Jogo da Morte

lee didn't manage to finish this film but director robert clouse (of e.t.dragon fame) manages to pick up the pieces left behind and make a film out of it which is where the film falls down. you see they had to bring in stunt doubles to replace Lee so everytime he's wearing shades or has his back to you you just know that it's not really lee. for the scene in which lee is shot they reused scenes from the superb fist of fury(it is sooooo obvious because the colour quality is different)!!! apart from the fun of spotting which scenes lee failed to complete, the changing room scene is fantasticly good fun to watch, your jaw will drop open at lee's two final finishing moves the penultimate kick is compareable to lee's complete bicycle kick in e.t.dragon. overall this film is well worth the mere £5.99 of which it costs in england

Game of Death (1978) was another film project that was a Warner Brothers and Golden Harvest joint production. Movie goers all around the world were still in shock from the sudden death of Bruce Lee. His last film Enter the Dragon was a worldwide success. After his death a plethora of knock-offs and wannabe Bruce Lees flooded the market place. Raymond Chow and company saw an untapped market for another film "starring" Bruce Lee. He heard of an unfinished film that Bruce was working on before he was dead. So he hired Robert Clouse to direct new footage so it could be worked into the existing one. Sammo Hung was hired to become the action director (he also appears as a prize fighter).

Robert Clouse used two doubles for Bruce Lee (one of them was Yuen Biao) and a lot of stock footage was used whenever it could. The use of the footage was a very, very bad idea. Many of the seems were obviously cut-and-paste and made the film look very cheap and exploitive fare. This was going to be another movie with Hong Kong actors and American ones thrown into the mix. Gig Young, Dean Jagger and Collen Camp (when she was extremely hot) co-star as well as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and several of Bruce Lee's friends. Instead of fleshing out the movie that Bruce was working on before he died, the film makers noticed that there were already several different films that were already made that bore a similarity to the original Game of Death. The new movie centered around a murder mystery and a lot of fighting peppered with a lot of action direction work from Sammo Hung.

The finished results were a mixed bag. The American cut of the film was not that great and is pretty mediocre. The Hong Kong version is a whole lot better with extra footage (It's also edited differently, has all the trademarks of a Sammo Hung film project instead of one by Robert Clouse). and more Hong Kong actors and plot. It must have been a success in Hong Kong because a sequel was made from even more unused footage and outtakes of Bruce Lee. This movie is actually better than this one because it doesn't take itself seriously, not as much recycled footage and the fight scenes are even better.

If I were to watch this movie I would recommend finding the Hong Kong version. It's a lot better than the boring American release.

Followed by the Tower of Death a.k.a. Game of Death 2.

Game of Death, Bruce Lee's most ambitious project to date, was designed to fully showcase Jeet Kune Do, the unique, fluid fighting style developed by its star; the story was to revolve around a martial artist's deadly mission to retrieve a valuable object from the top floor of a five storey pagoda, defeating a different foe in order to progress to each new level.

Although filming on Game of Death began shortly after completion of The Way of the Dragon, the production was put on hold when the star was offered the lead role in Warner Brothers' Enter the Dragon. Before the kung fu legend was able to resume work on the project, he had suffered a massive cerebral edema that tragically ended his life.

Bruce's sudden and unexpected death unsurprisingly threw a major spanner in the works of Game of Death: with 40 minutes of test footage and actual fight action in the can, but little else of use, the film sat on the shelf for three years before Enter The Dragon's director Robert Clouse was enlisted to somehow finish the film without the benefit of its main attraction.

Taking the audacious decision to radically alter the script, using 'doubles' to stand in for Bruce in most of the new scenes, Clouse eventually completed the film, which was released in 1978, five years after its star's demise. With Bruce's original storyline replaced by a dumb plot in which martial arts movie star Billy Lo (played by Lee and his stand-ins) is forced to take action against an evil racketeering syndicate that is keen to cash in on his success, and the tasteless inclusion of real footage from Lee's funeral, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that much of the movie is a total mess.

But even though Game of Death is far from the film that Lee had originally envisioned, it is still recommended viewing for kung fu fans thanks to one or two decent scraps amidst the mundane first hour or so (the bout between Sammo Hung's Lo Chen and bad guy Carl Miller, for example, is a lot of fun), excellent production values, a spiffing Bond style score courtesy of John Barry that enhances the action, suitably Bond-like opening credits, the iconic yellow tracksuit, and of course, the existing footage of the legendary pagoda sequence that makes it into the film's finale. It's definitely worth persevering through the poorly edited and exploitative dross featuring badly disguised stand-ins to witness Lee's incredible fight action at the end of the movie, the stand-out scenes being an awesome nunchuk duel and the unforgettable battle between Game of Death's diminutive star and 7'2" basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

It is these undeniably great moments that makes one wonder what might have been if only Bruce had lived to finish what he had started.

"Game of Death", a frankenstein concoction of bits and peices of Bruce Lee's final performance in a movie originally shot in 1972-73 and a later filmshot in 1978 after Lee's death is really two movies in one.

The first, a crime/revenge caper helmed by Robert Clouse is not as bad as you may have heard. The scenes are intercut badly and Lee's many doubles do look bad, but as a movie on it's own merit it isnt that bad.

The film concerns a young movie star, Billy Lo (played by several uncredited doubles) and a crime syndicate headed by evil Dr. Land (Dean Jagger who is good) His henchman (Hugh O'Brian, Mel Novak, and Bob Wall) won't let our hero rest until he signs an exclusive contract with them, which will put Billy under their control. Colleen Camp and Gig Young Co-star. Camp is benign as Billy's voluptuous girlfriend and Young looks like he wants to be anywhere else. The score is excellent courtesy of John Barry's music which sets a mood for the picture. The second part of the movie is the final fight scenes in a pagoda which include Bruce Lee himself in some magnificent fight scenes with several worthy advesaries including Kareem Abdul Jabbar(!) and Danny Inosanto. The last 15-20 minutes are the only to feature the real Bruce Lee, but watch the locker room fight, it is very good on it's own merit. In summary, a cheesy 70's Kung Fu movie that wraps around some spectacular footage of Bruce Lee in his "final performance", but which also has some charm of it's own.

The sad:

Bruce's premature death, the disposal of the original script, the inclusion of the current one, the cop-out ending, "Bruce's" punking out...

The Funny:

The double used through mist if the film meant to be passed off as Bruce Lee, the blatant use of stock footage from other Bruce films, the acting...

The enjoyable:

The score is very underrated, one of John Barry's finest (I have the soundtrack to this movie, along with another Barry film, Night Games.) Some real good martial arts sequences make the wait for the real Bruce footage towards the end, especially the locker room fight between "Bruce" and Bob Wall (choreaographed by Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, who reportedly portrayed Bruce in that scene.) Sammo himself appears as a fighter in the film. I give this movie a modest recommendation.