If Dave’s Videodrome in Carrboro, NC was still open, there’d be no space inside the rental shop from all the great movies from Hong Kong, Japan and other parts of Asia that have arrived on 4K UHD and Blu-ray in the last year. Over the last four years, movie fans have been treated to hundreds of titles getting upgraded or finally released in America.
The big news of the year was Shout! Studios getting the rights to Hong Kong’s legendary Golden Princess library. This was the studio that gave us the best works of John Woo, Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Shout! didn’t waste any time in releasing many of the crown jewels from the 156 titles in the vault. John Woo is once more getting the respect he deserves with his ballistic ballet masterpieces coming out on 4K UHD. So far the Hong Kong Cinema Classics line has included The Killer, Hard Boiled and The Better Tomorrow Trilogy (Tsui Hark directed the third film). Woo’s other two films from this era Bullet In The Head and Once A Thief, are slated for early 2026. Shout! Factory has many of these films streaming on their Hong Kong Fight Club FAST channel and other streaming sites for free.
Chow Yun-Fat’s amazing turn in Ringo Lam’s City On Fire also gets the 4K UHD treatment. It’s good that Chow’s superstar films from this era in Hong Kong cinema are looking better than the VHS tapes I rented in the early ’90s.
SHAW BROTHERS
Has it really been four years since the legendary Shaw Brothers vault was also opened up with the arrival of Arrow’s Shawscope Volume 1? Even with a lot of titles arriving in America since that joyful boxset arrived for Christmas 2021, there’s still plenty of movies from the legendary Hong Kong studio arriving in 2025.
Arrow Video’s Shawscope Volume Four contains 16 films from when the studio brought its action and excitement to films that weren’t traditional martial arts or wuxia titles. There’s a lot of supernatural wildness including the Black Magic and Hex titles. Even more exciting is the arrival of Super Inframan which was the studio’s entry into the superhero realm that was dominated by Toho. Many of these films were made in the ’80s when the studio was getting close to shutting down its feature film production so there’s a strange freedom to wildness.
Shout! Studios continued their Shaw Brothers Classics boxsets. They released boxsets 6, 7 and 8. Each contain between 11 and 12 films from the golden era of Hong Kong’s legendary studios. The titles included Heroes Shed No Tears, The Spiritual Boxer, Finger of Doom, Crazy Nuts of Kung Fu, Ambitious Kung Fu Girl and Return of the Sentimental Swordsman. Also it seems the earlier boxsets have been reduced in price so it’s a good time to grab them (or gift them).
You might think between these two boxsets and the last few years of releases that the Shaw Brothers vault must be empty. You’d be wrong. There were other great releases from other labels this year.
The Lady Assassin (88 Films) is a great movie that’s equally filled with palace intrigue, backstabbing, front stabbing and wuxia fights that fly across the screen. And there is flying as characters defy gravity during sword fights. There’s a lot packed into 90 minutes. While I’m not going to give away the ending, the final shot is perhaps the most brilliant final shot in the history of Shaw Brothers.
The Lady Is The Boss (88 Films) didn’t rely on the traditional Shaw Brothers sets, but was filled with the fighting spirit of their best films. Kara Hui is a whirlwind on the screen as she changes things up at the studio. She is the perfect comic foil for the traditional teacher played by Lau Kar-leung.
Lady With A Sword (88 Films) put Lily Ho front and center as the lady with a sword. She didn’t need to find a male swordsman to tackle the bad guys. More importantly was the film was directed by Kao Pao-shu, a longtime Shaw Brothers actress given her first chance to call the shots. Lady With A Sword is a female driven action film on both sides of the camera.
Exact Revenge – The Eunuch & The Deadly Knives (Eureka! Entertainment) is a prime Shaw Brothers double feature. While both films feature ruthless revenge, they’re rather different in their approach. The Eunuch has a man full of secrets except in his underwear. The Deadly Knives is savage in its depiction of what the Japanese would do to get their hands on high quality Chinese timber.
Martial Law: Lo Wei’s Wuxia World (Eureka! Entertainment) gives us a sense of what Lo Wei did before he directed two of the largest martial arts stars in the world. He did know how to deliver the action on screen. The films feature extremely interesting female leading characters without them being the same daughter character. There’s not confusing the undercover spy in The Black Butterfly with the backstabbing daughter of Death Valley and finally the surprising daughter of Vengeance of A Snow Girl. While the films have the Shaw Brothers aesthetic, they aren’t repetitive.
