Bamboo Gods and Iron Men (1973)
Day four of #Junesploitation and it’s Blaxploitation time with a little bit of martial arts and I love a good 70s martial arts film, this wasn’t a good 70s martial arts film…
The opening credits made me think I was in for a bit of treat, a funky soundtrack over a kung-fu montage is just the perfect opener, especially if it includes a bald bloke head butting a load of breeze blocks.
But unfortunately this was the high point of the whole film.
This really feels like it was jumping on the bandwagon of martial art films that were beginning to make a mark on Western cinema and especially Bruce Lee films and this had certain tropes that were similar to Enter the Dragon but my god could two films be so different!
Pace was way off with another terrible script where there was no real feel of where the film was going, the first third felt like a serious crime caper with a possible world threat, then it sort of descended into a bit of a farce, with a Clouseau type character as the police officer investigating the case in Manila.
The fight sequences and choreography were lacking so much.
So much, it was actually quite painful to watch the mugging of the actors as they were going through the paces and fumbling everything, again I’m comparing this to other films of the time which did it so well.
I think this was my least enjoyed of the four I’ve watched so far, made a bit worse by the obvious black-face right at the end with big grins.
4.7
