Blind Fist of Bruce (1979)

Sadly Over-hyped

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

When Jackie Chan became a Hong Kong superstar in the late '70s, Bruce Lee imitators like Ho Tsung-tao (Bruce Li) and Huang Kin-lung (Bruce Le) found themselves obliged to change with the times. Wearing a yellow tracksuit and clumsily flailing a nunchaku no longer impressed audiences; now they demanded more complex, ambitious fight choreography, resulting in the emergence of a few decent films from the Bruceploitation camp. One of them was "Blind Fist of Bruce", in which Ho plays a browbeaten bank manager who learns kung fu from a blind beggar (Simon Yuen, Jackie Chan's tipsy sifu in "Drunken Master") to fend off a gang of criminals led by Tiger Yang. There's nothing earth-shatteringly good here, but the lengthy final fight is worth sticking around for, and the film as a whole is a considerable improvement on Ho's earlier work. He could have joined the ranks of mid-level stars like Don Wong Tao and Tan Tao-liang had he not already been fatally typecast as a Bruce Lee clone.

If you have seen your share of Hong Kong kung fu movies from the 1970s, there is no real reason to see this particular one, because you will have seen practically everything in this effort before in the other examples. The production values look like it was hastily filmed in back alleys, the bad dubbing is not awful enough to be even worth a few laughs, and the story has elements like a kung fu master at first reluctant to train the hero in expert fighting skills so he can get revenge against bully villains... do I have to go on? There are only two bits of interest in this entire exercise. The first is that it's painfully clear that the character of the blind kung fu teacher is doubled during the more complex martial arts / acrobatic moments, and that the soundtrack uses (almost certainly without permission) music from spaghetti westerns, such as Ennio Morricone's music for the Sergio Leone western "Duck, You Sucker". Watch that movie instead of this one.

The movie would have been fine, but my boyfriend got it as part of a box set and it said this was a Bruce Lee movie. It's one thing to expect a martial arts movie, it's another to expect a Bruce Lee movie. Anyway, if you go in prepared for it, it's probably gonna be good.As he said, not a good entry level movie, I think it's better to start with one that's really amazing or that you know is good, then work your way to other lesser-known movies. This way you can develop an appreciation for the art without getting bored early on. Check out someone as breath-taking as Bruce Lee or as fun and entertaining as Jackie Chan.

'Blind Fist of Bruce' is a good, watchable martial arts film. Ho Tsung Tao portrays a once wealthy bank manager who's robbed of everything he ever had by a gang of martial arts extortionists. He seeks the help of an elderly and blind martial arts master (Charasmatically played by Yuen Siu Tien). The twist is that the leader of the extortionists, Tiger, was once a pupil of the martial arts master. Years before, Tiger blinded his kung fu teacher after he exiled him from the school. This film contains a few mediocre scenes, but the good fight scenes and decent acting make up for it. Director Kam Bo could have put a liitle more detail into the film (Maybe he could have used fake tears on Soo Ching when she mourns Miss Hong's death). Still, this movie is pretty good and it's a lot better than most of Ho Tsung Tao's early work as Bruce Li in the early 70's.