Are there good DVD/Blu-Ray issues of John Woo's Chinese Films?

I've got the Criterion Hard Boiled, which is letterboxed 4:3, and it seems like I might have a similar (non-Criterion) copy of The Killer. I've read that there is a terrible blu-ray of The Killer. Are there any good ones?
Thanks.

 

The Dragon Dynasty Blu-rays of HARD-BOILED and THE KILLER that were released in the US are both awful. There was a Japanese Blu of HARD-BOILED that is supposedly a lot better, but it doesn't have English subs. There's also a Japanese Blu of THE KILLER that was released by the same company, but I'm not sure how it stacks up, although I'd expect it to likewise trounce the Dragon Dynasty disc.

I never managed to get the Criterion KILLER DVD, but I do have a 2-disc French DVD (www.amazon.fr/The-Killer-Édition-Collector-Limitée/dp/B00005QZUB/ - again with no English subs, but it does have French subs), as well as the Criterion HARD-BOILED. Until a better Blu option comes along, if it ever does, I'm sticking with those.

 

Criterion should get on those blu-rays.

 

Amen. I was huge into John Woo, Jackie Chan and Stephen Chaiu films in the early/mid 90s, scooping up
DVDs in Boston's Chinatown, laserdiscs, and VHS dubs of laserdiscs in order to get the films subbed and letterboxed.

Itching to get these in better transfers than those initial releases, which tend to be 4x3 letterboxed and fairly fuzzy,
with standard pale white subs across the bottom of the screen, where invariably shirts, tablecloths, and all manner of
pale objects served to nullify the translation.

 

Fans have complained and fiddled with trying to improve the terrible fate of these films in the US for years. The Japanese Hard Boiled Blu comes from a new master but no one knows the source. The Killer's best transfer was in Germany for DVD and this is what was horribly thrown onto a Blu-ray here.

Today the best official transfers for these AFAIK:
HB-Dragon Dynasty is a compromise, but at least you get decent picture and the original mono audio. The subtitles aren't the greatest as they are from the English dub. Best audio is on the Criterion LD.
Killer-German DVD with PAL speedup. Otherwise the Criterion despite being very old and 4:3 has the best color. PCM mono on the LD.
ABT I and II-corrected Anchor Bay DVDs. I only have II but these are straight no nonsense transfers from prints with a great look and feel to them. Be sre and get the corrected ones as the old ones have audio from other films!
Once a Thief-?
Bullet in the Head-?

 

The first time I ever saw HARD-BOILED was a relatively new 35mm print on a big screen. After that, just about any home video experience was bound to be disappointing. But I still remember how excited I was to subsequently get the Criterion CAV laserdiscs of both HB and THE KILLER. It sure would be sweet if Criterion could do Blu-rays of both, but given that their rights window seemed to be quite narrow for the DVDs, I'm not optimistic that'll ever happen.

As far as ABT, I have the Chinese Zoke Culture DVDs of ABT, ABT II, and ABT III in a box set. They look decent and were dirt-cheap. I've never been able to A-B them against the Anchor Bay discs, but the Zoke disc of ABT I is mentioned favorably in a comparison here:

http://www.dvdcompare.net/comparisons/film.php?fid=1264

 

Is there a general reason why these well regarded movies don't seem to have good home releases?

Is there a complicated rights situation? I would think John Woo would have some pull, but maybe he doesn't care to look back on his older material. Or do good blu-rays exist in Asia, but without English subtitles?

 

From what I hear just general lack of respect from the powers that be in terms of archiving (see also King Hu films). Not to mention the films were shot on crap film stock to begin with. That AND western distributors just have no respect whatsoever and don't better foreign films competing with their crap remakes, etc.

 

The source materials reside in the country of origin, Hong Kong, and compound the lack of a proper storage philosophy (given most of these films were not prestige releases or released by smaller production companies) with the warm and humid weather and you get what you get. Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 film Ashes of Time was recut and regraded after recovering the negatives, which were already deteriorating in storage. Martin Scorsese's World Film Foundation restored Edward Yang's 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day in 2009, and it was noted that not all of the negative held in Taiwan was usable at that point. We're seeing the same thing with the attempt to try to restore and archive much of Satyajit Ray's filmography, as most of that effort is taking place outside of India.

Fortune Star, which holds the rights to many of the Hong Kong films in question, had been reissuing some of them on home video with much improved image quality some years back, but these may not necessarily have been true restorations. Probably this reflected more on the poor quality of the original home video release.

 

Thanks Hutch and htom for your responses. It's interesting that Criterion did issue a couple of John Woo's films on laserdisc in the '90s. They usually do a good job with getting early generation sources if they can. I wonder they used for those releases and if they could get another license for a blu-ray release. I also remember seeing Bullet In The Head in the theater Atlanta in about 1995 or so, but I wasn't paying much attention to the quality of the print, just the movie itself.

Surely there must be some facilities in Hong Kong (as one example) to properly store negatives. It sounds to me more of an issue of caring about archiving the material well. Are movies in the Asian culture thought of as more disposable where people don't have an interest in watching them again once there's something new?

 

I'm keeping my Criterion DVDs until GOOD Blu-rays are released (if ever) for Hard Boiled & The Killer because they are good enough as is.