After the cultural phenom Enter the Dragon brought Hong Kong cinema into the English mainstream by adding a dose of 007 DNA. However, it was Australia that best ran with Golden Harvest’s formula, producing the Ozploitation classic The Man from Hong Kong. To underline the Bond-ness of it all, they give it a catchy theme song in Jigsaw’s “Sky High” and even cast one-and-done 007 George Lazenby as the villain.

Hong Kong Special Branch Inspector Fang Sing Leng (Jimmy Wang Yu, Master of the Flying Guillotine) travels Down Under to extradite a scar-faced drug dealer (Sammo Hung, Eastern Condors). Crossbow-savvy crime lord Jack Wilton (Lazenby, Death Dimension) makes Fang’s assignment most difficult, if not downright impossible.

Another influence of Ian Fleming’s most famous creation? Putting Fang horizontal with beautiful women he’s just met. Chief among them is a journalist (Ros Spiers, Stone) who literally swoops into their first meeting on a hang glider; “Your kite is confiscated,” he says, ever the smooth-talker. His next conquest is a college student (Rebecca Gilling, Spiers’ fellow Stoner); “You’re my first Chinese,” she says, ever the statistician. (Let’s try to ignore how she then pulls her eyes back to slits, shall we?) In his sex scenes with both, Fang exhibits an interesting lovers’ technique: dragging his tongue across their face. Whatever works!

The first feature for Turkey Shoot director Brian Trenchard-Smith, The Man from Hong Kong contains some incredible action sequences. Aside from the hand-to-hand-to-foot combat on display, audiences get a couple of high-speed chases, a man on fire, a leap from a tall building and, yep, more hang gliding. One could draw a direct line from this ball-kicking bone-crusher to the groundbreaking work of Jackie Chan in the ’80s with Police Story, Armour of God and the like, so much so that a line of Wilton’s can be thrown back at the film: “Thank you for coming. You’ve been very entertaining.” —Rod Lott

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With Bruce Lee dead and buried, the world needs a new action star and they find one in Lee-alike Bruce Li! He’s just an everyday dude who becomes just as good as Lee — possibly better — with just a few days of training. And he’s going to need it to, because an area advertising agency has put a hit out on him, which seems a bit drastic.

Once a horny cab driver with a passing resemblance to Lee, Li is hired by an unscrupulous producer to become the new face of international kung fu; clad in a Game of Death workout suit, he uses his Yuen Woo Ping-choreographed martial arts to lay waste to a team of sparring partners, including one sent to kill him. He also uses it to make love to a French actress. Ooh-la-la!

The Cosmo Company, by the way, wants to assassinate Li because he won’t fall in line with their advertising wants and needs, forcing them to send world-class skiers, room-service attendants and a guy who resembles a fit Rudy Ray Moore to crack his dragon-looking ass in half, often spectacularly failing.

Li is pitted in one fight after another in the 96-minute runtime, often soundtracked by songs such as “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me. With a Rocky-lite finale and a quickie ending, Dynamo might as well have been the Bruceploitation masterpiece of the era, showcasing the nimble Li as a worthy successor with an actual personality to match. —Louis Fowler

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When Franco Nero declined to return for an Enter the Ninja sequel, Sho Kosugi raised his hand and rode that shuriken-throwing train as far as it would take him: more or less to 1989, as the Bruce Lee of the two-night-rental era. However, Kosugi did more than just play ninjas in the Cannon Group’s Ninja trilogy; he also played ninjas outside of it, including Pray for Death, a stand-alone from unlikely helmer Gordon Hessler of KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.

In Japan, Akira Saito (Kosugi) is a loving family man and hardworking salaryman, but his wife (Donna Kei Benz, Looker) longs to move to Los Angeles. So they do, with the intent to open a restaurant, but without the intent to be in an area so seedy, it could be a Chia Pet. Unbeknownst to the Saitos, an abandoned annex of their rundown place is where some crooks have hidden a valuable necklace. When those jewels disappear, the local mob boss known as — brace yourself for a name that screams “rejected Dick Tracy villain” — Limehouse Willy (Airport ’77’s James Booth, who also wrote the screenplay) wrongly assumes Akira and his family have something to do with it and will kill to get the necklace back.

