Featured Arts: Kali/eskrima – As well as being his teacher, Bruce Lee trained with Dan Inosanto in Filipino martial arts including kali/eskrima. Short sequences of double stick sinawali appear in amongst the multi-weapon fight scenes.
Overview: Bruce Lee is a martial-arts expert, invited to a martial arts tournament on an island owned by Han, a billionaire whose body guard was responsible for the death of Lee’s sister. Han uses the tournaments as an opportunity to smuggle drugs to and from his island fortress. Determined to help capture the drug dealer who killed his sister, Lee uses his skills to enter a martial arts contest and then fights his way into the dealer’s headquarters. Also involved are John Roper and Kelly Williams, martial artists who served together in Vietnam, soon to find themselves on the run from Han and his martial army.
Rating: 8.2 (of 10) – this is one the best of all Bruce Lee films. Still a bit campy by modern standards, it single-handedly created a genre. And the FMA represented by Sigung Bruce was quite respectable if brief.
(Re-produced under fair-use and with credit)