Bruce Lee and I (1976)

Bruce Lee and I (1976)
Aka: Bruce Lee – His Last Days, His Last Nights; I Love You, Bruce Lee
Chinese Title: 李小龍與我
Translation: Bruce Lee and Me

Starring: Betty Ting Pei, Danny Lee Sau-Yin, Wong San, Chin Ti, Wang Sha, Sze-Ma Wah-Lung, James Nam Seok-Hoon, Tony Lou Chun-Ku, Chan Lau, Chin Yuet-Sang, Tyrone Hsu Hsia, Huang Man
Director: Lo Mar
Action Director: Tong Gai, Yuen Woo-Ping

 

So, Bruce’s mistress Betty Ting Pei started her own production company, B&B Film Co. (“Betty and Bruce”?), to produce this 100-minute pity party. And then give it the running theme that “Everybody wants to exploit poor Betty” and “Nobody sees Betty as anything other than a sexpot.

The movie opens with a black-clad Betty walking alone on the beach while some sad ballad plays over the proceedings, letting us know that we are in for some pretentious crap. The next scene turns back the clock a few days, with Bruce Lee (Inframan’s Danny Lee) showing up at Betty’s pad and having frenetic drug-fueled sex (complete with random inserts of Betty writhing around naked on her bed, sans Bruce). After she gets out of the shower, she finds Bruce dead on the bed.

Betty is soon accosted by reporters and is slut-shamed all over Hong Kong, but not before declaring to the Little Dragon’s grave that because of her love for him, she will endure all the finger pointing. After almost getting assault by the Nunchaku Gang (led by Lady Whirlwind’s Chin Yuet-Sang), Betty tells her side of a story to a bar owner (Little Superman’s James Nam).

At this point, the film becomes Betty Ting Pei: Her First Days and Nights. We have 29-year-old Betty Ting Pei (still Betty, but with a long hair wig) as a high school student in Taiwan. Nobody likes her at the girl’s school she attends—did I mention that the film is a pity party? She gets expelled for fighting and spends her days visiting movie theaters. Her beauty calls the attention of a sleazy movie producer (Way of the Dragon’s Chin Ti), who slips her a roofie and takes naked pictures of her in order to blackmail her into being the body double for other actresses. After that goes on for a while, she breaks her contract and flees to Hong Kong.

The producer follows her there and tries to have her beat up, but Bruce Lee shows up out of nowhere and defends her. The benevolent Bruce gives her some money and leaves. Some time later, Betty is now working as an escort for old rich men and Bruce is filming The Big Boss. After the latter takes off, Betty recognizes her savior and returns the money he had given her, which sparks his interest in her. They become friends of sorts and we the viewer are treated to more pity party scenes as Betty Ting laments that nobody sees her as good for anything but porn. At one point, she shows her body (in a one-piece) to Bruce, who says that she would be the top porn star if he were a producer (his weird sense of humor in the film).

Life goes on and Betty’s escort work eventually leads her to develop a gambling habit, in which she throws away all of savings, plus tens of thousands in loans. She disappears for long swaths of time, which causes Bruce’s participation in Fist of Fury to suffer…because without that Betty coochie around, he just cannot concentrate. At one point, he shtups a female fan (Kong San) just to release some of his pent-up rage and lust, which becomes a subject of concern for Raymond Chow (called “Mr. Kong” here, played by Wang Sha) and Lo Wei’s wife (Huang Man).

Betty’s gambling addiction leads her to lose her house and get in trouble with some casino ruffians, including Yuen Woo-Ping collaborators Tyrone Hsu Hsia and Yen Shi-Kwan. Bruce saves her at the last moment and things start to look up for her as he negotiates a starring role for her in an American-backed production. After a round of celebratory sex—but without the pills and pot—Bruce has a massive headache and dies in her flat. And then the aforementioned barkeeper beats up the Nunchaku Gang with his Taekwondo skills and declares Betty to be innocent. The End.

There is a certain irony of producing a biographical film in which you bemoan how people only liked you for your tits and ass, and then willingly spend the film showing off your tits and ass. It is the Chinese movie equivalent to Mariah Carey’s Glitter, in which she plays a singer who doesn’t want to dress provocatively, but was made at a point in a career where she was handling her recent divorce by turning the tramp-o-meter up to 11. Or how Emily Ratajkowski is always talking about being exploited, but then shows up to pro-Women’s Rights rallies dressed as a cheap whore. Throw two more pairs of breasts that are specifically catered to the so-called “male gaze”—remember, Betty was producing this—and it all rings hollow. Oh, and the trampoline love scene must be one of the silliest things ever committed to film.

