Lo Wei's attempt to turn Jackie Chan into the next Bruce Lee fell flat as evidenced in NEW FIST OF FURY, on Blu-ray from 88 Films.

After her lover Chen Zhen was murdered at the conclusion of FISTOF FURY, Li-Er (Nora Miao, DRAGON FIST) wants revenge against the Japanese. Since it is too dangerous for her to stay in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, she resolve to travel with her "brothers" (THE MAGNIFICENT BUTCHER's Kam Cheung and THE KILLER METEORS' Kuo Chung Ching) – actually followers of Chen's school – to Taiwan where her grandfather Master Xu (Su Han, FISTS OF VENGEANCE), hoping to mobilize his Kung Fu school against the Japanese that occupy the island. No sooner does she arrive than her grandfather orders her to leave since Japanese martial arts master Okimura (Sing Chen, ACES GO PLACES) wants to unite all of the island's schools under his own and has resorted to violent and murderous means to do so with the help of his fierce daughter Chiyoko (Siu Siu Cheng). Xu's school is also under scrutiny by corrupt local police chief (Suen Lam) for suspicion of harboring anti-Japanese rebels. After discovering that thief Ah Lung (Chan) has a natural affinity for martial arts – including the usage of Chen's nunchuks which he and his uncle (Lung Chin) have stolen – Li-Er tries to convince him to train, especially after he is beaten up and left for dead after refusing to work for Su's rival Yang for cow-towing to Okimura. Feeling disrespected by Xu, Okimura and his daughter crash the man's eightieth birthday celebration and goad him into a heart attack. Ah-Lung still refuses to train with Li-Er when she reopens her grandfather's school until Okimura makes a public scene of crushing the opposition. In the face of his defiance, however, Okimura decides to wipe out the leaders of all the Chinese schools and deploy the Japanese and Taiwanese armies to massacre any opposition.

Produced three years after Bruce Lee's death amidst the Chinese film industry's race to promote a successor – with many stuntmen rechristened with sound-alike names and either playing Lee's characters in unofficial sequels or characters out to avenge his supposed murder – NEW FIST OF FURY was the effort of FIST OF FURY producer/director Lo Wei to promote Chan who had been toiling in largely uncredited roles throughout the first half of the seventies before briefly emigrating to Australia where his parents had been living and taking a job as a construction worker. Lo Wei's Jackie Chan vehicles were pretty much all box office flops but usually have redeeming elements; this is not the case with NEW FIST OF FURY. Overlong in its original two hour 1976 Mandarin cut, the film is a retread of the basic framework of the Lee film with plenty of gratuitous plot elements brought up and dropped, including Ah-Lung believing he is an orphan and his uncle concealing the secret that his mother is a wine girl at the brothel patronized by Okimura and his cadre and the anti-Japanese rebels who hide around the school but do little else. Chan's character takes a back seat to the dramatics of Li-Er – who both fiercely proclaims her desire for vengeance but also whines "but I'm still a girl and I need your help" – her grandfather, Okimura, and his various school master rivals, doing his training montage late in the film – most of the earlier heroic action is handled by Miao and Han Ying-Chieh (A TOUCH OF ZEN) as Xu's disciple and the film's action director – only getting to showcase his skills in the climax which actually is thrilling but not enough to be worth the wait. The film's anti-Japanese sentiment is particularly unsubtle, with Okimura's tantrum in the town square extending to "I kill you like dogs" in the English dub. As has been argued on various interviews and commentaries about Chan, Wei did not seem to recognize the incompatibility of the stoic Lee archetype with Chan's more comic bent, here most of all with the actor reigned in considerably to the point of being bland and Wei's camera and editing coverage of the fight scenes looking particularly stiff and unconvincing. After the film flopped on original release and export, Wei trimmed the film of roughly forty minutes and redubbed it in Cantonese for re-release in 1980. Cut to the bare bones to bring Chan to the fore, the film's lazy construction became more apparent and seemed even more indistinguishable from other examples of "Brucesploitation."

NEW FIST OF FURY's muddled release history extended to home video, with a center-cropped Simitar VHS and DVD of the longer Mandarin version followed by an anamorphic Columbia/Tri-Star DVD which clipped all instances of Chinese text and rephotographed the credits. While we could usually depend on the U.K. for improved releases of Asian martial arts films on DVD during this period, NEW FIST OF FURY proved problematic aside from the earlier BBFC-related issues and James Ferman's phobia about nunchuks. Eastern Heroes' 2002 DVD featured the export version which had been shortened by roughly ten minutes, was cropped to 1.78:1, and only featured the English dub track while Cine Asia's Hong Kong Legends special edition release only featured the shorter Cantonese cut with the Mandarin track re-synched to it. Germany's Splendid Film Blu-ray featured both Mandarin and Cantonese cuts of the film but upscaled from Fortune Star's older SD masters.

88 Films' Blu-ray features 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen transfers of both versions (120:05 and 82:40, respectively) from 2K restorations of the original 35mm camera negative. While these transfers are certainly the best the film has looked ever, the rough edges of the productions are more apparent, from the distortion of the older anamorphic lenses during pans to uneven black levels in the night exteriors. The Mandarin cut includes Mandarin and English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks while the Cantonese cut includes Cantonese and English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks. All tracks have their share of recording and age-related issues; however, most noticeable on the Cantonese track is that the Japanese dialogue was not redubbed but taken from the Mandarin version originally and sounds inferior to the Cantonese dialogue around it. Both versions have optional English subtitles.

The 1976 Mandarin cut is accompanied by two commentary tracks. On the first track, Bruce Lee historian and martial arts movie reviewer for Martial Arts Illustrated and World of Martial Arts magazines – who was supposed to do a track when Hong Kong Legens had the film on DVD – discusses the film in the context of FIST OF FURY (including actors carried over from that film in different roles as well as from Wei's other Lee film THE BIG BOSS), points out some "controversial" elements, differences between the two versions and video cuts, and Wei trying to fit Chan to Lee's mold despite their different fighting styles and demeanors. The track is filled with information but it is rather unfocused as he tries to fit in discussion of Lee's career, Chan's career, Wei's career, and the other FIST OF FURY sequels without scripting, jumping back and forth between onscreen action and background. The second track with Asian cinema expert Brandon Bentley and artist/Hong Kong cinema expert R.P. “Kung Fu Bob” O’Brien point out the differences between the two cuts of the film – noting Wei eliminating his own cameo and being of the opinion that the film needed trimming but his 1980 revision was not the way to go about it – and also covers both films with references to the sequels but feels a bit more focused in general with the pair noting that Lee and Chan were more instrumental in their own careers than Wei's promotion (they also point out that both English and Hong Kong trailers for the film highlight the director's role in "launching" Lee's career). The disc also includes the aforementioned Hong Kong trailer (3:35) and English export trailer (3:13).