Watch The Real Bruce Lee For Free

I love this movie so much

Best movie of this year hands down!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Oh man, this movie is the reason beer was invented! Seriously, although it is a total cheap cash-in on the death of a true legend, it nevertheless entertains, and at times, fascinates. The early section of the film, featuring clips of Bruce Lee as a child actor, in several different, very rare films, should be a great treat for fans of Lee. There is even a scene from his first film, "The Kid" where he acts with his real-life father. These obscure, shadowy black and white images provide proof that Bruce had the star quality and acting skills, even at age 5, and up, where he portrays a mean bully, a scared orphan, a silly carnival performer, all with amazing ability; he was a natural from the beginning. These are followed by a short look into his life, beginning with his journey to California, and showing him working in the school he opened there. The film noticeably skims over his iconic films, as they probably didn't have the rights to use clips from them. The shots of his huge funeral in Hong Kong are sad and moving, but the solemn feeling shifts gears quickly, when the film takes a look at the Bruce imitators. some brief shots of Bruce Li segue into a FULL-ON CRAPFEST FEATURE starring an imitator called Dragon Lee. to Dragon Lee's credit, the man had the moves, as well as an amazingly chiseled physique, but he did lack the physical beauty/grace of the original Bruce Lee, and the fact that while Bruce could act, Dragon really can't, makes this surreal film a disorienting freak show of riotous proportions. you'll be reaching for the remote control to replay the scene where the old man thrown across the cardboard room by Dragon, is plainly NOT the stunt double who goes flying, and is about 30 years younger and 40 pounds heavier. You will be wondering why most of the guys that Dragon fights are fat old slobs that were probably found under a bridge and paid in moonshine to perform. The sets and costumes are adequate, and Dragon Lee has a frenetic energy and there are some great fight scenes. nice touches and small details make this one stand out though, and this (un-named) film somehow possesses a noble and nostalgic quality all it's own. I have to admit that i enjoyed it from start to finish. Between the fits of laughter and the jarring visuals, this is a fascinating time capsule. Finally available in a decent print in an awesome box set called "Martial Arts Masters" This strange film is actually presented in widescreen! I just have to wonder how many suckers were duped into seeing this movie in the theater, lured in by the name of Bruce Lee. This kind of exploitation is a bit sad, but morbidly fascinating, like a train wreck...

Sure, there are several vintage clips of Bruce as a child on this DVD. I may be mistaken but I believe these are available elsewhere and in better form. There are also some essentially worthless clips of Bruce Lee doing Kato, and some Bruce Li clips.Skip through all that if you like. Get to the "Dragon Lee" film, which begins near a waterfall with "Dragon" practicing. This begins one of the most surreal and satisfying bad kung fu movies you will ever have the joy to watch.There is so much to describe, I couldn't possibly contain it all here. The plot is the standard baddie doing the usual "control all the local kung fu schools" routine, but here it is being done by some *really* fake-looking Japanese characters, who mostly all sport Hitler-style mini-moustaches. Wonderful! Later in the film they bring in their "champion" who is of mixed Japanese-German descent. Perfect! There's a lot of Japan-bashing going on here.The real enjoyment of the film comes from this kind of thing: The wonderfully awful dubbing, some of the worst I've ever heard. Over the top evil giggling from the bad guys; WAY excessively long grunts and groans from injured thugs; and of course, plenty of squeals and whoops and "bucocks!" from the Bruce imitator. (Did Bruce ever really make that chicken sound? I wonder).The sets and costumes. Sets are horribly claustrophobic. There seems to be no space in the movie larger than an 8 x 12 foot sound stage, and most are even smaller. Costumes are painfully dowdy, raggedy, and crudely made, like cheap Halloween costumes.The kind of wire-work you only see in your dreams. You just have to see it to believe it.The almost total lack of back-story, or any attempt at providing a story of any kind. This movie plays out like a great Nintendo 8-bit game from the 1980's (if you know what I mean) - just tons of action. It jumps from action sequence to plot contrivance and back again, with the barest whisper of dialogue and characterization in between. There are actually one or two characters we see several times, who are important to the plot, but whom we never get formally introduced to! We know almost nothing about them, and so feel nothing at their involvement or passing. It's great, one-dimensional fun - never preachy, always entertaining.Someone in another comment here said this was a Korean production, which would suit me just fine. The film *completely* lacks that Hong Kong or even mainland-China feel to it, and it is certainly not Japanese! Looking at a film like this, made in Korea in the early 1970's, is like finding a time capsule - you see things you didn't know existed, shown in ways you couldn't have possibly imagined.The movie is like a fever dream that you just can't wake up from, and I mean that in a good way! Small, sweaty, illogical, and lots of unnecessary closeups.

There's very little of the "real Bruce Lee" in this film, its title notwithstanding. The brief clips of four of the movies he made as a Hong Kong child star ("Kid Cheung", "Bad Boy", "Carnival", and "Orphan Sam") are mildly interesting, but they don't really have anything to do with Lee's later career as a martial arts practitioner/teacher/writer and kung-fu film luminary. The rest of "The Real Bruce Lee" consists of a handful of clips of Bruce Li, the first and most watchable Lee impersonator, followed by a (way too) long mini-feature which the narrator calls 'The Ultimate Lee'. Said mini-feature stars Dragon Lee, a rather graceless Korean martial artist who was by far the LEAST adept of the three major Bruce Lee imitators! There are no credits for 'The Ultimate Lee', and I suspect that it is an edit of a longer film which has never been seen in its complete form in the United States. It appears to have been shot in Korea, rather than Hong Kong or Taiwan, and the fight choreography is--as in most Dragon Lee films--very clunky. The dubbing and sound effects are standard (which is to say terrible) for a low-budget chopsocky movie. The most laughable thing about 'The Ultimate Lee' is the narrator's claim that it was Bruce Lee's next scheduled project, and that Dragon Lee had to be brought in to replace him! Bruce Lee had already starred in "The Chinese Connection"; he wouldn't have gone anywhere near this sordid, clumsy little ripoff of his own classic film. Avoid.

This movie has all the looks of a quickie movie that was made to capitalize on the death of Bruce Lee in Hong Kong in 1973. I am sure there were many , many movies like this made back then. Luckily for us, this one survives and is dubbed in English. The high points of this 2 hour film which is really a half-hour documentary about Bruce, followed by a full-length Kung Fu feature supposedly called " The Ultimate Lee" and is claimed to be the next scheduled movie was to have done ( yeah, right...). The first half-hour is where this feature shines as we see selected clips from Bruce's first four films made while he was a youngster in China. We see clips from "The Little Dragon", "The Bad Boy", "Carnival" and "Orphan Sam". Included is the only scene Bruce ever did with his father. We see scenes of Bruce behind the camera and casual. We also see scenes of Bruce's funeral. This is all very good and the collector would love to get his hands on footage like this. I will offer a caveat though when seeking this documentary out. Beware of inferior dubs. There is a video copy of this being sold that has Bruce on the cover with no shirt and with the pattern of a rising sun Japanese flag behind him ( strangely enough...), this is an inferior copy that looks like it was copied by a handheld camera with the movie being shown on a flapping sheet. The picture is out of focus a lot of the time and is very frustrating to watch, especially the rarities when you would like to see clearly. But if you can find the clear version, it is worth seeing for the Bruce Lee fan.