Contents
1) About the violence
2) About the transfer
3) Italian version -uncensored?
As far as I know, all of the video and DVD releases of the movie thus far have had alterations to several of the gory scenes to add a blurring effect to try and make them look less gruesome:
The image on the left is from the Japanese trailer for the movie. The image on the right is from the actual move itself. The original theatrical release of the film is meant to be the only one which was uncensored, but some fans have claimed that the blurring effect was also present in that, too. Strangely, quite a bit of the more major violence was not given the blurring effect for the home releases, such as when Jagi dies. Some other strange effects were added, such as for every time Shin stabs Kenshiro, the entire shot has a blue tint.
A major edit was done to the guy Galf kills -in the video/DVD version, as Galf is about to crush the guy's head, the shot switches to one of Ken-Oh and his army marching.
The above image shows three different versions of the film. The left image was from a bootleg of the film, which features a very bright transfer and actually cuts off the top and bottom of the picture, meaning you cannot see as much as you can in other versions. The middle image seems to be from the Streamline Pictures release, which has a red tint and it makes dark coloured objects and characters harder to see, meaning a great amount of detail is lost. The third image is from the remastered DVD, which was released in American by Discotek in 2009. This version has been remastered and is the best looking version of the movie currently available, but it is still censored -the scenes featuring the blurring effect haven't been remastered, either.
The original theatrical print for the film has said to have been either lost or destroyed, so we may never see the original version of the film again.
Thanks to the efforts of Kentai (visit his not safe for work blog here) it has been discovered that some versions of the Italian video release less censored material than any other version, even the Japanese ones. In particular:
-The scene where Shin gives Ken his seven scars doesn't feature the blue tint, the colors have been left alone.
-The scene where Galf crushes a man's head is actually shown.
-When Zeed's punks explode when Ken hits them, there is no blurring effect for their deaths.
-This above shot is from the part where Ken saves Bat and Lin from three punks. The censored versions add a tint to the final punk's death, but the Italian version doesn't have this.
If you want to know more about this, I would check out all of the hard work Kentai has done on the subject in these articles.
UPDATE: A video has been put up on Youtube showing all of the uncensored footage.