There is a lot of talk about Bruce Lee having a family—a wife and two kids—but they are never actually shown. The film really makes it look like Bruce had simply abandoned his family in the States in order to make movies in Hong Kong and sleep with fans and wannabe starlets in his free time. Bruce is shown as having taken an interest in Betty as a sort of compassion for her rough life, which apparently paralleled his own rough upbringing (but wasn’t his family well off because of their success in the entertainment industry?). So, as per this film, he saw himself as Betty’s protector…although whenever a married man decides to take on a put-upon woman as a project, adultery is usually in the waiting.

Being a Bruce biopic, there are a handful of fight scenes to keep things interesting in between Betty airing out her grievances that everybody just wants to [freak] her. Tong Gai and Yuen Woo-Ping are great choreographers, but Brucesploitation choreographers they are not. Yuen did it better a few years later in Tower of Death. There are a few fights meant to represent scenes from The Big Boss and Fist of Fury. The latter is interesting, because this film’s interpretation of the legendary Dojo Fight is to have a woman in ripped clothing standing in the background, suggesting that Chen Zhen fought the Japanese to avenge the rape of either Nora Miao or Maria Yi’s character. Later there is a sequence in which Bruce fights some challengers, including Tony Lou, Tino Wong and Chan Lau in your typical chop-socky rock quarry. The fight is full-out old school shapes, which is amusing, considering that the film is set in modern times and Bruce Lee completely eschewed that sort of thing. The last fight pits Bruce against the casino fighters, which is a bit more akin to the pace of his screen fight. That said, like The Dragon Lives, the film’s climax is also Betty Ting Pei’s, if you catch my drift.

I always wonder why they didn’t get Bruce Le (aka Huang Kin-Lung) to play the lead role. Maybe he was still a little green behind the ears as an actor. Maybe Danny Lee had a bit more marquee value. But Bruce Le had already been working for the Shaw Brothers since 1974 and even in Inframan, he was doing the Bruce Lee imitation bit in his fights. I really would have liked Bruce Le to have been choreographed at least once by Yuen Woo-Ping and see that result. Maybe his contract had run out. I do wonder what would have happened to his career had he appeared in this film in 1976 instead of Bruce’s Fingers.

Karate Kill (2016)

Karate Kill (2016)

Japanese Title: KARATE KILL カラテ・キル

Translation: Karate Kill

Starring: Hayate Matsuzaki, Mana Sakura, Asami, Kirk Geiger, Katarina Severen, Tom Voss, Miki Kawawa, Noriaki Kamata

Director: Kurando Mitsutake

Action Director: Keiya Tabuchi, Hayate

I spent the last week watching horror movies in celebration of Halloween (2024). I caught Halloween 3 and 4; Resident Evil 1, 5 and 6; and the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. That last one was the goriest of the lot, but even then the gut-munching was kept to a minimum and most of the violence—the film got an 18+ rating in Brazil, reserved for hard “R” and “NC-17” films—was in the form of (admittedly) bloody head shots. The Resident Evil films are some of the most sanitized zombie flicks around in terms of graphic violence, which is hard to believe, considering that Paul W.S. Anderson also did Event Horizon. And the two 1980s films are almost quaint when it comes to onscreen violence.

I say this because martial arts movies in the past 15 years have start attaining levels of onscreen graphic violence usually reserved for horror movies. I mean, you had Japanese chanbara films in the 1970s and stuff like Kill Bill Vol 1 which were full of blood geysers. Tom Yung Goong had that scene where Tony Jaa breaks the collective limbs of about 40 people in a single fight. But around the time of The Raid: Redemption, there was an extra level of visceral gore added to martial arts movies, especially those coming out of Indonesia. Headshot was mean-spirited to the point it was starting to get hard to watch. The Night Comes for Us was worse. Now I hear that Shadow Strays manages to be even gorier than that film.

I bring this up because on the week of Halloween, in which I watch six horror films in three days, the most violent film I watched was a martial arts movie: Karate Kill.

The movie opens in the desert with a man (Hayate) in a karate stance facing down a woman (Asami, of Gun Woman and The Machine Girl) pointing a gun at him. As we cut to another scene, we hear a gunshot.

The next scene opens with the large, healthy rump of a woman wearing a thong (AV actress Tia, of Milk the Maid) just a few inches from the camera. We then meet our main character, Kenji (the guy from the first scene), as he goes about his life from one part time job to another. He works at a warehouse, as a waiter at a small restaurant, at a construction site, and at a strip bar (hence the scene with Tia). All of his proceeds go to support his sister, Mayumi (AV actress Mana Sakura, of STAR-604). Mayumi has gone to Southern California to study acting in hopes of becoming an actress. Recently, Mayumi has stopped answering her phone and sending messages to Kenji. Thankfully, the manager of the strip bar (Takashi Nishina, of GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack and Gamera III: The Awakening of Irys) is a benevolent fellow. He gives Kenji some money to purchase a plane ticket and go to California to look for Mayumi.

