When Severin dedicates time and energy to a big box set like this one, they do not do things in half measures. The Game of Clones: Brucesploitation Collection Vol. 1 is massive in every respect and is sure to deliver so much punching, kicking and insanity that you may not be able to handle it. Let’s break down everything included:

First is Enter the Clones of Bruce, a feature-length documentary directed by David Gregory that does a great job of covering the rise of Bruce Lee, his death and the Brucesploitation phenomenon that sprung up in the vacuum left by Lee’s passing. It features interviews with so many major contributors to the sub-genre including actors like Ho Chung-Tao a.k.a. Bruce Li, Wong Kin-lung a.k.a. Bruce Le, Phillip Ko, and Angela Mao as well as director of Brucesploitation films Godfrey Ho and experts like Michael Worth (who is all over this box set in various capacities). It begins by setting the stage with how the Shaw Brothers Studio came to prominence, Bruce Lee’s falling out with them and eventual move to Golden Harvest, his rise to stardom then his tragic death. It then starts delving into the various Brucesploitation films, covering the actors, producers, directors and other important figures in the movement as well as highlighting the best and the weirdest of the films. If you’ve seen Gregory’s other documentary work for Severin, then you’ll be familiar with the quality of work we see here, thematically flowing seamlessly from one topic to the next and remaining engaging and informative from beginning to end.

Up next we have The Clones of Bruce Lee, one of the more insane films in the set. The plot involves a mad scientist (played by Jon T. Benn) who, in the wake of the death of Bruce Lee, obtains a sample of his DNA and uses it to make three clones (played by Bruce Le, Dragon Lee and relative newcomer Bruce Lai who stepped in when Bruce Li didn’t want to do the film) to do his bidding, sending them out to wreak vengeance on his enemies. But when they realize the nefarious motives of the scientist, they team up to fight through his robot Bruce Lee army and take him down. If you can’t guess from the description above, this movie is bananas. The wacky meta-premise alone is worth the cost of admission, but throw in a lot of solid kung fu action (Dragon Lee I think comes across the most badass while Bruce Le, as usual, goes overboard in mimicking Bruce Lee’s mannerisms) and zany battles like the fights with the indestructible, gold-painted “robot” clones or whatever they’re supposed to be, and this movie is just tons of fun. Another thing to note that you will hear come up again and again are the copyright infringe-o-rific soundtracks with this one featuring the theme from Rocky “I’m Gonna Fly Now” among others.

Next we have Enter Three Dragons a.k.a. Dragon on Fire, this one featuring primarily Dragon Lee but also another Bruce Lee look-alike named Il-do Jang (often incorrectly credited as Bruce Li here). Also like a lot of these Brucesploitation films, we have Phillip Ko as a bad guy (although he’s not in it much) and a fight with Bolo Yeung. It was a pretty common occurrence to cast actors from Bruce Lee’s actual films to try to trick audiences into thinking these movies were actual Bruce Lee movies sometimes. Anyway, this one has a needlessly convoluted plot involving Dragon Lee being sent to investigate an antiques smuggling ring. The combination of the gibberish plot and the actively terrible dubbing rendered this movie nigh incomprehensible at times. But that’s ok, Dragon Lee, even with his lame Bruce Lee mannerisms, has a style of his own and does some groovy ass kicking here.

Enter the Game of Death, released in 1978, is intended to directly capitalize off the mystique surrounding the unfinished Bruce Lee film Game of Death which we would see “finished” as a Golden Harvest hack job that same year. Production photos from Game of Death had been circulating for years, so as a result, we got several Brucesploitation films that were capitalizing off what it might be. This one features Bruce Le in the Lee role, classic track suit and all, fighting his way through several levels of a tower much like Game of Death would show us (although the big tower sequence happens in the middle of this movie with a more traditional action finale at the end). We get more Bolo Yeung (who Le fights three different times with each time the two fighters acting like they’ve never met) plus a crazy guy throwing snakes, a tall black guy (one press photo of Game of Death showed the famous Kareem Abdul Jabar scene so naturally the Brucesploitation flicks had to get in on that action) and a fight with a guy in a weird red room which incidentally was a scene that was cut from the screenplay of the actual Game of Death. Overall, this one is a lot of fun with a predictably shameless Le barreling through near non-stop fights.

