Mang quan gui shou

'Blind Fist of Bruce' is a good, watchable martial arts film. Ho Tsung Tao portrays a once wealthy bank manager who's robbed of everything he ever had by a gang of martial arts extortionists. He seeks the help of an elderly and blind martial arts master (Charasmatically played by Yuen Siu Tien). The twist is that the leader of the extortionists, Tiger, was once a pupil of the martial arts master. Years before, Tiger blinded his kung fu teacher after he exiled him from the school. This film contains a few mediocre scenes, but the good fight scenes and decent acting make up for it. Director Kam Bo could have put a liitle more detail into the film (Maybe he could have used fake tears on Soo Ching when she mourns Miss Hong's death). Still, this movie is pretty good and it's a lot better than most of Ho Tsung Tao's early work as Bruce Li in the early 70's.

I saw BLIND FIST OF BRUCE in Brentwood's fantastic 10-pack format, and it has set the standard for my viewing of these films. While not a terrible chop-socky movie, there isn't really much in BLIND FIST to set it apart from the rest.

BLIND FIST OF BRUCE stars Bruce Li (no, NOT Bruce Lee unfortunately) in what is labeled a "tribute to the formula that made Bruce Lee a star!" Li plays a banker whose town is set upon by a ruthless gang. Sound familiar? It should, as indeed this formula has been used for well over a hundred kung-fu movies. At times, BLIND FIST reminded me of Jackie Chan's MASTER WITH CRACKED FINGERS, but the two are incomparable in terms of action. While Li plays his part competently enough, his two "teachers" (who soon enough become gang members themselves) have that sort of chop-socky comic relief that doesn't hold well with American audiences.

There are enough characters to keep BLIND FIST interesting, including a blind man who has mastered the martial arts, a geisha and her kung-fu maid, and Li's aforementioned cat-fu and dog-fu mentors (they teach him such moves as "peeing dog" and "licking yourself"). Also, the film has enough of those beat-em-up moments for the audience to hate the bad guys and to side with Li and his blind teacher. Unfortunately, there is simply nothing too special about BLIND FIST OF BRUCE.

While not bad, I would recommend this movie only to die-hards like myself, rather than as an entry-level feature. Instead, watch MASTER WITH CRACKED FINGERS or, even better, FIVE DEADLY VENOMS. :)

There was a Quiz at the end of the DVD I got of this film. It was rather funny to find a 70s movie on a DVD with an interactive quiz on it. If you got a question about the movie right, the next screen had a still of one of the characters from the movie smiling. If you got it wrong, they showed a bad guy wagging his finger at you, or something. That alone was worth the three bucks I laid out at the yard sale for this somewhat watchable venture into Artsploitation. The Female Ninja in this movie was one of the other nice features, she seems skilled at acrobatics, without actually having any stage presence or confidence with the arts.

One's impression while watching this film is fairly mixed: there were many parts that made it funnier than the typical Kung Fu film (intentionally so) which kept me interested in the film. Furthermore, the acting is not as bad as typical of its' genre, and I found some of the characters especially expressive and entertaining.

However, the fault of the film is that it falls victim to many of the errors of its' genre: the quality being grainy and questionable, the simplicity of the plot and having shocking simplicity in the archetypes of good & evil, and furthermore, being overall rather corny.

But if you can stand for a typical Kung Fu B movie, this is not so bad; I found it entertaining and its' martial arts were not very shabby, either. And furthermore, the film did not fall victim to any ridiculous subplot or love-story, nor was it ruined by an overwhelming personality clogging up the story, which can easily kill other films. For what they have, a decent film. If you see it for what it is, it is not hard to watch and enjoy it. Decent for anybody who has an attachment to the genre.

When Jackie Chan became a Hong Kong superstar in the late '70s, Bruce Lee imitators like Ho Tsung-tao (Bruce Li) and Huang Kin-lung (Bruce Le) found themselves obliged to change with the times. Wearing a yellow tracksuit and clumsily flailing a nunchaku no longer impressed audiences; now they demanded more complex, ambitious fight choreography, resulting in the emergence of a few decent films from the Bruceploitation camp. One of them was "Blind Fist of Bruce", in which Ho plays a browbeaten bank manager who learns kung fu from a blind beggar (Simon Yuen, Jackie Chan's tipsy sifu in "Drunken Master") to fend off a gang of criminals led by Tiger Yang and Chiang Tao. There's nothing earth-shatteringly good here, but the lengthy final fight is worth sticking around for, and the film as a whole is a considerable improvement on Ho's earlier work. He could have joined the ranks of mid-level stars like Don Wong Tao and Tan Tao-liang had he not already been fatally typecast as a Bruce Lee clone.