Image Entertainment’s North American DVD release of Celestial Picture’s remastered and restored version of the Shaw Brothers wuxia/kung fu classic SHAOLIN INTRUDERS is a modest offering. On the plus side it gets a great martial arts film from the talented and underappreciated action directing master Tang Chia into the U.S. home video market in a licensed and authorized form. Unfortunately, the release could have been better. The video mode is interlaced instead of the superior progressive scan. The disc defaults to Celestial’s poorly engineered 5.1 remaster of the original mono Mandarin dubbing. At least Image did have the good sense to include the original Mandarin-language mono track. Yet they didn’t manage to track down an original English or Cantonese dub which is disappointing.
Bonus material includes original color production stills, which is nice. There are also 16 trailers for Shaw Brothers releases but they’re all the newer ones produced by Celestial. Thirteen additional Taiwanese and Hong Kong action movie trailers from other studios are included, some of which are originals.
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DVD • Image Entertainment • Shaolin Intruders (1983) • Shaw Brothers
