Deltamac or Megastar version of Police Story 3/Supercop? (1 Viewer)

[Dave F]

Which is the preferred version of Supercop/Police Story 3? I found listings on eBay for versions by Deltamac and Megastar. The only Megastar listing was region 0, so am I correct in assuming that was a bootleg? There were r3 and r0 listings for the Deltamac release.

Is either release worth getting? Or is there a better release on the horizon?

Thanks,
Dave

 

[Chris_Morris]

Being on eBay is what would make it a boot. There is a legit R0 Megastar out there though. I didn't see anything about the Deltamac release, but here is a review from www.asiandvdguide.com on the Megastar:

A little over a year and a half ago, I bought the Mega Star release of "Super Cop" from Five Star Laser. Not too long after that I sold it. Mostly it was because the film played terribly on my old Panasonic A-110. Now that I've bought it again, I can recount some of the other reasons I got rid of it the first time.

The transfer is from a clean-looking film print, but the mastering job is terrible. First of all, it's quite obviously a PAL transfer, and suffers from extreme blurriness of motion. This is especially noticeable because of the compression job done on this disc, which is simply awful. The bitrate hovers between 1 (!) and 5 Mbps, even during action scenes, causing very noticeable posterization of colors and obvious pixelization (especially in darkened scenes). The color appears to be quite washed out, and balanced a little too far towards the red end of the spectrum.

The subtitles are large and mis-timed, as seems typical for early Mega Star releases. It's not just a case of them being timed with the Mandarin; they seem to run a second or two behind either audio soundtrack. On the plus side, they're not terribly hard to decipher, meaning-wise, although it helps if you've seen the English version before (as a non-Chinese speaker).

I'm not sad I picked it up again; I've always been a fan of this film and no longer suffer from the idea that one can't own two versions of the same film. However, until someone does a remaster of this movie, I'd still pick the Buena Vista dub job (and I -hate- dubs) for a workout of the Home Theater.

virelai

dddhouse is currently out of the Deltamac, but they have the Megastar version in stock for $40HK (~$5.25US). And no fear of boots either.


Chris