Shawscope Volumes

[Maltic]

Regarding Mighty Peking Man, I was happy to see that they stuck a "totally weird Hong Kong movie, dude" title in there with all the venerable kung fu classics, but of course that's precisely the kind of thing you say and then regret once you actually sit through the movie.

[Glowingwabbit]

I could definitely use some guidance as to what else to look out for.

I'm very new to Shaw Bros. myself, but I really enjoyed Eight Diagram Pole Fighter and Legendary Weapons of China, both available from 88 Films, with the former supposedly forthcoming from Arrow US

88 films is also doing a US release of Legendary Weapons of China in February. It's only $19.99 to preorder on Amazon. And then Eight Diagram Pole Fighter should be in Arrow's announcements this month for an April release here in the US.

[cdnchris]

Regarding Mighty Peking Man, I was happy to see that they stuck a "totally weird Hong Kong movie, dude" title in there with all the venerable kung fu classics, but of course that's precisely the kind of thing you say and then regret once you actually sit through the movie.

I remembered this was one of those early DVDs that came out under Tarantino's short lived Rolling Thunder "label," which also released Switchblade Sisters, Detroit 9000, Chungking Express, and whatever else. I didn't get around to Peking Man until this set. Based on the other films released (despite the eclectic nature) and Tarantino's taste in general, I was pretty sure I knew what to expect. Oh boy, I was WAAAAAYYYYY off.

Edit: and I just looked up that Rolling Thunder Pictures also released Hardcore Logo. Jesus.

[therewillbeblus]

King Boxer was really, really good. At first I was nervous the whole set would be like this, with plot clearly subordinate to the fighting and action films. So I was glad to see that wasn't the case. This film is definitely one of the nicest looking ones in the set, and the action is really exciting. There's a moment when the protagonist is warned against pursuing a Kung Fu lifestyle, as it often leads to death and misery. The prophecy actually comes true, which lends a nice bit of darkness to the film.

I had no idea until the opening scene that I had seen this already (under its U.S. title Five Fingers of Death), though this restoration greatly improved on the mediocre impression I had from the film many years ago. It's a fun ride with swift pacing and engaging action scenes trumping the humdrum plotting and contrived classic western vibes. I especially enjoyed how bits of brutality were woven into the familiar, and at-times lighthearted skeleton, i.e. the hand-breaking moment from Django replicated here. The tonal blend was exciting, as the film oscillated between a means to an end of a playful contest, complete with a comparatively-tranquil and campy final fighting match, and savage infiltrations that would break rules of the culture, and startle both the characters' internal logic and the audience's impressions by proxy. If this was just a relentless bloody rollercoaster, it'd be cool enough, but that fluid shifting back and forth from safety in the predictable to jarring social-contract-destroying violence made for a more nuanced final product.

[feihong]

Not on blu ray, and not officially released in English, but if you really want to get into the weeds on Chiba, DVDs with english subs can be found of a mid-80s venture designed to prop up his student, Hiroyuki "Duke" Sanada––a film called Roaring Fire. This movie is batsh*t insane, and a must-see if you like the fairly outrageous Sonny Chiba of The Street Fighter. Sanada is a Texan cowboy who learns he was kidnapped as a baby, part of a pair of twins set to inherit a huge fortune, and he learns his twin was just gunned down in Hong Kong. He goes to Japan to inherit, and stumbles into a karate version of Hamlet. We only learn this halfway through the movie, when a ventriloquist's dummy reveals the plot during a cabaret show, and then Sonny Chiba appears as an interpol agent disguised as the ventriloquist, called "Mr. Magic." The fights are exceptionally good––Hiroyuki Sanada is an incredible action performer in the mold of Chiba (but much more agile), and the scene where ninjas are chasing him on bicycles has to be seen to be believed. There are some highly objectionable parts of the movie, which I put down to director Norifumi Suzuki's penchant for bad taste (the villainess in a nazi bdsm suit and her whole schtick is eye-poppingly grotesque––as a director Suzuki tends to revel in a kind of weird nazi camp), but it's a crazy movie, full of surprises in every scene.

