Zaku-sensei - 2012-08-19
I remember when I caught five minutes of this on Showcase in the mid 90s, back when that channel still played great movies at times you could actually watch them. I was mesmerized and wanted to see the whole thing, so I rented it from Blockbuster video. BIG MISTAKE, the copy they carried had several hundred micro-edits to the action scenes where they would remove a couple seconds of the violence at a time without completely removing the event, You could tell who fired the shots and who got hit, but the bullet impacts were lessened and the blood spray was almost all gone, and each time you could notice the cuts, so this made the whole film seem very poorly edited. terrible way to view the movie. Turns out Blockbuster Video had a reputation for forcing video distribution companies to edit down the violence in movies they carried so they could bolster up their family friendly image. Similarly the copy of John Woo's Hard Boiled I rented from another video store had been poorly dubbed and had the gamma set way too bright, so I disliked John Woo's two best films until I re-watched them years later in better formats, now they are among my favorite action films of all time.
TLDR = I'm glad video rental stores are dying out.
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