Starring Yee Tung-Shing, Cherie Chung, Ku Kuan-Chung, Lung Tien-Hsiang and Ai Fei. Directed by Chu Yuan. Produced by Mona Fong for Shaw Brothers.
He’s got superpowers!
Shue Sang is found as a baby in an ice cave and later discovers that he is actually Yuen Ying (Yee Tung-Shing), a being from the Da Lor fairyland, a place situated between the spiritual and physical worlds. Imbued with special powers, he falls in love with a princess (Cherie Chung) and battles an evil villain, also originating from Da Lor fairyland, who has reincarnated on Earth.
Don’t point that sword at Yuen Ying!
There are the usual spacious Shaw Brothers sets on view in this fu flick, but these don’t really make up for the shoddy direction and lacklustre action choreography. Some of the effects are pretty poor too, including store-bought dolls on wires used to represent transcendence!
This is a Shaw Brothers film, so there are many, many fights!
Even so, there’s stuff that keeps you watching, like the unexpected, ghoulish introduction of the Intelligent Kingdom, where young children on conveyer belts are checked over and, if it’s deemed their brains are too small, are nonchalantly tossed away into a furnace!
The bad guy leader of the Intelligent Kingdom decides this child is not intelligent enough… so a guard hurls the youngster into a flaming furnace! Yikes!
Plus there’s Yuen Ying’s bizarre selection of powers to look out for: he can fly, of course, he has the ability to turn into a giant pair of scissors, can duplicate himself, and he even transforms into a large axe to chop down the villain, who, during one fight, becomes a monster tree! Wild!
The villain splits into two versions of himself, then turns into this tree…
…and the villainous tree attacks the hero…
…so the hero transforms into a large axe and chops the tree in two… and then the tree and the axe catch fire!?
There’s also the novelty of seeing a Chinese mythological riff on the Superman/Clark Kent/Lois Lane story, complete with a clumsy alter-ego for the hero and his own version of the Fortress of Solitude.
The princess looks on
There are loads of shots of people flying around in this movie, plus we see lots of power-beams being fired from the hands of characters!
If nothing else, DESCENDANT OF THE SUN really pulls out all the stops for an ending chock-full of cell-animated hand beams, flame-breathing, flying, stormy winds, and an attack by ghostly corpses that chew on the golden-garbed hero. This finale is not quite well enough done but, damn it, the result overflows with a crazed energy that manages to make it entertaining to watch anyway, especially when Yuen Ying makes all the zombie-ghosts explode!
Starring Bruce Liang (aka Bruce Leung), Shen Ie-Lung, Tang Ching, Alexander Grand, Nick Cheung Lik, Eric Tsang, Lily Foo Lai, Jenny, Bobby Canavarro, Fang Yeh, Wong Mei, Cheung Hei and Yuen Siu-Tin. Written by Chi Lo, and Liang Wei. Directed by Lo Chi and produced by Hendrick Gozali for Goldig Film Company.
Poster!
Bruce Lee dies and wakes up in the underworld, makes friends with some of the nicer folks there, including Popeye and the One-Armed Swordsman, and clashes with other characters, such as James Bond, the King of the Underworld, The Godfather, Clint Eastwood, Dracula, Emmanuelle and Zatoichi!
James Bond!
Emmanuelle!
Dracula!
Aka DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU, this is a movie that has to be seen to be believed!
Another poster!
After a caption that reads ‘This film is dedicated to millions who love Bruce Lee’, ENTER THE DRAGON music kicks-in and then the Bond theme takes over, as James Bond faces-off against Bruce Lee! Awesomeness! This film is immensely enjoyable from the get-go, as characters we’ll be meeting in the movie strut their stuff during the extended shot-against-red credit sequence.
We’re then shown Bruce Lee’s body lying in the cavern/throne room of the King of the Underworld (Ching)… and it looks as if Bruce died with a massive erection… but this impressive stiffness turns out to be his nunchucks!
Bruce and his nunchucks…
Lee is played by Bruce Liang (aka Bruce Leung) who, let’s be brutally honest, is probably the Bruceploitation star who looked least like Bruce Lee, and the filmmakers obviously know this, so they have a character comment that, “It so happens when a person dies their face and their body undergo a change.” This explanation must also be the reason why Clint Eastwood, Popeye and Dracula are all asian in this film!
The good guys!
Eric (INFERNAL AFFAIRS) Tsang as Popeye!
Bruce soon comes to terms with the fact he’s dead and that he’s in hell, which pretty much resembles a Chinese town with a small casino and restaurants. There are also some cavern dwellings and a quarry. The underworld’s residents defer to the King, mainly because he has the power to cause earthquakes by shaking a pillar, though a shady cabal led by The Godfather have plans to take over the territory.
Don’t mess with Bruce Lee!
