 Here's our FAQ list so far. We get hundreds of mails asking these very questions, so here are our considered answers. Click on the question to see the answer - if you have any other questions, please contact us. |
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Questions about Snowblood Apple
Questions about movie availability
However, as the genre is becoming less niche and more mainstream, it's increasingly easy to find versions of the movie which you will be able to watch on your player. VCDs are slowly disappearing; grey-market vendors such as http://www.superhappyfun.com or ebay vendors like cannibal-king (who mostly has the movies professionally translated) or markymarkgv will be able to provide most movies listed in here on DVD or DVD-R. However, please bear in mind these are not legitimate releases and you buy at your own risk. We here at Snowblood Apple are not, of course, liable for any purchases you make and strongly recommend you only buy legitimate official releases to avoid disappointment. In the summer of 2005 Dreamworks also released a Region 1 boxset of Ring 2, Ring 0 and Rasen. As far as Ju-on is concerned, the original V-cinema releases (sometimes called The Curse, although we here at SA hate that non-official title) are not officially available with subtitles. However you can find very many grey market vendors on ebay - we list some of the more reliable ones above. In late summer 2005 the two movies are due to be released in Scandinavia with English subtitles - as far as we are aware this is the only legitimate release outside of Japan, and certainly the only officially sanctioned release with subtitles. - Do the movies have English subtitles, or are they dubbed? All movies on this site are only available in their original languages. Fortunately, all have English subtitles available on the disc. - Where can I find subtitles for any of these movies? A good resource for finding subtitles for Asian movie DVDs which come without subtitles is Kloofy's. You'll need a plug in like Direct VobSub to be able to use them though - much more info is available at Kloofy's. - Do I need to be careful with DVD regions? Will my US Region 1 player be able to play (for example) the UK release of Ringu? Yes, and probably not. DVDs are encoded into regions; relevant here are regions 1 (US and Canada), 2 (Europe) and 3 (South-East Asia). A significant number of films here are only available in region 3 versions. Unless you have a multi-region DVD player, you will not be able to view films from a different region to the one you're in on your player. You may strike lucky and pick up a film like Battle Royale which is R0, which means it is playable in any region. Grey-market DVDs are usually Region 0, meaning you will have no problem playing them in any player in any part of the world. Further complicating things is the two different TV formats, NTSC (used in regions 1 and 3) and PAL (used in Europe, and R2). Generally, NTSC players won't play anything from encoded in PAL, and vice versa. If you have an NTSC player and want to play an R0 PAL disc, you'll need some sort of converter, or a PAL compatible TV. On the other hand, most PAL players will play NTSC discs, especially if the player is multi-region - what they will output depends entirely on the player and/or your TV. Check with your product documentation and/or vendor if you're not sure - most modern TVs, especially widescreen ones, are NTSC compatible. If you've got a DVD-ROM drive on your computer, there is a program called DVD Region+CSS Free which runs concurrently to your DVD player software and strips away the region encoding. It's very good, and what we use to play discs which won't run in our dedicated R3 DVD-ROM drive. The DVD FAQ is an excellent resource, and probably answers this question far better than we ever could ;-) - What about VCDs? What can I play these on? Do they come with subtitles? Some DVD players play VCDs. The picture quality is slightly better than VHS videotape, but with greatly improved sound over VHS. Unlike DVDs, though, the picture cannot be anamorphic and so will either be pan-and-scan or letterboxed. And while there's no problem with regions, films will stretch over 2 discs so a change in the middle can break up the flow. Fortunately, all VCDs are playable on computers with CD-ROM drives, using software such as Windows Media Player or the fantastic Zoom Player. English subtitles often exist on Hong Kong released movies, will be burned into the image, and are non-removable, and often will compete for space with Cantonese subs too. So the picture gets a little crowded... here's an example from Shikoku, uncropped, with the letterboxing kept in. The grey background is NOT from the original movie - we just put it in so you can see the letterboxing better...
