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Battle of the Warriors


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Presentation

Getting past the re-titling, the cover art is actually pretty decent. The label of "from the action director of Hero" is a bit misleading. Both films do share an action director (Stephen Tung) but the directors are different. Anyway, overall, the cover art and packaging, which includes a cardboard slip case, is nice.

As you start up the disc, the same trailers for The Rebel and Fist of Legend that have been on the past several Dragon Dynasty releases auto-play. Thankfully, these can just be skipped through. The menus follow the usual Dragon Dynasty template, with a decent animated one on the front, with static ones behind it. They're nothing fancy, but they get the job done.


The Movie

Dragon Dynasty has done a tremendous job in remastering the picture, presenting it in a crisp anamorphic widescreen format. It makes the Hong Kong version, which was put out by Deltamac, look like a VHS tape.

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Dragon Dynasty

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Deltamac

The Deltamac version already had a solid Dolby 5.1 sound mix, which is reused here, in addition to an English Dolby 5.1 dub track, which has good quality. The subtitles (which can be displayed in English, English closed-captioning, or Spanish) are done well, featuring a much better translation than the Deltamac DVD -- no more "Chinglish" here. In case you are wondering, they are not dubtitles.


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The Extras

Commentary with Bey Logan: Bey Logan delivers an average commentary here, offering his usual highlighting of people in the cast, a bit of historical background, as well as some technical information about the film. Logan is good enough at commentaries, but it would be nice if Dragon Dynasty would start tapping other people to record commentaries, if for nothing else, for someone else to offer their own knowledge and views on Hong Kong films.

The Making of "Battle of the Warriors": This is the same featurette included on other versions of the DVD. Despite a somewhat strange presentation, with narration in Japanese and closed-captioning instead of subtitles, this 50-minute long featurette is actually fairly solid. Unlike a lot of "making of" featurettes, which basically just have the cast and crew of the film talking about how great it was to make, most of the footage here is actually stuff that was captured on the set, and gives a nice look into modern "big budget" film-making In Hong Kong, especially as it deals with the multi-national makeup of the cast and crew.