What did Golden Harvest Studios get when they spliced fifteen minutes of Bruce Lee demo footage onto a clumsy, poorly-written mess full of Mafia heavies, motorcycle-riding thugs, and faded Hollywood stars like Gig Young and Dean Jagger? Well, it's not a Bruce Lee movie, but it *is* called "Game of Death" (the title Lee had intended to use for a totally different film before he died). And it's a disaster. Not only are there two unconvincing doubles (Kim Tai-chung and Chen Yao-po) who stand in for Lee, but there's an equally unconvincing Kareem Abdul Jabbar double! That's right, Lee's student and friend wisely chose to have nothing to do with this humiliating bastard of a project, and--like Lee--appears only in the climactic fight scenes. Speaking of those scenes (in which Lee also takes on former student/instructor/nunchaku expert Dan Inosanto and hapkido master Ji Han Jae), they were shot immediately before work on "Enter the Dragon" began and obviously were not intended to be used in the final "Game of Death" project. They're interesting to watch, but they are ONLY demonstration footage; the choreography has a lot of rough edges. (Watch John Little's "Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey" to see the footage placed in its proper perspective.) The rest of the fights in the film are not up to the standard of the Lee scenes, of course. The locker room showdown between Kim Tai-chung and Bob Wall is okay, but if director Robert Clouse wanted to fool the audience into believing that the protagonist in this fight was Bruce Lee (and he obviously did, judging from all the split-second reaction clips of Lee from other films that were spliced into "Game of Death", both during the Bob Wall fight and elsewhere), he failed miserably. This is a rotten piece of work, people. And I repeat, it is NOT a Bruce Lee movie! In his definitive article on the Bruceploitation phenomenon in "Martial Arts Movies" magazine back in the '80s, Daniel C. Lee included "Game of Death" in his filmography of Bruce Lee exploitation flicks, and he was right--that's exactly where it belongs. This movie is an insult to Lee's memory and, thankfully, most fans now seem to recognize it as such. Single worst moment: about five minutes into the film, when a picture of Lee's face is pasted to a mirror, and the neck and shoulders of one of the doubles are placed immediately beneath the photo. Groooaaannnnn...how cheap and awful can you get? And no, Chuck Norris is not in "Game of Death", so why does his name appear in the credits? EVERYTHING about this movie is terrible, and not in a so-bad-it's-good way. AVOID!
Review of Game of Death
