"Actor: Jeanie Chang"

• The World of Drunken Master | DVD | (02/02/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Two orphans Sam the Seed (Lee Yi Min) and Tai Pei (Jack Long) are caught stealing grapes from an orchard by wine blender Chang (Chan Hiu Lau). He puts the two lads to task in his distillery as compensation. In time boss Chang takes a shine to the two lads and teaches them drunken boxing. They soon become experts at the art and decide to test out their new skill on the unsuspecting town thugs. But the duo do not know that the the leader of the thugs is none other than Yeh Hu (Lung Fei) who happens to be the enemy of the boss Chang. Yeh Hu gathers up all his lackeys and storms the distillery. The rest is drunken history. This Joseph Kuo offering was one of the best Drunken Master cash-ins to come out of Taiwan. The film told in flashback by the two reminiscing old winos is packed to the gills with top notch fight work and some off the wall training sequences by Taiwan's dynamic duo Jack Long and Lee Yi Min. A must-see for any high impact viewer. Choreographed on the style of Drunken Master by Yuen Cheung Yan who later was responsible for the high kicking action in Charlie's Angels.

• Mystery Of Chess Boxing | DVD | (04/06/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  A true cult martial arts film immortalised by the Hip-Hop group The Wu-Tang Clan and in particular 'Ghostface Killa'; one of their main members. A young student (Lee Yi Min) is out for revenge against the murderer of his father; Ghostface Killer. Before he is ready to face his nemesis he must first develop as a fighter and learn from a humble chess-master. The only way he'll be able to face this challenge is by perfecting the 'five elements' style of his deadly foe!

• 36 Deadly Styles | DVD | (13/01/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Manic martial arts action from decorated Hong Kong director Joseph Kuo.

• The World Of Drunken Master | DVD | (25/07/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Made in 1979 The World of Drunken Master appeared at the same time as Drunken Master Part 2, and is an unofficial prequel to Jackie Chan's Drunken Master (1978). As the titular character, Siu Tien Yuen appeared in all three films, though here his role is reduced to a 10-minute cameo and the bulk of the film is a flashback to 30 years earlier. The story unfolds as Jack and Mark Long play a pair of petty thieves who team-up, learn kung fu and fall in love with the daughter (Jeanie Chang) of the owner of a local distillery. Naturally there is a gang of villains who want to close the business down and steal the land, so that the second half of the movie is one long series of fight scenes. Clearly made on a very low budget, the action is nevertheless inventively choreographed and well filmed. Siu Tien Yuen doesn't have much to do, though the framing device and the passage of time to when the old friends meet again lends a poignancy and sense of loss unusual in kung fu movies. The star would reprise the character at greater length in Magnificent Butcher (again, 1979), while Jackie Chan finally delivered his own Drunken Master II in 1994. The title on this print is actually Drunken Dragon. On the DVD: the original 2.35:1 ratio film is presented here at standard TV 4:3, with often little evidence even of any panning and scanning so that the images look badly composed and lack important information throughout. The credits have been simply squashed to 4:3 so that everything looks tall and thin. Worse, the encoding is riddled with compression artefacts and the eye-aching out-of-focus, grainy, washed-out transfer shows clear evidence of originating with a poor quality video than the original film. There is no original soundtrack option, only a dreadful American dub. The sound is mediocre mono. Apart from various language subtitles the only extra is the original theatrical trailer. This is presented anamorphically enhanced, but the picture quality is still very poor and the image has been squashed from 2.35:1 to 1.77:1. The listed trailers for other MIA titles are missing from the disc, which astonishingly claims to be a "Special Edition". The cover blurb even manages to confuse the plot with that of an entirely different film, the same director's The Mystery of Chess Boxing (1979). --Gary S Dalkin