Fist of Fear, Touch of Death (1980)

In 1980, Aquarius Releasing, a distributor of trashy grindhouse feature films including notorious porno DEEP THROAT, did the impossible. In their only attempt at film production, they put together what is quite possibly the goofiest, but not worst, Bruceploitation movie ever made, more ridiculous than THE CLONES OF BRUCE LEE, BRUCE LEE FIGHTS BACK FROM THE GRAVE or BRUCE LEE VS. GAY POWER. On second thought that last one takes the brass ring and I don’t want to know what they did with it.

FIST OF FEAR, TOUCH OF DEATH is an intentional mockumentary, possibly intended as a way to poke fun at the culture of stupidity that had tainted Bruce Lee’s legacy ever since his death in 1973. Conspiracy theories suggested that Lee died from a martial “touch of death” or that he had been murdered by a cabal of kung fu masters angered by Lee’s determination to open to the Western world the once “closed door” of kung fu training. Poorly researched biopics beginning with BRUCE LEE: A DRAGON’S STORY, which starred Bruce Lee look-alike Ho Chung-tao (Bruce Li), fueled these fallacies, as well as a new sub-genre of martial arts film that featured a variety of Bruce Lee clones.

Taking cues from the previously distributed semi-fake, shock documentary FACES OF DEATH (1978) which mixed real death scenes with staged ones, Aquarius Releasing also borrowed a few pages from the playbook of previous Bruceploitation films. They went a step further by shooting for laughs while channeling a jumbled mess of likely influences including Woody Allen’s WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY (1966), REEFER MADNESS (1936), THE WARRIORS, and Sonny Chiba’s ultra-violent karate films.

It’s highly likely that the real genesis for this project came directly from Aquarius’ experience with releasing an Americanized version of Chiba’s THE BODYGUARD. For this 1976 release the distrib inserted a newly shot introduction with karate exponent and martial arts fight promoter Aaron Banks, along with martial artist Bill Louie, both New York natives. In this sequence they argued over whether Sonny Chiba or Bruce Lee was the better fighter. It seemed like a harmless enough way to plug the New York martial arts scene into the international martial arts movie trends of the day but it was only the start of something far more terrifying.

In FIST OF FEAR, Banks plays himself although his comments, as well as those of the rest of the “cast” are all scripted. Louie appears in two sequences, first in a brief exhibition in Madison Square Garden and later dressed as Kato where he beats up thugs intending to rape two female joggers. This latter sequence is suggested by the film’s narrator, Adolph Caesar who poses as a TV sports reporter, as a way to honor Lee’s contribution to THE GREEN HORNET TV series but in reality there is nothing that this film does to honor Bruce Lee.

This film is the sole credit for screenwriter Ron Harvey, the supposed brains behind the film although it is brainpower that the script seems to be missing altogether. The concept is flawed from the start. The idea is to set up a faux martial arts competition that will decide the successor to Bruce Lee. Between fights, we are supposed to learn about a fictional life of Bruce Lee and the legacy he left behind. Interspersed throughout are a series of gags that suggest elements of the lunacy found in THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE (1977) but executed with far less originality and laughs.

Based on comments found all over the internet, a lot of viewers over the years seem to have missed the point of FIST OF FEAR. It was never meant as a tribute to Bruce Lee. It was meant to be a comedy that plainly exploits his popularity for cheap laughs. Thanks to an idiotic script by Harvey and amateur direction by one-time helmer and co-writer Matthew Malinson, FIST OF FEAR largely fails in its attempt at a smarmy mockumentary and as a result has left the viewers who get it and those who don’t both scratching their heads ever since.

The comedy in the film is generally unfunny, ill-timed, too understated, poorly edited, and stretched far too thin. This tends to ruin any chance for real laughs but it occasionally leads to some mildly amusing surprises, the best being a moment where Louie gouges out the eyes of an opponent and tosses them into the crowd. Another one that sneaks up on the viewer, mostly due to Caesar’s consistently dry narration, is a completely odd match-up between two non-martial artists in street clothes named “Bad Ass Bonny Lee” and “Fred the Flying Fat Man.” It’s an instance laced with potentially genius levels of slapstick comedy that is never fully exploited.

Blaxploitation star Fred Williamson appears in a parody of his own screen image that plays on his sex appeal with the ladies. There is a really odd running gag tossed in where he is repeatedly mistaken for Harry Bellefonte. Posing as a stereotypical nerd, screenwriter Ron Harvey gets in on the act by playing a rival cab passenger named Jasper Milktoast who mistakes him for Bellefonte while trying to steal his cab. None of this is particularly funny and Williamson serves no useful purpose for the rest of the film.

Aaron Banks is the strangest character in the film. While being interviewed early on by Caesar, he starts talking about his theories on the “touch of death” that killed Bruce Lee and the concept of qi energy being channeled through the palm to cause it to happen. Edited together with these statements are scenes of Banks breaking boards with a closed fist, as a supposed example of this open-handed death strike. One of the scenes is actually an attempt to replicate Lee’s one-inch punch, which contrary to this film’s assertion has nothing to do with blasting someone with hot qi energy that kills in three to four weeks. This is one of many discrepancies in the script that reveal it to be bad on the scale of an Ed Wood movie. If it’s intentional, which is possible then it’s yet another example of humor that’s too poorly conceived and executed to work.

