Enter The Dragon

Robert Clouse, Hong Kong/USA 1973, 99 mins

Martial arts maestro Lee (Bruce Lee) is recruited by the secret service to infiltrate the island base of Han, the iron-claw armed criminal mastermind behind a drug smuggling and prostitution ring. Lee agrees, knowing that Han's henchman Oharra was responsible for the death of his sister - she committed suicide rather than have sex with him.

Lee travels to Han's island base where he meets Americans Roper (John Saxon) and Williams (ex-American football star Jim Kelly). Both men are on the run - Roper from the mob and Williams from the cops. The three good guys soon realise their common cause and unite to fight Han and his henchmen. Inevitably, after much chop-socky action, good triumphs over evil.

Enter the Dragon is a quintessential 70s film, notable as the last movie Bruce Lee completed in his tragically short career. The film's raison d'être is really to showcase his incredible martial arts prowess and it does so admirably. Famously, some of Lee's moves were too fast to capture at 24 frames a second. Thus it was necessary to shoot them at high speed so that they would appear in slow motion when shown on screen.

Lee's kung-fu fighting aside, there are lots of other incidental pleasures to be had from Enter the Dragon. Most, unfortunately, fall into the "so bad it's good" category: atrocious 70s fashions and hairstyles, piss-poor acting, a desperate overuse of the zoom lens and so forth. Lalo (Bullitt, Mission Impossible) Schifrin's characteristically funktastic score is, however, a plus point.

Certainly one of the baddest movies there is - in every sense of the term.

Keith H. Brown
EUFS Programme 1998-99