BLACK DRAGON VS. THE YELLOW TIGER is an outrageously blatant Bruceploitation picture in which the little-known Taiwanese actor Tang Lung does his best Bruce Lee impression throughout. The narrative is a straight-up copy of that of WAY OF THE DRAGON, featuring our hero battling his way through various evil Westerners and their Chinese allies. Being a Taiwanese movie, this is low budget through and through, with poor production values and intermittent fight scenes that fail to engage the viewer in any way. Repeated use of the ENTER THE DRAGON theme is made throughout. It's a waste of time whichever way you look at it.

There's no such thing as a good Bruceploitation film, but "Black Dragon vs. the Yellow Tiger" is a mess even by the low standards of its subgenre. Brawny Tong Lung (the brother of better-known Taiwanese martial arts film actor Alexander Lo Rei--not Kim Tai-chung, who later used the pseudonym 'Tong Lung' in "Game of Death II") stars in this sequel to Bruce Lee's "The Way of the Dragon". He plays Tang Fu, the cousin of Tang Lung, Lee's character in the original film. (Confused yet? Good.) An international crime syndicate is gunning for Tang Lung, and the group's Hong Kong representative mistakes Tang Fu for his cousin; eventually a wrestler, two karateka and, bizarrely, a fencer are called in to deal with the surprisingly formidable Tang Fu. It is the black karateka from the United States (Clint Robinson, a real-life tae kwon do instructor) who is our hero's final opponent. In what is perhaps the single funniest moment in the history of bad chop-socky dubbing, Robinson's character stands atop a pagoda and bawls, "Tang Fuuuuuuu! You now lookin' at the man who's gonna kill youuuuuuu!!" in a cracked voice that makes him sound like an 80-year-old sharecropper. It's hard to describe how unsophisticated this film is: fights begin without preamble; the opposing parties just sort of show up at one another's place of residence and start punching, kicking and shouting. The choreography is mostly decent, if not earth-shattering, but it's a wonder that Tong Lung didn't hurt himself swinging that nunchaku around. (He was pretty handy on a bicycle, however.) Filmed in 1974, "Black Dragon vs. the Yellow Tiger" was one of the earliest Bruceploitation efforts, released hot on the heels of Bruce Li's "The Dragon Dies Hard". But, unlike Li, Tong Lung bore little resemblance to Bruce Lee and would not forge a career in the subgenre. (Awkward as his performance is, however, Tong's not quite as bad as Dragon Lee, one of the later prominent Bruce Lee imitators.) The print available on DVD is very poor--almost bootleg quality, in fact--but students of the fascinating, if minor, cultural phenomenon known as Bruceploitation should see this film.

This Taiwanese extravaganza has all the flaws you could expect from an independent Karate-movie, but it has also a funny concept that could have been great in the Kung-Fu Comedy invented some year later: there's material for a spoof in the style of Sammo Hung's Enter the fat dragon, 1977, and I don't think that this WAY OF THE TIGER aka BLACK DRAGON VS YELLOW TIGER was playing too unintentionally. The plot is a clever joke: hero Tong Lung is a pupil/friend of Tang Lung/Bruce Lee and when the local crime syndacate learns that theyr Rome's branch was annihilated by the latter, they goes against the former, who promptly fights them generating a doubt: is he just a lookalike or the real Tang Lung? The Bruceploitation scheme lends to a final duel between the fake Bruce Lee against a western martialist (Afro-American Taekwando master Clint Robinson), just like Lee Vs. Norris in the original, but they are inside a pagoda, since Colosseum is not at hand. The poor tech values are in some way (of the tiger?) balanced by alot of action, and the presence of colorful personages as the english fence-master, the chinese wrestler and the usual Jap killer (played by the ubiquitous Enter the Dragon's extra Dai Ai Saan, aka Little eye), all adds a bizarre fun. There's also a rainy-night fight between Tong Lung and two american killers, a whiteman and an Afro, where the cheap photography makes almost impossible to distinguish the fighters, so all you can see are the white jackets of the killers dancing in the dark as if they were ghostly jackets with nobody inside. Actor-stuntmen Jackie Chen Shao Lung plays the gang henchman dressing a vest and a striped shirt, and he's a really good fighter. The whole thing is played for serious, but, as I wrote above, the intentional spoof is always around the corner. Released 2/26/73 and directed by Li Kuan Chang, later a director in Bruceploitation with Bruce Li/Ho Tsung Tao. Main star and bodybuilder Tong Lung (a nome-de-plume of course) was the real-life brother of Taekwando champion Aleaxander Lo Rei, later a star himself in the Ninja subgenre (Superninja, 1984). I rate this joke 6 just because oh his concept and some good action, even if the final duel at the pagoda is stolen from Lee-Norris almost frame by frame... well, you can't accuse the director of not having a good taste in copying!