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Quentin could barely contain himself.

I would've guessed that the director of Kill Bill had watched Shaw Brothers martial-arts picture King Boxer (a personal favorite, aka Five Fingers of Death aka Tian Xia Di Yi Quan, 1972) several dozen times — probably more. Yet when I sat down in May with Tarantino and broadcaster Elvis Mitchell in a recording studio two blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard, QT's visceral responses seemed completely fresh. You would have sworn he was reacting to the movie's jack-in-the-box kung fu staging and startling ultra-violence for the first time. The commentary track we recorded that day, for the Weinstein Company's brand new Dragon Dynasty DVD, is punctuated with his shouts of pleasure.

It may be impolitic of me to say so, since I worked on a couple of them (the other is The One-Armed Swordsman), but it's hard to shrug off the feeling that the first four state-of-the-art Shaw Brothers releases, in what promises to be a matched set of 50 on the Dragon Dynasty label, marks the beginning of a new era for the way the West regards Chinese martial-arts movies. Now no longer can they be dismissed as trash-fish movies that deserve nothing better than laughable dubbing and grainy "full frame" video presentations. In fact, if you listen to the track recorded by Wu Tang Clan rapper the RZA and Los Angeles CityBeat film critic Andy Klein for the Dragon Dynasty edition of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, you will catch a glimpse of a life transformed and given shape and purpose by one of the very best of these films. If that doesn't convince you that there's more here than ever met your eyes and ears in the previous crappy video versions, nothing will.

King Boxer

Working on the King Boxer track brought my own orientation toward Asian Pop Cinema into sharper focus. When in 1973 that film became the first in the genre to be released outside the Chinatown circuit in the U.S., as Five Fingers of Death, touching off the so-called Kung Fu Craze, I was not on board — though my co-commentators were, Mitchell watching them avidly in inner city Detroit, Tarantino in the vast suburban tracts of South Bay Los Angeles. When I finally caught up with this and other films of the Craze era in the mid-1980s, it was as the subject of film-critical research: I was tracking back from the John Woo and Tsui Hark movies I had fallen in love with, trying to find the source-of-the-Nile for the conventions of Hong Kong action cinema. I've since learned that one has to track back a good deal further, to prototype swordplay novels hundreds of years old. But I'm saving that bit for my doctoral dissertation.