cult film freak: BRUCE LEE, NORA MIAO, MARIA YI, MARILYN BAUTISTA 'THE BIG BOSS'

Title: THE BIG BOSS Year: 1971 Rating: **1/2

The Kong-Mark is around 45-minutes into a movie when what's anticipated finally occurs... the giant titular ape KING KONG rampaging after the kind of expository needed to build the characters and overall tension...

And that's when otherwise meditative Bruce Lee finally springs to life against an extremely small rural village's bevy of goons at a central ice factory.... although this first of two karate fights only lasts about a minute...

Opening Credit Artwork from THE BIG BOSS

The rest of THE BIG BOSS is sadly bland and lackluster: the sparse and familiar plot involving factory henchman bullying the poor workers... only with such a low budget, everyone seems equally meager and desperate...

The most memorable sequence... perhaps even better than the climax when Lee finally defeats the titular BOSS and his minions... involves the only worthy ingenue in the villain's party girl Marilyn Bautista, medicating Lee into submission after he's promoted from lowly worker to warehouse manager...

Opening Credit Artwork from THE BIG BOSS

Not only is he tempted into a partially suspenseful dilemma within enemy territory (an interior equally shoddy as the villager's shanties), but an actual story finally emerges involving Lee's otherwise one-dimensional passive-until-he's-not-passive character...

Flanked by two beautiful lookalike good-girl starlets: wide-eyed beauty Nora Miao, as a cameo "Drinkstand owner" before emerging to co-starring ingenue status in both FIST OF FURY and WAY OF THE DRAGON, where she'd play the kind of vulnerable girl-next-door type given to Maria Yi here, who, like everyone else... including Bruce Lee himself... kind of just stands around, waiting for something to actually happen.