Exit the Dragon, enter the tiger (1976)

[Neville]

You know, when I was in my early teens something miraculous happenned: Berlusconi's TeleCinque started their boradcasts in my country. All the stuff my parents (and national TV) had kept away from me for years was suddenly available, and I was old enough so my parents wouldn't care. Before my eyes there was a neverending parade of Chuck Norris films, 80s horror movies, erotica... and Hong Kong films starring all sorts of screaming yellow people, Bruce Li and Bruce Le among them.

So many years later, upon the oportunity of watching this film, my inner child took the reigns. And it's a quite funny film, you know. That is, if you can stand the blatant and shameless explotation of Bruce Lee's name and private life. The film opens with Bruce Lee telling our hero, David Lee (Bruce Li), that he fears for his life. So inmediately he names him his successor (yeah, right). Images of media reporting Bruce's death appear just afterwards, even images of the man in his coffin (!!). This is followed then by funky music (!) as we see Bruce Li kick injvisible oponents for a while. It's silly, but quite a good credit teaser as far as HK films go.

What follows is far less engaging: David Lee investigates Bruce Lee's death, which means he visits his ostensibly Asian wife (what?!), mentions the possibility Bruce Lee may have been sleeping with a HK actress (quite a way of honoring your master, man) and finally discobers an assasination plot so silly and preposterous I kept expecting for Charlie Chan to appear.

He doesn't, but I didn't get bored either. For all its faults (silly script, blatant explotation of Bruce Lee, bad acting worse dubbing) "Exit the dragon enter the tiger" is quite an entertainning film, if only for its shamelessness and the furious kung-fu fighting. Bruce Li doesn't remotely look like Bruce, but boy, he does kick a lot of ass, and his final fight against a crime lord nicknamed "the Baron" is alone worth the price of admission.

Now, if all those people stopped calling Bruce "Briuss"... THAT was annoying.