Posts Tagged ‘Blu-Ray’


The Colossus of New York & The Space Children, headed to Blu-ray from Olive Films

March 30th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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Previously released to DVD by Olive Films, Eugene Lourie’s stylish creature features the great Ross Martin (Experiment in Terror) as the eponymous The Colossus of New York - a massive robotic hulk powered by the brain of a brilliant young inventor. Also featuring John Baragrey (The Creeper), Mala Powers (City Beneath the Sea), and Wtf-Film favorite Robert Hutton (The Man Without a Body, They Came From Beyond Space). The Colossus of New York Blu-ray is slated for release on June 19th, and is currently up for pre-order through Amazon.com.

Also set for release on June 19th is former Universal B-producer William Alland (The Mole People, Tarantula) and director Jack Arnold’s Paramount sci-fi The Space Children, in which an alien intelligence uses children to tamper with a government space project. Famously mocked in late-season MST3K and previously unavailable on home video, The Space Children is arriving on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time, and is currently up for pre-order through Amazon.com.

 


Demetrius and the Gladiators

March 27th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Delmer Daves
1954 / 20th Century Fox / 102′
written by Philip Dunne
director of photography Milton R. Krasner
origianl music by Franz Waxman
starring Victor Mature, Susan Hayward, Michael Rennie, Debra Paget, Anne Bancroft, Jay Robinson, Barry Jones, and William Marshall
reviewed from a screener provided by Twilight Time
Demetrius and the Gladiators is available on Blu-ray from Twilight Time in a limited edition of 3000, and is offered exclusively through Screen Archives Entertainment and their Amazon storefront.

Pushed into production before The Robe had even wrapped by producers content with the likelihood of that film’s success but not with the thought of wasting its expensive dressings, the 1954 sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators is understandably a bit smaller and less refined than its epic progenitor, but that doesn’t keep it from being gobs more fun. Ostensibly a religious drama about the ebb and flow of one (very) early Christian’s faith in Caligula’s Rome, Demetrius punctuates its piety with hearty helpings of good old-fashioned violent spectacle – ‘gladiators’ isn’t in the title for nothing.

Demetrius and the Gladiators finds The Robe‘s eponymous artifact – the robe worn by Christ to Calvary - in the protective custody of that titular Demetrius (Victor Mature reprising his role from the previous film) while its chief protector, the apostle Peter (Michael Rennie in another carry-over role), is away on urgent church business. Unfortunately for Demetrius the increasingly mad Roman emperor Caligula (returning player Jay Robinson in a delightfully outrageous turn) wants the robe for himself, convinced that it possesses a power that will render him literally divine. It isn’t long before the Praetorian guard are knocking at Demetrius’ door, and when a scuffle with them turns violent the devout ex-slave finds himself involuntarily inducted into Strabo’s (Ernest Borgnine!) gladiatorial academy and destined for combat in the Emperor’s private arena. There he captures the fertile imagination of Messalina (Susan Hayward as a Code-friendly variation on the nymphomaniacal third wife of future Roman emperor Claudius), who finds perverse gratification in forcing the good Christian to fight against man and beast.

Demetrius’ devotion to peace and good will doesn’t last long, however. The presumed death of his potter girlfriend Lucia (Debra Paget, The Ten Commandments) at the hand of a fellow gladiator soon has the pectoral hunk renouncing his faith and slaughtering his co-combatants wholesale, much to the delight of Caligula and his Praetorian guard, who appoint him to their ranks as a tribune, as well as Messalina, with whom Demetrius begins an affair. Meanwhile Caligula goes madder, hallucinating that the gods are walking his palace’s halls and becoming increasingly paranoid of plots (both real and imagined) against him…

