Shout! Factory / Scream Factory

[Murdoch]

Any of the Shaw Classics sets that come highly recommended? I see a few pages back that Vol. 4 has its fans. I've been making my way through the Shawscope Vol. 2 set and loved the various 36th Chamber of Shaolin films, but am just dipping my toes into all the Shaw Bros' output.

[feihong]

Volume 3 has the most genuinely classic films in one set, to my eyes. Between Killer Clans and Deadly Breaking Sword you have genuinely great films, and Vengeful Beauty, Shaolin Rescuers and Life Gamble are only a tiny step down from that. Soul of the Sword is stylish and fun, too, as is Death Duel. That one is pinnacle to me; varied movies by a lot of different auteurs of the Shaw Bros' stable.

And Volume 4 has a lot of fun and classic films. I think Legend of the Fox is one of Chang Cheh's best late-era pictures, Opium and the Kung-Fu Master is a genuinely compelling drama with good martial arts, and the venoms highlights in House of Traps, Sword Stained with Royal Blood, The Rebel Intruders, and Two Champions of Shaolin are really great, high-quality pictures. Black Lizard is also a fun slight departure for Chor Yuen, a wuxia murder mystery. Chor Yuen also did a better movie just called The Lizard, but that one isn't in this volume. If the Venoms are your jam, Volume 4 is the one for you.

Volume 6 has a couple of standouts: Duel for Gold, Chor Yuen's first film for Shaws, a kind of kung-fu Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Black Tavern and The Young Avenger (Shih Szu swordplay pictures that are lean little thrillers).

Volume 2 has ups and downs. Lady of Steel, Delightful Forest, The Water Margin and Heroes Two are all good, solid films. Brothers Five, The Flying Guillotine, and The Shadow Whip are really slow and boring. None of these is a really great film on the level of Deadly Breaking Sword or Killer Clans.

Volume 5 I would pass on entirely. I don't know a single film on there I like.

[swo17]

I don't know how much of a selling point this is, but close to half the films on both Vols. 7 and 8 are directed by Chor Yuen

[Finch]

As tempting as feihong makes Vol 3 in particular sound, I keep thinking Arrow might release those when Shout's rights expire but that's at least a year or more away still. Are Shout's presentations much of a stepdown compared to Arrow's 2k restorations?

[mfunk9786]

Waiting for these Blaxploitation sets to go down a little bit more... or is this the kind of thing I should worry about going OOP and disappearing if I don't buy them now?

[Finch]

FOMO got me and the prices were just too tempting. Ordered Ti Lung & David Chiang set and SB Classics Vols 3+4 directly from Shout. Between this and the Criterion sale earlier today, this may be the most I've spent in a single day. Telling myself I can always trade those sets in at Orbit if Arrow ever releases those titles in better versions.

[Murdoch]

Feihong also sold me on volume three, appreciate everyone's input. I'm sure I'll be tempted to splurge a bit more given the hefty discounts!

[cdnchris]

Waiting for these Blaxploitation sets to go down a little bit more... or is this the kind of thing I should worry about going OOP and disappearing if I don't buy them now?

Do their sets go out of print quickly? I think I've seen them hang around for a while typically. I don't see that being a concern unless someone else knows different.

Im sort of in the same boat on watching for the price to come down on the second set (I already picked up the first). I held off because I've only seen Foxy Brown and Cotton Comes to Harlem. Not at all familiar with the others, but at the right price I'll bite.

[hearthesilence]

Contrary to rumors elsewhere, Shout Factory is not closing down nor are they quitting physical media.

[Matt]

What a strange little article. It's basically a guy saying "no it isn't" with no quote from a Shout representative, not even an anonymous source. I mean, I believe him—it would make no sense for their new owners to just shut it down—but Shout or Radial Entertainment don't have a PR flack to talk to?

[hearthesilence]

Since it's a trade paper, they probably are well-connected to sources, but it is strange that they don't bother to name anybody - it's a basic tenet of journalism, but we're not exactly living in an era where those tenets have been honored by everyone.

[swo17]

Some other heavy discounts:

A Kind of Loving $9.99 (only 21 copies left in stock at this moment)
Deadly Outlaw Rekka $7.99

Freaky UHD is almost half off at $20.99

And these obscene collector's boxes:

Labyrinth $39.99 (60% off)
Dark Crystal deluxe set $59.99 (almost 70% off the $191 list price--the non-deluxe edition actually costs $20 more)

[Finch]

I think I saw Freaky for even less on Amazon so worth comparing prices for films you want. Even the Darkman steel is down to $19.99 on Amazon.

