John Woo takes on every eighties action cliché in the jungle adventure HEROES SHED NO TEARS, on Blu-ray from 88 Films.

The Golden Triangle near the Vietnamese border is a haven for heroin production and trafficking, and the Thai government has had enough of it, hiring a group of Chinese mercenaries lead by Chan Chung (Eddy Ko, THE BUTTERFLY MURDERS) hoping to secure passage to America in order to destroy the operation run by General Samton. They ambush the General outside his fortress and grab him, heading for the border. First, however, they must make a stop for Chan Chung to pick up his family only to discover that the General's men have gotten there first and killed his father but he is able to rescue his sister-in-law and his six year old son Keong. When they reach the Vietnamese border, however, they discover soldiers led by a sadistic colonel (Ching-Ying Lam, EASTERN CONDORS) harassing a French journalist and his daughter (Cécile Le Bailly). Chan Chung does not want to get involved but his son implores him to help the girl before she is raped or killed, and the ensuing attack leaves the colonel with only one eye and it is laser-focused on Chan Chung for vengeance, even to the point of teaming up his soldiers with the Samton's soldiers and a local native tribe of machete-wielding trackers to find and capture them.

Following Woo's Golden Harvest martial arts efforts LAST HURRAH FOR CHIVALRY and HAND OF DEATH but preceding his better known eighties Hong Kong action films like THE KILLER and A BULLET IN THE HEAD, HEROES SHED NO TEARS was indeed the film that ended Woo's association with Golden Harvest who had just before this film consigned him to helming a handful of comedies. HEROES SHED NO TEARS is by no means a lost classic or even a diamond in the rough. At its best, it is Woo experimenting with bringing the values and tropes of his "heroic bloodshed" martial arts films to a more modern setting and genre; at its worst, it is an episodic, identikit action film that plays like an even bloodier but almost soulless variation on the kind of eighties actioners Cannon would undertake around the same time and that the likes of Bruno Mattei would imitate a couple years later. Apart from Ko's hero and his son, there is little in the way of characterization with the other soldiers brought on to eventually get killed but not before they take part in moral vignettes including one whose penchant for gambling gets him in trouble with another local tribe and another who pays the ultimate price for looting the bodies of enemy soldiers. Just when things get monotonous in the jungle pursuit, Chan Chung and company stumble upon his old French Vietnam war buddy Louis (Philippe Loffredo, TOO BEAUTIFUL FOR YOU) living a polyamorous life with a trio of Thai, Vietnamese, and French babes lovingly protected by his rigged barrier of explosives. While there is plenty of bloodshed, the film really takes a turn towards sadism once Chan Chung is caught by the colonel, and his six year old son is put in danger plenty of times; however, those who suffered with Chan Chung will be get a visceral thrill out of the finale in which Ko and Lam engage in extended hand-to-hand combat, fighting dirty with anything within reach. The end result is messy, but that is partially the fault of Golden Harvest who shelved the film in 1984 after trying to fix it with a handful of reshoots (including some directed by Woo and others including three sex scenes directed by someone else), before rushing the film into release in 1986 after Woo's hit with A BETTER TOMORROW. The original cut did have a theatrical release in South Korea since the country put money into the film, but the version projected and released on video was actually a workprint but it revealed not only what scenes were reshot but some drastic edits in the finished versions of scenes. What went out for export in 1986 was the reshoot version minus the aforementioned sex scenes (suggesting that Woo might have had some input on the export version). The film is not to be confused with the like-titled 1980 Chu Yuan film (released stateside on DVD by Well Go USA).

HEROES SHED NO TEARS went undistributed in the United States until the nineties when Rainbow Video put it out under the odd title A JOHN WOO FILM followed by a poor quality DVD from Tai Seng Marketing with upmixed 5.1 English, Mandarin, and Cantonese tracks while a superior edition came out from Hong Kong Legends in the UK with an anamorphic transfer, Cantonese and English mono tracks, English subtitles, and an interview with Woo. The HD master debuted in the U.S. last year from Film Movement which featured only the newer Fortune Star 5.1 remixes in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. 88 Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray offers encodes of both the Woo-disowned Hong Kong cut (88:24) and the more familiar international cut (85:04), the latter a reconstruction utilizing the new 2K scan. Colors are rich from jungle greener to heavy bloodshed, grain is retained while sharpness varies from the gritty nature of the shot overseas on location production. The Hong Kong cut offers up Fortune Star's new 5.1 Cantonese and English tracks in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 with some new foley effects and music cues (although some of the originals are retained) as well as the original Cantonese mono track in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. The English track prepared for the export version would not have contained the sex scenes, which would have required a hybrid of the classic dub and the newer one, so the original English export dub is only included on the export version of the film in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. Subtitles are available only for the Hong Kong version.

The Hong Kong cut is accompanied by an audio commentary by Asian Cinema expert Brandon Bentley in which he describes the film as a "necessary evil" in Woo's filmography, touching upn the differences between the shelved 1984 version and the 1986 release version, the Korean and French cast members, and positing a "let's get it over with" mentality in Woo's approach to the film as he attempted to finish off his Golden Harvest contract. Also quite informative is "A Tale of Two Cuts" (14:32) in which Bentley examines not the Hong Kong cut and the export version, but the Hong Kong cut and the workprint version as released on South Korean cassette. Bentley notes that not only was some of the character motivation altered by recutting – the wounded colonel actually got an up close view of Chan Chung after losing his eye in the workprint whereas we have to guess that he got a quick look at him through the rifles scope before it was pierced by Chan Chung's bullet in the finished version – and that some of the replacement scenes not involving sex were included because Golden Harvest though they needed to ease audiences into Woo's transition from comedy to action.