The final flip-through, and Daniel (@dungeondive) saves several of his strongest opinions for it. Infernal Affairs, he argues, is flatly better than The Departed, and he suspects the remake only existed because American audiences still resisted Asian leading men. Bio Zombie is his favourite zombie comedy from any country, better than Shaun of the Dead, and the only film he knows where a Game Boy Camera is used to peek around corners. Patrick Tam’s The Sword, one of the few wuxia films of the Hong Kong New Wave, sits in his all-time top ten and gets the loudest plea of the series to track it down.
There is a confession too: he owns no Bruce Lee films, only a pack of Bruceploitation knockoffs, and finds the real thing a little boring despite respecting the man. The oddities are the fun of this episode: Legend of the Sacred Stone, a wuxia epic performed entirely by marionettes and bought at Seattle’s Scarecrow Video; Yellow River Fighter, a film he loves saddled with the worst dub he has heard; an early John Woo directing a young Jackie Chan in Hand of Death; and a Sonny Chiba box bought solely because it held Ninja Wars, the tape he rented endlessly from the store near his grandmother’s house. Kung Fu Zombie closes the collection.
Daniel says Infernal Affairs beats The Departed on every count. Which remake do you think missed the point of its original?