Originally published on Set The Tape
There are a few men that you can point to and say that they made an entire genre of cinema popular, but Bruce Lee is one of these. Thanks to his work, martial arts films became hugely popular in the US and Europe, and his untimely death only helped to make him even more popular, as fans and the general public were caught up in both the drama of his death and thoughts about what could have been if he’d have lived. With a huge demand for more martial arts movies, and for more Bruce, filmmakers in Hong Kong made a bold decision: to bring Bruce Lee back to life. Thus began an era of Bruceploitation, where multiple men stepped up to bring the star back to screens.
Enter The Clones of Bruce is a new documentary feature that takes a look at this era in Hong Kong cinema, which resulted in bootleg sequels, fake biopics, and claims of long lost movies from Bruce Lee, most of which introduced a new pretender to the throne. The film focuses on the years immediately following the death of Lee, and charts the ever growing rosters of imitators and the movies they made. And the film does a decent job at tracking down a large number of these replacement Bruce’s, and bringing them onto camera to talk about the wild days of Hong Kong film making where it seemed anything goes was the rule.
It’s interesting to see the progressive wackiness of events, of a style of film making so bizarre that it simply couldn’t happen today thanks to tighter copyright laws, as well as people being less willing to milk the dead in the same way. It seems that as soon as one replacement Bruce made his way onto screens other production companies were doing the same, with anyone even remotely resembling the man being put in a Bruce Lee haircut and large sunglasses. And some are so vividly different that it’s ridiculous it was even tried (Hong Kong film makers banking on white audiences not being too good at telling Asian people apart, it seems).
Because of how surreal the entire thing was, and how ridiculous the movies they made were, Enter The Clones of Bruce seems to walk this fine line between documentary and comedy, though not by choice. You can’t dive into this subject and not have the end result feel a bit silly, because the events were. Especially when multiple Bruce Lee replacements get brought together in one movie to play his clones, or when a movie had Bruce Lee going to the afterlife to fight people like Abraham Lincoln, James Bond, Clint Eastwood, and Dracula.
The film also shows us the global impact of Bruce Lee’s passing, and how there were huge demands for more movies, not just in the US but France and Germany too. The film makers speak to several experts on the subject, including people who were involved in the marketing of these movies in Europe. One of the more interesting and eye opening parts of the film shows us how these films were originally marketed, with images of Bruce Lee fighting on the posters, claims that he’d directed them, and even photographs of him in his coffin appearing before legal action resulted in them replacing his images with the real actors, and removing false claims of his involvement.
For those who like the ridiculous, who enjoy finding weird and wonderful pieces of history, and those who have an interest in quite cheesy Hong Kong cinema, Enter The Clones of Bruce is a delightful examination of a unique and unrepeatable moment of film history. It may even add a whole lot of new films in your to-be-watched pile.
Enter The Clones of Bruce screened at FrightFest 2023.
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