THE NEW GAME OF DEATH is the first Bruce Li movie to see any kind of decent DVD release courtesy of the Shaw Brothers collection from IVL Hong Kong. Remastered widescreen video and audio with original Chinese language and English subtitles, Bruce Li has never looked better. Since I had neglected the website for so long, I decided I should try and get this DVD to review for the website. I'm too lazy and cheap to order a copy online, so I headed to Chinatown to look for a copy of it.

There are three video stores in Chinatown, two them in the same mall and literally 15 feet from each other. Antoher thing about looking for movies in Chinatown is that you cannot find a legimate DVD release to save your life, everything is bootleg. There used to be a cool shop in Chinatown called Hong Sing that sold actual legitimate releases, but they were forced to close because everyone was buying the bootleg stuff. I miss that store as they would order stuff for me and had replacement cases for DVDs and CDs, like every style ever made! I haven't really buying many movies in Chinatown because of the whole bootleg thing, but once in a while I'll cave in and buy something. THE NEW GAME OF DEATH isn't Bruce Li's best movie, so I didn't really care if I had a bootleg of it anyway. The bootelgs from Chinatown will usually just have the movie, menus, dialogue, and subtitles from the original Mei Ah disc (for example) and just strip the extras off it. They will even use the exact same cover art as the original disc they copied it from, except instead of sleeve art, it's a cardboard slip cover which goes over a plain black case. After arriving in Chinatown and browsing in a couple toy stores I went to the video store I usually check out called Super Video & Music. I checked out their IVL Shaw Bros. section looking for the following cover...

I didn't see it in the Shaw Bros section and thought maybe they hadn't gotten it yet, so decided to check out the other movies. They had a small section of Bruce Lee movies where I spotted a DVD with the title "The New Game of Death" on it. The cover looked super sketchy. I mean all this time I was spelling "rated" with a "d" instead of a "b". Man, do I feel stupid. It is truce Bruceploitation as they have a big picture of Bruce Lee on the cover, Bruce Li is nowhere to be found.

More Bruce Lee and Game of Death on the back of the box. After glancing through the movie description on the back of the box my first thought was, "WTF?!!" I'll guess I'll chalk the confusing movie synopsis (or "Plot epitome" as they call it) as something "lost in translation". Read it for yourself and see if you can make any sense of it.

See I told you! I couldn't make that up even if I drank an entire bottle of cough syrup then fell down a flight of stairs and bumped my head. Reading the specs on the box it says the sound is DTS, when the IVL disc only has mono sound. Also, languages on the disc are Cantonese and Mandarin, when the IVL disc only has Mandarin on it. The running time is listed as 98 minutes when the IVL disc notes it at 86 mintues. So despite all the blatant warning signs of getting a piece of crap I went ahead and forked over my $6 for THE NEW GAME OF DEATH bootleg DVD.

Upon getting home, I opened it up and stuck it in the DVD player, then it even didn't work! The DVD player wouldn't even read the damn thing, and it wouldn't work in my computer either. What a shock I know, I mean a bootleg DVD of poor quality and it doesn't even work? Doesn't anybody take pride in the their work anymore and put out quality merchandise they can be proud of? A few days later I went back and exhanged it for a new copy. I went home and put it straight in the DVD, then it didn't work...AGAIN! Going downtown is a bit of pain as it's not something I can just do whenever I feel like it, and I was too bummed out to even return it...AGAIN! In the end I paid $6.

This was originally supposed to be DVD review of IVL's THE NEW GAME OF DEATH DVD, but it didn't quite work out that way. I guess it's more a lesson to me (and maybe you?) to not buy bootleg DVDs and buy the legitimate versions, like that will ever happen. I guess I'm just lucky that I didn't buy the "DRUCE LEE COLLECTION" which was right beside it.