Director Chang Cheh’s prolific time at Shaw Brothers resulted in quite a few collections coming out this year beyond the studio boxsets.
The Daredevils/Ode To Gallantry: Two Venom Mob Films (Eureka! Entertainment) is a double feature that covers the start of their group work and the end of the era. Chang Cheh’s Venom Mob were to acting and action what the Harlem Globetrotter are to basketball. They just keep your attention as they mix it up between them.
The Magnificent Chang Cheh (Eureka! Entertainment) has two movies that Cheh directed before he’d have his two major career changing films. The Magnificent Trio came out the year before The One-Armed Swordsman that first made Cheh a directing force. Both films starred Jimmy Wang Yu. Magnificent Warriors would arrive a year before Cheh unleased Five Deadly Venoms with his Venom Mob acting troupe. The Magnificent Chang Cheh features two films that helped him prepare for this two big eras at the studio.
Furious Swords And Fantastic Warriors – The Heroic Cinema of Chang Cheh (Eureka! Entertainment) has 10 movies from the director’s time at Shaw Brothers. This is a small fraction of what he made there. There were years where he had 8 movies released as director. He averaged around five films a year. Chang Cheh was able to do all these films because Shaw Brothers was set up to be a movie factory beyond the dreams of the classic Hollywood Studio system.
Hong Kong Cinema
Running On Karma (Eureka! Entertainment) has Andy Lau playing a pumped up monk turned stripper who can see past lives. He has to battle a very flexible guy.
The Tattooed Dragon (Eureka! Entertianment) has the same vibe as a Spaghetti Western with Jimmy Wang Yu’s stranger character who comes to town. What’s intriguing is how this doesn’t seem to be Lo Wei making a Bruce Lee film with another actor filling in for Bruce. The Tattooed Dragon is not the Dragon.
Flaming Brothers (Eureka! Entertainment) has a strange vibe that Chow Yun-fat) and Alan Tang are playing this film as if they were Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. They exude a strange charm between scenes of massive bloodshed. You see people get nasty bullet wounds on the screen. Imagine Ocean’s Eleven except with people getting ventilated when the casino heist goes wrong.
The Cat (88 Films) is strange, bizarre, trippy and ultimately amazing. No matter how much I try to convey the weirdness, you’ll find even more weirdness when you watch The Cat.
The Island (Eureka! Entertainment) is the horror film that lets you know skipping the teacher chaperoned “vacation” was the smartest thing you ever did in your life. Director Po-Chih Leong (Hong Kong 1941) masterfully bends this film from a quirky school comedy into a bloody horror flick. You don’t feel that this is an abrupt change of tone so much as you’ve been waiting to see how crazed the Fat brothers are. The actors playing the school kids bring a bit to their character so they’re more than Spam on a tropical island.
Rosa (88 Films) is from that era when Hong Kong was eager to make comic cop films with the vibe of Police Academy yet with the martial arts action you’d get in a more serious film. Yuen Biao and Lowell Lo work well as a comic team. There’s a weird scene where they dress up as pimpish mobsters to try to get Rosa out of debt to loan shark. Lowell Lo puts on the Soul Man makeup.
Japanese Cinema
Love & Crime (88 Films) has Teruo Ishii presents the five true stories of lovers turned killers. Besides men, we witness women who have no limits when it comes to carnality and homicide.
A Certain Killer/A Killer’s Key (Arrow Video) has Raizō Ichikawa (Shinobi: Band of Assassins) play a hitman with a simple yet unorthodox lethal weapon.
Hokuriku Proxy War (Radiance Films) was Kinji Fukasaku’s final Yakuza film and showed how mobsters operated below freezing to control a piece of snow-covered turf. Hokuriku Proxy War feels like the proper ending for Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza movies since he takes us to what seems like the end of the world to show the final battle for the frozen turf. Hiroki Matsukata is unrelenting as he seeks to reestablish himself in his old town.
Play It Cool reminds us that the women working in the hostess clubs deserve their story to be told as much as the Yakuza members. Director Yasuzô Masumura (The Blind Beast) is one of the great filmmakers from Japan who is finally getting recognition as more of his titles arrive in North America. Until this Blu-ray release, Play It Cool supposedly hasn’t been seen outside of Japan. While this movie is considered to be one of his lesser works by Japanese critics, this film could easily be Oscar worthy seeing how Anora just won the big awards.
