NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: 88 Films Blu-ray (September 2026): 88 Films have transferred Sherman Wong's Sex and the Emperor to Blu-ray. This is cited as a 2K remaster of the original camera negative. On the evidence of the captures, the results are respectable. Skin texture survives intact in the tight close-ups - pore-level detail and fine hair are visible in the most extreme of them - looking solid in 1080P. Fine detail generally holds: the gold dragons and pearl trim on the imperial court dress resolve thread by thread, and the floral silk in the garden two-shot keeps its pattern rather than mushing into color. Blacks appear properly seated, with the stone floor in the overhead shot retaining separation rather than crushing. The compositions are more considered than the film's reputation allows. One high-angle master - a room seen from above, calligraphy scrolls laid as a diagonal across the stone floor, three figures placed at the corners of the frame - is a genuine piece of staging, not mere coverage, and it argues that Wong had more visual ambition than "adequate" credits him with. The close-ups are tight and frontal, often very tight, and hold on faces long enough to do real work in the melodramatic passages. The AR is 1.78:1 a slight bastardization of an original 1.85:1.

NOTE: There is no mention of an alternate or uncut version anywhere: not on the packaging, not in 88 Films' or MVD's product listings; not on any retailer page; and not in any published review, Nor is the second version reachable from any menu I have been able to locate on the disc itself. However...

The material removed sits a little over four minutes in: the sequence establishing Li's partial castration as a child - the surgical removal of a single testicle, bought down from the full procedure by his parents - staged explicitly and at length, with the boy naked and bound. It is the most difficult passage in a film already trading in atrocity, and the decision to cut it was almost certainly not a matter of taste. Depictions of this kind involving a child are not classifiable in the United Kingdom, and a British label handling this title had no realistic alternative. The cut should be read as a legal necessity rather than squeamishness, and 88 Films deserve no criticism for making it.

The difficulty is that the sequence has not been removed from the disc. The release is seamlessly branched, and the uncut version remains present as an alternate branch: not reachable from any menu I can locate, not mentioned on packaging, not referenced in any listing or press material, and not acknowledged in David West's commentary, which runs across both branched scenes without remarking on censorship or on the existence of two cuts, that I heard. Because seamless branching duplicates only the differing segment, the whole of it costs the disc about six seconds of data - which is precisely why it would be easy to overlook when finalizing the authoring.

NOTE: We have added 52 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, 88 Films use a linear PCM dual-mono tracks (24-bit) in the original Cantonese language and an optional English DUB. The Cantonese track is efficient, clear and very functional. The English DUB is thin and tinny, with an abrasiveness across the dialogue, and no amount of uncompressed 24-bit carriage can disguise it - the track has been reproduced faithfully, and what it faithfully reproduces is a poor element. That is unsurprising: export dubs of Hong Kong pictures of this vintage were knocked out quickly and cheaply for foreign markets, and what survives of them is rarely in good condition. It is included for completeness and for the small constituency who prefer their Category III in English, and it should be regarded as a curiosity rather than a viable way to watch the film. One credit is worth pausing on, because it bears directly on what the Cantonese track actually is. Kam-Wah Ho (Fist of Legend) is credited as dubbing editor (Cantonese), with Kuo-Hua Wu (Black Mask) as sound effects editor - and that first credit is a reminder that the "original" track is itself a post-synchronized one. Hong Kong production of this period routinely shot without usable location sound and built the entire soundtrack afterward, dialogue included. So the choice here is not between a live track and a DUB but between two DUBs, one of them made by the filmmakers in the language the film was written in. It also accounts for the characteristic qualities of such tracks: dialogue that sits close and clean and slightly forward of the image, with room tone and ambience laid in as separate decisions rather than captured on the day. Wu's effects work is doing more of the heavy lifting in the horror sequences than a Western viewer might assume. 88 Films offer optional English subtitles on their Region FREE Blu-ray.

The 88 Films Blu-ray offers extras. Heading the package is an audio commentary by David West, a writer on Asian cinema, presented. He engages in the production history, the Category III cycle, similar films that relate, the historical Tongzhi and eunuch material... he's great. "If this Castle A-Rocking" is a 22-minute interview with James Mudge who brings the longtime Asian film critic and festival programmer; the jokey title suggests a piece pitched more toward appreciation than academia, but twenty-two minutes is enough room for real context. The Hong Kong trailer runs conspicuously long - almost 5-minutes - by Western standards, though not unusually so for Hong Kong promotional material of the period, which routinely ran several minutes and thought nothing of walking an audience through the entire plot. An image gallery rounds out the on-disc material, its stated runtime indicating an auto-advancing presentation rather than a manually navigated one. The first pressing adds printed material of some substance: booklet notes by Zoë Rose Smith, editor-in-chief of Ghouls Magazine and a writer whose focus on women in horror should make her a pointed choice for a film that puts Guilian through what this one does. Presentation is up to the label's usual standard for its limited editions: a double-walled O-ring carrying new artwork by illustrator Sean Longmore, whose exceptional work has appeared across many Blu-ray releases, with a removable U-card that takes the certificates and markings off the O-ring - a small courtesy that collectors notice. Inside is a reversible sleeve (see below) offering the original Hong Kong art as an alternative.

Sherman Wong's Sex and the Emperor arrives near the crest of the Category III wave, in the same year as A Chinese Torture Chamber Story, and it shares that cycle's defining strategy: take a scandal out of Chinese dynastic history, treat it as a license for both eroticism and atrocity, and trust the period trappings to dignify the enterprise just enough to get it past the censors and into the theaters. Wong Jing's (Sex and Zen II, Royal Tramp, The Seventh Curse) name associated with the production tells you most of what you need to know about the register, and Sherman Wong's direction - competent, unfussy, occasionally more assured than the material deserves - is essentially in service of a producer's formula. What makes the picture worth more than a shrug is that the formula, this once, has been laid over historical material with real thematic weight, and every so often the weight shows through. Two strands run in parallel. In one, the young emperor takes an interest in the chambermaid Guilian (Yvonne Yung Hung - A Chinese Torture Chamber Story,) which is enough to mark her as an obstacle to the eunuch faction and to the woman standing behind it. She is beaten, degraded, and finally sold into a brothel - where, in the film's most interesting structural swerve, she acquires an erotic expertise that reverses the terms of her ruin and turns her into a figure of power in the very economy that discarded her. The result is the familiar Category III paradox: less than the sum of its parts, and yet the parts keep suggesting a better film than the one assembled. Taken as exploitation it delivers, and it is among the more genuinely sadistic entries in the cycle - viewers should know what they are in for. Taken as a court drama about the traffic in bodies at the end of a dynasty, it is a real if intermittent thing, buried under jokes that no one involved seems to have believed in. 88 Films have given a disreputable film a more respectful presentation than it has ever had - though buyers should know the feature is censored, a necessary cut that the packaging ought to have disclosed - a 2K scan of the original negative, the original Cantonese track restored, a commentary and an interview from genuine Asian cinema specialists, and a booklet essay, all wrapped in the label's usual limited-edition packaging. For a picture that has circulated for thirty years in dismal VCD and DVD transfers, that is a meaningful upgrade, and this new Blu-ray presentation is a respectable one. The film itself remains what it is: an uneven, frequently nasty piece of exploitation with a better movie struggling inside it. Viewers should know what they are in for. But the Category III cycle is now old enough to be a legitimate object of study, and this is the kind of release that makes that study possible.

Gary Tooze