The Movie: Enter The Dragon is considered by many to be the greatest Kung Fu movie ever made. Starring Bruce Lee (who died just before this film's public debut), this is definitely one of my favorite kung fu movies as well. Although the package claims 3 minutes, this DVD version contains an extra 10 minutes of footage that were not in the original theatrical release. Most of it consisted of some more of Bruce's philosophical content which were cut out.

Although the acting in this movie wasn't exactly academy award winning material, the fight scenes are top notch, and the sets are big, beautiful, and lavish. The movie's climax is the final battle between the evil Han and Lee, some of which takes place in this crazy hall of mirrors -- I have no idea how they filmed this scene without showing the camera! Not to mention the amazing way the shots were set up with the actors reflections and also the movements of the actors in relationship to the reflections. Simply amazing!

The music in this movie is hard to beat with funky bass lines and slinky vibrato guitar licks... it's a combination of stereotypical chinese gong bashing and 70's wokka-chika-wokka-chika goin' on.

This movie does take a little while to get going, especially with some of the extra footage in the beginning, but if you stick around long enough, you will be rewarded with a truly great experience.

The DVD: This is a dual sided disc, with the movie on one side, and special features on the other. The anamorphic transfer is pretty good, but the film is definitely showing its age as there is quite a bit of grain and dirt. The audio has been remixed into a 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround mix. I am pretty sure that the original release of this movie was in mono.

Most of the improvements in sound imaging are from the musical score, and there is a definite noticeable difference in quality between the music and the dialog which sounds much worse... and the sound effects which sound even worse than that. What you're left with is a confusing mix of lush, wide and bright music, with dull and flat sounding dialog and sound effects. But I think the overall experience is still better than plain mono.

Special features are plenty. There's a bunch of text stuff like cast and crew and some stuff about Hong Kong martial arts films, a blurb on Jackie Chan and other stuff, but the really good stuff is the video stuff. There's a new documentary called "Bruce Lee: In His Own Words" which features audio from different interviews with Bruce with various Bruce Lee video footage on top of it. It starts out with him talking about martial arts and his style of fighting, then moves on to him waxing philosophical about stardom and how we should live life, some of which is pretty far out man.

There's also the original 1973 featurette on the film, as well as interviews with Linda Lee Cadwell (his wife), four theatrical trailers, seven tv spots, and my favorite: Bruce Lee's backyard workout videos where you can see him really beat up a punching bag. There's quite a lot of good stuff in here, although it pertains more to Bruce Lee than the actual movie, but I don't have any problem with that.