Lam Kwok-Cheung, Choe U-Hyeong
Action Director: Bruce Le

 

Huang Kin-Lung was still working in Korea in 1978, churning out low-budget Brucesploitation potboilers. By that point, both he and Korean actor Moon Kyoung-Seok (a.k.a. Dragon Lee) were the only two actors who still took the sub-genre seriously. Bruce Liang had bidden farewell to his limited stint the previous year with The Dragon Lives Again. Bruce Li was beginning to inch away from the Little Dragon’s shadow, although he wouldn’t really make headway until the following year. Nonetheless, the release and success of the newly-completed Game of Death most likely gave Brucesploitation a shot in the arm and guaranteed the continued production of these movies for a few more years, even despite Sammo Hung’s Enter the Fat Dragon taking the piss out of the sub-genre. And nowhere was that more evident than it was in Bruce Le’s Enter the Game of Death.

Interestingly enough, the original script for Game of Death placed the infamous pagoda in South Korea. Whether or not those details were readily available to writer Heo Jin I do not know. What I do know is that she was clearly at a loss on how to combine elements of the Game of Death that audiences did see with her original ideas. The film is an anachronistic mess, set shortly before the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), but also asks us to believe that the Germans would actually hire black karate experts—did those even exist in the 1930s?—to do their dirty work. Yeah, right. But since Game of Death had Kareem Abdul Jabbar, this one had to one-up it with an entire cadre of African American actors, including whom the Hong Kong Movie Database claims is actually American Ninja’s Steve James.

We open with a German diplomat, Mr. Keegan (Michael B. Christy), discussing the recent theft of a secret Chinese document with a Chinese man, Wang (Sim Sang-Hyeon), and a Japanese karate master, Nakamura (Park Dong-Yong, of The Manchurian Tiger and Black Leopard). Both Keegan and Nakamura are interested in the document, although in true McGuffin form, we never learn why exactly the document is important. We do learn that it is actually in Wang’s possession, and that he has hidden it in a pagoda protected by a number of powerful fighters. In the real world, either men would send a platoon of soldiers to mow everyone down with machine guns and steal it. Actually, from the tone of the initial conversation, I’m not even sure that Keegan even realizes that it’s in Wang’s hands.

A third party is interested in the document: a secret society of Chinese patriots known as the Blue Robe. One of their agents, Lisa (Yeo Su-Jin, of Secret Rivals and The Hot, the Cool and the Vicious), is given the task of convincing a local fighter, Ahn (Bruce Le), to join their cause. He is initially reluctant. However, as he’s plagued by the memories of watching his cousin commit suicide after Nakamura raped her, he eventually givens in and joins the good cause. While Wang is negotiating a purchase of the document with the Japanese, Ahn sneaks into the tower and locks horns with the numerous guardians of each floor.

There is some intrigue involving the Japanese wanting to betray Wang and Lisa working for both the Blue Robe and the Germans, but it amounts to very little. It is pretty clear that both writer Heo Jin and directors Lam Kwok-Cheung and Choe U-Hyeong were more interested in establishing the most basic premise for a tower full of fighters to exist than they were telling an actual story. No thought was given to the implications of pre-WW2 Germans employing black people, nor to just how much the Germans would have been interested in China by the 1930s, given that they were getting ready to invade Poland by that point. I mean, Germans during the turn of the century? Yeah, okay. I can imagine that. But by the time the Axis Powers were formed, I imagine they had more invested in Europe and Western Asia than they did China.

Interestingly enough, the section of the movie in which Ahn makes his way up the pagoda accounts for the second act of the film, as opposed to the third—see Game of Death; New Game of Death; and Duel with the Devils. I think it would have been interesting if Heo Jin had indeed had access to the original script, in which the Korean mafia blackmails Bruce into storming a Korean pagoda. Imagine if a low-budget Korean film had made a movie closer to Bruce Lee’s original idea for Game of Death than the Golden Harvest film that came out that year. That would indeed be rather funny.

What I do know is that Enter the Game of Death ranks up there with Shaolin Temple Against Lama and Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin as one of the most fight-filled movies of all time. I mean, this is a movie in which the plot stops for a good ten minutes…at the ten minute mark…just for a random tournament in which Bolo Yeung (predating his Chong Li character from Bloodsport by a decade) beats up a half-dozen fighters before squaring off with Bruce Le. There is no explanation of the what the tournament is, who organized it, and what the winner has to gain from it, but there you go: six fight scenes in ten minutes, and that’s after a completely random encounter between Bruce and Bolo in the countryside a minute before. Then again, this is a film in which the entire second act is one long string of fight sequences as Bruce Le punches and kicks and nunchucks his way up the pagoda. And better still, once Bruce Le leaves the pagoda, thus marking the beginning of the third act, the film devolves into a series of fights between Bruce and various entities interested in the McGuffin. Every fight is arguably two or three minutes longer than the space of “story” that separates it from the next fight.

By 1978, Bruce Le had more or less gotten the hang of directing fight scenes and thus would choreograph most of his own movies until he stepped away from filmmaking on the whole. Le was a solid fight choreographer at best, rarely ever reaching the rank of very good. He knew how to film a fight for the most part. He could plan a series of moves and techniques for his stuntmen to perform. Once in a while he would have an inspired idea for a creative fight. But because he stuck so close to the Brucesploitation angle, he often allowed his fights to become repetitive and boring. Moreover, for all of his martial talents, he was simply not at Bruce Lee’s level and insisting on imitating the real thing often exposed his fighting faults, no matter how many times he thumbed his nose.

Bruce Le might have had a similar build to Bruce, but he lacks that musculature and his hits often look rather weak. And probably because of tight shooting schedules, Bruce Le often threw low kicks that suggested he couldn’t raise his leg above belt level. If Bruce Lee threw a low kick, he made it clear that he did so for a reason. You could see that in the fight itself. When Bruce Le kicks low, it looks sloppy and hurried. Without the charisma and physical strength, not to mention a clear fighting philosophy that shined in all of Bruce Lee’s films, Bruce Le was really nothing but a counterfeit.

That said, Enter the Game of Death has a lot of fans and many consider it to be Bruce Le’s best overall effort. Much of that has to do with the overabundance of fight action. Bruce Le’s fighting, for all its flaws, does get a better showcase here than it does in some of this other films, like Bruce and Dragon Fist or Clones of Bruce Lee. The pagoda sequence gives us a nice line-up of colorful fighters for him to fight. His first opponent is a monk, played by Lee Hoi-Sang, who wields a pair of butterfly swords like he did in The 36^th Chamber of Shaolin. His next opponent is a snake fist master whose room is full of live cobras. He uses the snakes as whips or holds them by their head and tries to make them bite our hero(!). The third opponent is a white-haired nunchaku master played by Brucesploitation regular Nick Cheung Lik. Finally, he faces off with two masters: a white-clad Eagle Claw Master (James Nan) and a black-clad Tiger Claw Master (Chiu Chi-Ling). Disappointingly, Chiu Chi-Ling’s fight is played mainly for laughs—much like his fight in Snake in Eagle’s Shadow—despite his being one of the grandmasters of hung gar.

The film climaxes with Bruce Le fighting Bolo Yeung (a third time), a bunch of lanky Caucasian guys, and some truly talented black guys, led by Enter Three Dragons’ Samuel Walls. Walls unleashes the traditional kung fu shapes on Bruce—again, that would never have existed in the 1930s—but the choreography is actually really good here. Le’s kicks reach their zenith in this sequence and the handwork is as complex as anything Sammo Hung was doing at the time. If you can ignore the shoddy writing, then this film gets a warm recommendation the fight scenes alone.