Bruce Lee’s untimely death in 1973, a few months before the release of kung fu classic  Enter The Dragon, shocked the world, and his posthumous fame inspired several Brucesploitation films.

Arguably the most interesting of the lot is 1977’s The Dragon Lives Again. In this insane, semi-coherent gem of a film - which incidentally is dedicated to “millions who love Bruce Lee” - Bruce Lee, played by Bruce Leeong, dies and goes to the Chinese underworld.

Upon arrival in the afterlife, fictional Bruce Lee does what any fictional martial arts master would do upon waking in a scary retro cave filled with people wearing crazy horse head masks and worshiping a man who calls himself the king of the underworld. He starts talking trash.

The king must have planned for such contingencies as cocky, newly dead martial artists. He all but runs to his ornate, gilded earthquake pole and proceeds to shake it, causing an earthquake on earth. Like all truly great superweapons, the earthquake pole does serious damage to the lair of its owner.

That’ll show ’em.

After the king’s laughable display of power, Lee leaves the cave and finds himself in a restaurant eating rice. This scene would have been unbearably dull, had Lee not met both Popeye the sailor, and a man whom Wikipedia identifies as Caine from the TV series Kung Fu.

This unlikely trio teams up against a scheming cabal headed by the godfather (as played by Marlon Brando). James Bond a.k.a. The Champion Boxer of Europe, the Exorcist (his record’s a bit spotty), Dracula, and a poncho-wearing, fictional Clint Eastwood are among his minions.

I’m not kidding.

At this point, the movie gets a bit hard to follow. The Wikipedia synopsis says that the evil cabal enlists the help of a beautiful woman to seduce the king and strain his heart with the ferocity of her love.

Their seemingly foolproof plan fails, and Lee defeats them all. The nature of his quarrel with them is never fully explained.

In the end, Lee threatens to kill the king of the underworld, the place of the dead, if the king refuses to allow him to return to earth. The exact results of death in the afterlife are unclear.

So where’s the appeal of this film? Why would anyone watch a movie in which fictional characters team up with fictionalizations of real people and fight various enemies for no apparent reason? Why would anyone watch a film in which the leading lady is billed as the northern European incarnation of a French porn star?

The answer to these questions is surprisingly straightforward. Sure, The Dragon Lives Again is a story of assorted celebrities battling other celebrities in strange places for strange reasons, but, unlike the E! channel, this movie, for all its craziness, is a story of hope, a story of the triumph of good over evil, and in its own way, a story of the wonder of life and the sad absurdity of death.

The Dragon Lives Again is the B-movie equivalent of a Fellini film; rent it now, but be advised — there is some nudity.