[feihong]

FOMO got me and the prices were just too tempting. Ordered Ti Lung & David Chiang set and SB Classics Vols 3+4 directly from Shout. Between this and the Criterion sale earlier today, this may be the most I've spent in a single day. Telling myself I can always trade those sets in at Orbit if Arrow ever releases those titles in better versions.

The Ti Lung/David Chiang set is incredibly strong, with pretty much all the Chang Cheh movies you would ever need to see in a lifetime.

Have Sword Will Travel is a wonderful start to the David Chiang/Ti Lung partnership, as rivals who team up against the much sleazier Ku Feng (who also looks young and very fit in this film, super fun to watch), to win the heart of Ti Lung's girlfriend, or of one another. This involves storming a extremely tall, incredibly dark-looking lookout tower full of Ku Feng's goons, level by level. The playing of the two leads is exceptionally adroit here.

The Heroic Ones is a story of the collapse of a clan of tartars. Weirdly, the Shaw Bros stars play the thirteen brothers (along with father Ku Feng) of the tartar clan, whose individual ambitions (especially the personal ambitions of the patriarch) do almost all of them in. Ti Lung has the standout scene here, fighting hundreds of guys while trying to hold together a vicious stomach wound, dying standing upright, staring straight ahead. for some reason David Chiang gets graphically drawn and quartered in this film. The movie ends with a few of the surviving brothers killing their traitorous family vizier and lamenting the way all the young stars of Shaw Bros playing the brothers have died here. It really ends with a bunch of plump old-timers as the only brothers left to make things right. I don't know what the themes here are actually supposed to be, but the film is huge, one of the largest Shaw Bros productions, with enormous setpieces and some of Chang Cheh's most exciting action sequences (especially a wild handheld bit in the middle of the film somewhere). It also features David Chiang beating the breaks off Bolo Yeung, which is always hilarious.

Vengeance! is the indelible classic of this collection, featuring David Chiang splendid in a pristine white suit with a mandarin collar, a look so striking Bruce Lee rips it off immediately for Fists of Fury. Chang Cheh's buried homoeroticism is at its most beguiling and bizarre in a story of an opera performer who rolls into town to get revenge for the death of his bosom buddy, practically a brother, or something more than that, whose memory he keeps graphically reliving as he works his way through the town's corrupt hierarchy to settle the score. Maybe Chiang's best performance, and some of Chang Cheh's most well-crafted scenework, especially in the building of atmosphere, which is something he is exceptionally good at doing, but which he can, especially later on, go a whole movie without bothering to even try. The most striking element of Chang's homoerotic subtext is in this movie, when Chiang is dying at the end, and sees a vision of the woman who loves him, waiting for him––and the vision is supplanted by one of him joking around with his friend he's avenging, doing flips and horseplay together.

Duel of Fists and The Angry Guest are one story, about two brothers separated at birth (David Chiang and Ti Lung), one of whom becomes a Hong-Kong-dwelling architect and kung fu hobbyist, the other one of whom becomes a pro muay thai fighter in Thailand. The first movie is set and partially filmed in Thailand, and features the against-all-odds reunion of the brothers. It's a pretty movie, but also a little rote. The Angry Guest, however, is a bonkers sequel, in which Ti Lung's girlfriend gets kidnapped by ninja, and the two brothers have to go to Japan to fight director Chang Cheh and his amanuensis, Yasuaki Kurata. Chang himself plays the "Japanese" crime kingpin here. Chang so laughingly stereotypes the Japanese characters here (except for Kurata, whom he seems to admire), and there is an extended sequence shot in a car when the heroes arrive in Japan, where the car stops at a traffic light and continues filming uninterrupted as hordes of people cross the street, and then the car drives on. It is the weirdest editing I've ever seen in a movie, since the rest of the picture just blazes along at a fast pace. The fights are better in this second movie, the interplay between the brothers is ever more enjoyable, and the film is funny and really fun.

The Duel is at once a sort of apotheosis of these movies, and a kind of tired end of the formula. It's visually one of the most beautiful of the films, and it features a mysterious antagonism between David Chiang and Ti Lung, playing martial artists whose paths cross again and again once Chiang befriends and treacherously murders Ti Lung's master. By the final duel, the two respect the hell out of each other; Ti Lung, who has lusted to kill Chiang the whole time, now wants to halt the duel, but Chiang knows it has to go on. The fatalism is mawkish and crazy, but that's sort of Chiang's point––the world as it is (in this case, the martial arts coterie) won't accept the love of these two.

