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Dom Robinson reviews
- Cat.no: DV 1016
- Cert: 15
- Running time: 91 minutes
- Year: 1993
- Pressing: 2000
- Region(s): 2 (UK PAL)
- Chapters: 14 plus extras
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Dolby Surround)
- Languages: English
- Subtitles: None
- Fullscreen: 4:3
- 16:9-enhanced: No
- Macrovision: No
- Disc Format: DVD 5
- Price: £19.99
- Extras : Scene index, Selected Filmography, Photo Gallery
Director:
- Toby Russell
Writer/Producer:
- George Tan
Death By Misadventure,subtitled, “The Curse of the Dragon”, is a documentary about thelate Bruce Lee who died on July 20th, 1973 in Hong Kong at the age of 32from a brain edema and the coroner registered the verdict as “DeathBy Misadventure”.
He was considered to be the king of martial arts films with hits such asGame Of Death, The Big Boss and Enter The Dragon, althoughhe made his debut as a child movie star in a number of films from the ageof eight that I couldn’t hope to translate into English, as well as theTV series The Green Hornet.
This feature also includes comments and chat from his martial arts teacher,his doctor, plus students who dish the dirt on how Bruce revelead martialarts secrets to the western world.
Finally, one chapter is reserved for his son Brandon Lee who was justgetting into his stride when he kicked the bucket on the last day in March1993 at the age of just 28 following an accident on the set ofThe Crow in a scenewhen he put a gun to his head that was meant to contain just blanks…
The interview with Brandon on this disc was taken from ITV’s Little PictureShow, an excellent late-night video review show hosted by MariellaFrostrup when it originated as Video View, but which began to falterafter doubling its length to an hour and changing its name and then completelyfell apart after La Frostrup jumped ship and it was taken over by Radio 1’sanswer to a question no-one asked, Wendy Lloyd.
The picture quality is, quite frankly, appalling, although it’s not M.I.A.’sfault as this isn’t down to the quality of the disc’s encoding which is fine,but the source quality. Interviews are shot with camcorders set permanentlyon soft-focus, bar the Brandon Lee interview which fares a bit better,while pan-and-scanned film clips are equally bobbins.
Presented in mostly a fullscreen 4:3 ratio, the average bitrate is arespectable 8.5Mb/s.
The sound is Dolby Digital 2.0 which normally translates to Dolby Surround,but you’d be hard pushed to find much to excite your speakers here as it’sall interviews and muffled clips from films so may as well be mono.
Extras : Chapters :
Only 14 chapters during the 91-minute feature, although it separatesit into the same number of individual topics which is fair enough.
Languages & Subtitles :English language, but no subtitles. And there’s more… :The Bruce & Brandon Photo Gallery sounds impressive but it’s twopages featuring a total of ten small pictures of varying quality and there’snot a great deal of Brandon in there either (I think I saw him twice).The Selected Filmography only lists a small handful of films thatBruce Lee appeared in. You can do a lot better by visitingThe Internet Movie Database. Menu :Very basic, silent and static, with a picture of Bruce in his famous EnterThe Dragon pose.
Overall :I wouldn’t recommend this as an instant purchase unless you’re a die-hardBruce Lee fan and must own everything of his on the digital format. If youcan find this on rental first, then try before you buy as the picture andsound quality leave much to be desired.FILM : ***PICTURE QUALITY : *SOUND QUALITY: *EXTRAS: ½——————————-OVERALL: *½
Also see my review forCinema of Vengeance.Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.