In Hell, Bruce Lee meets Popeye, Zatoichi, James Bond and Clint Eastwood...quite a movie
THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN (1977)
I like demented movies where you glance around at the audience and they are all saying, "What the...?!" This is one of them. THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN is an incredibly surreal movie! It's not really funny (the jokes are spaced far apart) but absurd enough to be worth watching. This was only a few years after Bruce Lee died in real life, and here we find him arriving in a sort of Purgatory inhabited by movie characters awaiting their own fates.
A shoddy version of Bruce has to deal with equally shoddy versions of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, Zatoichi, James Bond, Wang Yu's One Armed Boxer, the Exorcist, Kwai Chang Caine, the Godfather, Dracula and his zombies (guys in black bodysuits with skeletons painted on the front), even Popeye! There's a horde of Mummies in the cleanest, whitest wrappings you've ever seen. Even Emmanuelle from all those soft-core Eurosleazers shows up. What the heck. There are also many Asian characters I don't recognize but then I'm not deeply enough into Chinese movies or history. One of them could be a Chinese character equivalent of Lt Columbo or Davy Crockett, I wouldn't catch the reference. Who's the guy with the blue scarf, for example? (As an aside, for those who like being offended, Popeye, Dracula and the Man With No Name are played by Asian actors.)
There were at least a dozen Chinese actors doing Bruce Lee imitations for a decade after 1973. Most were hopeless, one or two were good enough at screen fighting to be worth watching. Here, we have Bruce Leong (real name supposed to be Siu Lung Leung, but that's doubtful too. There are undercover spies with fewer aliases than Hong Kong actors of that time.) He looks enough like Bruce to be dragged in for a police line up but then would be immediately dismissed, and his attempts to mimic Bruce's gestures and mannerisms are about as convincing as some guy at work reenacting a movie he saw last night. None of the actors here look much their characters, the James Bond and Clint Eastwood portrayers are particularly tragic. On the other hand, the movie has a tongue in cheek quality that excuses a lot. At least, I THINK it was meant to be a spoof, if these guys were being serious, then the movie is gobsmacking in its incompetence.
Not that surprisingly, there are a lot of jokes about how well endowed Bruce was. In a traditional Chinese doctor's office (where a walking skeleton leaves after thanking the doc, "You've been most kind."), it's implied that Bruce died from too much sex. The doctor's nurse says, "Aw grandpa, don't be so unfair. When a man's endowed like Bruce, the girls are bound to want him. He's gotta have his fun, hey Brucie?" This was the source of tons of gossip back in the day. I used to have stacks of Hong Kong magazines with only small amounts of English captions and they explain the nicknamed "Three Legged Bruce" was not REALLY because he kicked so fast he seemed to have an extra leg. But maybe that's a topic for another time. Back in our movie, Bruce is remorseful, apologizes for neglecting his wife Linda and says he wants to get to back to the land of the living. He can only do this if the King of Hell permits it.
The action scenes are nothing special, the same couple of moves you see in dozens of martial arts flicks from Hong Kong in this era. A few times, Bruce puts on the Kato chaffeur uniform for no particular reason, and we get music swiped from the James Bond theme to the score from ENTER THE DRAGON to even a snatch of Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting." At a crucial moment, Popeye does indeed eat some spinach and go to town with his theme song playing!
Bruce does win the right to go back to Earth, but no one else. When he asks when his friends like Popeye and Caine can return to the living, the King of Hell says if he allowed everyone to return, "then the Earth would be an even crazier place." Well, that's hard to dispute. Although a planet that gives us movies like this...