Starring:
Siu-Lung Leung (as Bruce Leong)
Eric Tsang

Dir: Kei Law

When I read the synopsis of this surreal, crazy Kung-Fu movie on the back cover of the DVD, I could not believe my luck. Had I discovered the best bad movie of all time?

The narrative of this God-awfully bad movie follows the recently-deceased Bruce Lee, who finds himself waking up in purgatory. For the purposes of this film, purgatory is inhabited completely by Chinese people.

While there, Bruce Lee uncovers a plot to overthrow the evil Lord of purgatory by even more evil people: James Bond, Emmanuelle, Dracula, Clint Eastwood’s “Man with no name” and a legion of mummies are lead by a character referred to only as “The Exorcist”. He’s not a priest, he’s a cigarette-smoking, moustachioed Machiavelli who inexplicably has a French accent in the English dub.

It gets better.

Helping Bruce Lee to defeat these evil-doers and help the evil Lord of Purgatory (yes, that’s how much sense the plot makes), are Kwai Chang Caine (as made famous by the recently-deceased David Carradine), and Popeye.

POPEYE.

Unbelievably, the person who played Popeye (Eric Tsang), the least credible character in the whole movie, made movies after this. He’s a huge star of Hong Kong cinema. This is his “Hercules in New York“.

“The Dragon Lives Again” can be hard work at times. After all, it is a terrible film. But the good bits are BRILLIANT. It’s full of lots of little touches that are the very reason we watch bad movies.

I loved this film so much that I went back to where I got it and bought every copy that they had so that I could lend it to friends without parting ways with my own copy. When a film is this good, you don’t care about the cost. Plus I had a fiver to burn.

Being the 21st century, this masterpiece of surreal, Kung-Fu narrative has been uploaded to YouTube in easily-digestible 10 minute chunks.

If you can’t stand the movie, then do me a favour and at least skip to the end. Easily the best ending to any movie ever.

“The Dragon Lives Again” has also been released under the following titles:

• Li San Jiao Wei Zhen Di Yu Men
• Deadly Hands of Kung Fu
• La Résurrection du Dragon
• Lee Saam Geuk Wai Jan Dei Yuk Moon

Tags: Bruce Lee, Bruce Leong, Bruceploitation, Clint Eastwood, David Carradine, Dracula, Emmanuelle, Eric Tsang, Exorcist, James Bond, Kung Fu, Kwai Chang Caine, Kwai Chung Kane, Mummy, Popeye, Siu-Lung Leung

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Bad Acting, Exploitation, Low Budget, Martial Arts, Pre-existing Fictional Characters, Reviews, Stupid Plots, Unnecessary Nudity, Zombies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.