At some point a film has to begin sending out more consistent clues to the audience suggesting that the script is not meant to be taken seriously and the failure to do so for much of this film is likely why so many people have ended up confused. For example, Harvey goes to great lengths to consistently mix up the martial arts styles. Although “kung fu” is occasionally mentioned in the film, Bruce Lee is almost always called a karate expert instead. This false idea of Lee being a karate practitioner is reinforced by dubbed footage that is taken from his appearance on LONGSTREET, as well as a child role in a 1950s-era Cantonese drama that I haven’t been able to identify. The problem is that people even today still confuse basic martial arts styles when talking about martial arts movies. I still see mainstream media, including Variety, mix and match karate and kung fu.

The LONGSTREET footage is edited into a fake conversation between Lee and Banks that is one of the most surreal things I have ever witnessed in martial arts moviedom. The two sit around praising each other for their contribution to martial arts and repeatedly talking about trading “maneuvers.” The scary part is that this could be taken seriously because Banks has been considered an important figure in bringing Asian martial arts to the attention of Americans through his fight promotion and karate instruction. Also, you have to wonder what supposedly respectable American martial artists are doing in this movie being party to essentially flinging crap all over Bruce Lee’s grave and charging admission for onlookers to watch it.

The closest thing to a real martial arts movie star to appear in FIST OF FEAR is Ron Van Clief, who made his debut, undoubtedly as a fill-in for Jim Kelly in the Hong Kong basher BLACK DRAGON, also starring Jason Pai Piao. He first discusses his training regime and then rescues yet another female jogger from potential rapists. If we were to take FIST OF FEAR seriously, I would have to assume that New York was literally filled with roving bands of rapists chasing every female jogger on the street with martial arts-fighting vigilantes waiting around every corner.

The middle portion of the film is dominated by approximately 30 minutes of filler footage from an early, black and white Bruce Lee drama and a wacky wuxia film titled INVINCIBLE SUPER CHAN. The Bruce Lee footage, like every other in the movie, is re-dubbed and taken out of context to support the film’s made up life story of Lee. In what looks like a nod to REEFER MADNESS, Lee is shown to be causing his family to go “karate crazy” with his obsession with martial arts. Like other parts of the film, there is the foundation for something genuinely funny to happen here but it never quite materializes and instead viewers must endure a lot of pointless banter. This is tied in with action footage from the swordplay film by suggesting that its star Tong Wai is the great grandfather of Bruce Lee, the greatest “samurai” warrior in China. Yes, samurai.

Originally titled FORCED TO FIGHT, INVINCIBLE SUPER CHAN is a 1971 film from Taiwan that mixes kung fu and wuxia conventions with truly outrageous action sequences. It’s the live-action DRAGONBALL Z and STORY OF RICKY for its time. The filmmakers of FIST OF FEAR must have felt this would be a humorous addition to their movie and dropped in long action sequences that possess minimal context. These are actually the best scenes in FIST OF FEAR. Another comedy fastball is fired at the audience when a brief shot of a fighter from the film is shown dropping from a roof in what is described as a scene from one of Bruce Lee’s early martial arts movies. If viewers had not figured out that FIST OF FEAR was one big joke at this point then there was probably no hope for them.

For the record, INVINCIBLE SUPER CHAN is out of print but was briefly given an unlicensed DVD release by Ground Zero.

When looking at FIST OF FEAR, TOUCH OF DEATH, something I hope never to do again, I cannot tell if the filmmakers entirely knew what they were doing. Their ignorance of quality filmmaking and martial arts may have been an attempt at a joke but it’s impossible to know for sure. In reality, there was and still is an enormous amount of ignorance about martial arts that passes for truth. Given that most Americans were being exposed to martial arts through movies that played at sleazy grindhouse theaters alongside DEBBIE DOES DALLAS, it’s entirely possible that the filmmakers were blindly flinging anything martial arts-related within reach to see what stuck. My theory is that Ron Harvey did know what he was doing but others involved in the production may have not been clued in. Such was the case for the singer-songwriter of the theme from BLAZING SADDLES who, according to Mel Brooks, thought he was performing a song for a serious western. Whatever the reasoning behind this bomb is, it has left us with one of the best and worst examples of martial arts and Bruce Lee exploitation in cinema. It has also left us with some truly awful yet funny lines, intentional or not.

“Bruce Lee, perhaps the greatest karate expert of them all.”

“His father realized that Bruce was driving everyone karate crazy.”

“Upon leaving home, Bruce visited several Hong Kong film studios trying to find work as a martial arts performer. He knew this was the fastest way to build a reputation and gain the respect needed to become a samurai soldier of fortune like his great ancestor.”