Flagrantly and with full intention violating my own arbitrary rule against watching R-rated movies for our Film After 11 podcast (at least knowingly so), I decided to introduce one of my sons to John Woo’s blood-soaked action masterpiece The Killer this week. Without spoiling anything, it’s safe to say the kid was an instant fan. I knew he would be. This movie is awesome, as I’ve written about it previously. Is it inappropriate for a 12-year-old? Well, he didn’t think so.
Should I pull back and do our usual PG and PG-13 content next time, or just give up and go full-bore into R-rated territory? Horror season is coming up, after all. Perhaps we should jump straight into Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
| Title: | The Killer (a.k.a. 喋血雙雄) |
| Year of Release: | 1989 |
| Director: | John Woo |
| Watched On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Blu-ray Fubo Kanopy Pluto TV Shout! TV |
Some Home Video Background Context for The Killer
For far too many years, movies from the Hong Kong film industry were treated very poorly by the studios and companies that owned them, especially on home video, and even more so on copies distributed in the American market. Back in 1995, news that the Criterion Collection had licensed The Killer for release on the premium Laserdisc video format was greeted with much excitement. Featuring an “exclusive new digital film-to-tape transfer approved by director John Woo” stated to be made from “a 35mm color composite optical release print” provided by the original distributor in Hong Kong, that disc was indeed the best available home video release of the movie at that time. However, the source print wasn’t in great shape and the film-to-tape transfer had a number of flaws, even beyond the obvious fact that it was created in standard-definition resolution.
Criterion ported that transfer over to DVD in 1998, but only in non-anamorphic letterbox format, as that was all the film-to-tape master offered. Even in the early days of DVD, that was a tremendous disappointment.
The film changed hands a few times afterward until released on Blu-ray in 2010 by Vivendi Entertainment under the Dragon Dynasty sub-label. Better than Criterion’s Laserdisc or DVD only by virtue of having been created in high-definition, the Blu-ray was basically a smeary and dull mess poorly converted from a 1080i/50Hz European TV broadcast master. Frankly, it sucked.
Until recently, the best (and I use that word with great reservation) home video copy of the film was a so-called “fan restoration” by the now-defunct bootleg label Hong Kong Rescue. I told the frustrating story of that release in my Blu-ray review of the disc. Essentially, HKR tried to fix problems from official home video editions by combining parts of multiple sources (some Blu-ray, some DVD or Laserdisc, even some VHS) and cleaning them up with digital tools. Results on that were mixed, limited by the fact that its starting point had to be the Dragon Dynasty Blu-ray.
Fast forward more than another decade, the current rights-holders in Asia have finally made a big push to restore their film catalogs in better quality and license them out for distribution around the world. In English speaking territories, new releases of The Killer came to both Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in late 2025 from Shout! Factory in the United States, and in early 2026 from Arrow Video in the UK.
The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Both the Shout! Factory and Arrow releases are said to derive from the same underlying 4K film scan of the original camera negative, with some color grading differences by each label. Arrow’s Limited Edition sold out extremely quickly and I was unable to grab a copy, but I do have the Shout! Factory “Hong Kong Cinema Classics” release. Some fans with both have claimed a preference for Arrow’s color grading, but from screenshot examples I’ve found online, the differences don’t appear to be too drastic.
Reviews generally state that Arrow’s color grading has a slightly warmer, more reddish hue while Shout! Factory leans a little cooler and bluer. As I said, I don’t have the Arrow disc myself, but when compared to the older Vivendi/Dragon Dynasty Blu-ray, Shout! Factory has a significant color temperature difference in some scenes, indeed pushing much more blue.
(Because I don’t have the ability to take 4K screenshots, all comparisons here are made with the Blu-ray copies. Click the links in the captions to expand to full size. Also note that none of these are screenshots from the Arrow release, which I don’t own.)
The Shout! Factory disc appears more similar to the Hong Kong Rescue fan restoration, which was supposedly graded using the John Woo-approved Laserdisc as a color reference.
From what I can tell (which is, again, second-hand), Arrow looks to split the difference and is warmer than Shout! Factory but not nearly as murky in dark scenes as the Dragon Dynasty transfer.
