Enter the Fat Dragon (1978)

A country bumpkin who idolizes Bruce Lee travels to the big city to earn a living and ends up using his kung fu skills to help his uncle and a young woman fend off a gang of thugs.

Without a doubt, this is one of Sammo Hung’s most entertaining comedies and he surely performs the best imitation of Bruce Lee ever seen on screen.

Lung is Bruce Lee’s number one fan and tries to act like him, fight like him and even dress like him. When Lung gets an opportunity to travel from his rural home to Hong Kong to work for his uncle, he soon finds himself trying to defend his uncle’s noodle shop from a local gang. After failing to save the shop, two of Lung’s new female friends help him get a job at a restaurant while his cousin is being pressured to work for an exporter of art forgeries. When one of the women is kidnapped by the exporter to satisfy the desires of a wealthy and eccentric customer, Lung and his cousin have to take on the exporter’s three expert bodyguards to save her.

Sammo knows Bruce Lee and it shows. Every scowl, thumbed nose, shriek, and hand gesture is nailed down perfectly. Sammo had worked with Lee on Enter the Dragon, appearing as a Shaolin fighter who spars with Lee at the beginning of the film. There is even rumor of a brief match that took place off screen that actually amounted to little more than Lee earning Sammo’s respect by demonstrating his lightning quick reflexes. After Lee’s death, a slew of bad imitators appeared in films meant to entertain Lee’s fans who still mourned his loss. They failed completely until Sammo decided to submit his definitive comic homage to Lee in 1978. As both a parody and a tribute, the film is nothing less than brilliant. Instead of trying to actually play a Bruce Lee-clone, Sammo is the country bumpkin in the big city who turns out to be lousy at everything except fighting. He even betrays the sense of invulnerability that Lee flaunted in the film’s final fight scene by nearly collapsing from exhaustion. Midway through the film, Sammo’s character gets an opportunity to play an extra on one of those Bruce Lee imitation films mentioned earlier which provides loads of fun as Sammo beats the tar out of the fake Lee while scolding him on his awful impersonation is.

While some of Sammo’s screwball humor, seen to greater effect in later films does not always translate well, his choreographed fights do, as always. The final scene involves a skirmish between Sammo and three fighters, a European boxing champion, a black karate expert, and a Chinese master of kung fu played by Leung Kar Yan. Sammo’s wide range of skills are shown to great effect as he fights each man in turn by matching their style, eventually switching from Southern Chinese boxing that matches Bruce Lee’s style to using more traditional kung fu forms to defeat Leung.

None of the supporting cast adds much to the film although the Chinese fellow playing a black fighter with a fro is hilarious, intentionally or not. The zany ’70’s music meant to sound a bit like Lalo Schifrin’s original score for Enter the Dragon definitely sets a proper tone. Enter the Fat Dragon is a fun film that is a great introduction to Sammo’s earlier work and is worth seeing solely for his incredible imitation of Bruce.