User Reviews

As martial arts movies go this is a pretty solid offering, hardly original or surprising, but nonetheless offering a pleasing action-boredom ratio (about 5:1 in my view) and plenty of amusing incidental moments – after all, this was made in the mid '70s, where wide-collared shirts and flares were all the rage, where guys wear vivid tanktops and skin-tight t-shirts for all the world to see and where the hero has a huge afro and lamb-chop sideburns bigger than a normal man's hand. Yep, the hero of the piece is the unlikely-monikered Ron Van Clief, a big, brooding kind of hero who displays his admirable martial arts skills in a series of violent punch-ups and show-downs in a range of street locations. The resulting movie is a fitting combination of the blaxploitation and martial arts genres.

As is the case with a small handful of films, the low budget actually works in this film's favour, giving it a street vibe of sweaty realism missing in bigger and slicker offerings. Although the Bruce Lee angle of the plot has obviously been tacked on by producers in a hope to sell it to a wider audience (thus adding it to the surprisingly large sub-genre of "made to cash in on his death" Bruce Lee films), the straightforward plot is just an otherwise excuse for a series of fights, battles and open street wars. Despite the ill-defined characters, the inaudible accents (dubbed or not dubbed? that is the question) and the less-than-impressive acting, this is for the most part worth watching. The second half of the film is by far the better, featuring as it does a lot more action than the fairly slow opening, and the excellent climax involves a series of violent showdowns resulting in the death of one or more characters.

Watch out for a nasty eye-gouging moment which comes as an unpleasant surprise, and see if you can spot the homosexual subtext between Van Clief and his best "buddy", a guy who closely resembles Jools Holland and who spends most of his time hanging around half-naked with his pal. The ante is upped for the film's finale, in which a nasty snake woman lobs a venomous adder at the good guys. The final one-on-one fight is actually very well choreographed, taking place on a lonely beach and very exciting with it. But for the most part this film just offers straightforward martial arts action – not great but definitely better than average and that means its not bad at all.

In the seventies the martial arts craze took solid hold on movie theaters. With the release of Bruce Lee's ENTER THE DRAGON the demand increased. His sudden death called for a replacement and while none could quite compare the list of stars made on his popularity was vast. Not only that, a number of films came out with the term "dragon" in them to capitalize on his nickname.

At the same time there was another huge player on the exploitation scene known as Blaxploitation films. These movies featured African-Americans in the lead roles and had themes more inclined towards urban audiences than most. While some would consider these stereotypical in a bad way at the time they were highly praised. Characters most often were pimps and mobsters taking on the man in charge.

But there was a different sort of black hero on the rise that found the merging of these two genres. The black martial arts star was a combination that drew audiences in. Jim Kelly was the first of these stars, having been featured in Lee's ENTER. But another on the scene was Ron van Clief. A former US Marine who went on to study martial arts and win numerous competitions, Clief parlayed that ability into a film career. While that film career was short lived, it did produce enough movies for fans to enjoy him in the role of hero.

Which brings us to BLACK DRAGON'S REVENGE. In the film Clief is hired by a billionaire to find out who was responsible for the death of Bruce Lee, a common theme after Lee's death in movies like this. He heads to the orient to pursue what few leads he has and gets an assist from an old friend named Charles (Charles Bonet). As the two begin to search for the assassin of Lee they find a mysterious organization trying to thwart their efforts. What follows is attempts on their lives, plenty of martial arts action and some incredibly weak story building.

Let's face the facts here, martial arts movies at the time with the exception of Lee's were pretty much low budget with the least amount of money being spent on the scripts. These were mostly tossed together with little more than finding a way to progress from one fight sequence to the next with enough story to make it seem plausible, though sometimes not even worrying about that. Fans wanted to see the fights and that was the focus.

But there were two sorts of films that featured those as well. One set was made in China and featured some amazing abilities captured on rather poor quality film stock. These films featured high wire effects and were performed more by acrobats than by actual martial arts stars. Their leaps would provide them with the ability to jump over walls and into trees. It was a fast paced choreography that has led to countless stars since that time including Jackie Chan and Jet Li.

The other sort featured actual martial artists like van Clief. These films tended to have decent fight sequences but were played more for reality and the choreography in these tended to be much slower and more an attempt to show the styles and result in less actual damage to the stars and stuntmen involved. It's not that they were bad, just that in comparison they were less eye popping for viewers. Perhaps the worst example of this was the TV series KUNG FU which featured David Carradine moving so slow that slow motion effects were used during the fight sequences to make it appear that this was why it seemed that way. It doesn't make it bad, it just makes it different.

So how does this movie fare in the end? It offers an evening's worth of entertainment for fans of both martial arts and Blaxploitation genres. Van Clief fans will be glad they can find a quality copy of the film to add to their collection. Film Detective is offering a quality print of the film on blu-ray, at least as clean as you can get considering the source material available, the original camera negative. Perhaps the most important thing is that in doing so they've preserved a part of film history that many may have chosen to ignore of forget. But for fans this means they can add another film to their collection to enjoy when they fondly remember these types of films. For those fans you'll want to pick this one up.

Ace martial arts champion Ron Van Clief is paid $100,000 dollars by some rich guy to find out exactly how the legendary Bruce Lee died. Fellow karate champ Charles Bonet, the star of the hilariously horrible cheapie "Death Promise," helps Van Clief out. Moreover, several other folks also investigate Lee's death. Of course, a bunch of evil people lead by a wicked bald guy try to stop our heroes. Director Chin-Ku Lu maintains a constant snappy pace throughout and stages the copious exciting fight scenes with a reasonable amount of flair. The villains are a truly mean and hateful bunch of no-count individuals; my favorite was the nasty lady who brandishes poisonous snakes. Van Clief's likable and charismatic presence rates as another plus; the engaging chemistry between Van Clief and Bonet really keeps the picture humming. The fairly polished cinematography, a generous sprinkling of brutal violence, the urgent, driving, wildly dramatic score, and the inevitable amusingly cruddy dubbing are among the other goodies to be relished in this hugely enjoyable chopsocky exploitation outing.