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What happened? When you went to the video store, did someone already rent Beast of Yucca Flats? Eegah was out? Doris Wishman films were all on a five day rental? This is a super low in the history of cinema. Bruce Lee isn't remotely in sight and although the opening title sequence is very, very promising in a Zombie Vs. Ninja sort of way, it quickly, quickly falls off.

The thing I remember most about this film were an Asian guy and a blonde American girl driving around LA trying to find a place to rent.

I think that's all this movie was about. Two people apartment-hunting. It could have been an interesting premise, if it was directed by Wim Wenders, but alas, this is just Z-grade, super lame terribleness that makes Alice in Acidland look visionary. Yikes.

The dubbing is atrocious and the acting makes Andy Warhol's stars seem like Sir Richard Chamberlin.

Watch anything else or better, observe paint drying on the wall, expand your mind reading the dictionary or telephone book or get an addiction. Whatever you do: AVOID BRUCE LEE FIGHTS BACK FROM THE GRAVE!

*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!

Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave (1976)

1/2 (out of 4)

The movie opens on the tombstone of Bruce Lee, which is struck by lightening causing the dead start to bust up through the dirt. From here "Bruce Lee" (Bruce K.L. Lea) seeks revenge on his former trainer who has been killed.

Brucexploitation is a sub-genre that really took off after the death of Bruce Lee. It was clear the Martial Arts genre needed something to keep those cash registers ringing so countless producers made in-name-only Bruce Lee movies. I'm slowly making my way through them and I really hope I don't come across one as bad as this one.

If you're a fan of bad movies then you'll get a couple laughs out of this sucker, which contains the typical bad dubbing and laughable sound effects. There's no question that the greatest thing about this picture is the American title, the opening credit sequence and how the title and this sequence are pretty much the only thing that deals with "Bruce Lee fighting back from the grave." I'm sure a zombie Bruce Lee movie with this title could have been awesome but sadly that's not what we got.

If you've got a Martial Arts movie with awful action scenes then you're pretty much dead in the water as far as entertainment goes. There are a couple funny action scenes including one dealing with a taxi cab driver but there's certainly not enough to keep you entertained throughout. The performances are all rather laughable and there's certainly nothing fresh or entertaining about the story.

BRUCE LEE FIGHTS BACK FROM THE GRAVE is a great title but it's certainly an awful film.

At first glance, "Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave" seems to be indistinguishable from other 1970s martial arts movies, though there are two differences. The first is that it was filmed in the United States, and the second being that it was made by Koreans instead of Hong Kong filmmakers.

But apart from those differences, the movie doesn't really stand out from the pack. As you may have expected, while the movie's title promises a resurrected Bruce Lee - and the opening sequence shows that title action - the movie quickly forgets what it promises and makes no further actions to be "Brucey". What follows is a long and hard slog through a really thin and boring story, with occasional martial art sequences that are badly directed, badly choreographed, and badly edited.

Is there any saving grace? Well, there is some really awful dubbing that occasionally provokes a chuckle, and the Korean filmmakers' occasional misconceptions of America and American people also is unintentionally funny at times. But there are not enough unintentional laughs to make this worth a look. Even aficionados of martial art movies will find this particularly tough to sit through.

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.