Come Drink with Me

Great wuxia story with good DVD quality
This film, Come Drink with Me (Great Drunken Hero), is one of my favorite Asian movies, and I think it is perhaps comparable to Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in terms of its contribution to the evolution of East Asian movies during the 1950s-1970s. I first saw this movie in either 1966 or 1967 at a movie theatre in the Far East, and recently I've seen it many more times on this DVD. The storyline takes place during the Ming Dynasty (either the 15th or the 16th century) in China's Two-River Province. The heroine Zhang, also known as Jin Yan Zi (meaning Golden Swallow), tries to rescue her older brother, the head prosecutor of the province, from captivity by the Five-Tiger Bandits. At the same time, a drunken beggar and martial-arts master Fan, called Da-Bei (meaning Big Drink), has to face the monk Liao Kung (Diao Jintang), his sworn older brother from the same Kung-fu league, to keep the Green Bamboo Pole that symbolizes the leadership of the Green Bamboo League. These two...

Great Movie, Horrible DVD
I am not giving the movie 2 stars, in my opinon it is required viewing for anyone interested in kung fu/wuxia cinema. This movie was groundbreaking for its time, and it was a lot of fun to see the many inspirations for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the film. It was also fun to see Chang Pei Pei (the villian of CTHD) in her early years. She and Angela Mao broke ground for future Hong Kong women warriors such as Michelle Yeoh. Now, as for the DVD itself...HORRIBLE. It is of such low quality that it wouldn't play on ANY player without skipping at least a little bit. The transfer looks horrible, it made what I am sure is a beautiful looking film look like I filmed it on a camera phone. And the worst offense, for about 20 minutes in the middle of the film you can't see the subtitles! They just drop off the screen! Well, not ALL of them, you can still read the tops of the letters!!! Somehow this is repaired before the film ends so the movie wasn't totally ruined. The day someone...

Watch out ! VCD transfer... and a very bad one
Well, the only star given to this early martial arts masterpiece concerns only its value as one of the firts high production kung fu movies, for it`s artistic vision and great action sequences. Back in 1968 this film was widely consider one of the first action kung fu movies, moving forward from pekin opera.
Now, speaking of the edition of this dvd, if i can call this a dvd, let`s go for parts: first this is NOT a dvd, it`s an INTERNET VCD DOWNLOAD, edited with scene selection. As we all know, besides lousy picture and sound quality, VCD format includes one or more subtitles (in this case cantonese and english) IN the picture, meaning NOT REMOVABLE.
Second, there`s blackouts every three minutes and the scene were drunken cat shows his rock breaking finger powers, is actually a complete digital mess.
If you flip the disc, the reading side is purple, typical 4.7 GB dvd disc with picture logo. OK, asian editions are bad, but at least they`re originals. Some new york...

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