Crouching Dragon—The Tiger Lily Cut

When the original was released in 2000, it sent thousands of Asia film fanboys into a tailspin tizzy.
“This is going to ruin all our cherished Hong Kong and Japanese exploitation fun!”
Apologists for the film and peddlers of imports did their best to mollify all those nervous Nellies.
And yet - - the mainstream Western world got exposed to and excited by Asian action cinema.
Crouching Tiger made a shitload of money, and, as doomsayers predicted, future Asian fare became ever more tasteful. Easier for the world digestion. The wackiness was on the fade.
All hail ssj for doing his best to return this talky bi-polar film to the crazy roots of Shaw Brothers!

Video - MPEG-4, 960 X 400p. Now this is widescreen. Plenty of dark scenes in this, though I saw nothing amiss. There were quick edits, but one gets so caught up in the goings-on that you don’t pay attention.

Audio - 2 Channel stereo, AAC. 160 Kbps. Subtitles - Yes, some of the best! This reviewer does not understand Mandarin, so I did more reading than listening. The audio seems exactly as the original. Fine for dialogue. Actiony bits by Shanghai Percussion Ensemble terrific. Anytime Yo Yo Ma picks up his cello, naptime.

Narrative - Bit overdone, with references to orcs and goblins and other creep-sters. If creatures get mentioned, then I want to see them. The Iron Chef theme comes and goes worse than a studied accent. Often I had no idea what was going on, plot wise. Jokes not necessarily relatable to ongoing screen follies.

Enjoyment - This is a great antidote to the borefest that the original was. Energy level diminishes in the final act, and jokes start to fall flat. The story tumbles into a confused mess, but I laughed out loud often. ssj has provides several generous extras, as well. Info sheet, trailer, and extraordinary press conference with Michelle Yeoh. Brilliant. I only wish I had a time machine and could kick a copy of this back to 2000 era readers of Asian Cult Cinema.

This provided a very enjoyable, lighthearted experience. The new plot (provided by ssj in the subtitles) is thin, but the humor more than makes up for that. As the original was a fantasy-tinged love story, so is ssj's take, though the romance is given less screen time. Not all viewers will understand all the references, but they do not detract from the experience.

I loved the idea. It would be great to see more fanedits take the same approach. I had difficulty sometimes with pacing and theme. Long, drawn-out fight scenes don't make much sense to me with talk of orcs, drow, undead in the subtitles. Nevertheless, I still recommend this as a courageous and brilliant fanedit. May imitation be the best flattery ssj receives.

Brilliant idea to use subtitles to create a new story. Yes, the story doesn't make fully sense, but it's just fascinating reading about monsters and necromancers... gives it a completely different atmosphere, and sometimes I laughed really hard, and it's not like ssj just inserted some funny lines, he tried to create a new story-line, kudos for that.

As to the videoquality, while it is HD, the small filesize reduces imho the quality.

Drugs, orcs, goblins and dragons oh my!

Super fun edit! I should have known, ssj is hilarious on the regular in the forums and his style of humor really shines through here. The jokes slow down a bit in the second half but it remains funny (and it's because of more great action scenes, so no harm, no foul). Some personal highlights for me are: part with a sword that's a second dick to you, Beijing's Top Chef, snorted brain magic, don't hurt my hair!, super similar really, the preciousss will summon skyrocks down on your ass, plump-ass rump, wrong movie, disturbing my bottom will only lead to sorrow and prepare me a dragon egg smoothie. The new story is pretty out there but funny, which is really all that matters.

Bonus: the subtitled interview is hilarious, as well!