All Men are Brothers is a sequel to Chang's The Water Margin, and isn't super coherent without seeing the first movie, or just knowing what happens in these ultra-classic stories. The standout bit of both these Water margin films is the meaty character performances by tons of Shaw Bros regulars, and the incredibly, ear-bleedingly, brain-meltingly funk-ti-fied score from the DeWolfe library. The film ends at a point in the Water Margin tales that does not convey much finality, and offers some really out-of-nowhere last-minute surprises. Not the best in the set, but very distinctively-made.

Blood Brothers is a classic for a reason. David Chang, Chen Kuan-tai and Ti Lung play sworn brothers, who fall out over the way Ti Lung covets Chen Kuan-tai's wife. The film is homoerotic in the extreme, but also a surprisingly gruesome tragedy. Well-made, though the drama moves a little slowly for the modern era. I think we can all take on board the idea of adultery faster than this film is willing to play it.

The Savage Five has a Twilight-Zone-like simplicity of storytelling that I find appealing, as well as another great DeWolfe score. A whole town of pacifists are menaced by a bandit gang, and have to learn to stand together to resist their oppression. Great performances all around, I seem to remember the most sympathetic performances coming from Danny Lee and Wang Chung, actually––though David Chiang is clearly the lead character who has to find courage somewhere and stand up to the brutes.

7-Man Army is a weird one, guest-starring Pai Ying from the King Hu films (he's the general in Touch of Zen, the Eunuch in Dragon Inn, a hero in Fate of Lee Khan and The Valiant Ones, etc.). Huge pageantry in the battle sequences, but the whole film takes place on one set (minus some flashback sequences, I believe). The film is full of chest-thumping patriotism, as the Chinese soldiers battle the Japanese expeditionary force in Manchuria to the death. Four Riders––not included in the set––a war movie with much the same cast set during the Vietnamese war with the United States, is much, much, much more critical and interesting a picture, and has much cleaner, clearer action, to boot.

The Anonymous Heroes and Deadly Duo are fun early teamings of Ti Lung and David Chiang where the chemistry is still really fresh and dynamic.


Probably worth explaining what I think is good about the other films I've recommended, too.


Deadly Breaking Sword is director Sun Chung's masterpiece. Ti Lung is the vainglorious hero getting on in years, a man whose sword gets shorter with every duel, as his schtick is to break off the tip of the sword in his foe as he kills them (a metaphor! In a Shaw Bros movie?). He agrees to a noirish plot to help a courtesan kill an evil doctor in town. Eventually he teems up with Alexander Fu Sheng as a casino security guard who marches to the beat of a different drummer. Sun Chung's style is not at all like that of Chang Cheh or Chor Yuen; he develops characters richly and uses that development to make the story extremely dynamic. There's a Peckinpah-like feel to the rivalries in this film, and it helps that Sun doesn't let any characters get dispatched too easily. Often they'll run away and return later on in the picture, sadder and wiser and more threatening. There's a strong sense in this movie that making a rivalry with anyone is a deadly business, and that the harm martial arts experts do comes back on them as they get older and live longer. It's a thematically rich film, and it has a really strong and different visualization as well. Sun Chung uses the zoom lens way more artfully than Chang Cheh or any of the other Shaw filmmakers except maybe Lau Kar-Leung.

Though I love the Sentimental Swordsman, it has to be said that all of Chor Yuen's best moviemaking, and his best films, come from the early part of his career, before the unending glut of Gu Long adaptations exhausts us and the director. Earlier, the films are much different from one another, more aesthetically adventurous, and more original-feeling. Duel for Gold has a blistering yellow and red color palette, and puts Ivy Ling Po and other actors you wouldn't really expect in this sort of thing through a noir-inflected roundelay of double-and-triple-crosses. The film feels immediate and very tactile (something the later movies will be increasingly abstract about). Killer Clans is a greater film, in spite of the fact that it's an undisguised wuxia remake of The Godfather––it even opens on a celebration scene like the wedding in The Godfather, an extended sequence in which we meet all the film's most important characters. Nonetheless, the adaptation works like a charm, and the film is full of intrigue, sleazy eroticism, fast swordplay action, and a huge cast of Shaws' best performers. One flaw is that the lead actor doesn't seem appropriately edgy in his role as a hired assassin––Danny Lee or Wang Chung, who also appear in this movie, would have been better fits for the role. The lead is Hua Chung, who just isn't quite capable of conveying the character as it's written. But there are so many other standout performances that it hardly matters. The film predates The Magic Blade and Clans of Intrigue, and so it might not seem as fresh to audiences, because those films borrow heavily from what the director achieves on this movie. But it has a fatalism that surpasses the other two films, a kind of sadistic confucian fatalism not many other movies display. Don't mess with the godfather, I guess.

