Fantasia 2025: Shout! Factory Brings Newly Restored Hong Kong Classics to Montreal

For many film enthusiasts, the joys of attending a film festival lie in the opportunity to see brand-new movies early or attend world premieres. Of course, this creates incredible memories that usually last a lifetime, especially if the film itself goes down in history. For many filmmakers, premiering a movie at a major festival is a lifelong dream, and, if successful, can catapult their careers to new horizons. It’s understandable, then, that most attendees at the Fantasia International Film Festival want to catch premieres of some of the year’s most hotly anticipated genre flicks, which had plenty to offer this year, including Mother of Flies (which won the Cheval Noir Award for Best Feature this year, through a jury led by Red Rooms director Pascal Plante), Terrestrial, and The Woman, just to name a few. 

Yet, one of my favorite aspects of Fantasia each year isn’t necessarily the premieres (though it is always cool to be the first in the world to watch a specific film), but to see restorations of classic genre films that we, in Montreal, are unable to watch otherwise in a movie theater. No local cinémathèque is playing Shaw Brothers films on the big screen, for example. You can only get that for three weeks at Fantasia. The same can be said for the 35mm trailers that play in front of several premieres of Hong Kong titles to get you pumped. This is the type of stuff that’s unique to the festival’s longstanding celebration of all things genre cinema, both new and old. 

This year, there were plenty of newly restored movies that made their premieres at Fantasia. Among the ones I did not see, Arrow Video premiered a brand-new 4K restoration of Pupi Avati’s The House with Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) and Kino Lorber unearthed a lesser-known crime film with their 4K remaster of Robert Butler and Sidney J. Furie’s Night of the Juggler. In the Québec section, a brand-new 4K print of George Mihalka’s Hostile Takeover was screened, which is one of the filmmaker’s rarest-to-find titles until now. 

However, what I was most interested in this year were the premieres of two brand-new, never-before-seen 4K restorations of some of the most acclaimed Hong Kong movies ever made: John Woo’s Bullet in the Head and Tony Ching Siu-tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story III. Earlier this year, Shout! Factory announced that it had acquired the Golden Princess library, home of many classics of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, from John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and many more. Titles that, until their acquisition, had no proper physical release in North America, either on DVD, Blu-ray, or now 4K Ultra HD discs. 

Many will remember that the Criterion Collection did release John Woo’s The Killer and Hard Boiled on DVD, but they have been out of print for a long time. There was no legal way to watch what are arguably the greatest action movies (or the greatest movies, I won’t argue against this claim) ever made for North American audiences, even though they’re highly regarded as influential for many of Hollywood’s contemporary genre filmmakers. Even when Universal remade The Killer last year, no one bothered to make the 1989 classic with Chow Yun-fat available for audiences to see how Woo reinterpreted his own movie. They were, in a way, lost media. 

Not anymore, said Shout! Factory, who, in a press release when the acquisition was announced, said that, “Golden Princess sits alongside Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest in the pantheon of Hong Kong cinema, but unlike the other two, the Golden Princess library has been dormant for decades outside of Asia,” even if “its fingerprints are all over modern action and crime genre.” To say their announcement of the Hong Kong Cinema Classics collection, in making some of the most influential films ever made available for a mainstream audience on physical and digital media, for them to be discovered or rediscovered, is a big deal, may be the understatement of the year. 

In fact, I’d even argue that it’s the most essential restoration project of the decade so far because those films cannot fall to the wayside. Their influence is too powerful for them only to be available to view through means that aren’t supposed to be mentioned in an article like this, and it’s a damn shame that most of my generation who discovered Woo’s Hong Kong cinema had to do it through these means, because it was the only way to view Hard Boiled, The Killer, and A Better Tomorrow. 

So when Fantasia announced that it would premiere Shout!’s restoration of Bullet in the Head, I ran to the festival to witness it firsthand and see just how good their project could be. Suffice it to say, the experience of watching a John Woo classic on the big screen remastered at the height of its power was so overwhelming that I was on the verge of tears. Everything looked immaculate, from its sharp colors hat repurposed Woo’s movie in a different light than the copies available on the internet, to the immense attention to detail in leaving no stone unturned to make sure this remaster felt like it honored the filmmaker’s original intent, it felt like discovering the Hong Kong artist’s bleakest movie for the first time. 

The only John Woo films I’ve seen that looked good on home video were his Hollywood works, because those movies, such as Hard Target, Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Mission: Impossible II, Windtalkers, and Paycheck, are all available to be streamed or bought on physical media. None of his most popular Hong Kong films were, which made the viewing experience feel like a shock to the system. 

