In yet another strange marketing movie, Marked For Death and Rapid Fire are being sold as a dual pack, with the two discs being encased in separate cases and sold together at a retail price of $49.95, quite a saving compared to the presumed cost of buying the two discs separately if they were released that way. Unfortunately, this is about the only reason to buy this dual-disc set, as the two films are of marginal plot quality, and both of the Region 4 discs have been made from censored masters. While Rapid Fire is a passable action film, you'd have to be stark raving mad about Steven Seagull to even contemplate indulging in Marked For Death, one of his most turgid efforts to date.

    As I mentioned, both of these films have been censored by agencies other than the usually level-headed Office Of Film And Literature Classification, with Marked For Death containing twenty-two seconds of edits so clumsy that I could have done a better job with a meat cleaver and some duct tape, not to mention the fact that Rapid Fire loses an entire scene of nunchaku usage. It is therefore with a heavy heart that I have to recommend we send Fox Home Entertainment a message by importing the Region 1 versions of these two films (not buying them at all would be the better option as I will explain shortly) until they stop allowing another country's absurd censorship laws to be inflicted on consumers in a country where the censorship laws are possibly the most enlightened in English-speaking society.
 
 

Overall Dual Pack Ratings

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Released	1990
Running Time	89:11 Minutes
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2, 4	Director	Dwight H. Little
Studio Distributor	Fox Home Entertainment	Starring	Steven Seagal Basil Wallace Keith David Tom Wright Joanna Pacula Elizabeth Gracen Bette Ford Danielle Harris
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	Dual Pack: $49.95	Music	James Newton Howard

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	Yes	Smoking	Yes, not necessarily tobacco, either
Subtitles	Czech Danish English for the Hearing Impaired Finnish Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Polish Portuguese Swedish	Annoying Product Placement	Yes, moderately
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Ah, the wonders of a Steven Seagull film, where plot, logic, and sense all go out the window so that our rather large and imposing all-American hero can beat the almighty crap out of impossibly large numbers of disposable, faceless bad guys. Naturally, he does all of this without losing the seagull-like expression on his face, or without getting his hair mussed. It is somewhat dumbfounding to recall that in the early days of the Region 4 DVD market, the two actors who had the most films released on Region 4 DVD were Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Thankfully, this situation has improved somewhat in the past year, but with films like this getting re-released, one sort of clenches their teeth and wishes a better action hero was more heavily represented on our beloved format, one like Dolph Lundgren or Arnold Schwarzenegger. There is no point in trying to explain the plot of Marked For Death in a meaningful fashion, so I will go with the idea of the Steven Seagull film review construction kit.

• The ugly good guy portrayed by Steven Seagull: John Hatcher, a Chicago DEA agent.
• The even uglier bad guys: members of the so-called Jamaican Voodoo Posse, led by the ugliest of the lot, Screwface (Basil Wallace).
• Threat of the bad guys against the good guy: assassination attempts upon John's sister Melissa (Elizabeth Gracen) and her daughter Tracey (Danielle Harris).
• Extremely thin and trivial reason the bad guys want the good guy and his family dead: John gets into a gun battle with Screwface and kills some of his men.
• Extremely lame one-liner by Steven Seagull: "One thought he was invincible, and the other thought he could fly. They were both wrong."

Video

    The transfer is presented in the proper aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and unlike its Region 1 counterpart, it is 16x9 Enhanced. The film was shot using the Super 35 process, but this film was definitely composed with a widescreen ratio in mind, which should be fairly obvious to anyone who has seen the VHS version as I did a long time ago. The transfer is reasonably sharp, but not as sharp as one would rightly expect from our beloved format. The shadow detail is also a little on the ordinary side, but there is no low-level noise to spoil the picture.

    The colour saturation varies between muted and drab for the scenes in which Steven Seagal beats the stuffings out of improbably large numbers of guys made up to look like Jamaicans, and bright and vibrant for the scenes depicting the quiet suburban life that these gangsters are supposed to be eroding.

    MPEG artefacts are not a problem in this transfer. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some occasional and rather trivial aliasing that was generally confined to the background. Film artefacts litter this picture, with numerous black marks showing up in the frame at almost all times. The worst film artefacts were a vertical white line through the picture at 4:38, and a vertical black line through the picture at 74:04.

Audio

    The dialogue is clear and easy to make out most of the time, within the limits of Steven Seagal's tendency to mumble, and the thick Jamaican accents used by some of the characters. There were no discernible problems with audio sync.

    The music in this film consists of a score by James Newton Howard, and some contemporary numbers such as the aforementioned Bob Marley song that mentions a villain by the name of Screwface. The score music left about as much impression upon me as the rest of the film, which is really very little at all.

    The surround channels were used to support such sound effects as gunfire and passing cars, which they did without really making an impression. There is not much in the soundtrack that calls for a really aggressive surround mix, and thus the mix seems rather frontal most of the time. The subwoofer was called into use to support the music, some explosions, and gunfire. It supported all of these elements in the soundtrack without becoming conspicuous at any time.

Menu

Theatrical Trailer

• Dolby Digital 5.1 Soundtrack
• 22 Seconds Of Footage

• 16x9 Enhancement

    The video transfer is good.

    The audio transfer is good.

    The extras consist of a single theatrical trailer.
 
