FIST OF FEAR, TOUCH OF DEATH (1980)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Set in New York's Madison Square Garden, Adolph Caesar ("A Soldier's Story") is the news reporter who is there to cover a martial-arts tournament where the successor to Bruce Lee will be determined. Caesar interviews action stars like Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, who feels the whole event is a waste of time; Aaron Banks, who believes in the Bruce Lee conspiracy that Lee was killed by the "touch of death," and there is a faux interview with Bruce Lee himself drenched in sepia tones. Then we are treated to an overlong faux biography of Bruce himself for no reason other than to pad the film to an interminable 1 hour and twenty minutes. The biographical information is a joke, determining that Bruce's karate, not kung-fu influence, was from his great-great grandfather who was a Chinese samurai! Even I know that the samurai were Japanese, not Chinese - a better foundation for Lee's skills would've been if his ancestors came from the Shaolin Temple. The footage of his great-great grandfather is from some obscure martial-arts film where we see one long fight sequence involving, among other things, an abacus used as a weapon! Even better is the endless Lee footage from the short-lived TV series "Longstreet" masquerading as interview footage.
The best moment is when Lee meets with a film director about doing an action film based on his martial-arts experience, just prior to doing "The Green Hornet." Then we are shown a clip of some guy jumping off a roof! The problem with this glaringly erroneous fact is that Bruce never made an American martial-arts film prior to "The Green Hornet," and even his first American film was "Marlowe" in 1969 where he played a minion to a mafioso type. Let's not forget that even Lee's proposed "Kung-Fu" series was accepted but the producers felt the public wasn't ready for a Chinese-American action star so they cast David Carradine instead.
But "Fist of Fear" doesn't end there. In fact, excepting the last five minutes of the film, there is hardly any Madison Square Garden footage, and most of it is limited to talking head interviews. We are terrorized by scenes where Fred Williamson is mistaken for Harry Belafonte (!), a Kato-impersonator (Billy Louie) kicks the butt of potential Central Park rapists, Ron Van Clief kicking butt with more of these rapists, a few close-up shots of women's breasts and buttocks while they jog, an obviously fake tournament fight where Billy Louie plucks his opponent's eyeballs out and throws them to the audience, and more garbage filler than most dumpsters can carry. One thing you'll learn from this trash is that women are often raped by the attacker by, get this, merely holding the woman's hands against a wall and screaming obscenities. There is no theme, no story, no sense of purpose to "Fist of Fear," other than finding the successor to Bruce Lee. If the legendary Bruce Lee is not turning over in his grave, then I will when I die.
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