Want to Make Sure You're Not Getting Stuck With a Crappy Bootleg of House of Flying Daggers? Here's

I did some digging yesterday on the multiple DVD editions of House of Flying Daggers due out this month and here's what I've turned up:

As near as I can tell the cheap Zoke edition is a bootleg. It's listed as having burned in subtitles, which is a dead giveaway. It's also being manufactured in Hong Kong, where the official rights holder is Edko - another dead giveaway. Thus, the Zoke edition will most likely be fairly low quality and one to avoid.

Then there's the Chinese mainland edition which doesn't include subtitles of any sort. This one is not widely available outside the mainland so it's not much of an issue.

Then there's the Edko release, which will be the high quality, official edition. It's 16:9 anamorphic with removable subs and 5.1 audio. I've also seen three different release dates given for it so far - Oct 15th, 18th and 20th.

How to tell which edition you're getting? Luckily enough the covers are significantly different from each other so it's not too difficult. The Edko cover is the one attached to this article. Note the color of the Chinese character. The Zoke cover is here. The key difference is that the Chinese glyph is red on the Zoke version, and there's also an additional row of lettering on this one. So: white writing good, red writing bad. If you're one of those who jumped on the chance to order through YesAsia you can rest assured that you're getting the Edko release. They don't stock boots, which rules Zoke out, and a look at their cover image confirms that they're stocking the white lettered Edko release.