Last night I watched Shin Ultraman and I loved it so much I ordered a different, better blu-ray to replace the blu-ray I watched it on.
The official US physical release was done by "Cleopatra Entertainment" one of those bottom of the barrel disc releasers that I'm frankly amazed are still around - most of their catalog consists of those extremely cheap, shitty, boring movies you might find flooding Tubi or Vudu that are just several bad actors wandering around the woods for an hour or something, you know the type. As such the disc has spotty quality - apparently it had to be re-issued twice and only on the third go did they finally implement actual subtitles for the Japanese audio instead of dubtitles (though they still keep the option for dubtitles like they don't want to admit that was a bad decision in the first place lmao), and even then the subs are iffy at best - lots of obvious typos, occasionally erratic timing, etc. At least the master they used has the Japanese text overlaid where it should be with subs strategically placed around them (looking at you, Funimation Shin Godzilla disc...).
It's also single-layer, which doesn't affect the video quality so much but does mean the audio tracks are all lossy, which is just lame and means if I were to rip this disc I couldn't in good conscience transcode the audio without generational loss. There's also no special features to speak of - just the trailer, a "slideshow" that is, genuinely, just a powerpoint presentation fading between screenshots from the movie with backing music, and a selection of trailers for other Cleopatra releases that are so bad I can't get more than 10 seconds into any of them before bailing out.
So I ordered the much better release from Canadian publisher Raven Banner, which has much cooler cover art, a dual-layer disc allowing lossless audio and theoretically better video quality, and actual special features like commentary tracks! Never heard of this tiny boutique before but I browsed their current site catalog and grabbed two other titles that Letterboxd seem to agree are good - The Sadness, and Lowlife. Love some good blind picks!
Now Shin Kamen Rider (or Shin Masked Rider I guess... why don't they just call it New Masked Rider at that point?) just needs a good release not exclusive to Japan...
