These are the other two Bruce Lee films from the box set I bought (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and Way of the Dragon were the first three). Bruce Lee only made three films–the previously noted titles–and although he started Game of Death in 1972, it was re-imagined after his death using footage they’d filmed and “doubles” for him. The second one was made using body doubles and clips from other films. So when I watched Fist of Fear, Touch of Death in 2024, I didn’t realize that there was a whole industry of remixing Bruce Lee material into new movies.
So, in Game of Death, Bruce Lee is Billy Lo, an international martial arts film star whom the syndicate wants a piece of. I say “is” instead of “plays” because the scenes he shot were apparently for a film with a different plot entirely, and it’s only in the remixing that they got meta with it. The confrontations with the syndicate become serious so after he is shot, Lo fakes his own death to get revenge and to protect his girlfriend played by Colleen Camp (whom we saw in DARYL and who contributed a song to the soundtrack, I think). Also, parenthetically (but I already used parentheses in the previous sentence, so I have to just say parenthetically in this sentence), although she has scenes with Billy Lo, she did not have any scenes with Bruce Lee because he was long dead. At any rate, the climactic scene finds Bruce Lee ascending the levels of a Chinese restaurant to get to the big boss, and one of the level bosses is played by Kareem Abdul Jabbar. So if you’re keeping score, Lee defeated Kareem, and it was Arnold Schwarzenneggar who defeated Wilt Chamberlain in Conan the Destroyer.
So part of the film was, again, meta as I was watching to see where Bruce Lee actually appeared. And it’s in several of the fight scenes, including the final assault on the Chinese restaurant. But otherwise it was (apparently) two other martial artists playing in disguise, filmed from behind, and a variety of other tricks to try to hide that it wasn’t Lee.
Game of Death II has Lee as Billy Lo again, but not the same Billy Lo. He’s friends with a martial arts master, Chin Ku, who is getting challenged to fight to the death a bunch recently as is Lo. Chin dies, and, at the funeral, a helicopter flies over with a Skill Crane cage and snatches the coffin, and Lo leaps onto it, but falls to his death when struck by a dart. Which is how they turn the film over to Lo’s younger brother, a ne’er do well who was not studying kung fu very dilligently. He goes to the compound of a rival martial arts master, who is a suspect but is cleared by getting killed in his sleep. Lo suspects the one-armed valet, whom he finds at a nearby temple and discovers the man has two arms after all–and the temple is the entrance to the Tower of Death, which is an futuristic underground bunker. Lo2 fights his way in, discovers Chin faked his own death because he’s a drug kingpin whom Interpol was closing in on, and they have a long fight where Lo triumphs.
Wow, this really was a cash-in. And low budget. We get scenes where Bruce Lee is talking to a mentor, and then they switch to a closeup of the mentor delivering lines pertaining to this plot, and it’s obviously a different guy. We get some of the filmed-from-behind, big sunglasses, and distant shot scenes to fill in gaps in the Billy Lo portion of the program. We get the changing shirt colors on Bruce Lee when two different films are spliced together. We get a lion attack where it’s obviously a guy in a lion costume. Jeez, Louise, I should have waited to watch Kung Pow: Enter the Fist until after I watched this film so I could see exactly what they were spoofing.
At any rate, I feel some sense of accomplishment in finishing the boxed set, and I’m kind of glad it wasn’t an Urban Action Cinema Collection kind of thing where I had to get through 15 movies. I like martial arts films, but watching too many of them in a row gets a little tedious. But, as I said, I feel a sense of completion from making it through the set, and I could use that.