Once in Los Angeles, Kenji finds her studio apartment: a run-down dump whose windows are mostly boarded up. Once in her room, he finds it occupied by a Japanese guy (Akihiro Kitamura, of CATnip) tossing the salad of a naked girl wearing a nun’s habit…what the heck, people? After some karate persuasion, Kenji learns that his sister was last scene working at a hostess club in Little Tokyo called “Secret Treasure.”

Kenji heads over to the hostess bar, which is run by a homo (or bi-)sexual dude with a comb-over (Noriaki Kamata, of Gun Woman and Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf). Kenji beats up every body in the establishment, including the bokken-wielding bar manager. Faced with the real possibility that Kenji will irreparably re-arrange his face, the manager comes clean. Mayumi did indeed work at the hostess club for a spell. However, the manager owed some money to a cult known as Capital Messiah, who funds their activities by showing snuff films over the dark web. When the manager couldn’t pay his debts to the cult, they showed up at his establishment and kidnapped a pair of girls, Mayumi and Kelly (Lion-Girl’s Miki Kawawa), as payment.

The cult compound is located in Texas and Kenji must fly there and find his sister before she gets killed, brainwashed, or both. Joining him for his hunt is Keiko, the only person to successfully escape from Capital Messiah’s clutches.

There is not much of a plot here. There are a few twists here and there, but the story is straight forward: Mayumi disappears, Kenji beats people up until he finds out where she is, then he has to beat more people up. End of story. There are a few moments where you think the film is gearing up for a climax, only to throw a (light) curve ball, but most viewers will know where this film is going.

What Karate Kill is is an exploitation film through and through. It is an updating of the 1970s Sonny Chiba karate movie, but with the over-the-top sensibilities of those late 2000s ôtaku-wank films that Nikkatsu and Sushi Typhoon were making at the time. This film plays those elements completely straight and you have the feeling that director Kurando Mitsutake really had a vision for this sort of thing. There are movies like Zombie Strippers where it’s clear both the actors and the filmmakers are in on the joke. Then you have movies like The Machine Girl, where the actors take it seriously, but you feel the people behind the camera are in on the joke. In Karate Kill, you almost feel as if there is no joke.

There may be no joke, but there is no shortage of sleaze. From that second scene two minutes in—followed shortly by Tia’s complete routine—to the finale, where one actress’s top has conveniently ripped in the right place, there is no shortage of female nudity. Some of it is consensual, like a sex scene between Hayate and Asami. You know how a lot of sex scenes in movies often cut to a close-up of the performers’ fingers interlocking to show union and affection? This film has him interlocking his fingers with the hook that has replaced her hand, which is blackly amusing. There is some sexual assault that occurs, mainly when bad b**** Simona (pro wrestler Katarina Severen) is groping Mana Sakura while the latter is being crucified. 

In addition to that sort of action, there is a fair amount of karate and gunplay, too. The action sequences were staged by Keiya Tabuchi, who had worked with director Mitsutake on Gun Woman. Tabuchi most recently staged the action sequences in the Netflix series “House of the Ninja,” so it’s good that he’s getting work still. The fight scenes are well choreographed. Hayate, who served as the film’s martial arts consultant, fights mainly with his fists. Fans of fancy bootwork may be disappointed with this movie. But he sells his fights well and really comes across as a Sonny Chiba for the new millenium.  His big fight is set inside of a truck container and pits him against a swordsman (David Sakurai, “Iron Fist” and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald). That fight is pretty cool, mixing solid choreography with the sort of pauses and strategizing that is typical of Japanese samurai movies.

The action is good, but there are no fights for the ages in this. What most people will remember from this movie is the gore. There is a lot of it. When Kenji goes into the hostess bar, some guy attacks him with a Bruce Lee impression. Kenji responds by simply ripping the guy’s ear off and throwing it into a cup of liquor. Interesting enough, my old karate sensei once told us about how you only needed four pounds (or so) of force to rip an ear off, so that scene gave me flashbacks to my old karate days. How appropriate. This film also has eye gougings, broken bones exposed through the skin, slit throats shown in loving detail, and nice long takes of people with their heads blown off. The only thing in which the gore falters is the CGI blood during the Keiko’s shootout with the cult members. The blood just disappears into the air (and the muzzle flashes feel incongruent with the angle of the gun and sound effect of the gunshot). 

