During the past 30 years, we’ve gotten used to motion pictures respectfully embalming our history. Movies such as “Amistad,” “Seabiscuit” and “Dances With Wolves” seem airless and false, exchanging life’s rugged vitality for prissy tastefulness and predictable “underdogs beat the odds” formulas.

The Chinese movie industry, on the other hand, treats history like a soccer ball, kicking it around, booting it into mud puddles, and leaving it scuffed and torn, waiting for the next director to come along and bang it around.

Today’s double-disc release of the Stephen Chow comedies “Royal Tramp” and “Royal Tramp 2” (both 1992) is a radical head-spinner for those used to having history presented with angelic choruses, shafts of golden light, and inspirational speeches. Based on the celebrated novel “The Deer and the Cauldron,” both films are set in the 17th century and tell the story of Wei Siu Bo (played by Mr. Chow, the creator of “Shaolin Soccer” and “Kung Fu Hustle”), a con man born in a brothel who is forced to infiltrate the Qing Emperor’s court as an agent of anti-Qing revolutionaries who want to overthrow the emperor and restore the Ming Dynasty.

Hong Kong’s king of bad taste, director Wong Jing, helmed these two lush, period epics and gave Mr. Chow free rein to turn them into his patented “mo lei tau” or “no sense” comedies, which find their humor in machine-gun wordplay, freaky sight gags, and a frantic blur of historical, literary, and pop-culture references that fly from the screen like bullets.

This rough and ready approach feels downright revolutionary. Rather than being a noble, self-sacrificing hero, Mr. Chow’s Wei Siu Bo is a craven coward whose politics are situational: He’s helping rebels overthrow the emperor one minute, protecting the emperor from assassination the next. It’s like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” with frenetic faux-violence and a deadpan embrace of true stupidity. The history is roughly accurate, but the fun comes in puncturing the pomposity of important men and their serious moments. If Mr. Chow had been in “Schindler’s List,” he would have interrupted Liam Neeson’s climactic “I could have done more” speech to say, “Okay. I need my dry cleaning picked up tomorrow morning. And don’t expect a tip.”

A host of imposing Chinese actresses fill the cast, from the irrepressible Chingmy Yau as the princess to the imperious Cheung Man as the Empress Dowager, who suddenly morphs into action icon Brigitte Lin at the start of “Royal Tramp 2.” In stark contrast to the machismo of so many American comedies, Mr. Chow is essentially the damsel in distress here. When he’s bedded by the hot-to-trot princess, we cut to the morning after as he sits on the edge of the mattress, sobbing softly, his blouse torn, his virtue violated by the grinning princess, who pats him on the head and demands another round. It’s like something out of “Memoirs of a Geisha,” only “Royal Tramp” and “Royal Tramp 2” are funny on purpose.

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If you like your Chinese history served straight, Jet Li’s mercilessly bleak “The Warlords” is out on DVD. It’s one part exploration of a forgotten 19th-century historical incident and one part essay on the many ways to chop off someone’s arms and legs. China’s biggest blockbuster so far this year, “The Warlords” is based on the 1972 martial arts film “Blood Brothers,” which is, in turn, based on the scandalous 1870 assassination of a Qing Dynasty general by his best friend.

General Ma Xinyi (Mr. Li) is the sole survivor of a massacre during the Taiping Rebellion. Stranded far from home with no money, troops, or food, he joins a gang of bandits led by Zhao (Andy Lau from “Infernal Affairs”) and Jiang (Takeshi Kaneshiro from “House of Flying Daggers”). The three men swear loyalty and eventually rejoin the emperor’s army, winning a series of bloody military engagements. But their brotherhood is rotting beneath the weight of Pang’s ambitions, and eventually everything collapses in a shower of arrows and black blood.

Peter Chan’s rugged, bare-knuckled action flick unfolds against a blasted, wintry landscape and is so technically accomplished it could have come from any American studio. Unfortunately, Andre Morgan, the film’s producer, is re-cutting the movie for Western audiences against the wishes of Mr. Chan. Fortunately, an English-subtitled DVD of “The Warlords” is available in every Chinatown video store and online. Although the disc is Region-Coded, it’s easily viewed on any region-free DVD player (they’re available all over town for about $99).

Region coding is the way Hollywood studios have carved up the world’s territories so they can maximize their profits by staggering their release schedules. There are six regions and technically a DVD that’s coded for Region 3 won’t play on a machine coded for Region 1, but the legality of Region Coding is in dispute and several cases are pending before the World Trade Organization. So if you don’t like a big corporation telling you what movies you can and can’t watch, pick yourself up a region-free player and a copy of “The Warlords” and learn that rousing historical epics may be dead, but they aren’t buried just yet.