Goodbye, Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death is another mock Game of Death, this time starring Bruce Li. The structure of this one is a bit odd, starting off more like a meta-movie as we follow the actor Bruce Li approached by film executives to star in Bruce Lee’s unfinished Game of Death as his stand-in (interestingly when Game of Death does surface, the stand-ins used for Bruce Lee are none of the more well-known Brucesploitation actors). When they sit down to watch the finished product, the movie switches to the movie within the movie (and the transition is as confusing as it sounds) and we then watch the expected Game of Death setup with Li fighting dudes in a tower with weirdos like a butt-bouncing swami to fight. Despite the nonsense subplots like shady businessmen and stolen money, this one, like Enter the Game of Death, is a fun watch due in no small part to the classic Game of Death setup itself of fighting up the tower. One other thing to mention about this one is that it features the the totally boss song “King of Kung Fu” by someone called Candy. I guarantee it will be stuck in your head for days afterward.

Ah, The Dragon Lives Again… If any film rivals or surpasses the insanity of The Clones of Bruce Lee, it’s this one. We open with the death of Bruce Lee, with Bruce Leung playing Lee in this one, at which point Lee descends into the underworld where he proceeds to hang out in a saloon with the likes of Popeye. That is, until the triumvirate of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, the blind swordsman Zatoichi and James Bond bust up in the place and start hassling him because they see him as a threat to their plot to take over Hell. Thankfully Lee has buddies like the One-Armed Swordsman and Cain from the TV series Kung Fu to help fight off skeletons, mummies, Dracula and a conspiratorial Emmanuelle. What I’m trying to say is that this is a batshit insane movie, and everyone should watch it. Leung isn’t as well-known as Li, Le or Dragon Lee, and he doesn’t particularly resemble Bruce Lee much at all, but he does have a certain spunky energy that makes him a good fit amidst all the weirdness.

From the balls-out craziness of The Dragon Lives Again, we head on to one of the more restrained, less exploitive films in this set, Bruce and the Iron Finger. While it stars both Bruce Li and Bruce Leung, neither are really doing a Bruce Lee impersonation here (and neither are named Bruce in the movie). What we get instead is actually a pretty solid ‘catch the killer’ plot with Li as a cop and Leung as an expert in the Iron Finger technique which the killer uses to kill teaming up to take the murderer down. This one features a lot of very good fights and offers further proof of how good an actual actor Bruce Li is when he isn’t asked to mimic Lee. Li has a certain emotional gravitas to his acting style that sets him apart from the other Bruce impersonators. He does a lot with his eyes in particular. Plus we get Fu Keng as a real scenery-chewing villain here that makes for a nice foil for Li and Leung. Overall, Bruce and the Iron Finger is one of the better legitimate films in this set.

Following on the heels of one of the more subdued films in the set comes another ridiculous one, Challenge of the Tiger. Co-written by, directed by and starring Bruce Le, we follow Le and Richard Harrison as two C.I.A. agents who go globe-hopping in an attempt to track down some kind of super sterility drug. Le is the badass fighter of the duo, setting forth his credentials early on when he fights a friggin’ bull, winning by cracking its skull open with a decisive punch to the head. Meanwhile Richard Harrison is the sexy playboy of the pair, sleeping with women constantly everywhere they go (I’m actually not sure what he brings to the table… Le seems to be do most of the work). In addition to watching Le kicking Nazi ass, we also are treated to a mesmerizing topless tennis match which must be seen to be appreciated.