Exploitation fans will probably take to Karate Kill quite handily. It is nothing but sex and violence, but with little of the wink-wink “We know we’re making crap” attitude that accompanies a lot of these sorts of films today. I personally find the film a bit too unpleasant to be able to enjoy, but fans of blood n’ boobs will certainly have fun with it.

The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies Vol. 1: 1954-1982 by John LeMay

The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies Vol. 1: 1954-1982 

by John LeMay

I have been diligently watching giant monster movies since 1989 when I got a VHS copy of Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster for Christmas. As soon as I was locked into the genre, I frequently checked out books on the topic, too. In my youngest days, we had limited information: the best book was Ian Thorne’s Godzilla. Other books, like Movie Monsters and Monsters from the Movies (both) by Thomas G. Aylesworth, or Great Monsters of the Movies by Edward Edelson, were limited in information (and accuracy) when it came to Godzilla coverage. There were some fanzines during the early 1990s that covered the genre, but I didn’t have easy access to them—frankly I didn’t know they existed.

Things started to change when the American Godzilla film—GINO, if you will—was made in 1998. Books started coming out of the woodwork. We got a quartet of Young Adult action novels by Marc Cerasini based loosely on the Heisei series. The summer of 1998 gave us Giant Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!  and The Ultimate Godzilla Compendium. A year or two later, we got Steve Ryfle’s Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star: An Unauthorized Biography of the Big G. All of these books were full of information, reviews, stills and photos, and synopses of Godzilla films that hadn’t (or had barely) gotten release in the States. For us younger fans who hadn’t discovered the grey market, these books were super important.

Sadly, when I moved to Brazil, I left most of my Godzilla collection (films and books) in the States. I brought my Cerasini books with me. Some years later, my mom brought me my Ultimate Godzilla Compendium. Sadly, the other books were inadvertently given away when the family storage unit was cleaned out. So, I lost my Ryfle book and, more importantly, my Ian Thorne book. That hurts me to this day.

But, as the years pass and I start making more money, the opportunity to rebuild my Godzilla collection has continuously presented itself. So, I may no longer own some of these books—I was able to re-purchase the Dark Horse trade paperbacks here in Brazil—John Lemay’s tireless efforts to self-publish as many kaiju-themed non-fiction books as humanly possible have filled that hole in my life.

The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies Vol. 1 is a collection of write-ups about all the Japanese monster movies made between 1954—the release of Gojira—and 1982, two years before Godzilla 1985 came out in Japan. Like The Ultimate Godzilla Compendium and Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star, the entries give us the names in front of and behind the camera, a brief-but-detailed synopsis, followed by a write-up that discusses various elements of the film’s history and Lemay’s thoughts on the film. That is followed by some trivia regarding the movie. Lemay allows his love for the genre to manifest itself in each write-up, but without the Toho-approved pandering of the Compendium and overly-critical tone of Ryfle’s book. Lemay strikes a healthy balance in between those two extremes: he enjoys the films for what they are, but he will point out glaring flaws where they apply.

Lemay covers all of Toho’s giant monster films made during the specified time period, as well as the collected works of Daiei and Toei studios, too. And of course, he does not omit the trippy contributions to the genre made by Shochiku and Nikkatsu studios, either. But…Lemay goes a step further. He reviews most of Toho’s sci-fi films on the whole, with the glaring exception of The Secret of Telegian. He also covers Toho’s excursion into vampire territory with its “Bloodthirsty Trilogy”, some of their disaster films (except Conflagration), and a few non-Japanese films, like Hong Kong’s Inframan and The Mighty Peking Man, and South Korea’s Yongary, Monster from the Deep. All of those films enjoyed the assistance of Japanese FX technicians, so their inclusion is appropriate.

Does Lemay cover all of the films he could have? Not in the second edition, which Lemay was gracious enough to send me as “payment” for some articles I wrote for his Lost Films Fanzine. I assume a few more movies were included in the third edition, which came out in 2020 (although I think that was before the rare Korean film Space Monster Wangmagwi reached American shores). It also has a more professional cover, although I like rustic charm of the art on the first and second edition covers. I understand that the issue of the lack of stills and photos is not addressed, although that has a lot to do with Japan and their lack of concept of “fair use.” You can’t really blame Lemay for not having the money necessary to pay for the rights to include pictures. 

In the end, I recommend The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies Vol. 1: 1954-1982 to any and all fans of the genre, from those newbies who were converted by the Monsterverse or Godzilla Minus One to those old school fans who are now in their 60s and 70s who had the opportunity to see many of these films in the theater (or on TV) when they first came out.