In what was turning out to be the best DVD transfer yet of The Heroic Trio I was suddenly disappointed to notice a censorship cut when the Dark Master of the underworld (although usually bathed in a bright canary yellow light at his throne!) chops off the fingers of Anthony Wong (the mute, beast-like Kau) when he has been infected by three poison darts. Also the joke is pretty much lost "let's see how long you can stand"...

I have had several versions of this film on DVD and Laserdisc from HK and USA over the years, and this is the first time I recall that bit of SFX being cut and somewhat spoiling the experience of what is so far a great picture quality pure NTSC DVD. Let's hope that the HD Master is not cut, and that a HD-DVD or BluRay will emerge complete - and sooner rather than later!

Supposedly the new HK DVD release makes all the same cuts as the US Miramax release did, leaving the old (out of print?) Tai Seng version as the only uncut DVD.

Great. Boy, am I glad I snagged the Tai Seng DVD way back when!

I was unhappy with the English subtitles on the Tai Seng edition, and in lieu looked again at the original pure NTSC Universal DVD and it has my fave Chinese and English theatrical subs burnt in on the print. This print is also uncut.

Imagine, if you will, fast forwarding to the end of the film when Wonder Woman is sitting at home with her hubby and the newscast on TV is detailing the events of the past few hours and Anita Mui turns to her Police Chief husband Paul Chun and asks where the name 'The Heroic Trio' came from? He replies casually, "It was just an improvisation" - this simple line and its timing on display (and many other instances of basic grammitcal translations and timings, and seemingly basic fun of the language) is lost in every other version I have seen.

The cuts on the latest versions are just unforgiveable.

Er, you mean Damian Lau, don'tcha?

Probably true - I was working backwards off IMDB!