In Praise of The Clones of Bruce Lee Part II

 

Our look at the wonderful world of Bruceploitation continues with a group of clones who didn’t last long on the scene.

One and done clones would include:

• Gyro Lee, Ajax Danielopoulos, a weak punching, hairy Greek, whose one starring vehicle, THE DRAGON GOES TO ATHENS (1976), stalled from the get-go.  The only thing of note is the soundtrack which generously borrowed music cues from THE EIGER SANCTION (1975), THE MECHANIC (1972) and even the themes from the game show MATCH GAME and cartoon TENNESSEE TUXEDO.

• Fedora Lee, who of course, wore a fedora and had his hands full in trying to corral a mischievous group of youngsters in THE SHAOLIN RASCALS (1977) aka WEE TANG RASCALS.

• Bruce Lee Majors, who made quite the non-impression in ENTER THE BIONIC DRAGON (1977).

Review from the bionic film reviewer ISSUE #45-March 1981

ENTER THE BIONIC DRAGON started off with great promise but soon fizzled out like a faulty firecracker. Just one big dud.   Judging by his name, the star, Bruce Lee Majors is doing his best to summon both Bruce Lee and Lee Majors . . .  He fails miserably at both summoning tasks, mainly due to having the personality of a wet dish rag.  He also has a full head of fire engine red hair that looks absolutely preposterous.  Bruce Lee Majors plays a top Interpol agent who, in a pre-credit sequence, is involved in a well filmed motorcycle chase scene which ends with him careening off of a hill.  Interpol does not want to lose their top man, so they give the go ahead for him to be operated on and become the first Bionic man.  Much like the original, he is given bionic implants in both legs, one arm, one eye and one ear, thus turning him into a superhuman secret agent.  At one point a character calls him a “Bionic Bond”.  At another point a bad guy calls him a “Bionic Boob”.  The latter description seems to fit best, and the paying audience seems to be the boob in this scenario.

There were four clones named after types of cheeses, who are known collectively as the “Bruce Lee  Cheese Clones”.

• Camembert Lee, who had a bit part in TO KILL A KUNG FU MAN (1978), has not been identified, nor has he come forward to prove his cloneness.

• Feta Lee who was a strong likable lead in FOR A FISTFUL OF FETA (1978), was Han Ming-Peng, a Taiwanese martial artist, who also had small but memorable  roles in BROTHERS OF THE THUNDERBOLT FIST (1977), THE MASTER OF SPIRITUAL BOXING (1978), had a non-fighting role in a mad cap comedy called KUNG FU HUSTLERS (1981) aka THE MAN WITH THE KUNG FU SMILE, and lastly, what Ancient Astronaut/Bruce Lee Clone Theorists consider his best movie, THE GREATEST HONG KONG HERO (1982).

• Gorgonzolee was Yuen Wing, the lead in THE GOUDA, THE BLEU & THE ULLOA (1978).  He had strong kung-fu skills and a warm smile.  He starred alongside Bambi Lee (More on her coming soon) in 1976’s MY LITTLE SISTER, MY BODYGUARD and 1979’s THE NEW FACE OF KUNG FU aka A FORCE OF NONE.

⦁ Brie Lee who appeared in ENTER THE ONE-ARMED CHEESEMAKER (1976) and its sequel RETURN OF THE ONE -ARMED CHEESEMAKER (1977), seemed destined for clone stardom, but left the movie business to work at a Hickory Farms store in Atlanta, Georgia.

• Rumors of CHEESE WIZ LEE have never been substantiated.

In Praise of Magno Films

Stan Delvecchio’s Boston based Magno films had a brief run of releases kicking off with two pickups from Britain.  The A title in the double feature was the 1973 mad killer movie SITTING DUCKS.  The B title was the 1972 sex romp MADELINE TAKES MANCHESTER, rechristened LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY for US audiences.

 

Picking up the US distribution rights for a decent price from Charterhouse Films, the double bill did well and was a good first step for the fledgling company.  Delvecchio, who had been in the business since the MGM lion was a cub, was in his seventies when he started up Magno.

DELVECCHIO:  People always asked me, why did you start a company at 74?  You should relax and enjoy your retirement.  It was always something that I wanted to do, be my own boss.  Besides, I hired good people to run the day to day.  Frankly, I didn’t like our releases or understand the appeal.  Things were getting more and more violent, and the nudity was more prevalent.  Now don’t get me wrong, I like looking at a naked broad as much as the next guy and a certain amount of violence is needed in some pictures, but it was getting a little over the top.  But this was the direction that the audience tastes were headed.  I had a good man running the office, Dante Phillips.

SITTING DUCKS:  In modern day England, a failed musician, unhinged by the constant rejection of his music, dresses up in Victorian age clothes and terrorizes London with a grisly murder spree that brings back bloody memories of Jack the Ripper.

LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY:  Madeline sets Manchester alight with her scorching hot sexual attitude, as she sets out to bed the entire phonebook.  

“Can a modern-day bird take on old-fashioned sexual stereotypes and come out ahead?” 

This is a prime example of a double feature, that on the surface, does not seem like an idea pairing, but ends up working well together.  The lead in SITTING DUCKS, Ian Donnelly, plays a similar character, a musician, though timid and non-violent, in LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY, which provides a unique through line for the double bill.

Ian Donnelly made his film debut in the 1971 British sex farce PERCY, THE ULTIMATE SEX GURU and went on to work exclusively in television, from comedy, CHURCHILL SLEPT HERE (1975-1977), JESUS OF JOLLY’S BOTTOM (1979), to drama, CASTLE OF THE FALLEN HERO (1981).

Playing the lead character, Madeline, was Maggie Hawthorne.  She initially broke through as a popular Page 3 girl for The Sun, making the jump to sex films including CONFESSIONS OF A GOVERNESS (1976), SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY (1977), SOHO AFTER DARK (1978) and CONFESSIONS OF A TROUSER SALESWOMAN (1978).

Magno’s next release was a horror triple feature that would thrust them onto the exploitation map. The bill was headlined by the 1974 Spanish shocker DON’T GO NEAR THE WENDY HOUSE aka UN NIÑO PEQUEÑO LOS MATARÁ aka A LITTLE CHILD SHALL KILL THEM.

Billed as “Three Intense horrors that will shake the shock out of you!”, this triple feature turned out to be a surprise hit for Magno Films.  Pairing DON'T GO NEAR THE WENDY HOUSE with the low budget American made rock-horror of 1973’s THE MUMMY OF MONTEREY POP and a second Spanish thriller THE LAST HOUSE AROUND THE CORNER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL (1972). 

Over the years Magno would employ these types of ads with slightly different warnings . . .

“TO AVOID MENTAL ANGUISH”

“TO AVOID YELLOW JAUNDICE”

"TO AVOID AN IRS AUDIT"

This triple bill turned out to be a massive hit for Magno, as word of mouth spread amongst the film bookers and theater owners.  This bill would play for near a decade in drive-in theaters across the country.

DONT GO NEAR THE WENDY HOUSE - PLOT:  A couple buys an antique Wendy house from a curio shop.  The mysterious owner of the shop relates that the Wendy house has a sinister aura with a history of violent death, the couple thinking the story to be an old man’s sales trick, purchase the house for their eleven year old daughter, Emma.  Once home, the malevolent force that exists inside the house awakens and starts to cause mishaps, these are minimal at first, but soon grow to deadly proportions.  Strange sounds and disembodied voices start to emanate from the Wendy house.  A glass window explodes causing the shards to fly out and severely cut the maids face.   A playmate chokes to death while playing inside the house. . . and the situations get worse after that.

The daughter was played by Imogene Cervera, the go-to child actor of the Spanish exploitation world of the seventies.  She had previously appeared as the creepy child of a werewolf, who was creepier than the werewolf, in 1973’s THE WEREWOLF PROWLS AT NIGHT aka COLMILLOS SANGRIENTOS BAJO LA LUNA LLENA aka BLOODY FANGS UNDER A FULL MOON aka WHEREWOLF (US video retitling).

Cervera plays the daughter of a diplomat, who is just as creepy prior to being possessed by the devil, than after, in 1976’s THE POSSESSION OF A LONELY CHILD aka A BUNDLE OF HELL, aka NATALIE: SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.  In 1977’s WHY ARE OUR CHILDREN KILLING US?, she plays the leader of a group of children in an isolated small town, that have moved on from playing with dolls and toy cars to brandishing weapons and dispatching the adults of the community in gruesome ways. The best of which is when her character plants a billhook into the throat of a priest trying to stop the killings.  In her final appearance, Cervera plays the daughter of a woman whose new husband may or may not be dead in 1978's ¿QUIÉN INVITÓ AL CADÁVER A LA BODA?  aka WHO INVITED THE CORPSE TO THE WEDDING?.

THE MUMMY OF MONTERREY POP:  A mummy unleashes its slow-moving fury on the concert goers and artists at the Monterrey Pop festival. 

Filmed prior, during and after the famous music festival, THE MUMMY OF MONTERREY POP is a fine curio, but does not delivery much in the way of scares.  The film does feature musical acts, but none of the actual performers that played the festival make an appearance, though the producers did find actors to approximate the Mamas and the Papas, Canned Heat and The Association with varying degrees of success.  The Mamas and the Papas clone foursome does contain two men and two women, one on the chunky side, but it is safe to say that Canned Heat never featured a balding tuba player.

