The Legend Of Fong Sai-Yuk

The image quality in this edition of The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk is great, but it’s a it’s quite clear that this is the international cut of the film, missing several of the quirkier scenes of the Chinese edition.

The soundtrack choices are slightly frustrating - you can choose between Cantonese dialogue with stereo sound with almost no dynamic range - where every kick, punch and impact is about the same volume, the traditional Kung Fu sound - or a 5.1 soundtrack with far better foley sound, but a terrible English dub. In addition, the music is totally different on the two soundtracks and the translation is a little odd; many of the jokes are sanitised and some of the dialogue is excised entirely. Presumably this is the format of the original cinematic productions, but it would be fantastic to see a version using the higher quality diagetic sound with the original Cantonese dialogue.

The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk hasn’t got a host of exciting extras, but those that are there are all fairly worthwhile. There’s an interview with director Corey Yuen - probably best known in the West for the Transporter movies - which gives some interesting insights into the production of the film and the crew, but will only really be appreciated by real genre aficionados. The second featurette is an interview with Jeff Lau, the film’s writer, which is interesting, but doesn’t really add much if you’ve already watched the director interview.

The best of the disk’s special features is probably the audio commentary to the main feature by Bey Logan - a renowned Hong Kong cinema expert. He gives a very wide and accessible back story and history of the characters in the film and the actors playing them. He also explains some of the more obscure comic references and provides a lot of colloquial translation hints which are excellent when watching the film in the original Cantonese. The only downside to his commentary is where he reveals how many missing scenes there are in the film, and that he hopes they’ll be on the disk (they’re not).

This release of The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk is far from the complete version but it looks great; the cuts which have been made are minor enough to be ignorable.