A martial arts movie star fakes his own death to avoid
the mob, then returns to take them down one at a time. ACTION/CRIME
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Game of Death (1978)Written and Directed by Robert Clouse
Starring Bruce Lee, Colleen Camp, Gig Young, Dean Jagger, Hugh O'Brian, Robert Wall, Mel Novak, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar |
Game of Death is such a bizarre movie. It's insane that this thing even came to life the way it did. Before his death in 1973, Bruce Lee started filming his next project after Enter the Dragon. What he filmed was 100 minutes of footage, including an epic fight with basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. When Lee died, producers waited five years, then edited eleven minutes of Lee's footage into a completely new movie. In Lee's place, they used body doubles, shadows, archive footage, and even cardboard cutouts. What we got was a Frankenstein's Monster of a movie that is actually pretty terrible.
Lee, and the five men who stand in for him, plays Billy Lo, a martial arts movie star whom the mob wants to fight for them. When Billy refuses, they attack him and threaten his girlfriend Ann (Camp). Billy decides to fake his death, which is where the producers used actual footage of Lee's real memorial service in the movie. There's even a shot of Lee's real corpse, which is in extremely poor taste. Anyway, Billy goes after the mobsters who ruined his life, taking them out one at a time. The only real new footage we get of Bruce is at the end, where he takes on Kareem and two other fighters. Then, the movie just sort of ends. It's not very well put together and it's clear the producers just wanted to cash in on Lee's image. Game of Death shouldn't exist. Plain and simple. Bruce Lee died in 1973, and there wasn't enough footage of this project to justify a new movie. Yet, it does exist thanks to greed. It's a damn shame that this ended up being Lee's swan song and not his masterpiece, Enter the Dragon. But hey, that Kareem fight was pretty good. |