We’re staying at the place of a colleague, here in the Tin Hau neighborhood of Hong Kong Island. Just a few blocks from Victoria Park, if you’re looking at a map of the city. Well, of course you’re not, but still …

We really like the neighborhood, and the serviced-apartment, too. It’s basically one big room, but it has a walk-in closet, a sizable bathroom and a big deck that we didn’t use as much as we could have/should have.

It also has a Philips wide-screen TV — and some DVDs lying about.

One of which is the Adam Sandler vehicle, “Don’t Mess with the Zohan.” Which normally I wouldn’t cross the street to see, but when you’re in another country and your TV options are surprisingly limited, even with cable …

Anyway, our suspicions of the origin of this DVD were raised immediately.

The thin plastic packaging the DVD came in on had a sort of mini-review on it, in English, that was surprising blunt and uncomplimentary.

To wit:

“Crude, tasteless, unfunny, the usual … ‘You Don’t Mess with the Zohan’ isn’t as offensive as it is just boring. … It’s low-grade, typically broad Sandler humor with a few amusing moments, though it ends up hit-or-miss mediocre.”

Now, that’s not the sort of review you would expect to read on a DVD manufactured by the studio. (And studios have been ticked, for years, by the pervasive of pirated content produced in China.)

Then we popped it into the machine, figured out how to start it … and had our suspicions confirmed.

First, was the quality of the disk. It produced an extraordinarily dark image. Oh, like, say, something a video-recorder might pick up off a movie-theater screen from the back of a room. (Think of Kramer in that old “Seinfeld” episode, and you’ve got it.)

But what clinched it was the subtitles.

I assume this was pirated somewhere in China, and the guys who did it knew they needed English subtitles to sell it to foreigners.

But they probably didn’t actually speak English, or couldn’t write it … and what we got (I’m fairly sure) was subtitles generated by a machine programmed to “hear” dialogue and translate it into English.

That doesn’t always work particularly well. And when most of the main characters are affecting Israeli or Arabic accents … it just goes to pieces. The subtitles were laughably bad and clearly second-rate.

The bad guy in the movie is named “Phantom,” but the subtitle insisted on calling him “fantasm.”

Some dialogue:

“You sound Easter.” Instead of “You sound Middle-Eastern.”

“I need to set the move for my fund” instead of “I need to set the mood for my fun.”

And “Sheik Somebody” came out “Shit Somebody.”

“Everyone recognize you” came out “everyone related to you.”

There even were a few passages when the computer was so confused … it gave subtitles in Spanish.

As if that evidence weren’t mountainous enough … at the end, the standard DVD options (outtakes, etc.) weren’t there.

So, yeah. My first pirated DVD.  I suppose it was good enough for me to recognize that “Zohan” is a bad movie. And the subtitles  made it all a little funnier than it actually was.

But it seems to me you get what you pay for — and this copy of Zohan probably cost $10 Hong Kong — about $1.25, U.S.  Grainy and screwed up subtitles …that’s what you get.