 

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

 © Dean McIntosh (my bio sucks... read it anyway)
May 18, 2001

This review is sponsored by

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Released	1992
Running Time	91:14 Minutes
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Dwight H. Little
Studio Distributor	Fox Home Entertainment	Starring	Brandon Lee Powers Boothe Nick Mancuso Raymond J. Barry Kate Hodge Tzi Ma
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	Dual Pack: $49.95	Music	Christopher Young

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	Yes	Smoking	No
Subtitles	Czech Danish English for the Hearing Impaired Finnish Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Polish Portuguese Swedish	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The film begins in an unspecified part of Thailand, with Sicilian drug lord Antonio Serrano (Nick Mancuso) paying Kinman Tau (Tzi Ma) a little visit. Serrano's business is not doing as well as he'd like, while Kinman, whom he got started in the drug business, is quite literally raking in the dollars. Naturally, Serrano feels that Kinman owes him a favour, since he got the man started in the business, but Kinman won't have a bar for it, repeating that old Sicilian proverb that revolves around not asking for that which you cannot take. Thus, a war between these two factions in the drug trade is brewing, as Kinman says when he visits Carl Chang (Michael Paul Chan), one of his distributors. Meanwhile, Jake Lo (Brandon Lee) is trying to live a quiet life while coping with the loss of his family during the Tiananmen Square massacre, while people such as Paul Yang (Dustin Nguyen) are trying to get him to support the fight for democracy that got his family killed. Of course, when a nude model asks Jake to come to a nice little place without telling him exactly what to expect there, you can't imagine him having the ability to resist, so he is less than impressed to find that Paul hired her to lure him there. Of course, she tells Jake that a businessman lets the organization use the place, and that businessman happens to be none other than Chang.

    Meanwhile, Serrano has decided to drop in and pay Chang a visit, making good on Kinman's demand that he be willing to use force to take what he is asking for. Chang doesn't react too favourably to Serrano's presence, either, so he gets a chestful of buckshot and plummets through a glass wall, which just happens to provide Jake with a good view of Serrano with the smoking shotgun in his hands. After a wild and wacky battle in Chang's place, the police eventually stop and arrest Jake for overdoing his stunts, which Agent Wesley (Basil Wallace) of the FBI coming in to handle the case. After they basically coerce Jake into testifying, they move him to Chicago where he can sit down and relax until crooked agents come to ensure he doesn't testify. Detective Karla Withers (Kate Hodge) winds up having to protect Jake from crooked law enforcement agents as well as the Mafia, while Jake is more concerned with disposing of the crooks that are after him and getting into her pants.

    Okay, so its a fairly standard action film with few redeeming values, and there's nothing in here that is going to earn anyone an Oscar, or even a second film in a lot of cases. However, if you're looking for a collection of fight scenes with which to while away ninety minutes, this is worth having a look at.

Video

    The transfer is presented in the proper aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and it is 16x9 Enhanced.

    The transfer is generally quite sharp, although darker scenes and some of the action sequences see something of a fall-off in the sharpness. Although this transfer is definitely an improvement upon previous formats this film has been released upon, it is still below what one would normally expect from a DVD. The shadow detail of this transfer is somewhat average, although it is adequate to discern what is going on in each shot. There is no low-level noise, although some shots generally take on a grainy appearance.

    The colours of this transfer are muted and dull, mostly reflecting the setting of the film, although sometimes the colours are a little faded in comparison to how I remember them from the theatrical exhibition. Aside from this, however, colour is not a problem.

    MPEG artefacts were not a problem for this transfer, with the bitrate being consistently high to accommodate the source material. Film-to-video artefacts are not a major problem for this transfer, either, with aliasing generally being only small and unnoticeable, although a burst of telecine wobble at 64:47 was enough to warrant point deductions. Film artefacts were plentiful, littering the picture enough to be noticed, but they were generally acceptable considering the age of the film.

    Much of the dialogue in this film is spoken in Chinese, and the film originally had subtitles burned into the print so that one could follow what was being said. No subtitles accompany these portions of the dialogue unless the English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles are engaged, which is quite annoying.

Audio

    The dialogue is pretty clear and easy to understand, although the aforementioned lines that are spoken in Chinese will have most viewers picking up their remote controls and engaging the subtitle option, which is a little disappointing. There were no discernible problems with audio sync.

    The score music in this film is credited to Christopher Young, and an especially forgettable effort it is at that. The word clichéd comes to mind a lot when trying to describe this score music, and the contemporary numbers that are mixed in for good measure only serve to date the film even more. Much of the score consists of pseudo-oriental themes played on pipes and drums, which helps to build the pseudo-oriental mood of the film.

    The surround channels are used by this soundtrack to support the action sequences, as well as the occasional piece of music or passing car. The few dialogue sequences in this film have a more monaural sound, although this is acceptable since the dialogue sequences basically serve as a logical bridge between each action sequence. Information about the original sound format of this film is somewhat scarce, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was originally presented with matrixed surround.

    The subwoofer was only really used by this soundtrack during the action sequences, which sound rather thin and anaemic most of the time. Overall, the soundtrack is reflective of its purpose, but one can't help but wonder what could have resulted from a Dolby Digital 5.1 remix, or at least the addition of a dedicated LFE channel.

Menu

Theatrical Trailer

    The video transfer is good considering the film's age.

    The audio transfer is also good when the film's age is taken into account.

    The extras package is rather minimal.
 
 

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

 © Dean McIntosh (my bio sucks... read it anyway)
May 18, 2001