The Street Fighter Collection [Blu-ray]

This comes with a great packaging and an alternate cover on the blu ray box the movies themselves are restored great it’s a total grindhouse extravaganza! Sonny Chiba is one bad arse fighter!

Shout Factory as part of their Shout Select line brings the legendary Sonny Chiba films "The Street Fighter" (1974), "Return of the Street Fighter" (1974), and "The Street Fighter's Last Revenge" (1974) together in an excellent and long overdue blu-ray set that will make fans very happy. The original film was a surprise worldwide hit which spawned two quickly assembled sequels. It also initiated a spinoff series beginning with "Sister Street Fighter" in which Sonny Chiba appeared in that spawned three sequels. (Arrow Video has put out an excellent blu-ray collection of all four "Sister Street Fighter" films by the way.) "The Street Fighter" is notable for being the first film to garner an X rating in the U.S. purely for violence. The sequels while not as good still have their moments and are enjoyable in their own right. For years this series languished in poor DVD releases of dubious quality and it seemed that we might not ever get restored blu-ray releases of the films. Thankfully Shout Factory has come to the rescue with this three disc collection which presents the films in style.Each film is gets its own dual layer disc in their original 2.35:1 aspect ratios utilizing the AVC codec featuring average bit rates of 33 to 35 mbps. A disclaimer at the start of both "The Street Fighter" and "Return of the Street Fighter" states that Shout Factory's transfers "comes from two sources; a new 2K scan of the color reversal internegative of the shorter English language cut and an earlier HD master of the Japanese cut." They then add that they matched the color for both sources for a balanced presentation. Both films look positively stunning and it is truly like seeing them again for the first time. These are the unrated and uncut versions of each film by the way.The transfer for "The Street Fighter's Last Revenge" proved a little more interesting of a challenge for Shout Factory though. At the main menu you are given an option to watch either the censored U.S. R rated cut of the film which also got a brand new 2K transfer like the first two films or the uncut Japanese version. At the start of the Japanese cut a disclaimer states that they had to splice in about 4 minutes of standard definition footage due to those trims not being in the Warner Brothers vaults. Shout Factory did a great job upscaling and color matching the standard definition footage and it was not too jarring whenever they had to switch back and forth between the HD and SD sources. Some people online have complained that the SD footage looks terrible but I disagree. While it is disappointing that those original trims for the third film have been lost, at least we still got the complete version of the film to watch. The HD footage looks as spectacular as the first two films.Audio wise you can each film in dubbed English or the original Japanese language in master mono audio. The first film also gets an extra English option of the 90's re-release dub too which I thought was cool. The films sound very good overall.In terms of extras each film gets both U.S. and Japanese trailers as well as still galleries. The first film also gets a very recent and cool 27 minute interview with the legendary Sonny Chiba as well a 13 minute interview with trailer editor & filmmaker Jack Sholder who was responsible for cutting the brilliant U.S. trailer for "The Street Fighter".Sonny Chiba fans should pick up Shout Factory's "The Street Fighter Collection" without hesitation. All 3 films looks great even with the SD inserts used in the uncut version of the third film. I never thought we would see these films fully restored on blu-ray but Shout Factory comes to the rescue once again. Highly recommend!

Good films with Sonny Chiba as an anti-hero who will fight for money but has a sense of honor. He's no angel so don't be surprised when he sells a woman into prostitution. He fights to win which includes throat ripping. The first film is the best. The other 2 are OK. Good old 70s exploitation.

This is a must watch for everybody

These are just great Kung fu flicks to watch on a rainy day and the restoration of this set is amazing the best in quality I’ve ever seen I will be buying more movies from Shout Factory in the forseeing future!!

Some of the best action movies ever made. Ridiculous action and a anti hero that's pretty much the baddest man ever.

First class work very happy with this order, also very fast service only took two days to get it, never seen STREET FIGHTER looks so good awesome picture.

Perfect blu rays to add to the collection