Search - Martial Arts Masters on DVD

Mixed quality, not enough of Bruce

A Reader | St. Peters, MO United States | 12/31/2006

(1 out of 5 stars)

"Got this as a gift, so I can't complain too much. However, the one real Bruce Lee movie in the set I already had a copy of. Mostly this is a collection of Sonny Chiba movies of mixed quality.

Some of the movies have been cropped to look like widescreen, but you can tell that they got cropped too much, cutting off part of words that were on the bottom of the screen and/or cutting off people's heads at the top of the screen. What's the point? They probably copied it from VCR and cropped it to fool people into thinking they are watching a digitally re-mastered movie. The cropping was particularly obvious on Shogun's Ninja, and Ninja Wars is obviously copied from VCR tape with a noisy sound track and occasional tracking lines. Honestly, I have duped better quality VCR copies on my home DVD recorder.

The best quality is The Street Fighter, which also seems to be the movie that made Chiba famous, mainly because it is so shockingly violent. There are scenes where he punches holes into people or pulls out hunks of their flesh from sensitive parts of their bodies. Very nasty. In fact, I read somewhere else that when the movie was first released in the U.S. they gave it an X rating because it was so violent.

Anyway, rule of thumb with these old martial arts movies seems to be that when you buy them in big collections you should not expect good quality. While it might sound good you are getting 14 hours of entertainment for small change, you should keep in mind that you always get what you paid for. So, set your expectations low with this collection."