One of the first DVDs ever released, Samsung's Cutthroat Island

[Damnation]

I know many on this board aren't too keen on the DVD format, but I thought I'd share since this particular release is really, really early. It's from South Korea released in October 1996 by Samsung Electronics. The first commercially available DVD releases were released in Japan in November '96 while North America saw the first in March '97. So I'm unsure if this disc was for consumers or a format demonstration disc for tech shows and such. I know it's from 10/1996 because it's long been customary for Korean video releases to have their release date printed on the back cover.

It's NTSC coded Region 3 with English Dolby 5.1 and a Korean 5.1 dub. English and Korean subtitles. No extras. The film is cropped from 2.35:1 to 1.78:1 widescreen, although the opening credits are uncropped. Picture quality isn't much to write home about, lots of visible MPEG-2 artifacts, really shows how far DVD video encoding has come. The English 5.1 audio is incredibly strong, don't think the audio was downmixed for home theaters on this release. The menu is extremely basic.

[Eric H]

Cool, my list shows that I have the 1997 U.S. release, if I can find it I'll have to take a look at it and see how the quality is.

I've never seen the movie, mostly because I've heard mostly dreadful things about it, but you know, sometimes bad is good.

[Damnation]

It's not a bad flick at all, just seemed that the stars aligned for it to bomb at the box office.