Jakoman & Tetsu (88 Films) is what happens when the greatest mobster director creates a film with a script from a king of the art house. You get a gripping drama about fishing for herring. Kinji Fukasaku revolutionized gangster films with his Battles Without Honor Or Humanity series and shocked the world with Battle Royale, made Jakoman & Tetsu early in his career at Toei Films. How did he end up with Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai & Ran) as his screenwriter?
Yakuza Wives (88 Films) is about how ladies keep things going when their husbands and boyfriends were off doing time. Based on Shôko Ieda’s non-fiction book about the ladies that married into the mob.
V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal (Arrow Video) features 9 movies that were made for the smaller screen of an old TV tube, but play bigger than 24 inches of a Sony Trinitron can hold.
The Rapacious Jailbreaker (Radiance Films) shows us the conditions and life of being a prisoner in Japan during the post-World War II period. The film focuses on a single prisoner (Battles Without Honor and Humanity‘s Hirokio Matsukata) who is eager to escape and return to the free world to continue his outlaw lifestyle. He’s not going to let the walls hold him inside.
Detonation! Violent Riders (88 Films) is a Japanese biker flick starring Sonny Chiba. Director Teruo Ishii (Horrors of Malformed Men & Orgies of Edo) shows us the nastier side of the motorcycle gang. We first meet the Red Rose Gang as they’re huffing out of inflated bags. Iwaki seems rather cool in the film because he has no intention of being part of a motorcycle gang although one gravitates around him eventually. Nothing in the film makes you want to think this is a great lifestyle choice outside of the two ladies interested in Iwaki.
Shinobi: Volume 2 (Radiance Films) Raizo Ichikawa returns as a ninja although he’s now the legendary Mist Saizo. Shinobi: Volume 2 is as thrilling as the first ninja adventures with its mix of action and history.
The Betrayal (Radiance) has Raizo Ichikawa playing a samurai warrior instead of a ninja. However he must be stealth to survive in feudal Japan. More importantly is the last reel of The Betrayal might be the greatest against the odds fight in cinema history.
School In The Crosshairs (Cult Epics) is a brilliant and outrageous trip back to junior high. Hiroko Yakushimaru (Sailor Suit and Machine Gun) battles aliens that wanted to disrupt her academic life. This is a teenager who can’t feel the angst of normal schoolgirl problems. This is part of Cult Epic’s retrospective of director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi (House) teenage films.
Daiei Gothic Vol 2: Japanese Ghost Stories (Radiance Films) is a sophisticated way to enjoy spooky season. These are three movies really have chilling atmospheres with supernatural nightmares attacking people. Visually all three are stunning as they mix the horror with samurai life.
Inflatable Sex Doll Of The Wastelands (Deaf Crocodile) was written and directed by Atsushi Yamatoya who had co-written and appeared in Branded To Kill. Both are equally bizarre hitman movies. While you’d imagine both films would cult hits, Inflatable has had a lower profile. Part of the problem has been access since Inflatable doesn’t appear to have had much of a home video release in America. Deaf Crocodile’s Blu-ray was restored off the only 35mm film elements, a worn and damaged release print. But now the film is hear so you can enjoy what else Atsushi Yamatoya was doing in 1967.
Korean Cinema
Ninja Terminator (Neon Eagle) is a fun martial arts film with its weird twists, jumps between two films and the Garfield phone. Director Godfrey Ho brings plenty of ninja action in his half of the film. You don’t feel cheated by the title. If any ninja controls the pieces of the statue, they will become a terminator in ninja garb. The South Korean portion of the movie does have plenty of non-ninja fighting including a baseball fight.
Space Monster Wangmagwi! (SRS Cinema) was South Korea’s first local giant monster science fiction movie. It beat Yongary, Monster from the Deep to the marquees of Seoul by 2 months. Yongary came to America thanks to a deal with American International Pictures. Space Monster Wangmagwi! remained trapped in South Korea until SRS Cinema finally brought the invasion plan here.
American Cinema
Furious (Visual Vengeance and Wild Eye Releasing) helped launch the career of the Rhee brothers: Simon and Phillip. Ronald Jackson part of Dolemite’s posse gets to show his skills once more.
In case you’re curious about Dave’s Videodrome. Check out what they kept on the shelves back in the ’90s:
