Brothers Five (DVD – Well GO USA)

Well Go USA’s DVD release of writer-director Lo Wei’s wuxia actioner BROTHERS FIVE provides a bittersweet viewing experience. The film itself is entertaining and worth picking up for Shaw Brothers and wuxia fans. Disc features a fully-restored anamorphic picture that looks good but is matched with a horribly engineered surround remix of the original Mandarin-language soundtrack.

BROTHERS FIVE originally had a mono soundtrack. In their poor judgment, Celestial Pictures thought it would be a good idea to remix the audio in surround sound and drop new synthesizer music over the old music. The result is some of the worst sound engineering I have ever heard. It makes this movie unwatchable at times without the volume turned down. (I may be more annoyed by this than the average viewer.) The new and old soundtrack sometimes intermingle and clash. The new music is poorly arranged, plays too much and occasionally drowns out the dialogue, especially on non-surround audio systems. The best way I can describe it is if they had looped a recording of an orchestra warming up before a concert, except that all the instruments are digital samples. This is the audio equivalent of colorizing black and white movies. It only serves to cheapen the original product.

In Well Go USA’s poor judgment, they didn’t bother to ask Celestial for the original mono soundtrack. So now we have two DVD versions of this movie, one from Hong Kong distributor IVL and the other from Well Go USA and I cannot recommend either one.

The DVD transfer of the print could have been much better. It suffers from being interlaced instead of progressive scan which means the picture looks worse on digital monitors. Picture resolution isn’t great either for a re-mastered film.

I cannot speak for the translation but the English subtitle text is presented in a large and easy-to-read font.

The one bonus feature on the disc is the original Hong Kong trailer to BROTHERS FIVE.

Format: Region 1 NTSC DVD
Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Widescreen (2.35:1)
Audio: Mandarin 5.1
Subtitles: English
Length: 102 minutes
Release Date: July, 15, 2008