Release Date: July 26, 2022
Format: Blu-ray
Company: Vinegar Syndrome

Synopsis:
This special limited edition 3-disc Blu-ray Set comes with a hard slipcase + slipcover combo (designed by Tony Stella & Earl Kessler Jr.) includes a 40-page perfect bound book and is limited to 6,000 units. It’s available here at VinegarSyndrome.com!

Martial Arts legend Yuen Biao stars as Ha Ling-Ching, a respected prosecutor who has always followed the rule of law, but has recently found himself frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the court system. Ha is pushed over the edge by the murder of a key witness in a trial along with the witness's entire family. Fed up with the court's inability to punish the guilty and protect the innocent, Ha decides to take the law into his own hands and eliminate those responsible for the murders. Soon, Ha's actions catch the interest of C.I.D. Senior Inspector Cindy See (Cynthia Rothrock) and her slovenly new partner known as Stink Egg (Corey Yuen). While trying to stop Ha, Cindy uncovers who is really behind the recent murders and the two must put aside their differences in order to take down the criminal organization before they go unpunished.

Heavily re-edited and released in different versions throughout the world, Righting Wrongs - released in an English-friendly version under the title Above The Law - is one of the more infamous Hong Kong action films to be released in the 80s. Directed by prolific action director, Corey Yuen, Righting Wrongs explodes with jaw-dropping fight choreography and features strong performances by Yuen Biao, Cynthia Rothrock, Corey Yuen, and Melvin Wong, along with scene-stealing fight cameos by Peter Cunningham and Karen Sheperd. Vinegar Syndrome is extremely proud to present Righting Wrongs on Blu-ray, featuring three different cuts of the movie (including both the "darker" ending as well as the more "audience-friendly" ending) and loaded with a multitude of special features exclusive to this release, including the incredible The Best of Martial Arts Films feature-length documentary from 1990 which includes several interviews and footage from the stars of Righting Wrongs !

Review:
I came to true action film fandom pretty late in the game.

Let me explain what I mean by true action film fandom.

So growing up, like any good English kid, in the 1980s, I watched all the James Bond and Indiana Jones films and the sort of action adventure film that was, at the time, the staple of mainstream, family blockbusters. Then, in the 90s, I started to watch the Lethal Weapons, Beverly Hills Cop films, Die Hards, Dirty Harry and more. Honestly, even the films of action titans Stallone and Schwarzenegger were not fully on my radar - although at college and university I saw a couple of the Rambos, Commando and, of course, Predator.

I’ve been a film fan since I was old enough to watch television but it really started with cult comedy and then a lot of horror, my rabid action genre love came a little later.

When I talk about true action film fandom though, I am not talking about the films that, if you stopped someone in the street and randomly asked them about movies, they might know about - mostly franchise films like the ones listed above or more recent franchises like the Bourne films or the Fast and Furious saga - I am talking about the films of Sammo Hung, Yuen Baio, Jackie Chan, Cynthia Rothrock, Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Jeff Speakman, Jeff Wincott, Gary Daniels, Lorenzo Lamas, Billy Blanks etc. (and more recently Scott Adkins, Iko Uwais, Donny Yen, Tony Jaa etc.)

We live in an age where they’ve turned Ted from Bill & Ted into one of the most compelling action stars of the day, where “please treat me like a serious acTOR” Matt “I’m a janitor who does math good” Damon can bulk up, train for a few weeks and pass as a martial artist and street fighter on camera - not to mention the costumed superhero lot who are aided and abetted by CGI and the best stunt crews money can buy - and I don’t pass judgement on any of that, really, it is what it is and a lot of it is very enjoyable, but when I want something that was made for a handful of change, with nothing more than an athlete or martial artist in the lead and a flimsy generic plot that is all held together with duck tape, gumption, derring do, death defying madness and all the smashed junker cars that the auto yard was willing to part with, I turn to the second tier, and below, Hong Kong and American, video rental market mainstays of the names mentioned above. Because like any genre when you delve slightly beneath the polished veneer of Hollywood productions, yeah there’s a lot of shit, a lot of “they really tried but sadly failed” and then there are the curious delights and the genuine successes.