THE LAST HOUSE AROUND THE CORNER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL - PLOT:  Another horror film based around supernatural shenanigans.   A vacation house located in the middle of nowhere seems to draw in visitors with none of them fairing too well.  A plumber gets his leg stuck in a hole in the basement floor and then drowns as water gushes from a pipe and fills the basement.  When the next group of people arrive, there is no body and no sign of a flooded basement.  A docile family dog turns malevolent and rips out his master's throat.

Magno’s final release was another hit for the company as they jumped on the “Redneck car crash genre” with 1978’s energetic BLOCKADE BUSTERS.

 

PLOT:  Del and Dan are brother truckers who work as independent contractors.  When their family house and ranch is about to be stolen from them by an unscrupulous, but well dressed, land buyer, Del and Dan have to take a job hauling illegal whiskey to be able to retain their homestead.

Starring Patrick Gifford as Del and Lou Myers as Dan, both in their only film roles.

Playing the land baron with gleeful evil is Paul Lowman, whose long thin frame and slicked back hair can be seen as a confused rocker in DEATH BEFORE DISCO (1979), a bewildered deputy in THE GREAT PUCKERBUSH COUNTY 100 YEAR FEUD (1977) and as a befuddled cockfighter in BALLAD OF A COCKFIGHTER (1978).

The soundtrack was released on Tonearm Records International

Del’s and Dan’s Theme:

Del and Dan are truckers, they like to drive their truck

Sheriff Blue don’t care for them, but they don’t give a ---

Luck is always on their side, they treat their job with skill and pride

Don’t give a Quarter, don’t budge an inch

when it comes to hauling freight, they come through in a pinch

Many try to stop them but their all pressing luck

Del and dan brake for nothing, cause they don’t give a ---

 

Stan Delvecchio was getting up in age at this point and was constantly in ill health.  He stopped acquiring new  product and just kept his films in circulation until he passed away in 1983.

In Praise of Progress: Futuretech Film Productions

                                 

                        "We make the films of the future, today."

Futuretech was founded by disgraced, would be movie mogul, Bernard Feeney, who in 1970, was fired from his high position at ABC Pictures for green lighting the grandiose musical biopic, 31 DAYS: THE WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON STORY (1970).  A critical and commercial failure that was pulled from theaters quicker than its subjects time in office.  

The loss of Feeney's job at ABC Pictures was a forgone conclusion, and he now found himself a pariah.  His friends in the film industry turned their backs on him, trying to avoid the stench of a dead man walking.

After a year of reflection, psychiatric counseling, and intense shock treatment, Feeney had a renewed hunger to return to the movie world, but the distance in time did not help and no studio would even offer a menial position to prove himself.  Feeney was a gadget buff, who would always be ahead of the curve on new technological wonders.  He was one of the first people to own a phone answering machine, a pocket-sized calculator, and one of those big foam hands.  He was intrigued by the computer revolution that he knew was on the horizon.  

When things were looking dark for any type of movie business return, Feeney met James Rembrandt, a technological wunderkind who built his own computers, word processors, and bird feeders.  Rembrandt also wanted to get his foot in the door of movie production, and in 1971 the two men formed Futuretech Film Productions.  

Futuretech would use Rembrandt's computers which were specially built, programmed and developed to handle every aspect of the movie making process.  From script to screen, with data fed to the machines from Feeney, Futuretech Film Productions would truly lead the way for the motion picture industry to enter a new dawn of movie production. 

Rembrandt developed numerous machines and computers to do the work of what would typically be the domain of dozens of hired workers.  The Script-Tomatron 2000 could write an entire screenplay in one hour.  The Locale-Locator could scout thousands of possible filming locations in minutes, the BudgetMaster could devise a concise budget and the Best Boy Finder lived up to its name and could find the best, Best Boy, to work on the film.

  

When all was said and done, Futuretech had over one-hundred completed scripts . . . None were ever produced.  Bernard Feeney left the movie business for good.

James Rembrandt rechristened the Script-Tomatron 2000, as the Nantucket 2000 and reprogrammed it to create dirty limericks.

There was a little-known precursor to the Script-Tomatron 2000 which dated back to 1961, The Script-O-Meter.

The idea of the Script-O-Meter was hatched and cultivated over a series of clandestine meetings, including at least one at the infamous Bohemian Grove.  Big wigs with the major film companies concocted a plan to invent a script machine, in order to circumvent working with temperamental human screenwriters.  Hiring the brilliant minds of those who had worked on the atomic bomb and early computer systems, future NASA scientists, the brainchild of the reservoir tip and the sharp wits behind the first underground revolving restaurant chain, Merry Go Under Ground.  

The Script-O-Meter had its preliminary test runs in the fall of 1962, but these proved to be a major disappointment, as no matter the information that was plugged into its file card system, the resulting scripts would turn out to be versions of THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN (1938).  The Script-O Meter would go back the drawing board for a few years, but the project was shut down in 1963.