Have you ever seen a John Woo gunfight at its fullest potential? Not on the big screen, but via a print that showed what the film would’ve looked like if you were there when it released. Probably not, and the restoration was so powerful that one could hear the tears emanating from the audience when the movie eventually leads to its climax, where Ben (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) confronts Paul (Waise Lee) over his actions towards Frank (Jacky Cheung), who, ever since he was shot in the head, has become a drug addict and is living in perpetual suffering. The inseparable friends who promised to always be there for one another are now fighting for their lives in a sequence of pure poetry, where the shots fired at each other speak louder than the agonizing scream Ben gives as the credits roll. None of us has seen a Woo film quite like this, and many will soon eventually discover (or rediscover) this staggering work of art presented in a way that makes us appreciate Woo’s contribution to cinema (and not just action movies) even more. 

With Fantasia having shown the first two installments of A Chinese Ghost Story (in 35mm) in 2023 and 2024, it’s only natural for them to conclude the Tsui Hark-produced franchise with the brand-new remaster of the third film, which also stars Tony Leung, in its Shout! Factory glory. I personally think that Tony Ching Siu-tung’s trilogy has some of the most gorgeously photographed action of any Hong Kong movie, past or present, especially as it blends otherworldly elements into the story. It’s even trickier to pull this off when you set most of your movie at night, where ghosts appear and wreak havoc in the life of debt collector Ning Choi-san (Leslie Cheung), whose entire world changes when he realizes that the existence of spirits is indeed real. 

A Chinese Ghost Story III is set 100 years after the conclusion of the second installment and follows a new set of characters as Hark and Ching Siu-tung remake the first half of the original movie before diving into kookier – and more violent – territories. And when it gets weird (trust me, it absolutely does), you’re going to want to see all of it in the best possible way. From the looks of the 4K remaster, what Shout! Factory has accomplished is an incredible achievement in ensuring that these films will last much longer than all of us will, which sadly was not the case when they were made unavailable for audiences to see how Hong Kong changed the game, both in their action and fantasy epics. 

This feels as significant for cinema as is the Éléphant project in Québec, which has restored over 260 movies from the province that were previously unavailable or in poor condition, for them to be digitally released on various video-on-demand platforms. The Golden Princess films need to survive, and the internet is not a place for them to be stuck in. They needed to be freed from the vault, so they could begin a brand-new life and finally be introduced to a generation that should know John Woo and Tsui Hark as household names who have shaped what cinema should strive to achieve, even today. 

As we wait for the physical releases of these incredible movies, Shout! has already released a number of their remastered titles on digital, which include: 

• John Woo’s Hard Boiled, A Better Tomorrow, A Better Tomorrow II, and The Killer (1989). 
• Ringo Lam’s City on Fire
• Tsui Hark’s A Better Tomorrow III and Peking Opera Blues

Upcoming digital releases include:

• Tony Ching Siu-tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story, A Chinese Ghost Story II, and A Chinese Ghost Story III (August 5)
• John Woo’s Bullet in the Head (August 19). 

Shout! Has also released its first five sets of 4K Blu-rays from the Hong Kong Cinema Classics collection, though they are not from the Golden Princess library. It is instead a box set celebrating some of Jet Li’s most underseen works from Golden Harvest, which include: 

• Fong Sai Yuk (1993, Corey Yuen)
• Fong Sai Yuk II (1993, Corey Yuen)
• Tai-Chi Master (1993, Yuen Woo-Ping)
• The Bodyguard from Beijing (1994, Corey Yuen)
• Fist of Legend (1994, Gordon Chan)

4K Blu-Rays of both City on Fire and Peking Opera Blues are the next to be released, which will respectively be on August 26 and September 23. 

I’d also be remiss not to mention some of the other restorations I saw at the festival, including the Vinegar Syndrome 4K remaster of Paul Morrissey’s Mixed Blood, which is not at all what I expected from the filmmaker, and the Arrow Video 2K restoration of Pao Hsueh-Li’s The Battle Wizard. No words can describe the out-of-body experience I felt watching this crazy movie, one you must see to believe. It will be released in an eventual Shawscope Vol. 4 set, so keep an eye out for this one. Trust me, you need to see how properly nuts it is at least once in your life. 

Also, special shoutout to programmer King-Wei Chu, who, before the screening of Bullet in the Head began, decided to play a trick on the audience and play the opening scene of Walter Hill’s Bullet to the Head, starring Sylvester Stallone. It’s classic Fantasia, a festival that, regardless of its fluctuating lineup, never disappoints, either through its wild audience reactions, in-jokes, or funny tricks like these. You were either there when it happened, or you missed out. 

Lastly, I’ll say this: seeing the Hard Boiled trailer in 35mm will remain the biggest highlight of this year’s edition of the festival for me. It’s one of the greatest action movies ever made for a reason. In a short minute and a half, you’re reminded why. Whenever Shout! releases the eventual John Woo 4K set, it’s an immediate day one buy.