Doctor Ting has just developed a formula to end all world hunger - but
greedy foreignt businessmen want to make it their own at any price, even
if that price involves a kidnapping and some murders. So Doctor Ting calls
Green Hornet for help - but Green Hornet is temporarily out of commission,
so he sends his assistant Kato (Bruce Li) to help out, who has a special
interest in the doctor's daughter Alice. When Kato and his pal Tan Yu
arrive at the doctor's place, they find the kidnapping of doctor Ting and
his daughter already well in place, but after a (not so) wild car chase,
they can beat the living daylights out of the baddies and free Ting and
Alice. So the baddies up the ante and hire super martial artist Superman,
his apemen (?) and his two black superstudents, then kidnap the doctor
again ... but they forget his heart medicine, so Alice has to come and
bring it ... which of course leads Kato and Tan Yu right into the lion's
den, where for a while they are distracted by the monkeymen. Meanwhile the
two superstudents learn what his master has gotten them into and turn
against him, and ultimately prevent the worst when he goes against Kato. In
their final fight, Superman and Kato pretty much take each other apart,
and it's more luck than anything else that Kato manages to ultimately slay
Superman. Meanwhile, the baddies have of course gotten their filthy hands
on doctor Ting and try to get him over the border ... but a regenerated
Green Hornet has taken up pursuit, and the baddies' driver is an
undercover policewoman, too. So yeah, everything ends happily ... Above
all else, this is not an official Green Hornet adaptation,
which should explain why the costumes of the Hornet and Kato differ from
all other adaptations quite a bit, and why neither character is really in
character (if that makes any sense). But of course, the Hornet's
involvement in Bruce Lee against Supermen relies on the fact that
Bruce Lee was actually in the 1960's TV series, so ... All of this of
course says next to nothing about the film as such - but quite expectedly,
it is highly derivative martial arts trash, shot on the cheap but fattened
up with a few cheap and campy superhero outfits. There's really nothing in
this one that would distinguish it from the myriad other bruceploitation
films of its time (even if this one comes from the bizarre end of the
"genre") - which of course makes this movie well worth a chuckle
if nothing else. It's not a great film by any measure of course, but who'd
expect that from a movie called "Bruce Lee against Supermen",
right? Instead, it's a trip down nostalgia lane, to a time when films like
this were actually made and distributed on the premise that they would be
mistaken for actual Bruce Lee films. And what people got instead was
so-bad-it's-good entertainment ... well, can't lose them all I suppose ;)
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