Seeing as how Pray for Death is a revenge picture, take a good guess where things go from there. This is the kind of movie in which a low-speed fender bender causes a vehicle to explode as soon as bumpers touch. In which Akira always knows where to find his enemies. In which a woman is knocked unconscious before being fatally stabbed, with a quick round of sexual assault in between. In which the ultimate showdown takes place in a warehouse full of mannequins.

It’s in that last 20 minutes when Pray for Death comes, um, alive, as Kosugi drops the pacifism, applies the black eyeliner, puts on enough armor to resemble a Mortal Kombat character and ninjas up the place. Before that, thanks to the genial but cardboard acting of Kosugi, the movie is desperate for action. It could use a lot more of Akira leaping and flipping over a moving pickup truck, which Hessler shows in slow motion — as it should be, being the pic’s coup de grâce as far as visuals goes. Heck, I’d settle for just a little more of Akira’s kid’s tricked-out bicycle with jets of red smoke, a dashboard slingshot, hidden blow darts and more, all to make buffoons of mob goons and help Ninja Dad extract vengeance, sweet vengeance. —Rod Lott

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Considered a seminal martial arts film more for concept than execution, The Flying Guillotine is about your basic greedy Asian dictator who delights in his staff’s development of a new weapon for his armies. This unusual device looks like a basket affixed to a chain, but when thrown onto the head of your enemy and yanked back, blades within the basket pop out to chop off the unfortunate wearer’s head! Every movie could use one.

This is first demonstrated on a dog, much to the evil guy’s delight. It’s sick, yeah, but it should be even sicker. The movie often cuts away so you rarely see any decapitations. I wanted to see twitching headless bodies running loco for several seconds, like Anne Ramsey in Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend, right after she gets beaned with a basketball.

But I’ll give the Shaw Brothers and director Meng Hua Ho (The Oily Maniac) points for even pursuing something this demented in the first place, even if they weigh down the second half with needless chitchat. For an infinitely more entertaining flick, Jimmy Wang Yu’s Master of the Flying Guillotine from 1976 is, um, heads above. —Rod Lott

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Part sports documentary, part biopic and part clip job, Fist of Fear, Touch of Death is all steaming pile. It’s also all comedy — and not that intentional kind, either. Matthew Mallinson’s film is so inept and pathetic on every level that it deserves to be known as the Plan 9 of not just Bruceploitation pics, but martial arts movies in general.

As it begins, ’70s trailer narrator king Adolph Caesar (Oscar-nommed for A Soldier’s Story, but certainly not for this) discusses the big impending karate championship at Madison Square Garden, where someone will walk away with the honor of the title of Bruce Lee’s successor. But will they also walk away with Lee’s curse — aka the Touch of Death? That’s the conflict set up by the — how you say? — “script,” and then completely discarded 80 minutes later.

Credited as “Hammer, the Ladies Man,” Fred Williamson (Vigilante) wakes up next to some skanky white ho in a hotel room. He’s gotta get to the Garden for the match, but his mattress partner wants to “make it a six-pack,” not fully satisfied with being Hammered the mere five times prior. In a running gag, the Hammer is continually mistaken for singer Harry Belafonte. This, my friends, is what the dictionary means by “funny.”

After giving Williamson a lift to the Garden and then interviewing him, Caesar brags about having discovered Lee, and then gives us the whole story about Lee’s pre-stardom years, courtesy of poorly dubbed black-and-white sequences. In these, Bruce often dreams of his great-grandfather’s prowess as a samurai warrior, which we see flashbacks of, courtesy of color clips from 1971’s kick-ass Invincible Super Chan with a fighting midget and a guy who uses an abacus as a weapon.

Caesar briefly mentions Lee’s breakthrough role as Kato on TV’s The Green Hornet, and in present day, we see karate champ Bill Louie decked out as Kato, beating up would-be rapists in the park, killing one with hurled ninja stars. The whole ugly scene starts when some horny redneck, spotting a comely jogger, exclaims, “Shit! Fuckin’ cantaloupe tits!”

As for the much-discussed karate match, we see precious little of it, but that’s okay. At least we get to see a bit of one bout, ending with one guy’s eyes being ripped out of their sockets, complete with cartoon sound effects! So what the hell are you waiting for? —Rod Lott

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