When the fairly recent boom of boutique Blu-Ray companies started, it was often on the back of the horror genre. Taking cues from companies like Anchor Bay before them, Arrow, Shout Factory, Blue Underground and more built their libraries and fan reputations off the back of owning the catalogues or specific popular titles of filmmakers like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Sam Raimi, Larry Cohen, Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento and more.

Then slowly, ever so slowly, we’d see a Charles Bronson movie get a release or a Chuck Norris film, some key Blaxploitation titles, maybe an early Dolph Lundgren or a cult Jean Claude Van Damme might squeak out…

Then more and more boutique companies started to spring up and as they did, more and more distribution catalogues were purchased (or rented) and we slowly saw a lot of the Asian martial arts films getting releases - mostly in the U.K. and Europe.

Then Vinegar Syndrome, a label I adore - not least of which because I live in Connecticut and their brick and mortar store The Archive in Bridgeport is one of my favourite places on earth - who made their bones on erotic films and releasing the sort of underground, cult, horror and shot on video titles that used to crowd the video rental shelves back in the VHS heyday of a million distributers, started putting out action films in the same vein. The sort of films that the true video nerds know about. The forgotten, unloved, unsung, scrappy films known only by the kind of video renter who would bypass the new release wall and spend hours rummaging for anything and everything that just looked different, smelled different, promised everything and, most likely, rarely delivered on that promise. Films with titles like Tiger Claws, Martial Law, Expect No Mercy etc.

To me, VS were always doing important work, film restoration work and providing titles that had not seen the light of day in some time but now they are releasing second tier action film curios from the 80s and 90s… well that’s REALLY my language. (I am the Kick Ass Kid from Dr.Action and the Kick Ass Kid after all!)

They used to say that with each new format, we lost about 50% of titles - DVD never replaced everything on VHS and initially Blu-Ray looked set to not even replace everything on DVD and, as for streaming, forget about it, you’re lucky to get about 0.5% of all the films ever made - a vast discrepancy from the so called “everything will now be available to stream-physical media is dead” crap that the early days of Netflix seemed to promise. However with the rise of the boutique blu-ray companies, we are slowly and surely redressing that.

One of these action titles that languished in obscurity and very limited availability on any physical media format was Righting Wrongs AKA Above The Law which, objectively, is Cynthia Rothrock’s finest film. Rothrock, much like the film’s lead, Yuen Baio, was never really given her due. None of her films were ever released theatrically in America, no major U.S. studio ever gave her a contract, despite flinging money at damn near every male athlete or martial artist at one time or another - even Jeff Speakman’s Perfect Weapon was made at Paramount where he was offered a multi-picture deal - and, to this day, many of her films are exceptionally hard to find in any other format but VHS, and don’t even exist on foreign imports.

That is slowly changing though and now that we have Righting Wrongs out there on such a beautiful and important edition (with another one coming from 88 Films in the U.K. too), I think things are about to change and the Rothrock floodgates are about to pour open. I hope.

Righting Wrongs is chock full of breath taking and brutal action set-pieces and while there is a smattering of the, sometimes a bit juvenile, humour that can, for me at least, often mar my enjoyment of Hong Kong action flicks, it never gets in the way too long. It has a nice nihilistic vibe to the whole thing (especially when watched with the original ending) and most of the protagonists and antagonists are ambiguous and not in the usual hero mold that we’re used to.

Yuen Baio shows himself to be every bit the watchable and jaw dropping performer like his contemporaries and friends, Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan.
Cynthia is phenomenal and more than holds her own alongside all the seasoned professionals. She’s impressive in every fight scene but the two that really stand out are the woman on woman clash, with fellow forms champion Karen Sheperd, and her apartment fight with Yuen.

Rothrock had a strong run of Hong Kong films followed by a few, notably decent American movies - release China O’Brien 1 & 2 next please!!! - however most of her films fall sadly into the “not really as good as I’d hoped or as good as I know she can be” pile. It’s frustrating because you would’ve liked to see her show up in the odd Hollywood action flick, paired with someone maybe, so that a broader audience could’ve seen what she was capable of but the closest she comes is Fast Getaway 1 & 2 with an already on the wane, Corey Haim - yeah I don’t get how that made sense on paper either.