Limited to just a handful of admittedly gargantuan sets and over and done with in a sight less than two hours Demetrius and the Gladiators really can’t help but feel on the small side compared to its mega-produced big brother The Robe, but it’s a distinction that ultimately works in the film’s favor. Focusing on just a few of that previous film’s surviving players and adding but a handful more, Philip Dunne’s capable screenplay works perfectly well as entertainment even as its ramshackle contrivance becomes increasingly obvious. The obligatory religious dramatics are more a means to an end than anything else, and leave poor Demetrius to seem more than a little the flake – one moment he’s ready to die for his beliefs, the next he’s tearing through Caligula’s private arena with a sword in each hand. The degree of Demetrius’ faith seems wholly dependent on the fate of his girlfriend here – an odd turn to be sure for a character whose Christianity was previously affirmed by no less than witnessing the crucifixion first hand, but it does get the action moving towards the arena, an essential development for a film whose credits spell out THE GLADIATORS at a scale considerably larger than that granted its eponymous hero.

The Hays Code may have put the kibosh on any possibility of overt blood and gore, but Demetrius and the Gladiators still offers audiences plenty of lavish arena-bound action. The show-stopper, despite the obviousness of its artifice, may be Demetrius’ first go in the arena when, after surviving a round with the King of Cartoons (a young William Marshall as Glycon), Caligula orders that the tigers be loosed upon him. A skillful blend of composite effects and stunts with trained animals make the sequence a real thrill, even when the tigers inevitably end up appearing more friendly than threatening. With skilled stuntmen and fencing instructor Jean Heramans (Scaramouche) at his disposal, all-purpose director Delmer Daves (Dark Passage, 3:10 to Yuma) proves himself more than adept in delivering Demetrius‘ big-screen action set pieces. Though essentially bloodless (Demetrius typically finishes off his opponents by bopping them on the helmet, complete with a sanitized, meatless sound effect) the choreography and set-ups are quite good, particularly when Demetrius is in his revenge-fueled dual-bladed frenzy.

Demetrius and the Gladiators is rarely great film making, but it is never less than good enough. The wonderfully erratic work of Jay Robinson, whose Caligula slithers about his palace with cool, reptilian menace, and the bosom-heaving performance of Susan Hayward, tempting enough despite being but a shadow of the notorious historical Messalina, help to elevate the show beyond the cash-in ambitions of its producers, while the much maligned Wtf-Film favorite Victor Mature seems well at home in yet another religious epic (following his turns in Samson and Delilah, Androcles and the Lion, and The Robe). This is good stuff, provided you don’t take it too seriously, and essential viewing for sword and sandal buffs.

Whether due to deficiencies in the available source materials, the age of the HD transfer, or both, Demetrius and the Gladiators looks substantially weaker in its Blu-ray debut than either its predecessor The Robe or the impossibly vibrant The Egyptian - Fox’s other lavish CinemaScope religious epic from 1954. The presence of a variety of damage, ranging from minor dust and debris to larger blemishes and even a few nasty vertical scratches, indicates that at the very least Demetrius hasn’t been treated to the same level of restoration Fox has bestowed upon those other films. As such Demetrius offers perhaps the weakest HD video presentation yet for niche label Twilight Time, but I still found it an imminently watchable disc and easily the superior of past editions.

Presented at the appropriate extra-wide 2.55:1 aspect ratio, the 1080p transfer has a lower level of detail than even the limitations of early CinemaScope lenses can explain – a factor compounded by an especially course, unrefined grain structure (just compare the grain in the screenshots here to that of the DeLuxe CinemaScope The Egyptian or the Technicolor CinemaScope Picnic). While contrast is strong color saturation rarely follows suit, falling short of the sort of lushness Demetrius‘ original Technicolor prints would have exported and often lending the film a dusty, subdued appearance – the image also appears unnaturally dark and overly red to these eyes. Even with all that in mind the presentation still thoroughly trounces that of the older DVD edition (released a decade ago), and the imperfect image is free of any undue digital manipulations. Twilight Time provide their typically strong technical backing as well. The video is Mpeg-4 AVC-encoded at a healthy average bitrate of 33.2 Mbps, and the relatively short feature (at least by epic standards) stretches comfortably into dual layer territory.