VCDs are dying out rapidly now though as the take-up of DVDs increases. We haven't seen a VCD-only release in a very long time. - What's better - DVD, VCD, DivX, what? Without doubt, DVD, if you can get round the region and picture format issues. And some DVD players just don't like particular discs (eg the Snowblood standalone multi-region multi-format NAD DVD player will not play Dark Water under any circumstances, but will play any other R3 disc quite happily). VCD is cheap and easy to play, though you lose picture quality and won't get any extras. Equally, some films only come on VCD in any case and so that format is the only way you're going to get to see it. And if you've got a DivX file, you shouldn't do as no official releases are ever made in that format ;-) The short answer is, it depends on the resolution, bitrate and framerate - we've seen some fantastic results from DivX, and equally some awful ones which make Casshern look like an "amusing" 1970's cardboard cartoon from Czechoslovakia... - Do you know a place where I can rent any of these? Not unless you live in Calne, Wiltshire, UK, where we do. And our video shop has only just got its first copies of Flashdance, causing a stir in the high street and encouraging locals to don new-fangled legwarmers and get over-excited. If you're lucky enough to have a good video store in your locality, ask the manager if they're ever going to get these films stocked. If enough people ask, who knows. - Do you have any of these films available? NO! We're not a store, we're a review site. D'oh. There are plenty of online stores in the links page, though we'd recommend Poker Industries. They've happily sold us 90% of the movies reviewed here, and we've never had cause to complain. - Where can I download any of these movies? We do not support illegal downloads of movies. Some movies are starting to be available legitimately on On Demand online; but to be honest DVDs have dropped in price so much it costs little more than a few dollars to buy the things. dddhouse is an excellent source of legitimate, cheap DVDs from Hong Kong, where Asian movies are often released well before they are in the west.
Questions about movies and performers - Which movies would you recommend to a novice viewer of Asian Extreme Cinema? A good place to start is to look at any movie on the A-Z index page which has the "Snowblood Apple Favourite" logo. This means it is one of our staff's top films. However, Mandi Apple and Alex Apple have compiled their own top ten places to start and have posted them on the forum - here is Mandi's and here is Alex's. For Sven's magnificent guide to gore movies, read his post on the forum here. These posts are all taken from our forum's Official Recommendations thread, which also contains the endorsements of our community members. - Where can I find more information about Ring and the associated movies? If you haven't been to Ringworld yet, go RIGHT NOW. Why are you still here? Chop chop! - Is The Ring based on a true story? No, NONE of the movie is real. It's not "based on a true story" which half of Hollywood pretends to be because it keeps it real, man; it was based on a Japanese movie (by Nakata Hideo) which itself was based on a Japanese book (by Suzuki Koji), in which the Rachel character was male and the Noah character was a confessed serial rapist. And no, we're not making that up. - What's better - Ringu or The Ring? Well, while The Ring has a lot going for it, and it's far more tailored for the Western mainstream than the original movies, frankly Ringu is the original and best, in our opinions. - Do you know anything about Chizuko Mifune and Sadako Takahashi, the real people upon whom the characters in Ringu were based? Yikes! In a word, very little. Try over at Ringworld and the forums there. Whatever we know, we've posted on our pages. - What's all that with the "real" ghost appearances in the Ring series? There are two accounts of supposedly actual ghostly goings-on, one in Ringu, one in Ringu 2. The second account, regarding spirit sounds on the soundtrack of Ring 2 in the cave scene, is totally discredited and was a practical joke among the cast.
That's it almost in the middle, between the Reiko and the professor... make of it what you will... - How many versions of Ring are there? Well, there's... For info on all of them, we cannot recommend more highly http://www.theringworld.com, the most comprehensive site on the Net to do with all things Ring, and a genuine source of awe and wonder to the Snowblood Apple Team, doubly helped by the fact that Ringworld Webmaster J Lopez is a top geezer and a good mate. - Do you have any idea what's going on with the ending in Ichi The Killer? There are currently three schools of thought about this: 1. Kakihara really is killed by Ichi. There was a good thread about this on the Ringworld forum, but it's gone now. There's a thread on our forum which picks up from that though. I think the phrase "Your guess is as good as mine" was invented for endings such as Ichi The Killer. Takashi Miike has clearly left the ambiguous ending completely open to the viewer's interpretation, just as he left the final scene of Audition fairly open-ended. - Have you seen the fantastic new movie from the Philippines, Feng Shui? We have heard of Feng Shui, and it had the Filipino members on our forum vaguely excited for a bit. Larry Burns has seen it, and thought it was OK albeit unintentionally hilarious. The only possible way we'd review it is if the distributor were to send us a screener copy, and even then it would be a low-priority movie for review. - I'm <star's name here>'s best friend. Do you have their email address / home phone number / bank details / vital statistics / "artistic" photos / etc? You'd be surprised how often we get asked this. Well, as their best friend, call them, and ask! ;-) We're just fans, and have no personal details on any of the actors, directors or crews featured on this site. We've definitely never met them in a dark alley to exchange Yen for artistic photos. And face it, would you like to try that with Sadako?
