The World of Drunken Master [DVD]

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