BRUCE’S DEADLY FINGERS [1976]

Bruce's Deadly Fingers (1976)
Directed by: Joseph Velasco
Written by: Joseph Velasco
Starring: Bruce Le, Lo Lieh, Michael Wai-Man Chan, Nora Miao

AKA LUNG MRN BIE CHI

HONG KONG

AVAILABLE TO STREAM ON ARROW PLAYER: NOW

RUNNING TIME: 91 mins

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

Crime boss Lee Hung is obsessed with owning the late Bruce Lee’s ‘Kung Fu Finger Book’, a book that he wrote shortly before he died detailing a series of deadly take-downs you can perform with one-finger. After some unsuccessful interrogations, he sends his cronies to kidnap Lee’s ex-girlfriend Nina who somehow knows the whereabouts of said lethal literature. However, one of Lee’s students Bruce Wong returns to Hong Kong after spending some time in San Francisco after he received a letter begging him to return to get the Kung Fu Finger Book before it falls into the wrong hands. But before he can go after the book, he needs to find his missing sister Shi Ju who’s just been sold into prostitution by her boyfriend to pay for his gambling debts…

One of my favourite watches of last year was Enter The Clones Of Bruce, a marvelous documentary about the ’70s phenomenon that was Bruceploitation, where the death of Bruce Lee led to to a wave of imitations where guys who often only bore a passing resemblance to the Little Dragon were given new names like Bruce Lo and Brute Lee starred in loads of cheapie “chop socky” flicks which often made serious money both domestically and overseas. I intended to check out some of these films, though for several reasons that had to be put on hold. However, Severin Films’s The Game Of Clones: Bruceploitation Collection: Volume One is winging its way to my abode as I type, and right now there’s Bruce’s Deadly Fingers on Arrow Player. While my experience with both is limited, it seems to be generally agreed that, out of arguably the two biggest Lee clones, Bruce Li made the better movies and Bruce Le made the crazier movies. Well, one thing I can tell you; this particular Le effort is pretty crazy. You could call it a bad movie – in fact in many ways it is a bad movie – but many of us film lovers would rather watch a fun bad movie than a dull good one, and probably martial arts movie fans in particular. Bruce’s Deadly Fingers looks like it was cobbled together in the editing suite over just a few hours, at times it being a barely coherent mess of scenes and cuts back and forth between scenes. People appear without proper introductions so we don’t know who they are. Things happen for no reason, and not just fights. People behave in the oddest fashion and say the oddest things – thankyou Arrow for showing this in the English dub, which is awful in the best possible way [Doc crosses his legs Kenny Everett-style for any reader who’s old enough to remember what he’s on about]. The fights are plentiful but – let’s me honest – are pretty poor until the final reel where the quality steps up a few notches. As for Le – he ain’t great, either as an actor, a martial arts actor or a Lee imitator, though he does show some skill with weapons.

Right then, the story. This might be hard. Even though the story is probably pretty basic really, it’s t old in a manner that seems to be intended to make things confusing. Though there’s one thing that most certainly won’t confuse anyone. We’re never allowed to forget for more than a few minutes about this “Kung Fu Fingerbook”, it being mentioned so many times that one wonders if director / screenwriter Joseph Valesco, or maybe the English language dubbers, were seeing bow many times they could force it into conversation. Anyway – we  begin with Fist Of Fury-type music over Spaghetti Western-meets-James Bond titles with various scenes from the film in strange colour schemes playing out in large circles. The weirdest thing about the titles is that a certain “Bruce Lee” is third-billed. Did the filmmakers really think that people would think that the man himself was in the film and then not feel cheated when they soon find out that actually, he wasn’t? Cut to a still shot of San Francisco and then two men facing off in a field, with the usual type of dialogue i.e. “I want you. There is no way at all that you can get at me”. One of the fighters is Five Fingers Of Death man-turned-perennial villain Lo Lieh as Hung, a Hong Kong boss who, for some reason, is also in San Francisco. After only a minute or so of brawling Hung’s opponent vows to put him behind bars and then, before the scene has properly concluded,t we suddenly cut to Hong Kong and Le himself as our main hero Wong walking about the city followed by this old guy who throughout the film does nothing but follow Wong about, always looking suspicious and obvious. Wong tells someone else that he has to find this book. “Why bother with Finger Kung Fu”? his friend asks. “Because I must” is the answer. Fair enough.

