It's very distressing how IMDB and its ownership by Amazon can totally distort facts about movies....you have this totally bogus cast list being sold as fact on hundreds of sites. You could almost make a case of false advertising on Amazon's part with their lack of fact checking for the database
Funny you should mention, I've been adding new entries and correcting tons of mistakes for sloppy data (for all films) at IMDB over the years and I think they just have no learned authority on staff for anything before the 90s as far as Asian films go so just like Wikipedia (or even here if we're not careful), it's all surfer beware. I'm either laughing out loud or offended that IMDB lists blatantly incorrect staff members, bad transliterations or misrepesenting images that are all presented as hard facts over there. Part of the problem is that if there's a misrepresentation based on some past non-native distributor of an Asian title who's unfamiliar or not sensitive with the native subject matter for some 30 year old exploitation or action title on an overseas language video box dated some 20 years ago, by seniority alone that surviving artifact becomes the authoritative precedent for truthful fact now since unlike here, there's no other archival information native or otherwise to anyone's avail to counter it. I mean if it's not a part the editor's knowledge base or even better their cultural DNA, aren't the folks here just as capable of similiar infractions? I feel the best arbiter here is a better understanding of the written & spoken language for the films that they're professing knowledge to. That's where the goodwill at HKMDB lies in all your collective knowledge base in this regards.
That being said, being that the IMDB's 'International', they have database goals loftier in magnitude to achieve (guessing HKMDB cubed in size) by making the claim to 'conquer the world'. One item in their favor, I do like how the IMDB lists each title in their native language transliterations (romanization of Chinese characters) but the practice itself is tricky business for Chinese titles since the language itself possesses its own complex cultural & linguistic nuances. There's yet to be an implicit rule from what I knowbut their original language sources seem to be from common sources here (favoring Pinyin). For example, objectification issues exist like: do you apply Pinyin or the old Yale based Wade-Giles i.e. the romanization style practiced now or prevalent during the time of the title? Or why list a Cantonese romanized title for a HK film that was obviously filmed or voiced strictly in Mandarin (or visa versa)? And there seem to be inexperienced Chinese friendly editors experienced only with one dialect that seem to think that the default dialect for all HK films is only Cantonese or others who's only exposure to a HK title is by watching it dubbed in English or another tongue. The result is that the IMDB entries obviously have entries containing a mishmash of data from divergent sources (unlike the near tag-team checks & balances I find here) and the IMDB is at the mercy of one rabid individual (like moi) or random fan-based editors applyiing their own cultural baggage (or lack of thereof) into the mix and since they took the effort to contribute without any apparent fact-checking oversight other than their own self-auditing, the editors' guesses are as good as the IMDB's. That being said, I think they're doing a yeoman's job but I also think there's no one sole entity over at IMDB to arbitrate any of the finer cultural nuances required for maintaining the standards of accuacy we find here on behalf of native Asian titles especially where Thai, Korean, Filipino, Malay, Bollywood, or pre-80s Chinese/Japanese titles are vastly under-represented over there but like here it's all a work in progress. As long as I'm alive & not blind to set them straight
specifically for my familiar era of 50-80s 'freeworld' USA/Chinese/Japanese and selective Korean/Filipino/Malay cinema titles, I've been trying but only randomly whenever I can to correct data that's so egregiously 'whacked' it's not funny because I'm certainly not the data police...for that task, it really does takes a village.
2 with Billy Chow and 2 with Philip Ko 