It almost happened.

She was approached by none other than Sylvester Stallone to star together in a William Friedkin film called The Executioner (based on a character from a series of novels.) Sadly, the film never got made but it is odd that Stallone didn’t try and find another vehicle for the both of them, or that he didn’t put her in The Expendables where she belonged.
It’s also annoying that while she admits the Hong kong films were becoming harder and more painful to keep doing (with the frequency that she was) and that she burned a little bridge with Golden Harvest - who wanted two more China O’Brien films - by accepting Stallone’s offer, the fact that Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung or anyone else in the Hong Kong scene didn’t call her up occasionally to get her in a film, is a real shame.
Even the low budget, big stunts, straight to video production company PM Entertainment only did one film with her (Guardian Angel - again, please release it!!) while making several with Gary Daniels, Don Wilson and Jeff Wincott - who, don’t get me wrong, are all good but Rothrock is a cut above.

So we have what we have - four decades of a mishmash of “action” films that veer wildly from the great to the watchable to the what the fuck was everyone thinking - and, if I am honest with myself, Vinegar Syndrome could release every single one and I’d purchase all of them.

Blu-Ray review:
Vinegar Syndrome have pulled out all the stops for this release. We get all three versions of the film (featuring the different endings) looking and sounding better than any previous release, a shed load of excellent, new and retro extras and a whole additional feature film documentary, The Best of Martial Arts Films, which isn’t just a ripped from VHS, throwaway, third disc extra but rather a cleaned up, feature length doc that looks amazing. It’s basically a Golden Harvest clip show, hosted by an incredibly 70s and sultry looking John Saxon, with a few small interviews in-between and, tantalisingly, some China O’Brien behind the scenes footage (that they were shooting at the time). It all looks so good though and makes you wish that Vinegar Syndrome would get to release every title mentioned in the film because I know they’d do one hell of a job.

Pick up Righting Wrongs today!

EXTRAS:

• 3-disc Region A Blu-ray Set

• Three different unaltered original feature-length presentations of the film, including: the original Hong Kong cut (96min) with Cantonese, English & Mandarin language tracks along with newly translated Cantonese-to-English subtitles; the extended and vastly different Mandarin language export cut (100min) with newly translated Mandarin-to-English subtitles; and the English friendly Above The Law cut (92min).

• "The Best of Martial Arts Films" (91min) - feature-length documentary hosted by John Saxon and including footage and interviews with Cynthia Rothrock, Yuen Biao, Karen Sheperd, Jackie Chan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bruce Lee and many more!

• Brand new commentary track with actress Cynthia Rothrock *

• Archival commentary track with Cynthia Rothrock

• Critical commentary track with martial arts film historians Mike Leeder and Arne Venema *

• "Fighting Wrongs" (25min) - a brand new interview with Cynthia Rothrock *

• "Unscripted Justice" (35min) - a brand new interview with actress Karen Sheperd *

• "Kung Fu Was The Equalizer" (20min) - a brand new interview with actor Melvin Wong *

• "Fighting For Success" (20min) - a brand new interview with actor Peter Cunningham *

• "The Vigilante" (17min) - an archival interview with star Yuen Biao

• "Action Overload" (13min) - an archival interview with Cynthia Rothrock

• "From the Ring to the Silver Screen" (19min) - an archival interview with Peter Cunningham

• Video essay with film historians Samm Deighan and Charles Perks *

• Cantonese and English theatrical trailers for Righting Wrongs

• Theatrical trailer for The Best of Martial Arts Films

• 40-page perfect bound book with essays by film programmer Pearl Chan, author and martial arts historian Grady Hendrix and filmmaker/fan Simon Barrett *

• Photo gallery

• Reversible cover artwork

• Newly translated English subtitles

* = exclusively produced for this release

OTHER DETAILS:

• 1986

• Multi-Language Mono

• 1.85:1

• 96, 100 & 92 mins