Questions about Snowblood Apple - Do you ever give out free stuff? Sometimes we run competitions when distributors are nice enough to give us free stuff. Our competition is currently taking a well-earned hiatus, but might be back in 2006. - Why can't I see the images on the site? You can blame the hotlinkers for that. We've got a script that refuses to serve images to any remote computer that doesn't have mandiapple.com as a referrer. This effectively means if someone tries to hotlink an image, it won't show on that remote site, and won't leech our bandwidth. An unfortunate side effect for some people is that their firewall refuses to show the images. We're not recommending you turn off your firewall, but you might want to tweak the settings a bit so that it allows referrers - sometimes it's labelled "Enable Referrer Logging". We use the free version of ZoneAlarm, which works fine for us. If we turned off the hotlinking script, our monthly bandwidth limit would be gone in a matter of hours. And no, we're not going to email the images to you either. - What do the different colours of the pages mean? The standard colourscheme is the one on this page - black and grey background, yellow-ish text and red sidebar. A blue tinge means it's a US remake (because blue was the predominant colour of The Ring, and it stuck); a red tint indicates a Guinea Pig movie (gore, you see); a grey shading means a black and white movie (very monochrome); and Uzumaki is green just, well, because ;-) - Thanks for making these movies! Can I get the remake rights from you? <distant muffled sound of thumping as reviewer's head knocks against a wall repeatedly> We are NOT a film company, NOR a distribution company, NOR do we sell movies OR give away free merchandise. We are fans first and reviewers second. D'oh! - Your site's great! Can we link to you? Of course you can. And please, let us know, so we can link back to you. We've also got a banner:
- Your site's great! Can I write for you? We sometimes do advertise vacancies for reviewers. These will be advertised on the Snowblood Apple News section of the forum. More often than not though, we ask people to be reviewers. These will be people who have posted intelligent, well-written reviews and opinions on our forum and who we think would be an asset to Snowblood Apple. So, if you want to write for us, you're better off registering on the boards and posting intelligently. We then may well approach you. - Can I use one of your images as an avatar for a forum, or can I put one up on a weblog? We don't own the copyright to the images on this site - they belong to the people who made the movies. You should therefore direct your request to them. That said, the companies are unlikely to come after you unless you're making money off their work. If you do use our images, what we do request is that you leave the Snowblood Apple logo in the top left on the image, and that you credit us and link to this site when you do so. It takes a long time to take the screencaps and process them to make them suitable for the web, and we hate it when people rip off our hard work and don't give us any credit. If you don't, we're quite likely to go to your webhost and ask them to remove the pictures sourced from here (and they'll probably yank the rest of your site too). BUT - we do have a set of screenshots we took for some of our pages that we haven't used. If you would like these, mail us. - Can I, if I link to you, put your content (text or pictures) up on MY site? For pictures, see the previous question. - Can I ask you some questions for my school / college project? We regret, due to the volume of mail we get, we can't answer long questions about the movies featured on this site. We don't have any "insider information", just our considered opinions. We only know as much as you can find on the web, no more and no less. So, for example, we don't have a hotline straight to Hideo Nakata, or detailed financial information about the movies' budgets, and we don't make the films either, so we can't give you an audition for the next one... Our best suggestion is, if you want to bounce ideas off people, either visit our forums or, if you're doing a Ring-based project, go visit Ringworld and their forums too. Indeed, there's an excellent, very intelligent Ring Theories board over there. Here, we don't specialise in Ring-related content, although we have lots of theories and opinions of our own. In the interests of academic good practice and to avoid getting you axed for plagiarism, you MUST of course on your essay / paper / thesis / whatever declare your sources... All of our text is copyrighted and must not be incorporated in whole or in part into your work. - Did you know there's a script to stop hotlinkers? Yes, we do actually, and we're using it. See above. - When are you going to update again? To be confusing, Snowblood Apple has two sets of staff ;-) The reviewing staff are: Mandi Apple, Alex Apple, Larry D Burns, Koch, Sven and Midori. Mandi and Alex, the site owners, live in the west of England near the "historic" city of Swindon; Larry lives in Manila, in the Philippines; Koch and Midori both reside in the UK; and Sven hails from Holland. The forum staff are: Mandi Apple, Alex Apple, Vertigo, Yani, Rasen and Scuz. Our dedicated team of admins and moderators are on hand (almost) 24/7 to help SAF community members in any way they can. Here's a recent Polaroid of Mandi and Alex Apple, having a nice quiet night in with a video. Photo came out a bit funny though... I knew we shouldn't have rented that odd short film that was just labelled "COPY" at the video shop. Well, it was either that or Flashdance again... If there's any questions that you have we haven't answered here, please mail us.
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