Bruce visits the main town restaurant and encounters Popeye (a youthful Eric Tsang), while elsewhere in the establishment Zatoichi the blind masseur/swordsman catches flies and puts them in his food, so that he can get out of paying his bill. Then Zatoichi, along with James Bond, Clint Eastwood (dressed as the Man With No Name), and a bunch of dudes in skeleton costumes confront Bruce in the restaurant, and Bruce starts to feel sweaty and dizzy, making it easy for Clint to beat him up. Fortunately for Bruce, he’s cared for afterwards by Wa To (Siu-Tin), the doctor to the King of the Underworld, who’s such a good doctor he even helps skeletons! Bruce admits during his convalescence that his Achilles heel when he was alive was that he played around too much and says aloud that he’s sorry to Linda, his wife.
Zatoichi, Clint Eastwood, James Bond and their zombie henchmen (wearing skeleton costumes) confront Bruce Lee!I want my mummy!
What makes this production so enjoyable are all the famous characters added to the mix, with some of them depicting real-life people like Bruce Lee and Clint Eastwood and others representing fictional characters like Popeye, the One-Armed Swordsman, Zatoichi and Kwai Chang Caine from the KUNG FU television show. So it’s great fun when the film cuts to Clint Eastwood, The Exorcist, Emmanuelle, Zatoichi and James Bond hanging out together in The Godfather’s cavern HQ. There’s no rhyme or reason to why some characters, like Bond and Emmanuelle, are played by western actors, and why Clint Eastwood, The Exorcist, etc, are played by asian actors. I guess we just have to remember that ‘when a person dies their face and their body undergo a change’, even when they’re fictional characters like The Godfather!
Clint Eastwood! Honest!
Zatoichi!
The Godfather and The Exorcist! Honest!
Bruce does a little gambling at a casino, but he then tells everyone they should stop gambling because that is probably the reason they ended up in the underworld. He meets the One-Armed Swordsman here and strikes up a friendship with him.
We also get to see some of the naked underworld concubines in a large bath, chatting about Bruce Lee, discussing the Hollywood actors he trained, and musing about how they’d like to go out with him.
Bath time in the Underworld
The movie jumps from obvious sets to obviously real-world locations without attempting to disguise the transitions, mainly when Bruce and other characters dash from the town studio set and end up immediately in a bright exterior quarry location. I think this editing just adds to the hey-we-don’t-give-a-f**k-what-you-think mindset of the filmmakers!
Bruce, dressed as Kato, in the Underworld quarry location
At the quarry Bruce duels with Zatoichi, and each fighter takes turns to use different styles against the other, with the name of each technique superimposed on-screen. Zatoichi uses these styles: ‘Blind Man Finds Way’, ‘Blind Chicken Peaks’, ‘Blind Man Kills Mosquito’, ‘Blind Snake Climbs’, ‘Blind Fool Massages’ and ‘Blind Dog Pisses’! Bruce, meanwhile, uses these special techniques, inspired by movie titles: ‘The Big Boss’, ‘Enter the Dragon’, ‘Way of the Dragon’, ‘Fist of Fury’ and ‘Game of Death’!
Bruce’s ‘Fist of Fury’ technique basically means that he bites his opponent’s leg!?
For a while the movie shifts into sex farce territory, with the King of the Underworld cavorting and playing blind man’s buff in the hot tub with nude women, for no particular reason, plot-wise, other than to show off some attractive nekkid ladies. We also get one of the underworld concubines and the Queen of the Underworld planning to seduce Bruce, which involves them trying to give him a potion to ‘stiffen his resolve’. The foxy Queen even tells Bruce, “Beat me hard with that terrible weapon”! The concubine and the Queen end up forcing each other to drink the potion, however, and they both become scabby-faced hags. Meanwhile, sexpot Emmanuelle meets-up with the King of the Underworld. “You can spank my botty,” she informs him, and she promises to become the King’s wife.
The Queen of the Underworld and a concubine fight over who should have Bruce Lee!
Dracula (Hei) shows up now with his skeleton henchmen (referred to as zombies) and Bruce arrives to take them all on dressed as Kato from THE GREEN HORNET! Bruce gets pinned to the ground by the henchmen, who hold onto his arms and legs, so that Dracula can bend down, ready to bite him… and, suddenly, a third leg shoots up from Bruce’s groin area, booting Dracula in the face, as an on-screen title informs us this style is called ‘The Third Leg of Bruce’! Insane stuff!
Dracula’s skeleton henchmen run rings around Bruce!The henchmen pin Bruce to the floor and Dracula approaches…
Back with Emmanuelle and the King, they have sex in his pink-lit bed. There’s lots of moaning and groaning and Bruce has to intervene to warn the King that Emmanuelle was trying to give him a heart attack through pleasure, and the King muses that, “Her pussy’s in this plot too, she was using it to murder me.”
Bruce is made the new captain of the King’s bodyguards, triggering reprisals from The Godfather’s team, resulting in Bruce killing James Bond and then Clint Eastwood. The Exorcist and The Godfather decide to try and kill the King, who defends himself by creating an earthquake by shaking the pillar, so they then decide to attack Bruce. This fight between Bruce, The Exorcist and The Godfather is very nicely done, in fact it’s thrilling and totally ace, as Bruce finishes off The Godfather (played by a very cool-looking Shen Ie-Lung) by utilising his ‘Fingers of Fury’ technique!
