THE CHINESE STUNTMAN (1982) **

Bruce Li quits working at a karate school to sell insurance.  Meanwhile, a greedy movie producer plots to kill his biggest star and collect the insurance money.  Bruce’s crooked boss is in on the scheme and lures him into brokering the deal.  Bruce, unaware of the producer’s sinister intentions, goes along with it.  Bruce befriends the star, who is impressed by his karate background, and promptly hires him to be his stunt double.  Since the rest of the stunt team is in cahoots with the producer, they try to not only eliminate the leading man, but Bruce as well.

The insurance angle is certainly novel and assures that you probably won’t completely forget this one.  However, none of it really works.  I mean there’s a reason why insurance fraud isn’t a common plot point in chopsocky films.  The scenes of backstabbing intrigue on the movie set is equally inane.  Bruce does what he can, but the fluky plot and the lethargic pacing keeps The Chinese Stuntman from ever really cutting loose. 

There are a lot of film-within-a-film fights, but they don’t advance the plot, and ultimately mean very little in the long run.  Because of that, they act more like padding than anything else.  We do get a great scene where Bruce comes back to visit his friends at the karate school and they try to beat him up.  He attempts to diffuse the situation by saying, “Come on, guys!  Let’s talk about insurance!”  Yeah, because there’s nothing like a good insurance pitch to make trained fighters lower their defenses.  

The funniest scene though is the movie star’s lengthy love scene set to an instrumental version of “Hotel California”.  Unfortunately, this scene goes out of its way to make sure his partner doesn’t show her breasts, which is a tad frustrating.  Later, when there’s another chance for nudity, the actress’s boobs are completely blurred out!  What the hell?  

Another botched opportunity for WTF lunacy occurs near the end.  That’s when the Odd Job lookalike henchman shows up, complete with razor blade hat.  Not only that, he’s accompanied by a little person who acts as his Mini-Me sidekick.  Like most of the winning moments in The Chinese Stuntman, it’s nothing more than a little throwaway bit.

AKA:  The Chieh Boxing Master.  AKA:  Counter Attack.