Who else but the "Great Drunken Hero" would invite wuxia fans to COME DRINK WITH ME for King Hu's trendsetting martial arts film on Blu-ray from 88 Films.

While escorting bandit Smiling Tiger (Yunzhong Li, THE MAGNIFICENT TRIO) to prison, governor's son Chang Pu-ching (Chung Wang, THE NINJA PIRATES) is captured and held for ransom to negotiate the release of the gang's leader. The governor instead sends his deadly daughter Golden Swallow (Pei-Pei Cheng, LILTING) to the local inn to negotiate, and she gives the gang an ultimatum to surrender in the same time period they have guaranteed for her brother's survival. Although Golden Swallow is a skilled fighter, she is impetuous and finds unexpected protection and assistance from a singing beggar known as "Drunken Cat" who is actually Fan Da-Pei (Hua Yueh, PRINCESS IRON FAN) who has been fighting the more formidable and corrupt Liao Kung (Ying-Chi Kuan, THE TWIN SWORDS) over the successorship of their dissolved order. After Fan Da-Pei helps her out of an ambush when she tracks the gang down to a local monastery and then subsequently helps arrange for her brother's release, Golden Swallow is conflicted over making sure her brother gets back home safely and returning the favor when Fan Da-Pei finally faces off against his arch nemesis.

Although his six feature film A TOUCH OF ZEN was a Cannes sensation and put actor/art director/editor-turned-director King Hu's name on the international map after the commercial failure of the now-acclaimed DRAGON INN, his fourth feature as a director and third for his contract with Shaw Brothers COME DRINK WITH ME was an equally pivotal work not only for the director but for the wuxia (martial heroes) genre, setting narrative and visual trends as well as being instrumental in the resurgence of swordswomen characters who had fallen out of favor in Chinese cinema around the 1930s. While the notion is comical that we and the villains are not supposed to realize that Golden Swallow is a woman until she literally lets her hair down, and the fight scene choreography is more concerned with composition than quick cuts, the film's balance of humor and violence is as refreshing as its brazenness to stage a fight inside a Buddhist temple in which both hero and villain chide each other for such behavior in a holy site while thoroughly demolishing it. The climax also surprises by throwing in an entire army of swordswomen up against the gang in a large scale outdoor battle while the final showdown dips into the fantastic with the mystical powers of Drunken Cat and his enemy. Pei-Pei Cheng also appeared in the sequel GOLDEN SWALLOW by the more prolific Cheh Chang (TRAIL OF THE BROKEN BLADE).

Released theatrically stateside by Frank Lee International (Akira Kurosawa's RED BEARD), COME DRINK WITH ME was hard to see legitimately until the nineties when Tai Seng flooded the home video market with Hong Kong imports in fair to middling quality and a non-anamorphic DVD of questionable legality before Miramax got their hands on the film for their Dragon Dynasty DVD line sporting an improved anamorphic transfer. Japan and Germany beat out the UK's 88 Films to Blu-ray for the film, but the Japanese release was not English-friendly and the German release came from a sped-up 1080i50 master. While King Hu's other films have been making their way to Blu-ray in both the US and UK – among them LEGEND OF THE MOUNTAIN, RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN, A TOUCH OF ZEN, and THE FATE OF LEE KHAN – COME DRINK WITH ME may still be with whoever has Miramax's library now, but 88 Films' Region B-locked 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen transfer improves on the SD edition in some respects with more vivid colors, being slightly brighter and sharper, but also reminding us of the state of the Shaw Brothers vault materials when Celestial Pictures bought the library and readied the assets for home video. The presentation is more consistent than the recent restorations of LEGEND OF THE MOUNTAIN (which had an hour chopped away for theatrical release that had to be restored from trims in poorer condition than the negative) and RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN (whose negative had to be patched with an interpositive and a 35mm print from which burnt-in subtitles had to be digitally erased). The original Mandarin mono has been preserved in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 as has an English dub track that had only previously been available with the same gimmicky music and effects alterations of the 5.1 upmixes prepared for DVD. Optional English subtitles are also available.