There is also a Hong Kong movie Chiba directs and co-stars in with Sibelle Hu, which I am trying to find and watch. Like Orlac said, the Arrow Sister Street Fighter movies are awesome. And Shout Factory's Street Fighter collection is pretty definitive on those. I recently saw a 1080p TV broadcast of Chiba's The Bodyguard, which is a pretty decent one.

[Orlac]

It''s not a good film, but I hope Chiba's Soul of Chiba gets a good release one day.

[TheRanchHand]

Volume 2 is just as stacked. Many will find it more favorable than the first but hopefully some of the more lost classics like Tiger Boy will follow in a volume 3.

[yoloswegmaster]

Someone who is involved with the Shaw sets has confirmed that the 36th Chamber trilogy and The Boxer's Omen are going to be in the second set. I'm surprised that they're not releasing the 36th Chambers trilogy in a seperate set.

[Mr Sausage]

The Boxer’s Omen is such unbridled, wall-to-wall madness that it’s basically a piece of surrealist art.

[colinr0380]

I only know Boxer's Omen from its write up in Pete Tombs' Mondo Macabro book (an image from the film was also used for the extremely vivid cover of the book too). Here's the write up from that book:

Often described as a sequel to Bewitched, the 1983 film The Boxer's Omen is Gui Zhihong's much more elaborate reworking of the same themes. Here, a boxer from Hong Kong comes to Thailand to settle a score with a rival fighter. He meets a mysterious Taoist priest and discovers that his destiny is to defeat the evil Black Wizard. An amazing series of gruesome scenes, involving demon bats, giant spiders, a huge disembodied brain, crocodile skulls and maggots, ends with the defeat of the Black Wizard. The boxer is then dispatched to Nepal, where he takes on a seductive she-demon created by the wizard's disciples out of a crocodile's stomach.

The Boxer's Omen is almost psychedelic in its excesses. In one scene the boxer regurgitates a two foot long conga eel that leaps around his hotel bathroom before depositing itself in the toilet bowl. Another shot shows a temple erupting into a sea of burning lava. To strengthen his magic powers, the boxer is encased in a pink transparent pot and has Buddhist sutras magically written over his skin. The final conflict takes place in a temple in Kathmandu, where the rising sun, shining on the ashes of a dead priest, frees the boxer from his curse. He pulls two huge needles out of his eyes as ethereal chanting fills the air.

Incidentally 88 Films released Bewitched a couple of years ago on Blu-ray in the UK.

[therewillbeblus]

The Boxer’s Omen is such unbridled, wall-to-wall madness that it’s basically a piece of surrealist art.

You weren't kidding! This was great- though some of the recurring motifs (i.e. crocodiles) felt overused, they only stood out because the rest of the phantasmagoric ride was endlessly rerouting to unique places (my favorite being the random animated sequence with Chinese characters tattooed all over the body- I wonder if these could possibly be subbed on the Arrow set?!) I had Bewitched on my SB kevyip, is it anywhere near as bonkers as this/should I move it up a few notches?

[feihong]

I'd say Bewitched is fairly tame by comparison. The emphasis, if I remember right, is on this girl getting revenge on this Hong Kong playboy. There's some worms coming out of peoples' suppurating wounds and stuff, but not on the level of Boxer's Omen, I don't think.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't think there's anything even close to being as bonkers as The Boxer's Omen, not even similarly themed occult stuff from HK like The Seventh Curse or Black Magic.

[Glowingwabbit]

Someone who is involved with the Shaw sets has confirmed that the 36th Chamber trilogy and The Boxer's Omen are going to be in the second set.

James Flower just confirmed The Boxer's Omen on twitter as being in Vol 2 (apparently someone got a postcard as well). Volume 2 will also have 14 titles!

