BCI Eclipse – the company formerly known as Brentwood – continues to step up in the DVD marketplace with an array of interesting releases, like Sept. 19’s two-disc special edition of SPIRITED KILLER. This Thai martial-arts actioner stars Tony Jaa, following up his out-of-nowhere smash ONG BAK: THE THAI WARRIOR.

If you’ve read the current issue of HITCH, you know how nuts we are for that one, so word of more Jaa – a truly worthy successor to Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li – gets our bloodstream flowing faster. Special features will include a documentary on Jaa and a featurette on Thai action cinema. That’s awesome in any language.

And so is BCI’s new “Ronin Entertainment” division. This brand will focus on films and TV series from Japan licensed directly from studios like Toei and Kadokawa. Initial titles include the legendary Akira Kurosawa’s THE QUIET DUEL on Sept. 5, the story of syphilitic army surgeon.

Less prestigious but by no means less important is the SONNY CHIBA ACTION PACK. Due Aug. 22, this box set collects the assassin manga adaptation GOLGO 13 and two disaster films (VIRUS and BULLET TRAIN), all starring the man we all know and love as THE STREETFIGHTER.

And speaking of, in November, Ronin will unleash Chiba’s SHADOW WARRIORS television series of fighting Shogun. And Sept. 5 brings even more Chiba in SISTER STREET FIGHTER COLLECTION, featuring the uncut, widescreen version of SISTER STREET FIGHTER (our review here), the unofficial fourth film in the STREETFIGHTER franchise.

He’s not to be found in the SISTER sequels HANGING BY A THREAD, RETURN OF SISTER STREET FIGHTER and FIFTH LEVEL FIST, but Sue Shihomi is every bit as ass-kickin’ cool in her own right. Plus, these three flicks have never been released to the states, so I’m positively pumped.

Finally, though having nothing to do with Asian films but everything to do with my childhood, BCI continues bringing out Filmation cartoons with a complete series set of GROOVIE GOOLIES on Oct. 24. I don’t remember a whole lot about them other than the show involved monsters, music and bad jokes (and rotated with several other cartoons), but I’ll be checking it out nonetheless.

Buy them at Amazon.
Discuss it in our forums.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 1:36 pm and is filed under DVD Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.