Blu-ray screenshots were captured as full resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 97% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Far less troublesome is the audio, which presents Demetrius and the Gladiators‘ original 4-track surround mix in lossless DTS-HD MA. The separation here is notable, and obviously intended for BIG theatrical projection – even the dialogue makes full use of the track’s right, left, and center channels. While the dialogue and sound effect sound as strong as can be expected from the vintage mix it’s Franz Waxman’s exhilarating score (which also incorporates themes adapted from Alfred Newman’s score for The Robe) that really wows. Waxman’s compositions are as essential Demetrius‘s epic style as its enormous sets and color CinemaScope photography, and I found his heroic opening melody bouncing about in my brain long after the imagery had faded. The only drawback on the audio front is, again, a lack of optional English subtitles. Fox’s own editions always come with a mix of them, and that they aren’t even providing Twilight Time with an SDH track is a crying shame.

Supplements are light, as expected (and advertised), with an original trailer (in SD) providing the only video extra. The only other supplement is of excellent stuff, however – Franz Waxman’s score, included as an isolated DTS-HD MA 2.0 track. The Film Score Monthly CD issue of the same is long out of print, and the importance of its addition here should not be understated. Twilight Time’s typically excellent packaging (which amusingly reverses the trend of giving the word “GLADIATORS” dominance over the name of the film’s hero) is again highlighted by a liner essay from the esteemed Julie Kirgo, who clearly has a ball discussing the film even screenwriter Philip Dunne labelled a “harebrained adventure”.

Demetrius and the Gladiators may be a harebrained adventure, but it wouldn’t have retained a quarter of its substantial appeal if it were anything else. Though loaded with compulsory attempts at evoking the pious gravitas of its predecessor Demetrius is ultimately all about seeing its eponymous hero break as many commandments as his test-of-faith (and the Code) will allow, and while the final product may never reach the dizzying heights of vintage DeMille-ian excess (Sign of the Cross this isn’t) it still offers plenty of that indelible old-Hollywood spectacle. For their part Twilight Time have offered another solid Blu-ray treatment, even if the HD materials leave something to be desired. Recommended, if for the keen lossless audio options alone.


Blu vs. Blu: Night of the Living Dead

March 21st, 2012 | article by | 3 Comments »
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A couple of notes before starting. Firstly, this is strictly to be a comparison of the two most readily available Blu-ray editions for George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead - a film that’s been scaring the hell out of me since I was in grade school. For those interested in my thoughts on the film itself, this article should do the trick.

Second, I had hoped to cover the domestic Forgotten Films Blu-ray release of the film as well, but the $17+shipping asking price at Amazon is just too rich for my blood given a company with zero reputation and a product that is almost destined to fall below my standards (even for a low budget horror nearly 45 years old). If anyone out there has a copy they wouldn’t mind lending out for a few days I’d be happy to include coverage of it here. Otherwise I’ll post about it when I get around to it, but given the money I already have tied up in pre-orders that’s not likely to be anytime soon.

Third, this article may become a bit more involved than my usual Blu-ray coverage, and to prevent any confusion as to which edition I’m discussing the discs will be referred to, in bold, by the name of the company that released them: Network and Optimum for the two Blu-rays, and with reference to past DVD editions, Dimension (40th Anniversary Edition) and Elite (Millennium Edition).

Now, onto the details of the two discs to be reviewed:

Optimum Home Entertainment
UK / BD-25 / 01:35:52
video: 1080p / 4:3 / black and white
audio: English / DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono
no subtitles / Region B-locked
supplement: One for the Fire documentary
available for purchase through Amazon UK
Network
UK / BD-25 / 01:35:12
video: 1080p / 4:3 / black and white
audio: English / 16-bit LPCM 2.0 Mono
no subtitles / All Region Compatible
supplemnt: Original Trailer (HD)
available for purchase through Amazon UK

 

First things first – let’s talk about sources. The Optimum Blu-ray of Night of the Living Dead is sourced from the very same high definition master that was struck for Dimension‘s 40th Anniversary Edition DVD in 2008 (the Elite Millennium Edition DVD, by contrast, was authored from the SD master that company had originally prepared for Laserdisc and VHS issue in the 1990s). The 2008 master is sourced from the original 35mm negatives, as was the earlier Elite master. The 2008 master used by Optimum has also been sourced for Blu-ray releases in Japan, France, Spain and elsewhere.