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

You weren't kidding! This was great- though some of the recurring motifs (i.e. crocodiles) felt overused, they only stood out because the rest of the phantasmagoric ride was endlessly rerouting to unique places (my favorite being the random animated sequence with Chinese characters tattooed all over the body- I wonder if these could possibly be subbed on the Arrow set?!)

Those aren't Chinese characters, it's Sanskrit. It's a sutra, possibly the one the monks are chanting. It wouldn't be comprehensible to Chinese-speaking viewers either.

[therewillbeblus]

Interesting! I wonder if someone on a corner of the internet has subbed it, or will once this reaches wider audiences post-release of the second box..

[Mr Sausage]

You weren't kidding! This was great- though some of the recurring motifs (i.e. crocodiles) felt overused, they only stood out because the rest of the phantasmagoric ride was endlessly rerouting to unique places (my favorite being the random animated sequence with Chinese characters tattooed all over the body- I wonder if these could possibly be subbed on the Arrow set?!)

Those aren't Chinese characters, it's Sanskrit. It's a sutra, possibly the one the monks are chanting. It wouldn't be comprehensible to Chinese-speaking viewers either.

Reminds me of A Chinese Ghost Story, where the Taoist monk tells Leslie Cheung to chant a sutra. When Cheung asks what it means, the monk shrugs and more or less says, ‘who knows, it’s Sanskrit. But it works!’

[MichaelB]

Yes, when subtitling it's important not to be overzealous - if the film's original target audience wasn't supposed to understand it, international audiences shouldn't be able to either (unless they're Sanskrit scholars, although in that case they'll probably recognise it as gibberish).

[Orlac]

My wife's a huge anime fan, and some of the subtitles on those are silly - when people are talking, there's a second string of subtitles going on for an unrelated radio broadcast in the background, and every damn sign on a street!

[MichaelB]

Sony's official transcript for The China Syndrome was the most astonishingly comprehensive I think I've ever encountered, including the full text of every background news bulletin even if you couldn't hear what they were saying.

But it would have been technically impossible to have included everything, so I had to make multiple executive decisions when putting together Indicator's SDH subtitles - and with news reports (a pretty important dramatic element in this film), I had to be careful to balance imparting necessary information with avoiding overkill - for instance, if there's important dialogue going on at the same time (as there often was), that obviously had to be foregrounded, but at the same time I had to make sure that at least the facts of the news report came across too.

But if the news report has no dramatic relevance at all, there's no reason to subtitle it, other than briefly acknowledge that it's a news report, a radio DJ talking between records, or whatever. If the original viewer clearly wasn't supposed to listen to the content, there's no reason to translate it.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah I definitely don’t want to be flooded with more visual information than necessary- especially during that scene in The Boxer’s Omen, where so much is happening that a wall of subtitle text over the Sanskrit on his back would block a lot of the visual power occurring at lightning speed. So if it was subtitled on the feature’s main English track, that would be frustrating, tho it would be a cool spectral feature to translate it on the side

[Mr Sausage]

I wonder what the overlap is between Sanskrit scholars and 90s gonzo cinema fans.

[MichaelB]

Oh, huge, I reckon. They've got to wind down some way after a hard day's scholarship.

[therewillbeblus]

I love how in the slow-boiling opening scene of Ten Tigers of Kwangtung, we see a group of men being targeted for vengeance, one talking about how he's not drunk at all, only to cut back to the men planning their attack pointing to that man and immediately saying something like, "See the drunkest one there, he's ----" Another exhibit of dry comedy played so sincerely during a very grave scene that I'm not even sure is intended to be funny, but... how could it not be? I haven't laughed that hard in a while. I love these sneaky bits of observational/anti-social humor

[What A Disgrace]

Volume 2 pre-order on Amazon UK.

Here ya go.

No Chor Yuen this time around, I suppose they're saving him to star in the third volume.