Legend of the Fox, based on a Jin Yong novel, stars a very young Chin Siu-Ho in his first leading role, as well as most of the Venoms actors. Unlike the more hardcore Venoms movies, it's a story of dueling sorcerers fighting with poison, a for once pretty het romantic story (Chang surrendering, I guess to the timbre of the Jin Yong source material). There's good martial arts, the Venoms actors do the acting part of their job better than usual. Visually the film is very satisfying. It's a romantic fantasy adventure, a departure for Chang, but a good one. I don't know if I've ever gushed here about Chin Siu-Ho before, MVP of the original Mr. Vampire, brother of fight-double-extraordinaire/occasional-movie-star Chin Kar-lok. He is amazing in this movie, a great performer of martial arts on film, but also a swift, dynamic actor as at home in sly comedy as he is in more serious roles. To my mind he's a lot more fun and inspired on screen than a lot of his contemporaries, including classic actors in the same vein, like Jet Li (he is Jet's antagonist in both Fist of Legend and Tai Chi Master). And I think he has a lot more charisma than almost any of the kung fu-based lead actors in Hong Kong cinema. For some reason, his career was always a little lower-wattage than his contemporaries. Don't know why. His name now appears to be mud in HK cinema, after a couple of insalubrious scandals swirling around him, but I think he's exceptional in most movies and he should have gone farther. At the very least, all the movies his younger brother starred in would have been better with him in the lead. He was an actor with legitimate range, and some filmmakers––especially Lam Ngai Kai, cast him for his acting skills alone (he is the lead in The Seventh Curse and the crazy Mahjong thriller, Killer's Nocturne). He is in many of the Venoms movies, actually, but he is a huge value-add in this one, in particular.

Vengeful Beauty is one of Ho Meng-Hua's fastest-moving, most dramatically consistent and entertaining films, about a lady avenger, doing kung fu to avenge the death of her husband, all while in the early stages of pregnancy. The film is a spin-off of Ho Meng-Hua's Flying Guillotine movies, and the villains are the Flying Guillotine assassins––making it all the wilder that a pregnant woman fighting with just her fists and feet takes them apart. Ho Meng-Hua films can often move at a plodding pace through unsurprising story beats, but this one is much weirder than most, and directed with an unforeseen flair and intensity.

Shaolin Rescuers has some of the Venoms' best fight scenes and one of the their more suspenseful stories. House of Traps might be their sort of platonic ideal, with various members of the Venoms teaming up to do a heist in the titular house full of deathtraps. Life Gamble, meanwhile is almost like what would happen if Casino Royale was a Venoms kung fu film. Alexander Fu Sheng is very serious as the Bond-like character, and gives a good performance, and the film moves quickly through a lot of gambling and fighting scenarios. Between Shaolin Rescuers, House of Traps, Life Gamble and Legend of the Fox, you have what I think of as the best the Venoms have to offer (though maybe The Daredevils belongs in that group as well).

Lady of Steel is a western-coded wuxia film starring Cheng Pei-Pei as the drifter character. Delightful Forest is somehow Chang Cheh's sequel to the Li Han-Hsiang film which will be made a decade later, Tiger Killer. That's because they're both adapted from part of The Water Margin, just filming different parts of the story as different films, but both somehow star Ti Lung as the same character, the Tiger Killer Wu Sung. In the later movie that is a prequel to this, Ti Lung kills a tiger with his bare hands (mostly just a ridiculous dude in a tiger costume, looks like something out of Monty Python), gets hit on by his sister-in-law, and murders her and her lover when they conspire to kill the Tiger Killer's hunchback brother. Delightful Forest picks up when the Tiger Killer has been arrested for the murder of the sister-in-law and her lover, and chronicles his trip through the forest in stocks, as soldiers take him to be executed for the crime. Suffice to say, this and that happen, and he never makes it to his execution, fighting honorably to defend his jailors and fending off terrible villains out in the forest. If I remember right, he gets recruited from here into the collection of heroes in the manor at the titular water margin (a swamp). Ti Lung also plays this character in Chang Cheh's adaptations The Water margin and All Men Are Brothers––I guess Wu Sung was his specialty. Heroes Two is one of Chang Cheh's better movies about the aftermath of the burning of the Shaolin Temple, with Alexander Fu Sheng playing Fong Sai-Yuk and Chen Kuan-Tai playing Hong Xiguan.