Cameroon Connection is a pretty unique film in this set. Co-written, directed by and starring Alphonse Beni who has a real affection for the kung fu genre to the point that he wanted to make his own action flick despite there being no real infrastructure for a film industry in Cameroon at the time. Leveraging French financiers and recruiting Bruce Le to appear in the film in a supporting role (whose true nature I won’t reveal here), Beni stars as Police Inspector Baïko investigating the murder of a young woman. Interestingly Beni had played this same character in a couple films prior to this one and would play Baïko again at least two more times after this in films like African Fever and the Richard Harrison co-starring Terror Force Commando. Cameroon Connection, not surprisingly, has a distinctly different feel to it, taking advantage of Cameroon locations and supporting cast to good effect while also provided a solid procedural thriller with some decent action thrown in.

Super Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is the first of two Bruce Lee biopics starring Bruce Li in this set and is the first of six (!) Lee Biopics that Li (under the stage name Lai Hsiao Lung) would star in. Super Dragon in fact is one of the very first Brucesploitation films, if not the very first, rushed into production shortly after his death and released a scant year later. We follow Bruce Lee as a young man with a paper route in Seattle to his growing skill in kung fu before landing the role of Kato on The Green Hornet. We also follow his marriage as well as an affair he has with Betty Ting Pei. It’s a bit of a ramshackle production that’s surprisingly light on action with an odd fixation on the affair subplot. Maybe this scandalous relationship is what they thought would bring people to seats this early in the Brucesploitation cycle? It’s interesting to see Bruce Li so fresh-faced before he really started to come into his own as an actor.

As an interesting counterpoint, next we have The Dragon Lives, another Bruce Li-starring Lee biopic released just two years later. Li’s performance here is like night and day though compared to Super Dragon. Li feels much more comfortable in his own skin and delivers a more nuanced and emotional performance as well. According to Michael Worth in the intro, this film is also unique among Lee biopics in that it covers Lee’s entire life from birth to death, using a compelling ticking clock motif, indicating that Lee was doomed from birth to perish tragically. In addition to being more competently acted, The Dragon Lives also has a more polished look to it with more action scenes for the Brucesploitation audiences. Overall, this is certainly a more successful film that Super Dragon.

Next we have glorious director Godfrey Ho’s The Dragon, The Hero in his first legitimate feature film directorial debut (having worked as an assistant director to Chang Cheh and others prior to this). While this does have Dragon Lee in a supporting role, it mostly stars John Liu as an expert in the Strike Rock Fist technique who is sent to investigate an antique smuggling ring (man… antique smuggling must have really been a problem in China and Taiwan…seems to be in like half these movies) and is aided by Tino Wong. We get Bolo Yeung early on in a really goofy cameo doing drunken monkey kung fu, and naturally we get Phillip Ko as a seething villain because of course we do. This one isn’t going to win any awards for skillful filmmaking or masterful writing. But Joh Liu does kick lots of ass and the movie in general has a sense of loose fun to it that makes it incredibly watchable. It’s almost certainly one of Godfrey Ho’s most competent films.

Rage of the Dragon stars the mighty Dragon Lee in a very familiar setup. Lee is a hard-working student of kung fu whose father, a specialist in antiques (those antiques again!), is murdered mysteriously. As you would expect, Lee sets out to seek revenge on those he believe killed his dad. Of the Bruce Lee impersonators, Dragon Lee actually resembles him the most in my opinion despite being Korean. Having said that, Dragon Lee is burlier with a simmering intensity unlike Bruce Lee’s more measured calm. The title Rage of the Dragon is apt here. Dragon Lee when properly stirred up is able to unleash a kind of kinetic fury that makes for very lively fight scenes. In a special treat for the climax, we get Dragon Lee squaring off against Carter Wong. This is definitely a fun one that’s well-worth checking out despite the extremely basic plot line that is essentially just a setup for Dragon Lee to go from person to person kicking ass.

