Cinematic Hell: Fist of Fear, Touch of Death (1980)

by Hal Astell

Director: Matthew Mallinson

Stars: Bruce Lee, Fred Williamson and Ron Van Clief


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Bruceploitation is a wild and crazy world, one conjured into existence by filmmakers in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan after the death of Bruce Lee in 1973. Lee had been the breakthrough to whole new markets for them, becoming an international superstar and iconic figure around the globe, especially after Enter the Dragon, which was a Hollywood production shot mostly in English. Everyone knew who Bruce Lee was in the same way everyone knew who Charlie Chaplin was. Yet now he was dead and so couldn't make another movie. So they conjured up a successor. Actually they conjured up a lot of successors. What seemed like everyone in Asian cinema suddenly changed their name to either Bruce or Lee and they suddenly starred in films with portmanteau titles of other Bruce Lee movies.

Cinematic Hell: The Brainiac (1962)

by Hal Astell

Director: Chano Urueta

Stars: Abel Salazar, Ariadne Welter, David Silva and Germán Robles

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One of the most annoying things about living in west Phoenix with its large Hispanic population is discovering that the cheap and plentiful supply of bizarre Mexican films in stores around the valley never come with subtitles. It's like being a child in a world of candy but being forbidden to eat anything. One day I'm going to need to learn Spanish just to be able to understand what's going on in bad Mexican wrestling and horror movies. So to me, K Gordon Murray is a godsend. He was a American film producer, often known as 'the King of the Kiddie Matinee' and what he did was to take these Mexican films, give them outrageous new titles and dub them into English so we single language speakers can understand them.

Cinematic Hell: Eegah (1962)

by Hal Astell

Director: Nicholas Merriwether

Stars: Arch Hall Jr, Marilyn Manning and Richard Kiel

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There are films that live on in legend because whatever else they might be, they're mostly prominent embarrassments in the career of someone eminently recognisable. I'm not talking about the direction John Carradine's career went as it dragged on way down into the depths, but about things like Trog with Joan Crawford, Teenage Caveman with Robert Vaughan and Eegah with Richard Kiel, three films that coincidentally share a theme. Yes, Richard Kiel is a 7'2" apparently ageless prehistoric giant caveman, which might have seemed a step up at the time from being merely a bouncer in a night club, but may well have been a little too prominent for comfort when he put on his steel teeth and started duking it out with James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me fifteen years later.

Cinematic Hell: The Crippled Masters (1979)

by Hal Astell

Director: Kei Law

Stars: Chen Mu Chuan, Jackie Conn and Frankie Shum

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Any martial arts movie that begins with a horrific cry and a severed arm falling onto the ground can't be too bad, right? Well think again, this one is as bad as you could imagine, albeit bad in the most fun way possible. There are bad films that are endurance tests and there are bad films that are joys to behold: think Manos: The Hands of Fate and Plan 9 from Outer Space as the epitomes of the two. This certainly falls into the latter category because it's a real guilty pleasure. If you thought The Terror of Tiny Town was politically incorrect, how about this little gem from Taiwan, shot in Hong Kong, that features as its two stars an actor with no arms and an actor with shrivelled legs, who team up to become a killing machine. Well, why not? It's just like a version of Transformers with cripples instead of robots.