cal42 wrote:Seriously, Brian, how much money do I need to bring with me if and when I come to Toronto?
This could be really expensive!
You'll be surprised how far the money will go! These $5 DVDs work out to about £2.75, the VCDs about £2.20. That's more or less on par with what DDD House charges, only minus the shipping, which helps.
Keep in mind the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) has at least SIX Chinatowns (10-12% of the population here is Chinese): the oldest and most famous one in the downtown core; another one called "Chinatown East" that is generally a waste of time if you're looking for movies; another due west of me (I'm north of the downtown core) called Agincourt that's also a bit barren these days, and then two sprawling, Chinese-centric wonder-suburbs north of that, with countless malls and plazas including the famed Pacific Mall; and finally a so-so Chinatown in a west-end borough called Mississauga that probably won't be worth the drive since everything there is available at the others. You won't lack for options, though, that's for sure.
I think the biggest reason so much of this stuff seems to be available so cheaply is Toronto's most popular scourge: the bootleggers. They proliferated so strongly over the past decade that the honest retailers couldn't compete and either closed up shop or got out of retail media altogether, but the latest crackdown, which fortunately is still ongoing after several months now (and hasn't been
advertised by local media the way previous ones have) has given the surviving legit shops a small respite.
But since the damage has largely been done, and illegal streaming and downloading of Asian cinema is all the rage with the kiddies today, some shops, such as the Wa Yi Trading that I've mentioned above, are just closing their doors at a more relaxed pace. A couple of other places have become legit/boot hybrids, where you can get killer prices on DVDs because they've already opened them and made copies that sit on the shelves in little paper envelopes right beside them. I suppose this way, they look more respectable because the store is still filled with honest-to-goodness DVDs and TV series box sets. It sucks to see this, but it at least means folks like us can still get our hands on the real deals, and they'll restock them because they need to for appearance's sake. At least for now.
At present, and aside from the
occasional goodie box stored at the back of an off-piste housewares or knick-knack store in Chinatown, there are six shops I visit routinely to get this stuff: the aforementioned Wa Yi, which was one of my first regular haunts from 1997 onwards and deserves a god damned award for never having gone the boot route; three Broadcast Book & Gift shops, all in different Chinese malls, and all with varying degrees of stock, fully legit and surviving (and expanding) rather well; and the two "hybrids" mentioned above, one of which has massive amounts of original and "uncopied" DVDs that I suspect will drop in price before long (they're currently $10 for nearly everything, but not much sells at that price point anymore), including many Shaw titles still priced over $20. These last two are where I also found many of the $1 VCDs in last year's scrounge thread, though their remaining stock seems to have vanished in recent months (perhaps the Laroque boys paid a visit?
). All in all, there's still some untapped oil out there.
So yeah, if you're planning on visiting, you might wanna bring some extra cash. Who knows, the stuff might be even cheaper by then, though hopefully not too picked over. Might be best to bring a list, or email one to me in advance and I can at least give you an idea of what you're
likely to find (and maybe some maps!
). Not sure how one goes about getting such materials back to England, or the costs involved in the endeavor, but perhaps that might influence the final tally?
cal42 wrote:I'm interested in Beast Stalker - let me know what it's like when you see it as there aren't any reviews in the DB yet.
At the rate I get around to watching these things, you might see plenty of other reviews here before mine, though it was the Variety review, posted via one of Dennis' news digests, that made me spring for it so soon after it's release (normally I wait for the prices to come down), so perhaps that's a sign that I'll get to it sooner than later!
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout ... 39587&cs=1Discovering that the commentary really was subbed was just a nice tease for when I finally settle in for this one.
. Might get some for my brother. Picked up a whole bunch of Dragon Dynasty 3 for 10 at FYE (all for my bro's upcoming bday) so those won't count here.
Wondering if I got somebody's fansub version, which probably shouldn't surprise me from HKFlix. Any chance you've found something better? Saw this with good subs in a theater here late last year and have started wishing I'd smuggled in a video camera for posterity! 
.
. I picked up a couple of their bargain bin films too - the HK edition of 
This is bar none the absolute worst movie in the original Panther canon. I haven't seen the newer Steve Martin movies, and have never felt particularly 
.