Bruce Lee Lucha desde la Tumba

This movie is a underground martial arts cult classic (as with fantasy mission force), although this movie does not star Bruce Lee, it is about him, and stars the look-alike bruce le , who has portrayed lee in other films. This is about bruce lee making a pact with the dark angel, and he has come on earth to get his "revenge" on the people that tried to kill him. For Bruce Lee fans this can be a funny film or a film they hate , i found this film funny though.

rated R for action violence and mild brief nudity.

This is a film with one of those great exploitation titles that promises so much more than it eventually delivers. At first glance I was expecting to see some extreme kung-fu horror flick with a mad sorcerer reviving Bruce Lee from his death and turning him into an unstoppable zombie killer, with only a young novice martial artist to stop him. Sadly this was not to be. Aside from the cheesy opening shot, in which a guy pretending to be Bruce Lee jumps straight out of a grave and a drawing of such a scene follows on quickly, we're in the middle of a run-of-the-mill fight flick that has nothing to do with Bruce Lee at all. In fact, he's not even mentioned!

The film instead concerns a young Bruce Lee lookalike named Bruce Lea (see where the confusion can arise?). It turns out that an old buddy of Lea's has died, so he goes to investigate and find the killers responsible. It turns out to be, apparently, the Village People! Yep, a Japanese man, a black man, a cowboy and a white man were last seen with the deceased and soon Lea finds himself battling the criminal gang in a succession of largely unimpressive fights. Things are tied up with a very unsurprising twist ending, a touch of tragedy and lots of very bad dubbing and worse acting. Lots of running time is taken up with scenes of human bonding which occur between Lea and would-be girlfriend Deborah Chaplin and the will-they-or-won't-they relationship which develops between them.

Interspersed with the light plot are some fairly average scenes of kung fu which are nothing to get excited about. They are okay, but Lea is no Bruce Lee or even Bruce Li. In fact, Bruce Lea is a better actor than he is a fighter, which is unusual considering the proliferation of good fighters/poor actors that fill our screens year after year! Chaplin is also not bad in a developed part, although the bad guys are little more than clichés waiting to be cut down by our hero.

The film is quite slow and uninteresting, let down by poor production values and a somewhat gloomy atmosphere. The photography is always dark and the editing looks like child's work, with silly slow-motion inserts for no reason (the moves aren't even that impressive to begin with). For some reason, some prints of the film claim that Umberto Lenzi is the director, but I believe this to be a simple case of mistaken identity; also, why on earth would Lenzi leave his beloved cop films in Italy to go globetrotting for a low budget kung fu trash oddity? A guy named Doo-Yong Lee appears to be the real culprit.

*Possible Partial Spoilers*

Originally entitled "The Stranger" and directed by Umberto Lenzi (under a Korean pseudonym), who helmed the infamous grossout cannibal flick "Make Them Die Slowly", "Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave" is the most hilariously awful installment in the Bruceploitation subgenre of 1974-80. It doesn't even star one of the three well-known Bruce Lee impersonators (Bruce Li, Bruce Le, and Dragon Lee). "Bruce K.L. Lea" is actually Jun Chong, a Korean taekwon do instructor based in Los Angeles. He's terrible as far as imitating Lee's mannerisms goes, but he's a fine kicker. You have to enjoy this for what it is. PLEASE don't expect a Bruce Lee movie! He only made four films--"Fists of Fury", "The Chinese Connection", "Return of the Dragon", and "Enter the Dragon" ("Game of Death" doesn't qualify)--and he wasn't identified by a name other than Bruce Lee in any of them. Not Li, not Le, not Lea, not Lai. The story has nothing to do with Bruce Lee fighting back from the grave, either. Jun Chong does not play Lee nor a character based on Lee, but rather a Korean martial artist who comes to Los Angeles to find out how his best friend died...only to discover that he's being stalked by a weird assortment of bad guys (a Japanese swordsman played by future "Revenge of the Ninja" star Sho Kosugi, a tall, bald black man with a cape and an earring, and a cowboy among them). As I mentioned, Chong does a kind of dimestore Bruce Lee impression during the fight scenes (thumbing his nose, going "waaaaahhhh!"), and the dubbing is truly hilarious--even for a martial arts movie. Particularly amusing is the evil cowboy's voice; he sounds about as masculine as the guy who wore the stetson hat in the Village People. Now that you know what to expect...enjoy! And look around for the original poster art for this film, too. The company that released the DVD is really doing its customers a disservice by not including this wild, cartoony art on the box!

An oriental Kung Fu expert named Wong Han (played by Bruce K.L. Lea) travels to America at the invite of his long-time friend and former Kung Fu school training partner only to learn his friend is now dead, apparently the result of a suicide. Suspecting foul play, Wong Han sets out to bring down a gang of strange characters he suspects are responsible for his friend's death but when he attempts to do so, there's also quite a few unexpected surprises awaiting our hero.

Despite the title referring to Bruce Lee, he actually has nothing whatsoever to do with this movie apart from an extremely cheesy, silly opening introduction title sequence in which we see a man resembling Lee jump out of a grave with the headstone behind him bearing Lee's name. What this movie is actually about is a man coming to America trying to avenge his fallen friend while protecting his deceased friend's last belongings. There he befriends a beautiful young woman named Susan (played by the delectable Deborah Chaplin) who tries to help him in his quest. However, the gang of colorful thugs, a true assortment of weird characters if there ever was one, are after him and Susan for some reason unknown to Wong Han and go all out in their efforts to bring them down meaning Wong Han has to constantly fight for his own survival while also trying to protect Susan.

As you can tell, the basic plot for this movie isn't half-bad. The Kung Fu fighting scenes featuring Bruce Lea, who throws a mean-looking kick, also proved much better than expected although they fall rather short in comparison to the one and only Bruce Lee. The major problem here is that the movie seems to go on a bit too long, the pace feeling a little too slow, which isn't helped by the fact there's too much obvious filler footage of people simply driving vehicles from place to place. Also the colorful villainous assortment of characters Wong Han tries to bring down never evolve beyond anything other than one-dimensional caricatures.

I bought this movie years ago at a local dollar store for the title alone and once I got around to watching it, I was pleasantly surprised how entertaining it was. It's been years since I've seen this film, so I'll have to go digging through my archives and watch it again - but don't believe the crap people say. It's an enjoyable movie, though as best as I can recall it didn't have much ( or anything?) to do with Bruce Lee returning from the grave. It's not a zombie movie or anything, just an enjoyable and entertaining kung fu B film from the 70's. I myself am a huge Bruce Lee fan, but I don't initially hate a movie because it tries to capitalize on the death of a legend by using his name in the title...I believe there's an entire genre of that - bruceploitation. I'd definitely recommend this film to fans of B films or old kung fu films. The copy I got was pretty grainy...but I bought it for a dollar, so...I didn't exactly go in with the highest of expectations. So if you buy it cheap or see it for free, read the title, and know the star is bruce lea, go in with your expectations set low - you might like it.