| This technical review makes reference to screen shots, which are available at the time of this writing at www.sogood.tk.
I bought this movie as part of the Visible Secret 1 & 2 Collector's Edition which is packaged in a round tin. With it you get the same Megastar discs (sans cover art sadly) that are available separately, four Visible Secret II postcards, four film frames from the banned subway scenes (more on that below) and a nice creepy 3-D hologram of the female ghost seen in the banned scenes. That is also supposed to be assembled to create a mini-fan but I let it stay on the tin cover, looks better on the shelf.
The 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer looks very good and the washed out bleak colors seems accurately presented. Very little damage is present and some grain in the beginning parts of the film is the only complaint I have.
The Cantonese Dolby Digital 5.1 track also puts you nicely in the movie. It wasn't as spread out at the front as I would've liked but is still effective overall. Surrounds are used a little too much at times though. A mandarin 5.1 is also included.
The English subtitles are good but comes with more than a few errors than expected for a recent movie. Traditional and simplified Chinese subtitles are also included.
We find a few extras on this release starting with The making of Visible Secret which lasts for 14 minutes and 24 seconds. This piece only provides permanent Chinese subtitles and is therefore no good in terms of info for us English speakers. There's some nice behind the scenes footage but that is spoiled by the annoying ghost trail effect the makers has decided to shoot this making of with. Also in the extras section is the normal plot synopsis and cast & crew listings (with short biographies of Ann Hui, Eason Chan, Shu Qi and Sam Lee).
Now for the interesting extras. As part of the poster campaign (as seen on the cover art above) Media Asia had a female ghost (played by Jo Kuk) riding on a subway train amongst normal passengers. This got some extra publicity when Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway thought the poster might scare riders Therefore the posters were removed as well as the corresponding scene in the movie. However shots of it are still in both the teaser and theatrical trailer on the disc as seen below:
(from the Teaser and Theatrical trailer respectively)
The four film frames included in the tin shows a different shot not seen in the trailers so that makes for a nice collector's item. Lastly a 94 page comic version of the film is included and that is of good use to see where the banned scenes would fit in the film. |