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A LOOK BACK AT BRUCE LEE’S LAST FILM, “GAME OF DEATH.”

Posted by BIG AL in Big Al's Log, Uncategorized on July 21st, 2009 | no responses

WELCOME TO MORE TWISTED THOUGHTS FROM BIG AL, CREATOR OF THE GREATEST NYC PUBLIC ACCESS TV SHOW OF ALL TIME, SPIC’N SPANISH:

This past July 20th marked the 40th anniversary of man’s first landing on the moon. While this was in indeed a momentous occasion, Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” is not the first thing that comes to my mind whenever July 20th rolls around. And that’s because to me, July 20th is first and foremost the anniversary of the indomitable Bruce Lee’s death. Which is why I’m dedicating this week’s blog to Lee and my personal favorite of his five action-packed flicks, the revenge-driven Game of Death.

Anybody who knows me well can tell you that I've always been a Bruce Lee fan.

Bruce Lee: Often imitated, but never duplicated.

Often imitated, but never duplicated: "Game of Death" was the first movie to feature a vengeful martial artist in a yellow-and-black tracksuit.

Bruce Lee died on July 20th, 1973, after suffering an allergic reaction to the drug Equagesic, which had been given to him by an actress he was supposed to have co-starred with in Game of Death. Despite his death, the movie was eventually completed and released five years later, albeit with just 11 minutes of actual Bruce Lee footage shot specifically for the film. (The rest of the scenes involving Lee were either lifted from his previous movies or were shot with body doubles.)

Bruce Lee smiles as he envisions how much fun it's going to be to kick his next victim's ass.

In the movie, Lee and his various doubles play Billy Lo, a martial arts film superstar (how’s that for a stretch?) who is constantly being pressured by a crime syndicate to join their organization. After repeatedly failing to get Lo on their side, they attempt to kill him as a way of sending a message to anybody else who would dare to refuse their advances.

Theatrical poster for "Game of Death."

In a scene that would eerily foretell the death of Bruce’s son Brandon Lee 15 years after the release of Game of Death, a syndicate henchman manages to infiltrate the set of Billy Lo’s latest movie, carrying with him a loaded gun. The scene that Lo is shooting that day requires that he be shot to death by a group of armed men (somehow, the syndicate hitman manages to make himself a part of the actors who are going to shoot Lo), and when the director yells “Action,” Lo ends up getting shot for real by the assassin (who then simply walks off the set as everyone around him is reeling in shock from the sight of Lo’s blasted, bloody face).

Like father, like son: Both Bruce Lee (left) and son Brandon (right, in 1994's "The Crow"), died while filming movies where their characters "come back from the dead" to avenge their own deaths.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a revenge flick, which means that Lo ends up making a full recovery (as well as faking his own death after getting shot), and spends the rest of the movie hunting down the syndicate members one by one, killing each bastard until there is absolutely no one left. With all due respect to all you Enter the Dragon loyalists out there, it is Billy Lo’s rage-filled vendetta against these ruthless assholes that makes Game of Death my favorite Bruce Lee movie, and even though we only get to see three fight scenes that exclusively feature the real Bruce Lee in the entire movie, they are among the very best that he EVER shot (one of them being his famous battle with NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). This is also the movie that features what is arguably the most iconic image of Bruce Lee: him wearing the yellow-and-black tracksuit, an outfit which was also worn by Uma Thurman in 2003’s Kill Bill: Volume 1.

No wires or CGI required: That's really Bruce Lee about to kick Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the face!

It is ironic that my favorite Bruce Lee movie hardly contains any actual footage of the martial arts legend, but the fact that I still love it anyway is testament to just how enjoyable the film is; a good supporting cast, a great soundtrack, and some fantastic, bone-crunching fight scenes (some of which were shot using Lee’s body doubles but are nevertheless superb) more than make up for the fact that we don’t see much of the real Bruce Lee. When it comes to good-old fashioned ass-kicking revenge cinema, you can’t do much better than Game of Death!

Big Al can be heard every Friday LIVE at 6pm EST on “The Black & the Jew Comedy Hour” on www.nytalkradio.net.

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