The definitely not fictitious Vulcan Video recently began acquiring the new reissues of old school Shaw Brothers classics, so I got my third ever taste of the genius of King Hu last night (and the first ever decently transferred taste.)
Come Drink With Me rocks. The fight scenes are fast, gory and brutal with very little of the over-the-top acrobatics that characterize the later Chang Cheh and Liu Chia Liang picturesaand the subtitles were all spelled correctly and shoved under the LETTERBOXED! frame. With the hideous pan-and-scan/dismal and dingy look of the older King Hu issues I’ve seen (Dragon Inn and One Armed Swordsman, in case you’re interested) gone, I began to really appreciate his talent for filmmaking. The use of outdoor locations is a huge improvement over the papier-mache-boulder strewn sound stages I’m used to, and the guy knew his way around a tracking shot, although nothing particularly fancy happened. Besides that, all the classic elements that I love so much were there - a kungfu master disguised as a drunken beggar, exotic weapons, a battle fought under the pretense of everyday activity (serving food), family loyalty, revenge, cruel villains disguised as Buddhist monks, wacky nicknames, the whole lot. I can’t wait for them to reissue Mad Monkey Kungfu looking as good as this.
BTW, these DVDs are from Celestial Pictures, a Singaporean company that bought back every SB movies rights…and they are doing an incredible job with putting the movies back in shape…some of their transfers look almost new, it’s incredible :eek:
it’s just a crop of this pic.
I just thought the expression was priceless.
I couldn’t get the whole caption in my title though.
We do need to lobby for larger avatar sizes though.
Maybe a graduated avatar size, say every 1000 posts you can get a bigger avatar size.
