Enter the Bruceploitation_1 / Short introduction about Bruceploitation movies and some memories...

Short introduction about Bruceploitation movies

The Bruceploitation film category is a subgenre of martial arts films that exploits the image of Bruce Lee through actors who look like him, dress, move and fight like him in his films. These films flourished shortly after Bruce Lee's death, some of which were even released as his original films.

Bruce Lee was not just a Hong Kong star, with the international success of "Enter the Dragon" he gained worldwide popularity, increasing the appeal of martial arts films in overseas cinemas. The Hong Kong film industry needed a replacement for Bruce Lee. Several of these films are pseudo-biopics of Bruce Lee, products of fiction that are of no interest to Bruce Lee fans other than martial arts fans.

The Karate movies, the various Bruces and some memories of the Karate and bruceploitation movies

For me these movies are quite entertaining and if the main reason they were made was for companies to profit by exploiting the fame of BRUCE LEE, and if for many these movies are an insult to BRUCE LEE they are actually mythologizing him and turning him into a mythical super hero. I feel lucky that I got to see these movies in theaters before I started watching them and re-watching them a few years later on video.

My first "karate" movie, that's what we used to call kung fu and martial arts movies, was a bruceploitation movie, COBRA, with an Indonesian protagonist who was Chinese to me then and to many still today , BRUCE LEΙ aka STEVEN LEE. I saw the film when I was eleven years old in the summer cinema of my neighborhood "Katerina" which for several years has been a municipal cinema and has been renamed "Martha Karagianni", in the summer of 1983.

The following year, other "karate" movies followed, most of which happened to be bruceploitation, such as "BRUCE'S FINGERS," starring, according to the poster, the actual successor to BRUCE LEE, BRUCE LEI.

Actually the protagonist was not BRUCE LEI but another BRUCE, BRUCE LE. The paradox of the case was that next to the poster and photos of "BRUCE'S FINGERS" in the window of the "Katerina" cinema, the poster and photos of the next week's "karate" (every week they also played a "karate") which was another bruceploitation movie "ENTER THE GAME OF DEATH" with BRUCE LE, looking at the pictures of the one movie starring BRUCE LE, I saw BRUCE LE, looking at the pictures of the other movie supposedly starring BRUCE LEI, I saw BRUCE LE again. After all, who was what? I was too young to be put through such problems.

In those days we spent several hours outside the theaters "studying" the pictures from the "karate" movies which were actually "kung fu" movies and a little later the "ninja" movies.

Summers followed in "Katerina" and other bruceploitation films such as: "BRUCE STRIKES BACK" with BRUCE LE, "THE DRAGON LIVES" with BRUCE LI, "BRUCE LEE'S SECRET" with BRUCE LI alternating with other "karate" films either with braids (that's what we used to call the classic martial arts movies of e.g. Shaw Brothers Studio) like "SHAOLIN TEMPLE" with DAVID CHIANG and ALEXANDER FU SENG, or JACKIE CHAN's karate movies like "SHAOLIN WOODEN MEN" and "FANTASY MISSION FORCE ".

In the winters I used to watch "karate" movies at another cinema called "Lux". "Lux" in the winters operated as a winter cinema and in the summers with a conversion on the roof as a summer one. Unfortunately, for many years the cinema has not existed and in its place a small shopping center has been built with a sporting goods store opened by the owner of "Lux" and in the corner a coffee shop.

In "Lux" I saw movies like "RETURN OF BRUCE" with BRUCE LE, "CHALLENGE OF THE TIGER" with BRUCE LE and "BRUCE LEE: THE STAR OF ALL STARS" with BRUCE LI.

In most martial arts movies regardless of whether the movie had something to do with BRUCE LEE or not, the Greek title had something to do with BRUCE LEE. it had nothing to do with BRUCE LEE neither in case nor in era and the poster of the movie had a photo of BRUCE LEE from "ENTER THE DRAGON" with the Greek title "300 AMAZONS IN BRUCE LEE'S THERMOPYLES" (I don't know the original title film).

At the time we watched these movies in theaters there was some confusion, perhaps due to the fact that these movies starred a BRUCE, and in addition to BRUCE LEE, BRUCE LEE and BRUCE LEE who presented him as the "real successor to BRUCE LEE" " or better than BRUCE LEE, other BRUCES like BRUCE LEE YEUNG and BRUCE LE YEUNG had been added.

 

The viewers who watched these movies and were regulars were mostly teenagers and young men who often thought they were seeing the real BRUCE LEE on the screen or thought BRUCE LI was BRUCE LEE's brother, this kind of confusion was universal phenomenon. Even viewers who knew they weren't watching the real BRUCE LEE were sure that the lead actor was the right size and their outbursts and applause were just like those in the original BRUCE LEE movies.

The confusion created by these films which have been watched by pretty much everyone of my generation and older than me still exists today. A few years ago one Sunday I saw in an antique bookstore in Monastiraki in Athens the Greek poster of the first martial arts movie I saw "COBRA" hanging in a high and visible part of the store, I was impressed that when I told the owner of the store that I wanted to buy and while on the poster along with the title the name of the protagonist "BRUCE LEΙ" is written, the owner told an employee to take down "BRUCE LEE".

In the following years I enjoyed the "karate" movies on my home video, where I also saw my first BRUCE LEE movie, "GAME OF DEATH" which my father bought for me from a video club in my neighborhood. Until then I had never seen an original BRUCE LEE movie in the cinema, this happened because even then the same movies were playing over and over again, the place of only four BRUCE LEE movies had been taken by dozens of BRUCE LI, BRUCE LE, BRUCE LEI, BRUCE LEUNG and many other BRUCES.  

A little later these films also began to decline as their place was taken by the new type of JACKIE CHAN crime comedies, ninja films with SHO KOSUKI and RICHARD HARRISON and films with JEAN CLUDE VAN DAMME and CHUCK NORRIS.

BRUCE LEE I saw in the cinema just before the cinemas started to close and more and more video clubs opened, it was "ENTER THE DRAGON" in a re-release.

On my home video watching each movie as many times as I wanted, the ones I had seen before in the cinema and the ones I didn't get to see since almost all of them had been released on videocassettes I discovered that a movie on video noticeably lost a large part of its magic in compared to cinema. This is because in addition there is no comparison between the image of a cinema screen from a camera projecting even 1980s-era 35mm film and the image of a VHS tape from a video player playing it on a 1980s television screen. , but also that the majority of martial arts movies other than BRUCE LEE movies released by decent companies like "Home Video Hellas" and "Warner Home Video", were released by cheap companies set up opportunistically to profit from the boom of video clubs. In most films the transfer has been done by videotaping from a simple video camera on the cinema screen while the film is shown. The result is that the films on the cassettes are of very low quality, dark and a significant part of the image is missing from the edges.