Hung, now in Hong Kong, tells his cronies to find these guys in a photograph who may have the manual. Why some people are questioned while looking for the book is never really explained. It’s as if the bad guys opened the local phone book, stuck a finger in it and decided that’s who they’d interrogate. We see a new character battling some bad guys [it’s as if most character introductions were cut out of this movie], then Wong being chased and battling some more bad guys. It’s often pretty random. Eventually Wong arrives at a house to learn that his mother recently passed away and bis sister has disappeared, then rings up Nina, Bruce Lee’s widow. She’s played by Nora Maio, Lee’s love interest twice, so it’s slightly poignant. “You’re in danger here, you should never have come to Hong Kong” she says to him, but of course he stays. The villains are now torturing “Old Kwarq” for the book, while meanwhile Wong’s sister Shi-Ju is being sold into prostitution by her boyfriend because he’ll never be able to repay his gambling depths. He actually seems sincere in trying to convince her that this is a good idea, then nasties force her to to do it by showing a snake being dangled above a naked woman before being put in her crotch. Wong enters the brothel, picks a hooker and spends so long with her – though not having any sex – that the owner gets annoyed and bursts in so Wong can beat him up. But Wong didn’t need to do all that – he could have just beaten him up anyway! Pointless things are often done in this film. Wong rescues Shi-Ju and takes her to stay with Nina, while he recruits Alan Fong from his Kung Fu school to help. But then the same guy who fought Hung at the beginning is snooping around. What’s his game? Why does he attack this guy who helps him? Am I really remembering things right? I took notes but might have got a bit confused.

So let’s look at the martial arts aspect. There are some nice moments with Wong and his teacher. In one scene Wong is all rash and breaks a cup. He comes back with two new ones but teacher calmly knocks both of them onto the floor where they smash. It’s not that Wong destroyed a cup you see, it’s that he, without thinking, wrecked one that was very valuable. Unfortunately there isn’t more stuff like this, but actual fights are plentiful, and a good effort is made to diversify locations, from a scrapyard by a river with the Hong Kong skyscrapers on the other side, to a pool room, to high up on lots of huge rocks. While Fong gets beaten up so much one wonders why Wong picked him, Le bests waves of opponents, but lots of cuts show that he’s not doing a lot of the moves, and his screen presence is rather weak, even when asked to do Lee-like moves and actions like ripping off his shirt. I can see now Lee got loads of gay and female fans by exploiting bis sexuality, but when Le does it, it just feels mechanical. Nonetheless the choreography distinctly improves in the last twenty minutes, after some training where our hero hits hanging dummies which have all the pressure points while we zoom into [a poster of] Lee, in a film which I don’t think is actively disrespectful to the Man himself, and him learning the ‘Eight Finger Stance’, we have all sorts of mayhem. A bench, Nunchuku [including double Nunchuku], knives and poles are put to good use, sometimes by Le himself. Bolo Yeung – barely known in the east, legend in the west – shows up, and Le goes up against Lieh. Genre fans puzzled by the rest of the movie will be satisfied despite not a  single one of the fights, even the last one, being of a decent length.

There’s some memorable dialogue in the English dub. “Our leader is called Lee Hong”, “Ah, so Lee Hong is your leader”?. “Your Kung Fu’s really good. Ever thought of becoming a policeman”. The line “Nobody followed us” being followed by a cut to someone following them suggests that at least a few of the film’s laughs were intended. After all, this is a movie where Wong and Fong drive to the house where the two ladies are residing, and a car passes by containing some bad guys with the ladies kidnapped but visible in the back, Only after a few seconds does that useless oaf Fong say “that car we passed, I’m sure they were inside”. Meanwhile Nina several times tells people that they’re safe before being it very quickly proven that they’re not. And look at how easily the women easily untie themselves when left alone. An Inspector Chan shows up to warn “Don’t take the law into your own hands” but expectations that he’ll be a major character like the similar one in Fist Of Fury aren’t fulfilled and he never comes back. Acting-wise Lieh probably fares best, his character also given a wife who’s virtually his equal, a rarity for the time and genre. His brutal death is well handled by Valesco, who generally seems to have little control over matters no matter how many fast zooms into character’s eyes he gives us. Exploitation elements come to the fore sometimes, but the main element of danger when some topless bad guys grab some women and begin to rape them, for no apparent reason except that they’re really bad, isn’t the predicament of the women. We can quite clearly see that a flammable substance was spread in a circle and ignited with actors in the center. It was obviously a windy night, and we cut away as the wind seems to blow the flames higher and toward the actors, just before any clothes caught on fire. I wonder if any of them ended up in hospital?

The groovy music score, which incorporates a couple of tiny John Barry James Bond phrases, often chugs along, and you also get  to hear bits of Pink Floyd’s ”Time and ‘On The Run’ and Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s ‘Tarkus’, though none of the music is as in your face as the ghastly shirts that are sometimes worn. Films like this can be difficult to sum up and rate. This mess is probably something that I ought to give a really low rating too, but I had such tremendous fun watching it, laughing and scratching my head, that I can’t do that at all. It could almost be a classic of the “so bad it’s good” kind.

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