None of this should read that the Shout! Factory disc has no red or is blue throughout. Most scenes have very natural-looking color, and red is still used stylistically quite frequently. If not for all the chatter online, I’d see no reason to complain about color at all. Given that an alternative exists, an argument can be made in favor of Arrow’s grading, but colors on the Shout! Factory disc look perfectly fine on their own. Whether one disc is actually more faithful to the original intentions of John Woo or his two cinematographers back in 1989, I’m in no position to judge.
In other respects, the Shout! Factory 4K disc is an immense upgrade from prior home video editions. Although the photography in The Killer has always looked rather soft, detail is much improved over any other copy I’ve seen, enough so to expose a thin hair growing out of actor Danny Lee’s chin that comes and goes from scene to scene. (The movie’s scenes having been shot out of sequence, he must have plucked it at some point during production.)
What the 1.85:1 image doesn’t have is much sense of HDR, beyond slightly improved detail in highlights that were clipped on other Blu-rays. Again, the Arrow version is supposedly a little more vibrant in that respect. Still, considering the movie’s very troubled history on home video, I can hardly believe it looks this good now.
Another major difference between Shout! Factory and Arrow is that the Shout! disc only includes the movie’s original mono soundtrack, in a choice of Cantonese or an English dub, both encoded in DTS-HD Master Audio format. Meanwhile, Arrow also adds a new Dolby Atmos remix. Personally, I’m not a fan of mono-to-Atmos remixes, and I have several from Arrow that I just plain don’t like at all (such as The Warriors and Conan the Barbarian off the top of my head). I’m inclined to stick with mono in any case, specifically the Cantonese mono.
That said, due to production limitations when it was made, The Killer has never had a great soundtrack. Despite being authored at a loud default volume, the track’s musical score is scratchy and sound effects are typically thin. That’s a particular disappointment for gunfire. On the other hand, I think I’d be very annoyed if those sounds were replaced with library gunshot effects for the remix. All things considered, this sounds more robust than the wimpy Dragon Dynasty Blu-ray. From what I have on hand, it’s most similar to the Criterion Laserdisc PCM mono (stolen for use on the Hong Kong Rescue Blu-ray.) It’ll do.
As was usually the case for Hong Kong cinema of the era, all dialogue was recorded in ADR later and is often way out of sync with the actors’ faces. That’s just the way these movies were made.
The disc packaging boasts of, “Optional English subtitles newly translated for this release.” Those subtitles are adequate enough to follow the story and dialogue, but suffer a number of typos and/or weird translation choices. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they turn out to have been translated by A.I.
Weirdly, when I ripped the disc to my computer, I was able to access a captioning track with what seems to be an older translation. Likely prepared for the deaf and hard of hearing, it also describes sound effects and music cues. The dialogue may be preferable in some scenes, but is crudely simplified most of the time and even renames the main character Ah Jong to “Jeff.”
When watching the disc in my regular 4K UHD player, I’m not able to access this track at all! Neither the disc menus nor my player’s own audio controls have any option for it.
The Shout! Factory 4K edition contains only the film’s 111-minute theatrical cut. Arrow of course has the same, but additionally includes an alternate Taiwanese 136-minute extended cut as a bonus feature on a Blu-ray disc. That Taiwanese cut was also found on the Hong Kong Rescue Blu-ray. In my opinion, the added length is mostly a lot of padding and filler, and feels like an unrefined rough cut. Director John Woo is on record that the theatrical cut is his preferred final cut. The Taiwanese version is more a curiosity for fans.
Extras from Shout! Factory start with three audio commentaries, one by a guy who used to work for me and has apparently moved on to better things (congrats, Drew). Another is an archival track from the Criterion Collection. The rest of the items are found on a dedicated bonus disc:
- A documentary about John Woo
- New interviews with Woo, producer Terence Chang, and editor David Wu
- A featurette hosted by author Grady Hendrix, co-founder of the New York Asian Film Festival
- Deleted and extended scenes
- Trailer
- Image gallery.
The movie keepcase is stored inside a slipcover box that also comes with a booklet with several essays about the film.
Related
- The Killer
- John Woo
- Other Awesome Movies of 1989
Note: Screenshots on this page were taken from Blu-ray editions of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.
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