Man Wanted DVD
     Tai Seng usually does a good job of translating and re-releasing Hong Kong films with clear legible subtitles; unfortunately, the same cannot always be said of their transfers. The problems occur right from the start, as the title screen has to be scrolled up to fit the English ‘Man Wanted’ lettering into the frame. Tai Seng’s video release of Man Wanted was dark and oversaturated, so I expected at least that level of quality for the DVD. Surprisingly the DVD is in some ways worse than the VHS. The picture is dull and totally lacks sharpness, and colors, especially darks and red values, tend to bleed a lot. There’s also visible artifacting throughout.
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   Tai Seng has also chosen a different font from the VHS for its optional white subtitles, which isn’t too important, but for some reason they have raised up the text more, rather than near the bottom as they should be, obscuring the image. During close-ups, this can even have writing going directly over the faces of characters, which is pretty distracting.
The sound is kind of flat, but not terrible. Close, though.
     The packaging- again, different, and worse, then the video tape. Their self-produced tag line, “If you’re an undercover cop, you go deep… or get DEAD” isn’t even clearly distinguishable from the background. Very cheap looking.
     The DVD has a nice animated main menu with a portion of the film’s music score, a very dreamy montage of the Hong Kong streets at night. You’ll have to manually select the menu, however, because the disc skips straight to the movie, (rather than defaulting to the menu) as soon as you put it in. The rest of the menu pages are very poor looking.
Language options are Cantonese, Mandarin and an English track, which is fun to switch over to just to see how much an English dub ruins a HK film.
There are bios and filmographies for Simon Yam, Benny Chan, Christy Chung, and Yu Rong-Guong.
   16 titled scene selections spread out over 4 pages are offered. Example: “Brother Feng’s Birthday”, “No Way Out”, “Back From the Dead”, “The Sky of Mongkok”, etc. You can also skip directly to the end credits.
     Then there’s the god-awful Tai Seng trailers for their other releases- Bride with White Hair, Bride with White Hair II, The Untold Story, Organized Crime & Triad Bureau, "Shaolin Classic Series", and Man Wanted itself. Try not to cringe too much if you watch these.
Summary: An insulting presentation of a great film.
Man Wanted review / synopsis
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