Here’s another film poster that’s kind of perplexing. There was a phenomenon after Bruce Lee’s death called “Bruceploitation“, of which this is technically an example… but it didn’t start that way. It’s actually a South Korean film called Visitor of America that had nothing to do with Bruce Lee even as a character; evidently an American distributor hired a Bruce imitator and shot a new sequence of “Bruce” emerging from the grave to tack on to the start before re-dubbing the film for American release (and apparently re-racialising it, too, the film’s Wiki entry notes that all the Korean characters are called “Chinese” in the English dub). Oh, and also re-crediting the film on the poster to one “Bert Lenzi”.
This was the perplexing bit, cos when I first saw this and lighted upon the director credit. Umberto Lenzi did Bruceploitation?
Umberto Lenzi was a hack of all trades in Italian genre cinema from the 60s to the 90s. He’s probably most notable for having basically invented the hideous Italian cannibal trend with Man From Deep River in 1972, but he was generally one of those genre journeymen who did whatever was popular in Italy at any given moment, sword and sandal, historical adventure, spy thrillers, spaghetti westerns, gialli, poliziotteschi, and horror of whatever sort. I knew this much about him, but the idea that an Italian filmmaker would get mixed up in a specifically south-east Asian trend just seemed too weird to be true.
And that’s because it was. Lenzi actually had piss all to do with this film, which was actually directed by one Lee Doo-yong. So what was Lenzi’s name doing on the poster, then? I did briefly entertain the possibility that there might have been a director in Hong Kong called Bert Len Zi until I realised that was, frankly, too stupid to be the case. Why him? Unfortunately I don’t know enough about the 70s exploitation scene to know what sort of name recognition Eurotrash directors like Lenzi actually had among American audiences for this sort of thing. I mean, I’m sure the films were known to American viewers, they got released there, but to what extent did people know or care who made them? The American distributor seems to have thought Lenzi was enough of a “name” that they could palm this thing off as his work. But why him? Why anyone at all? And did it work?
And who was the distributor, anyway? According to the poster it was something called Head Gorilla Releasing, but the film’s IMDB page suggests Aquarius (who, amusingly enough, had actual Umberto Lenzi films on their books) handled the original 1978 US release and the other company (whose only IMDB credit is this thing) only got their hands on it in 1982. So I thought maybe this Head Gorilla mob had done the deed… but apparently not, cos as it turns out you can actually find the film on Internet Archive, where the print used has the “Bruce emerges from the grave” opening (which is somehow even stupider to watch than it sounds) and an Aquarius logo. So was it all their work and Head Gorilla got it from them in this form? I don’t know, and no doubt there’s no way we ever will know now. It all mystifies me, and likely as not only I care anyway…
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