Furious, The (1974)

Directed by Joseph Velasco
Written by Peter Ronald
Starring
- Chan Wei Min
- Lo Lien
- Fu Kung
- Hwang Ka Tat
Produced by Robert Jeffery

As you may have seen, I’ve been going through something of a bad patch of late. Beginning with Apostic assigning me The Apple for B-Masters “Secret Santas” roundtable, I’ve been assaulted by a greater-than-normal percentage of movies that sucked. Raptor, The Beauties and the Beast, Wired to Kill, Abraxas… Not all of them have earned my “COLD” rating (which I reserve for those movies that literally have me shaking my fist at the screen), but not a one of these movies was worth the effort of watching. It’s starting to sap my strength of will; winter doldrums like these, I don’t need.

Tu Pao: Underworld figure and president of the Roddy McDowall Fan Club.

And this movie… More of the same, I’m afraid.

Granted, expecting quality from a “fake Bruce Lee” movie is tantamount to searching your own poop for gold (unless you’re really sure you swallowed that filling). But still. Someone went to the trouble of reproducing and packaging the movie for human consumption, and it presumably wasn’t the director’s mom. Call my Pollyannish, but I’d always like to think that there’s got to be something worth seeing in every movie, right?

To start the confusion, I’m not even sure which one “Bruce Le” is. The box proudly proclaims his name as star, but the photo is obviously not from this movie (The Furious isn’t a period drama, unless you want to count the ’70s), and Le’s face is an an angle that makes it darned hard to recognize him in the movie. You can see above that none of the credits on the actual print read “Bruce Le” (my guess is that he adopted the name a little later), and anyway there are no closing credits, so I can’t see which actor played which part. (That also accounts for the cross-cultural massacre of character names below.) Not that knowing which actor was making a buck off of a dead martial arts genius would really enhance my viewing pleasure anyway.

Our hero: A man named Ho.

Anyway. The story starts in Indonesia, which I didn’t know until half an hour into the movie; there were probably several subtle clues to let an East Asian audience know that it was Indonesia, but as far as I’m concerned, unless they’ve got a big-ass sign saying “Welcome to Indonesia!” in one of the establishing shots, I will perversely assume that a Kong Hong action movie is set in Hong Kong. Anyhoo: a drug pusher visits his usual customers, then gets chased by two guys who shoot at him repeatedly. It’s only after the catch him that we find out the two are cops, and moreover, they just wanted the guy as an informant to snitch on his boss. (Which wouldn’t have worked well if they had perforated him, so it’s just as well that they’re lousy shots.)

Said boss is Tu Pao, a younger badass in the underworld (could this be Bruce Le?), and his shipment is supposed to come in tomorrow, so the cops, led by Officer Cha (could this be Bruce Le?), hide near the seashore where Tu Pao is to meet a boat, ready to apprehend him as soon as the deal is made on the shore. Naturally, a couple of nuns choose this moment to lead their class on a beach field trip, and so when the cops try to apprehend the evildoers, Tu Pao grabs a fat kid as a hostage and drives like hell. The cops follow, Tu Pao ditches the car (now smoking inexplicably) and the knocked-out kid behind and scampers off, and the cops arrive just in time for the car to explode for no apparent reason except Tu Pao’s evil influence.

Cha then tries to find Tu Pao by, um, entering crummy-looking apartments at random, lambasting the occupants, and searching for five seconds. At least, that’s what it looked like he was doing; granted, he apparently knew the occupants from earlier run-ins, but there seemed to be very little rhyme or reason to his investigation. (There is, however, a thug in a wife-beater who’s dubbed in a pathetic Cockney accent, which will also show up in another minor character’s mouth later on.)

Product placement knows no borders.

The action then moves to Hong Kong, where a young Romeo schmoozing his girlfriend inexplicably gets some kind of “Keep your hands to yourself” talking-to from Police Inspector Ho. (This is the one person that I can guarantee is not Bruce Le; it’s Hwang Ka Tat, better known as Carter Wong, who is a pretty recognizable face for the chop-socky movie fan.) Ho then meets Cha at the station, as Tu Pao is rumored to be in Hong Kong, seeking to exchange twenty pounds of drugs for protection.

Ho demonstrates that the Indonesian police are not alone in their counterintuitive and generally unsuccessful investigative methodology, as his basic strategy is to get all of his detectives to descend as a body on a number of sleazy nightclubs, street, pushers, pimps, etc., get belligerent in everyone’s face, and start kung fu fights; they consistently leave the premises without any more information than they started. (Given that the police are both stupid and disagreeable, it’s no surprise to me that the criminal underworld is so strong in Hong Kong; hell, if I encountered one of these cops, my next stop would probably be at my local triad’s recruiting office.)

Tu Pao lays low for a month, though, until approaching Hong Kong kingpin Chang Ki (way too old to be Bruce Le), one of those tough-as-nails criminals who has his henchmen attack him and wipes the floor with them for practice. Tu Pao wants to sell him the drugs for a cut rate and join his organization; Chang Ki gives him a test; make three hits for him, and Tu Pao is in.

Okay then, where’s the “After” shot? (Ha! I slay me!)

With the cops always far behind and trying to catch up, Tu Pao takes out Chang Ki’s enemies: a quartet playing Mah Jongg and making sexual innuendos (kung-fued into submission and set on fire), a bodybuilder (kung-fued into submission and then strangled with a shower curtain in the gym), and some gang fellow who had just finished sex with his girl (which explains why he didn’t need much kung-fuing to tire him out — and hey, at least he died right after sex, rather than right before). Each scene is padded out, because we need to make a full movie out of this, so we get a looong scene of tense Mah Jongg strategy (which might have been more interesting if I knew squat about Mah Jongg), a long scene of BodyBoulder Boy admiring his pecs, and a long scene of a couple making the beast with two backs.

Unfortunately, one of the fire victims survives, and manages to ID Tu Pao for Inspector Ho. He then figures out the plot: If all of Chang Ki’s rivals are getting hit, then Tu Pao is hooking up with Chang Ki! (Ho declares that the M.O. in all the killings has been the same — said M.O. apparently being too stupid to bring a gun, and instead having a knock-down-drag-out fight with each mark.) And yet, after all the detective work involved in figuring that out, it becomes moot, as a mole in Chang Ki’s employees gives the cops the same information anyway. On the day that Tu Pao and Chang Ki are to meet face to face and exchange the drugs (and kiss the ring, or whatever it is that thugs do to swear fealty to triad lords), the cops do a piss-poor job of surrounding the house, so that even when they come in shooting and kung fu fighting, Tu Pao manages to get away.

He manages to get himself to Thailand, where he has a brother who will protect him, but since Cha knows Tu Pao has a brother in Thailand, he and Ho get themselves there first (Tu Pao took a boat, the two cops hopped a plane) and are waiting there for him, where they have the final climactic two-against-one kung fu fight. The end.

Of all the ways to go…

Quite frankly, this movie wasn’t worth the effort it took to tell you about it, much less come up with any insightful conclusions. I simply didn’t care — not about Tu Pao, not about Cha, not about Ho. Not one of them was interesting or sympathetic enough to want to spend 90 minutes in their company. Whole sections of the movie were present for no other reason than to get us further from the beginning but no nearer the conclusion (SEE the thrilling play-by-play Mah Jongg action!), and the kung fu — which was the reason for the whole exercise — was stingy, and none too thrilling when it finally erupted.

It doesn’t matter that Bruce Le was here, unidentified or not; the movie as a whole was tepid enough that the real Bruce Lee wouldn’t have been able to spice it up.