Movies about Bruce Lee's Death

Bruce Lee was murdered! He must have been! Why else would a healthy 32-year-old martial arts master suddenly drop dead? The police say he died of natural causes. Then they are either covering up his murder or are incompetent! Someone should do an investigation and find the real killers!!

That was exactly what many were thinking back in 1973. Bruce Lee's fans could simply not accept that nature took out their hero. Someone needed to be blamed. There were many theories as to who would want to see Bruce Lee dead so bad that they would have him murdered. The chief suspect was rival martial arts masters who did not approve of Lee teaching martial arts to students who were not Chinese. But Lee had been teaching Chinese martial arts to American students for over a decade. Had they wanted him dead they would have done it years earlier, not when he had become such a big movie star that he was too busy to teach. Still, many theories abound of how Lee was either poisoned or fatally injured in a fight with a rival Kung Fu master. It was suggested that there were some techniques that would cause a delayed reaction where weeks after being struck the victim would die. In the Bruceploitation movie Fists of Fear, Touch of Death it was suggested by Arron Banks that Bruce Lee was killed by the Vibrating Palm technique.

Some Bruceploitation movies came up with the crowd-pleasing idea that the mystery behind Bruce Lee's death could be solved. Bruce Li was in two of these movies. In Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger Li has a double role playing both Bruce Lee and his close friend Tiger. Lee tells Tiger that he has chosen him as his replacement should he mysteriously die, then goes on to tell Tiger that he has been receiving ominous phone calls. After Bruce Lee dies Tiger decides that he must investigate. He does not find out who or why Lee died but instead uncovers that days before his death a drug dealer known as the baron had tried to convince him to transport drugs. The Baron is brought to justice for his crimes while Bruce Lee's death is left unsolved.

A couple of years later Bruce Li attempted again to solve Bruce Lee's death in the even more ridiculous Bruce Lee, We Miss You. Here Li plays Stone, a martial arts teacher and overly enthusiastic fan of Bruce Lee who goes on a drinking binge the night he learns Bruce Lee died. In his delirium he either hallucinates or for real sees Bruce Lee's ghost who beckons Stone to solve his murder. Stone decides the best way to do this is to become friends with Betty Ting Pei and once they are close to ask her if she really knows how Bruce Lee died. The head of Golden Harvest studio Raymond Chow figures out that Stone must be dating Betty to uncover the mystery behind Bruce Lee's death. He sends thugs after Stone and even kidnaps his brother, but Stone remains relentless. He even stares straight into the camera and breaking the fourth wall tells the audience that he is going to find out exactly how Bruce Lee died. Finally disguising himself as Bruce Lee's ghost Stone shows up at Chow's house where he is having a meeting with Run Run Shaw and the heads of the other Hog Kong studios. It turns out that they were all in cahoots together to keep Bruce Lee's death from being solved. This is never explained why they would want or do this, but it is determined that they had nothing to do with Bruce Lee's death. In other words the hour and ten minutes leading up to this point had Stone investigating the wrong people. Now that the studio heads are no longer stopping him Stone finally gets Betty to tell him what happened to Bruce Lee, but all she knows is that he showed up at his apartment mortally wounded and said nothing before he died. Stone has literally reached a dead end in his investigation when by sheer coincidence a crime boss happens to see him and mistakes him as being Bruce Lee. The crime boss wants to know why Bruce Lee is still alive and sends his thugs over to Stone's school to beat people up. This causes Stone to confront the thugs who then after being beaten up reveal that the reason Bruce Lee was killed was that he refused to throw a fight they had bet on. Stone confronts the crime boss on his golf course who may or may not have been the person who murdered Bruce Lee, and after Lee's spirit possess Stone's body the boss is beaten to death.

Another actor who investigated Bruce Lee's death was his actual student Ron Van Clief in the literally titled movie Death of Bruce Lee. Here a mysterious man shows up at Ron's house in California and pays him a lot of money to go to Hong Kong and investigate Bruce Lee's death. Once in Hong Kong the investigation goes nowhere as each time a lead is found the person willing to talk is killed by a gang of thugs lead by a woman who carries around poisonous snakes in her purse. Finally the only living lead is Betty Ting Pei who Ron attempts to question. But he arrives at her house to find her dead and the thugs waiting for him. Ron kills the thugs along with the woman who leads them, then walks into the next room to find their boss who turns out to be the same mysterious man who hired him in the first place. Ron kills the man and with him the reason why Bruce Lee was killed, although it is suggested Bruce Lee died from taking drugs the bad guy were supplying.

While neither Bruce Li nor Ron Van Clief cold fully uncover why Bruce Lee died another movie was able to solve Bruce Lee's death vicariously. Game of Death II ( aka Tower of Death ) has Bruce Lee's character Billy Lo killed and his brother returning to Hong Kong to investigate his murder. Lo's death is by no means mysterious as it was seen in front of an entire crowd and possibly caught on television cameras. It happens during a funeral for his friend. A helicopter with a clamp hanging from the bottom steals the coffin with Billy Lo's friend inside. Lo jumps up and grabs on to the coffin as it rises up into the air. Someone in the helicopter shoots a dart or something at Lo causing him to let go of the coffin. It is either the fall to the ground or the dart or perhaps both that killed Billy Lo. Bobby Lo decides the only way to solve his brothers murder is to solve the death of his friend who's coffin was stolen. It turns out that Billy's friend is still alive and had faked his death so that he could become the crime boss who rules from the underground Tower of Death. Billy died only because he was becoming too curious. Another movie that vicariously solves Bruce Lee's demise is also another variation on Game of Death called True Game of Death. Here a Bruce Lee like character solves his own death after being nearly fatally poisoned by his own wife. Allowing the world to believe he has died the lead character finds out that his wife poisoned him believing she was giving him a sedative that thugs were forcing her to give him. The thugs were from that generic crime syndicate that often turns up in 70's Hong Kong movies, a group of white crime bosses that go by the name STP and who want every actor in Hong Kong to sign with their organization. Since the Bruce Lee like character was the biggest in Hong Kong his refusal to sign was causing other actors to also stand up for themselves and to do the same. Of course this plot is identical to the original Game of Death where Bruce Lee's character Billy Lo fakes his own death in order to track down members of the crime syndicate who tried to have him killed.

Finally in 1993, two decades after Bruce lee's death, a movie was finally released where Bruce Lee's death is completely solved. The documentary Death by Misadventure goes into great detail of the final days of Bruce Lee and his autopsy proving that he did in fact die of natural causes brought on by an adverse reaction to pain killers, no different than having an allergic reaction to the medicine. No rival martial arts teachers, no vibrating palm, no organized crime. Bruce Lee died because it turns out he was human.