The Bootleg Report - Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Hard Target



A big part of Dragon*Con is trawling the dealer’s room for bootleg DVDs. I'll cover some of them here.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 – In Japan Kill Bill Vol. 1 was released in an alternate version that has a bit more footage in a few places, but most importantly has the House of Blue Leaves fight scene in color. That fight switching to black and white was a ploy by Tarantino to allow him to show people getting in half by a samurai sword but still keep an R-rating, and a clever ploy at that, but the scene plays much better when it isn’t interrupted. That would have almost made this DVD my preferred way of watching the film, but it’s a direct rip of the Japanese release, and therefore the subtitles options don’t really work for English language viewing. You can watch it with English subtitles on or off, but there is no way to subtitle just the Japanese language. Either the subtitles are on all the time, or you make the effort to turn them on when and off during the feature.



Hard Target - John Woo's first American film has a variant 116 minute "director's cut" that hasn't been released anywhere; I reviewed it here. Even though this DVD is labeled "Extended Director's Cut" it is in fact the international version from Japanese laser disc. The only difference in the international version is a bit more violence, especially in the final fight in the warehouse. Because it's a from Japanese LD there are burned-in Japanese subtitles. While it's somewhat nice to have the international cut (the editing is more fluid, and I finally found out how you write, "Good whiskey make jackrabbit slap de bear!" in Japanese), I really would have liked the director's cut, which I only owned as a crappy VHS tape. If you don't want to get fooled like I did on this one just ask your friendly bootlegger to show you the print. If it's got Japanese subtitles, you know it isn't really the director's cut.

Posted: Thu - September 8, 2005 at      

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