To Kill with Intrigue Blu-ray Screenshots (Patreon)

Video

While the color clearly suffers from significant age, visible from the mostly dry primaries, exaggerated reds still bleed out. To Kill with Intrigue's mastering is suspect all around.

Grain does remain in the image, but the film stock fights against digital tools trying to erase its existence. The resulting imagery appears smeary, worn, and in places, barely discernible. Chan's first appearance happens somewhat in shadow, and in a long shot, his face looks more like a gray blob. Grain still leftover from the sloppy noise reduction, at best, looks mushy, even poorly resolved by the contrast.

Yellowed contrast diminishes peak white, and even worse, will clip detail. Awful black levels fail to reach black, all the while further muddying the image. Add this to lackluster resolution (at best an HD scan, not a fresh 2K/4K effort) and To Kill with Intrigue is visually miserable.

Audio

Five audio tracks show up in the menu. Three are mono DTS-HD - Mandarin, English, and a Japanese Mandarin. In true stereo is a Cantonese track, followed by two surround mixes, but only in Dolby Digital and of dubious mixing quality. To further confuse, the Mandarin mono is partly a stereo track - listen to the torches around 20-minutes in as the sound effects clearly exist discreetly in the stereo channels. The same happens during the finale as Chan jumps around the treeline.

There isn't an obvious winner among them. Each carries dwindling fidelity, from the messy music to scratchy, worn dialog. Balance between the dialog and sound effects can be way off, like the bloated dialog of the Mandarin mono and English dub.