British Kung-Fu film fanatic Toby Russell who has done a lot ot promote the genre in his native land is the man behind the new imprint Rarescope.  This imprint promises to bring rare and hard to find old school martial arts films to DVD with an original language track as well as an English dub.  They started releasing discs in early 2006 in region one through Brentwood, and their latest release is Drunken Dragon.  This is the first Rarescope disc I've seen and though the film is a nice mixture of action and humor, the print and sound left a lot to be desired.

Looking at the back cover of this DVD, I started to get a little worried.  The small print lists the actors and crew, and gives the title as "Drunken Dragon (Exciting Dragon)".  Did Rarescope change the name of the film in order to cash in on the popularity of Jackie Chan's classic Drunken Master films?  Someone surely did, since this film has no drunken fighting in it.  I'm willing to give Rarescope the benefit of the doubt though.  The name could have been changed by a distributor years ago.

As for the film itself, it's a fun martial arts romp.  Doom, your typical Kung Fu villain (with a name like that, what else could he grow up to be??  I blame his parents for the evil that he perpetrates.), wants to be the most powerful fighter in the world.  It achieve this end he takes out an entire Dojo and his old master which are guarding a sword of immense power.  Unfortunately he needs the Seven Star Armor in order to unlock the sword's vault.  That is being kept safe in another village.

The scene changes to an old healer and her grandson Doggy (Sun Kuo-Miing).  After some wacky escapades with a poisoned man, a fat bride for Doggy, and a rival doctor who's out to get grandma, it is revealed that the old lady is the keeper of the sacred armor.  After she passes it on to Doggy and sends him away to seek his fortune, Doom tracks her down and kills her.  Now it's up to Doggy to train and become a great fighter in order to avenge his grandmother's death.

This film was a mixed bag.  The beginning and the end were great, but it tended to drag in the middle.  The best parts of the film were filled with a lot of goofy weapons, wacky training machines,
and unusual fighting techniques.  I really enjoyed the guy who wears a candle on his head that shoots fire, and the exploding paper-mâché owl.  There's a fun fight at the beginning between Doom's henchmen and the old master who fights while sitting in a row boat with wheels and batting his opponent with oars.  A lot of strange fun.

The middle half of the film is very different though, it feels like it is a totally different movie.  They totally drop the Seven Star Armor plot and have a long sequence where Doggy meets his fiancee, Tiger, who he hasn't seen since they were kids, at the boat dock.  It turns out that she's really fat, but can fight and hen pecks him a bit.  This plot goes on for about 45 minutes until Doggy is sent away with the armor, at which point Tiger leaves the film never to be seen again.  Since they devoted so much of the movie to this relationship they could have at least wrapped it up.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this film was edited.  Some of the transitions are a bit awkward, and the film ends very abruptly.  The fact that plot lines are dropped further reinforces that theory.  I couldn't find an original running time though, so I can't be sure.

Audio:

This disc offers both the original Mandarin soundtrack in a newly created 5.1 mix with English subtitles (rife with misspellings and poor grammar) and an older English stereo dub.  For some reason viewers aren't able to switch between the two audio tracks or turn the subtitles on and off while the movie plays, only from the main menu.  Neither audio track is very good.  I watched the movie in the original language and then switched to English after a while.  Both tracks had a lot of noise in the background and a hum constantly present which was louder in the Mandarin track. They both had a very narrow dynamic range and were plagued by distortion.  I also noticed that the dub track was missing several seconds of audio in one portion.  The English dubbing was poor, but the Mandarin voices didn't sound that much better.  Overall a rather poor sounding disc.

Video:

This film is presented in a nonanamorphically enhanced widescreen image.  The film itself has  1.66:1 aspect ratio but the opening credits (which are in English) have a rather uncommon 2.2:1 aspect ratio.  These old Kung-Fu films weren't treated well, and this film is no exception.  The picture is soft, has frequent scratches and dirt marks, the colors have faded.  Digitally it doesn't look much better with aliasing and blocking appearing fairly frequently.  The image is also a bit of the dark side, with so-so contrast.  While you can't expect much from these poorly treated films, I was hoping for a better image from this 20 year old film.

Extras:

I was pleasantly surprised to discover extras on this disc  Most of the time these old school choppy-socky films are released on budget bare bones DVDs.  In addition to the film there is a two minute William Yen Demo where Yen (Yen Ming Jun) performs an act from his Peking Opera days, and a three minute interview with stunt man and producer Phillip Ko (who played the villain Doom).  He talks about getting started in the business and working with Bruce Lee, it's an interesting interview.  The disc is rounded out with a 6 ½ minute reel of trailers to upcoming Rarescope films.

Final Thoughts:

Parts of this movie are great.  I really enjoyed the beginning where the plot was set up, the resolution at the end, and much of the training.  There's an odd romantic-comedy section that dominates the film however that really doesn't belong.  The audio and video quality are quite poor also, which bodes ill for the rest of the Rarescope line.  It was encouraging to see some nice extras included on this disc though.  Fans of old school martial arts films should rent this, based on the strength of the good sections.  While it's not perfect, it is entertaining enough to make it worth your while.