‘Enter the Clones of Bruce’ is a wild exploration of “Bruceploitation”
Bruce Lee’s actual movie career was only the beginning- for years after his death, filmmakers exploited him with imitators, knockoffs, and homages.
Bruce Lee died in the summer of 1973 at just 32, leaving behind a filmography of films he made in Hong Kong and popular worldwide, including in the United States.
Lee’s most famous film, Enter the Dragon, was released shortly after his death, while the unfinished Game of Death was finally completed and released five years later. However, after that, both Lee and the martial arts genre remained hugely popular (Justin Lin directed a mockumentary, Finishing the Game, about the completion of the latter film.)
So the solution was many, many years of faux Bruce Lee movies. And that’s the subject of Enter the Clones of Bruce, a hugely entertaining new documentary from director David Gregory that looks at what became known as the Bruceploitation genre.
The idea was to create the impression of a new Bruce Lee movie, which was impossible. So they hired actors and gave them names like “Bruce Li” (pronounced “Bruce Lie”), “Dragon Lee,” “Bruce Le,” and “Bruce Lo.”
Some were positioned as biopics of Bruce Lee, with varying degrees of truth, while others presupposed that Lee had been murdered and the movie was about investigating or getting revenge. Still others claimed Bruce Li or the other star had been a student or protege of Bruce Lee (the two men had never met.)
There was also something called “The Sister of Bruce Lee” and a movie called “Bruce Lee and I,” which was pitched as “the most exciting Kung Fu picture ever directed by Bruce Lee” (it was not not directed by Bruce Lee.)
Other films invented other connections with the real Lee. One movie — Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave — just went ahead and included Lee’s entire funeral.
A later wave applied the Bruce Lee template to other movie genres, like Blaxploitation and sci-fi.
It was shameless, wildly cynical stuff based on the notion that the filmmakers could swap in a fake Bruce Lee, and no one would care. And it was successful- the Bruceploitation era lasted longer than the real Bruce Lee’s movie star career.
In the film, we hear from both Ho Chung-tao (Bruce Li) and Moon Kyung-seok (Dragon Lee), various filmmakers, Hong Kong film historians, and many others involved. Overall, it’s a hilarious dive into an underexplored corner of film history, likely to delight those who know this history intimately or not at all.
Martial arts movies were so popular in the 1970s that the state of New York went so far as to ban the use and ownership of nunchuks. They remained illegal until 2018 when a Long Island man who had developed a martial arts discipline sued under Second Amendment grounds and got the weapon legalized.
Enter the Clones of Bruce, while available on VOD, has also been on a tour of screenings in various cities. One of the “clones,” Bruce Le, is doing live Q&As at some of them.