The Game of Death (1978)
Reviewed by: Chungking_Cash on 2003-01-27
The cinematic equivalent to defecating on Bruce Lee's grave.

Five years after his untimely demise Golden Harvest hired Robert Clouse (with the aid of Sammo Hung) to build a new film around a fraction of existing footage Lee had shot for "The Game of Death" (which Brandon Lee erroneously claimed was nearly completed when his father put the project on ice to film "Enter the Dragon").

The real Bruce Lee appears in only one sequence of Clouse's "The Game of Death" memorably fighting his off camera pupil basketball legend Kareen Abdul Jabbar.

The remainder of Lee's character is comprised of a conglomerate of stand-ins incognito along with outtakes from past Bruce Lee roles shamefully spliced into the narrative.

This in addition to an infamous sequence involving a Bruce Lee photo superimposed over a double's face during a brief but agonizing exchange.

If there's ten films from Hong Kong that you should avoid at all costs make sure that Robert Clouse's "The Game of Death" is one of them.

In 1997, Bey Logan of Media Asia found the dailies for Bruce Lee's "The Game of Death" in the Golden Harvest vault and while they featured a considerable amount of footage of the late martial artist's original vision they did not prove seamless enough to edit into a feature length film and were later licensed to a number of media outlets around the world most notably for the documentary "Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey" (2000).

Reviewer Score: 1