STONER

d. Huang Feng (1974)
 
Originally planned as a $10m international blockbuster starring Bruce Lee, Sonny Chiba and George Lazenby, The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss was understandably compromised by Lee’s sudden death, which left a huge superstar shaped void (and no longer guaranteed box office success) and prompted the enigmatic Chiba to pack his samurai sword and go back to Japan. Rapidly regrouping, the supremely practical producer Raymond Chow slashed the budget by 9/10ths and had the ambitious script hastily rewritten to accommodate its remaining star, rangy Australian Lazenby, the man who walked out on the James Bond franchise claiming he didn’t need the degradation and could make more money elsewhere (his sole outing, 1969's On Her Majesty’s Secret Service once  underrated, is now vastly overrated. Objective reality: it’s not bad).

The end result, renamed Stoner in a number of territories to further emphasise the centrality of Lazenby’s character, is a shaggy but exhilarating mix of crime, espionage and crunching kung fu, centring around the invention, distribution and use of a new drug called Happy Pills, an opium based aphrodisiac and mind blower that has flooded the far east causing instant addiction and is now threatening places where white people live. After the drug related death of his sister, the moustachioed and slightly detestable Joshua Stoner decides to investigate, striding through the temples, night clubs and back alleys of Hong Kong in an incredibly conspicuous way, not least because he is at least a foot taller than everybody else.

Lazenby is as much tailors dummy as actor, but he does exhibit what he brought to his uneven interpretation of Bond, a sudden, brutal physicality that manifests itself in a number of fast, bruising and very convincing fight scenes. He’s no Bruce Lee, of course, but he hands out (and takes) a number of comprehensive beatings, and looks committed and convincing as he does so, aided and abetted by crunching and slapping noises dubbed loudly over the action.

He later teams up with a Taiwanese undercover cop played by the rather marvellous Angela Mao, part mouse, part lion, and the last half of the film plays out like a Bond film: they infiltrate the billionaire villain’s underground lair (he doesn’t have a white cat, instead, rather curiously, he has a spinning desk), then kill him in an interesting and grisly way and blow everything up. The End.

Additional highlights include the discordant electronics that play when anyone mentions drugs, Stoner’s taupe and caramel wardrobe and cloak clad Rupert, a deep voiced, statuesque black love guru who leads a flaky hippy sex cult made up of really scrawny white blokes and a number of dirty faced women who greedily and obscenely suck ice lollies when the Happy Pills start to kick in.