Shiv Shankly

Anyone have the UK R2 disc of Tsui Hark's The Blade who can provide some comments about the quality of the disc?

Trigger

I've avoided it because I hear it's not that good quality-wise. My favorite film and no good DVDs of it. Grrr... check out www.asiandvdguide.com to see what others have said about the quality

carnifern

I have the DVD and it's pretty poor video quality. I haven't looked at it in a while but I seem to recall it playing a little jerkily on my Apex. The only recommendation I can give it is that it's better than the VCD so if you must own it then it's, unfortunately, the best you're going to get.

Trigger

Well I bought the VHS that Tai Seng put out and it's pretty good quality for a VHS. I also have the VCD and the VHS is a little softer, but the action is smoother while the VCD suffers from looking like a digital streaming realplayer webcast... like they took out every 5th frame or something... just looks kinda wierd - it's a cool effect though and made the movie look even cooler.

HepDude

I just watched this movie today on the VCD (due to recommendations by Trigger and others).

Definitely an excellent film ! I want this on DVD

It differs from many other HK martial arts movies in that there is no comedy whatsoever - the whole movie is serious. Sort of a martial arts "art house" film. It seems that this film achieves what Ashes of Time tried to do, but failed (due to being too obscure, and somewhat adolescent).

Caution - this film has extensive ultra-violence, gore, rape, torture, etc. - but none of it is gratuitous.

PS It seems that all the various pressings/versions that have English subtitles are so mediocre, that it might be worth buying the Pioneer Japanese DVD, just to see the film the way it was intended to look - after previously seeing it on VCD in order to understand the plot and dialogue.

HepDude

I subsequently went and read through the reviews of the UK and Japanese DVDs at AsianDVDGuide.com .

One of them mentioned that this film is based on One-Armed Swordsman.

One-Armed Swordsman is considered the original Martial Arts movie - or at least the one that started its popularity. It was made by Chang Cheh and the Shaw Brothers in 1967 and starred Wang Yu.

Due to this, I had already obtained the VCD from www.sensasian.com for something like US$10 - all the VHS copies are harder to get - the cheapest is on Amazon at $36.99 (where there are a number of informative comments) and other sites charge even more.

The VCD, however, is marginal in quality - I'm pretty sure that it was taped off a TV broadcast in Asia (there is a channel bug at times) and it is pan-and-scanned which cuts off the edges of the subtitles (it's amazing how good one can get in figuring out the meaning of a sentence missing the first and last words).

Anyway, the comment in the Blade review made me get out and watch One-Armed Swordsman.

The difference between Blade and One-Armed Swordsman is that the latter - although well known for being gory, is actually significantly less violent and gory than Blade. And Blade substitutes the sword manufacturing plant for the normal School of Martial Arts (in this case swordsmanship), and the adveraries are an organized group of bandits, rather than a rival School.

Otherwise, the details are almost identical. The master's daughter is even more brainlessly lame and ditzy in One-Armed Swordsman, if you can believe that !

You can see that a lot of stuff in the subsequent Shaw Brothers films (like the Venoms series) were taken from this original, including the master-gathering-his-disciples-on-his-birthday bit.

PS I just came across this portion of a book review on HK films that confirms my impressions:

HepDude

Here's a whole review of The Blade that explores the Ashes of Time comparison:

http://www.lazybastard.com/blade.htm