The Concubine

[Zen_Amako]

I recently purchased the Hong Kong Blu-ray of this South Korean film only to discover that the Blu-ray is an edited version of the film.

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-C...Blu-ray/78784/

The region 3 Korean DVD runs 122 mins.; however, this Blu-ray version is 93 mins. I somehow missed the note about the running time on Yesasia.

I'm not sure why the shorter cut exists unless they just wanted to reduce the running time of the film for other countries. The sex scenes and the scenes with nudity are intact.

The biggest issue I have with this version is that fairly early in the film, for no good reason, someone has clumsily spliced in a montage of sex scenes that appear again later in the film, including the film's climax. I don't want to see clips from the (emotionally charged) ending of the film at about the 30 minute mark. The Korean version doesn't have this.

The upside is that the movie looks pretty great in HD. Too bad I'll be sticking with the DVD.

The subtitles on the HK Blu-ray are also much worse than the subs on the Korean DVD, mainly due to poor timing - it's not uncommon to see lines attributed to the wrong character.

I haven't seen any discussion of this movie or Blu-ray at all here, so I wanted to make sure people know to avoid this release. It's too bad this film hasn't been released on Blu-ray in Korea. It was a pretty big hit, so I'm not sure what the reason is.