If you ordered this beefy box set from the Severin webstore, it comes with TWO additional movies! The first of these is The Big Boss Part II, a film advertised as a direct sequel to Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss (and not the only one for that matter). Bruce Le in his first Brucesploitation role plays the role Bruce Lee played in the prior film, although he spends most of the movie in prison doing a Bruce Lee impersonation, so it really isn’t about him. Instead we get Lieh Lo from Five Fingers of Death as his brother, taking revenge on the man who killed their father. This movie is apparently more well-known for being extremely difficult to track down. Like many of these Brucesploitation flicks, it also features plethora of ripped off music like many Hong Kong movies from this time (James Bond, Jimi Hendrix, etc.), and those themes are always fun to listen for. As far as the film itself, the action is serviceable, but this is more of a curio for hardcore fans of the original The Big Boss than as a stand-alone action movie.

The last of the films in this massive box set is The Black Dragon vs. the Yellow Tiger and like The Big Boss Part II, it acts as a direct sequel to an actual Bruce Lee film. In this case, it’s a follow-up to Lee’s sole directorial effort Way of the Dragon (the only Brucesploitation “sequel” in fact) with actor Tong Lung playing the cousin of the character Bruce Lee played in the original film who is targeted by an evil crime syndicate when he’s mistaken for Bruce Lee’s character from the first movie. While Tong Lung doesn’t really look much like Bruce Lee, it’s remarkable the extents to which the film goes to imitate Bruce. We get scenes of Tong Lung basically doing line-by-line copies of scenes from other Bruce Lee movies. Even the way some of the action scenes are choreographed are staged exactly like famous Bruce Lee fights. This is a pretty shabby effort overall if I’m being honest. The editing and dubbing are pretty bad and the whole movie lacks imagination. This is definitely one of the weaker films in this set.

As one would imagine, the audio and video quality on these films are highly variable in terms of clarity. Many of these transfers are taken from beat-up grindhouse prints or degraded internegatives (and in the case of The Clones of Bruce Lee, two different prints). Some like Enter the Game of Death is faded as well leading to discoloration (his yellow jump suit looked orange to me). As far as the transfers that suffer the most, the bonus films The Big Boss Part II and The Black Dragon vs. the Yellow Tiger fare the worst with heavy scratches and even burnt in subtitles. It’s not all doom and gloom on the transfer front though. While we are dealing we aged and deteriorated elements for many of these, the actual transfers themselves have been handled quite well. This is most evident when you take a look at two of the better preserved films in the set, Challenge of the Tiger and Cameroon Connection. Both of these are 4K masters taken from the original negative, and it’s very evident the difference in clarity between these two films and the majority of the rest of the set. Regardless, this is most likely the best any of these films will ever look given the troublesome issues with negative preservation in Hong Kong. With the audio, you have a similar situation where we are dealing with very old badly dubbed mono tracks in most cases. While they are all cleanly mastered, several of them sound hollow or tinny due to the quality of the original dubbing tracks. None are so distorted as to be unintelligible though.

Now we come to the juicy goodness at the heart of this release, the copious extras! Severin has gone above and beyond is the extras department with each disc just jam-packed with context-enhancing content. First of all, every film includes “Severin’s Kung Fu Theater” intros, a 3- to 5-minute introduction by expert Michael Worth, all of which are worth watching to set the context for each film and what makes it special in the overarching Brucesploitation movement. Additionally every film in the set save two (Enter Three Dragons and The Big Boss Part II) includes an audio commentary track. Michael Worth is included on most of them in addition to other experts and other people involved in the making of the film. For example, The Clones of Bruce Lee includes not only Michael Worth and product of Enter the Clones of Bruce Frank Djeng but also Bruce Lee historian Brandon Bentley, co-author of These Fists Break Bricks Chris Poggiali, Matthew Whitaker of The Clones Cast podcast, action film historian Mike Leeder, stunt coordinator John Kreng and brother of actor Jon T. Benn (the actor who portrayed the mad scientist in the film), Rick Benn. The way the track splices in all these different voices feels seamless as well. It’s a great commentary and a very good example of the kind of commentaries to expect here. Some other commentaries to highlight includes the one for Challenge of the Tiger featuring Michael Worth as well as director and film expert C. Courtney Joyner and the one on The Dragon, the Hero with Michael Worth and Godfrey Ho. Ho, both here and on his contributions to the Enter the Clones of Bruce documentary is an absolute fountain of information. Ho seems to have an uncanny recall for his involvement in the Hong Kong film industry back in the ’70s and makes for a great interview subject. As far as other extras goes, let’s just go disc by disc.

