I watched the Celestial DVD of Jimmy Wang Yu's THE CHINESE BOXER last night. I really enjoyed it, even if it unfolds in almost the exact same manner as Wang Yu's later THE ONE ARMED BOXER. Good performances by Wang Yu and Lo Lieh and the last half hour is really good. The disc looks amazing, widescreen with great colors and easy to read subs.

Unfortunately, there is a problem. Celestial has seen fit to add a horrible synthisizer score during parts of the film. It is really bad, sounding like a low end Full Moon soundtrack. It is odd because at other points of the film, the original soundtrack is used (believe me, you can tell the difference). It didn't ruin the film for me at all, but I know some people might want to know this info before purchasing it.

Ugh :( The DVD of THE SPIRITUAL BOXER also suffers from added sound effects that have been very poorly mixed into the original track. I thought that we'd managed to convince Celestial that this practise added no value to their DVDs (quite the opposite), but apparently they've decided to resume it. I wonder if anybody there actually watches/listens to the films they're releasing?

On the bright-ish side, I believe the VCDs for the recent titles thusly afflicted feature original, mono, unaltered soundtracks. Which makes it doubly upsetting that they couldn't at least give us the option on the DVDs :(