The Godfather puts up a good fight against Bruce!
Knowing that Bruce is angry with him for causing an earthquake that hurt innocent people, the King implores General Cheung Fei to help him rid himself of Lee… so Cheung Fei leads a mob of bandaged mummies to attack Bruce! Popeye, the One-Armed Swordsman and Kwai Chang Caine come to Bruce’s aid and a madcap final martial arts skirmish takes place in the underworld quarry. Popeye gets kicked about… so he eats a can of spinach and the ‘I’m Popeye the Sailor Man’ tune plays as he beats-up the mummies! The One-Armed Swordsman slashes the mummies with his sword and Bruce battles General Cheung Fei with nunchucks! This is excellent stuff, with Bruce finally being granted permission to leave the underworld.
General Cheung Fei, the King of the Underworld, and a bunch of mummies surround Bruce!
Here’s another pic of Eric (THE LAST BLOOD) Tsang as Popeye!
THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN is a priceless, peculiar pantomime of preposterous proportions. The movie would have been a stand-out Bruceploitation flick solely because of its totally unhinged storyline, but what makes it even better, what provides the exciting icing on the crazy cake, is the fact that the action is really, really good. Bruce Liang may not resemble Bruce Lee, but in real life Liang was a very skilled (and tough) martial artist – and he looks extremely good on-screen in the many fight scenes that were choreographed by him.
Bruce Lee faces-off against Clint Eastwood in that same bloody quarry!
Directed by Pao Hsueh-Li, starring Danny Lee, Tan Nei, Lin Chen-Chi and Shih Chung-Tien.
Poster
The hero fights a gorilla skilled in kung fu. You heard me right: a gorilla skilled in kung fu!
Saying that this Shaw Brothers movie, based loosely on the novel ‘Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils’, is off the wall is no understatement…
The pre-credit sequence features the Emperor’s brother sending light beams from his fingers to shoot off the legs of his lover’s husband, Wang Yu Win (names vary depending on which film print you watch): yikes!
Using a finger-beam to shoot at the legs of his lover’s husband!
First one leg is sliced away…
…and then the second leg is shot off!
Twenty years later, Wang (aka Yellow Robe Man) seeks revenge on the man who crippled him, by attempting to kill his foe’s son, Tuan Yu (Lee). Oh, by the way, Wang now has metal, telescopic, clawed bird feet which he can contract and expand for use in battle!
Wang can eject his metal bird feet over long distances with his super-extending tubular limbs!
Wang is aided by his brother, who has dime store fangs, a bald, veined, scabby scalp, a metal crab-type pincer in place of one of his arms and a partly mangled face. At one point this dude pinches a guy in the groin with his pincer, lobbing the victim through the air.
Wang’s brother ain’t pretty
Watch out for his pincer!
Fight!
Tuan Yu is helped by a girl called Ling Ar, who has the power to make snakes glow and bore into people’s bodies, and masked swordswoman Miss Moo, who is revealed to be his stepsister.
One of Ling Ar’s magical, glowing snakes
A cheap-but-colourful set
Tuan Yu wrestles with a giant, red snake that attacks him in the woods. He wins and, because he drank some of the serpent’s blood, he attains the power to fire beams from his hands (like his dad) and the ability, at one point, to run up vertical walls.
Tuan Yu battles the snake in the water!
When Moo and Tuan Yu are thrown into a pit, they are attacked by a kung fu-skilled gorilla (a man in a suit, of course)… and Tuan Yu kills the simian adversary by using a hand-strike to chop off one of its arms!
Kung fu gorilla!
This ape won’t be so happy…
…once he gets his arm chopped off!
Tuan Yu develops even more powers after eating a glowing, green toad. This makes him totally invincible, enabling him to escape the pit.
Tuan Yu, his father and the Emperor, all of whom can fire laser/heat beams, have a final battle with pole-legged Wang and his clawed brother. Tuan Yu, who is now really super-charged, blows the fanged brother’s head off and then blasts Wang, who dissolves in multi-colours onto the floor. Miss Moo also dies, and Tuan Yu rides off with Ling Ar.
Folks have got all kinds of powers in this film…
…including the ability to shoot heat-beams from their hands
Zap!
This oddball production contains lots of optical/cell animated beam/magic effects during the finale and also boasts an oral flamethrower trick: Wang breaths flames onto his foes and, during the last fight, there’s a contest between his jet of flame and Tuan Yu’s red/green hand beams.
The merging of weird storyline, so-so optical effects (Miss Moo fires cartoon darts out of a bone weapon), theatrical, colourful sets, frenzied pacing and a gorilla that knows kung fu does manage to elicit a decent amount of warped respect for this film!
Flame breath!
This isn’t a normal bone…
…it fires cartoon darts!
Some more imagery for the flick…
Chinese poster
German ‘limited edition’
German video cover
One more look at the snake fight…
Sssssssssss!
And, finally, let’s see the villain’s ‘mouth flamethrower’ technique in action…
Bad guy’s got bad breath!
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