Disc 1, which contains only the documentary Enter the Clones of Bruce, contains several additional featurettes that were excised from the final cut of the doc but provides some nice additional context on various aspects of the HK movie industry at the time. For instance we have one that gives more info on what it was like to work for the Shaw Brothers with various cast and crew that were present at the time. We get more personal anecdotes from people who worked with Bruce Lee. We get one focused on the dire state of film negatives from kung fu movies (which definitely helps give more context on the variable quality of the transfers in this set). We also get a Hong Kong locations tour with producer Frank Djeng. Overall, it’s a really nice set of extras just on this disc alone. On disc 2, in addition to the commentary and intros we also get an interview with late actor Jon T. Benn. On disc 3, we get an interview and scene-specific commentary with Chiu Chi Ling as well as the first of several round table discussions featuring Tatevik Hunanyan, John Kreng, Ron Strong, and Michael Worth. We also get a featurette on San Francisco’s movie theaters from the ’70s which also acts as a walking tour and deleted scenes from Goodbye, Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death. Disc 4 includes another round table discussion (this time on what their first Brucesploitation film was) as well as deleted scenes for The Dragon Lives Again and Bruce and the Iron Finger and a nice audio essay from Cult Cinema critic Lovely Jon. Disc 5 includes a couple of very good extras that give more context on Alphonse Beni, the director of Cameroon Connection. The documentary Lights… Cameroon… Action! in particular is well worth checking out. Disc 6 has another roundtable discussion, this one on Bruce Lee biopics, as well as an audio interview with Anders Gustav Nelsson, the songwriter of the song “He’s a Legend, He’s a Hero” from The Dragon Lives, and an interview with Caryn White Stedman on how many of these Brucesploitation films originated in Taiwan (for instance actor Bruce Li is Taiwanese). Disc 7 includes, in addition to his audio commentary, a nearly 20-minute interview with Godfrey Ho, as well as deleted scenes from The Dragon, the Hero and another roundtable discussion talking about theaters specializing in kung fu movies. In addition to all this, every disc includes also the usual smattering of promo materials like radio spots and trailers for the films involved. In addition to all of the on-disc extras, the set also comes with a very nice 100-page book featuring two essays from Michael Worth, the first breaking down the emergence of the Brucesploitation sub-genre and how they captured the various facets of Bruce Lee’s personality in action and the second focusing on Bruce Li, as well as an essay from Chris Poggiali on how Brucesploitation arrived on American shores, and two essays about the video labels that released Brucesploitation films, the first by John Casbard and the second by Roger Cross. So yea, the extras here are absolutely STACKED.

How do I even begin to summarize how awesome this set is? I wasn’t sure going into this how much I’d really enjoy these films given their reputations as quick cash grabs to take advantage of a tragedy. But the Brucesploitation genre is more than just a cash grab. In the wake of Bruce Lee’s untimely death, people WANTED more Bruce. They desired to catch a glimpse of the promise that such a dynamic on-screen presence would bring in the future. What the Brucesploitation genre brings more than any other niche is a kind of wish fulfillment to make good on that promise, however brief and however tenuous. Sure, none of the clones look a great deal like Bruce, but in the end does it matter? What the films in this set represent is a resourcefulness and creativity to put a nation’s hero in scenarios they never had a chance to see him in. From the film that might’ve been of the Game of Death pastiches to the most ludicrous scenarios of casting Bruce Lee as mad scientist clones or fighting James Bond and Dracula in Hell, these Brucesploitation flicks are more than just cheap cash-ins. They capture the hopes and dreams of what could have been. What Severin has done here is graced us with an absolutely wonderful box set of strange, crazy and fun movies in a beautiful package with tons of meaningful extras. And it’s just volume one! Here’s hoping volume two is just around the corner!