Lion's Gate Quietly Releasing MUAY THAI FIGHTER and THE STORM WARRIORS on DVD

Somehow this information got past me.  Lion's Gate Films have picked up several somewhat high profile martial arts titles and are dumping them to DVD with little to no fanfare.  I stumbled across a few of them today. 

The first is the little seen but much admired Thai action-drama film, Muay Thai Chaiya, retitled Muay Thai Fighter for simplicity's sake.  This is one of the best Muay Thai focused films that Thailand has put out in these last few years.  It may not have the ridiculous stunts of an Ong Bak or Chocolate, but it has a much more engaging plot and better characters than anything else to come out of that country in a while.  I saw it first at the Asian Film Festival of Dallas several years back, and here at ScreenAnarchy we've given in great reviews a couple of times.  That one is set to release on April 12th in a DVD only release.

The second is the Pang Brothers super CG sequel, The Storm Warriors.  The film came out to mixed reviews a couple of years ago, and was never heard from in the USA.  We've reviewed the film and found it to be, "definitely not a masterpiece, but taking it at face value, it's an almost perfect piece of entertainment featuring some stunning art direction".  Sometimes that's all it takes.  I'd been holding off on buying an import with the thought that surely such big name directors and a big budget project would see a Blu-ray release here, but apparently I was wrong.  The Storm Warriors will be released next week, February 15th on DVD only.

Oh, and in case you missed it, Wu Jing's directorial debut Legendary Assassin was also released through Lion's Gate on December 28th.  I know I missed it...

Lion's Gate doesn't seem like they actually have any intention of trying to sell these titles, a shame, really.