These are really fun movies, but I'm leery of the quality. That and price has kept me from getting the Shout Factory collections. The Arrow discs look exceptional, but I have a lot of these other films on blu ray from Germany already, and I have the hunch that the German transfers are probably very similar to the Shout Factory ones. The German discs look better than the IVL DVDs, but they don't really look like quality blu rays with grain and depth and stuff. Honestly, at around half-price the Shout Factory discs are still too expensive to me. But maybe they look good? I dunno. The films are worth seeing, certainly.

[Peacock]

I now own all but one of the Shout Shaw box sets although I haven’t got round to watching any yet. But in terms of quality folks on Blu-ray.com say these sets are basically the Celestial masters left untouched - including frame cuts and some DNR. Arrow is the outlier here, restoring some of their acquisitions themselves to bypass the Celestial masters, albeit for cost reasons they haven’t done this for all.

[andyli]

Yes. Arrow’s 2K restoration is even better than Celestial’s 4K. I guess that’s the main reason they go all 2K on this new set.

[Finch]

I agree that even at half price those sets were still not a great deal considering you can get 2k restorations of other titles from the catalogue for the same sale price from Arrow with better subs and two, three extra movies, too, but I've wanted to see so many of those films and who knows how soon Arrow gets to them. Vol 5 might be another non-wuxia/non-martial arts set. Hopefully they'll come along though. In the meantime, those sets will do me fine.

[swo17]

Yeah, the Shout sets aren't up to Arrow's quality level. The real appeal is that virtually none of the films have been duplicated by other boutique labels

[JFlu25]

Yeah, the Shout sets aren't up to Arrow's quality level. The real appeal is that virtually none of the films have been duplicated by other boutique labels

This is something I’ve heard in other film communities, but I’ve never really seen a concrete set of reasons put down: Why is Arrow superior to them? Just in terms of overall quality, presentation, or extras/supplements? I only have a few things from Shout, just a few Carpenter films, and everything else from other labels.

[dwk]

This discussion is about the Shaw stuff. The Arrow sets have better special features and, more importantly, after the first volume, Arrow started to do their own restorations. Shout's Shaw sets use the mediocre masters provided by Celestial.

[mfunk9786]

Contrary to rumors elsewhere, Shout Factory is not closing down nor are they quitting physical media.

Yeah, I had heard this and taken it at face value, hence the OOP question. This is nice news to hear. If those Blaxploitation sets get as low as $80 though, I might have to relent.

[Orlac]

All Men are Brothers is a sequel to Chang's The Water Margin, and isn't super coherent without seeing the first movie, or just knowing what happens in these ultra-classic stories. The standout bit of both these Water margin films is the meaty character performances by tons of Shaw Bros regulars, and the incredibly, ear-bleedingly, brain-meltingly funk-ti-fied score from the DeWolfe library. The film ends at a point in the Water Margin tales that does not convey much finality, and offers some really out-of-nowhere last-minute surprises. Not the best in the set, but very distinctively-made.

I don't think Shaws was using De Wolfe at this time. The score for The Water Margin is mostly "Salisbury" by Uriah Heep - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zau-okp ... rt_radio=1 - though I have no idea where that "Chikka-Chikka-CHA!" sting they keep playing everytime David Chiang does anything comes from!

[feihong]

All Men are Brothers is a sequel to Chang's The Water Margin, and isn't super coherent without seeing the first movie, or just knowing what happens in these ultra-classic stories. The standout bit of both these Water margin films is the meaty character performances by tons of Shaw Bros regulars, and the incredibly, ear-bleedingly, brain-meltingly funk-ti-fied score from the DeWolfe library. The film ends at a point in the Water Margin tales that does not convey much finality, and offers some really out-of-nowhere last-minute surprises. Not the best in the set, but very distinctively-made.

I don't think Shaws was using De Wolfe at this time. The score for The Water Margin is mostly "Salisbury" by Uriah Heep - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zau-okp ... rt_radio=1 - though I have no idea where that "Chikka-Chikka-CHA!" sting they keep playing everytime David Chiang does anything comes from!

News to me. That's pretty cool! When I think about it, I do recall some other music sources, as well. Swordsman and Enchantress borrows the score to Robin & Marian, and a couple of the Venoms movies used the score from Seijun Suzuki's Naked Age.

[What A Disgrace]

For what it's worth, Bells of Death (from the first Shaw box, If I'm not mistaken) was released by Eureka. I'm surprised their many Shaw releases don't have more crossover with the hundred-and-more titles released in Shout's series, though I suppose it mostly has to do with Eureka trying to be multi-region now.

[dwk]

Diabolik DVD posted that they only received 1/4 of their order of the Hard Boiled UHD with no eta when they will get the rest of their copies.