The Network Blu-ray, by contrast, is sourced from a new proprietary HD master struck from a 35mm theatrical release print, and features a super-imposed credit for Movielab (one of the producers of prints for the film’s initial theatrical runs) in the opening titles. No other disc that I’m aware of is sourced from Network‘s master. Interestingly, though both the Optimum and Network editions are framed at the proper 1.33:1, the latter offers substantially more information on all sides of the frame in comparison to the former. This appears to be a result of zooming of the Dimension master at the transfer level (that company’s DVD is framed in the same manner), and is not indicative of manipulation on Optimum‘s part.

For those familiar with the Dimension DVD’s precise presentation (tight framing aside), the Optimum Blu-ray offers much the same, only with the expected uptick in clarity and detail. Textures are quite impressive, from the wood grain in the comparison above to the thread patterns of clothes and furniture to the subtle details of human flesh (un-dead and otherwise). Damage is at low levels throughout, though the minor scratches and speckling of the source elements are more readily noticeable in this HD iteration. Contrast is at healthy levels throughout, with a nice array of gray tones, with only a bit of posterization here and there to distract. A fine grain is in evidence throughout, and soundly rendered by the Mpeg-4 AVC video encode (at an average bitrate of 20.6 Mbps). The image maintains its filmic quality even on close inspection (zooming in 3-4x) with negligible encoding artifacts. Most importantly, Optimum‘s presentation is fully uncut, running just under 96 minutes with no missing footage (save for the final shot, but more on that in a moment).

Network‘s presentation is another beast all together, but I’m not totally averse to it. I grew up watching Night of the Living Dead from copies sourced from the same blown-out Movielab-produced theatrical elements as are utilized here, so the presentation tickles the nostalgic corners of my brain in the best of ways. This applies especially to the film’s unsettling closing credits sequence, which is rendered here just as it was theatrically (with the unfortunate omission of the final “The End” closing card). In all three of the other editions referenced here, and all of the other editions sourced from those same transfers, the zoomed-in still of a lit torch fades to black, before either cutting or fading to the final shot of the bonfire. The Dimension transfer gets things particularly wrong on this front, fading into this final shot a second or more later than it should. The Network transfer preserves the theatrical ending, with the screen flaring white as the torch still is “lit” and cutting to the shot of the bonfire lighting.

  

Still, one can’t let nostalgia get in the way of objectivity, and with the exception of the closing editing and the correct framing Network‘s presentation is, by virtue of its source alone, the inferior of Optimum‘s. Detail and textures remain at higher levels than SD can muster, but are mitigated by the blown-out contrast of the Movielab source print. The shadows are frightfully intense, and light areas of the frame can really blaze – fine detail is frequently lost to both. To be fair, this is exactly as I recall these theatrical prints looking, but for consumers of modern HD transfers, which typically harvest from the OCN, interpositive, or internegative, this appearance may come as quite a shock. Damage is considerable, from dust, dirt, and speckling to prominent vertical scratching (both black and white, meaning that at least some of this was printed right in). There is even some persistent emulsion bubbling towards the top center of the frame, further evidence of just how much care (not much) was taken by Movielab in minting the print to begin with.

This biggest issue with Network‘s presentation, however, is the amount of footage that’s missing (a little more than half a minute). Some of it amounts to a few frames lost to splices here and there, as at the end of the opening “An Image Ten Production” credit, though more substantial losses are also evident (a long shot of the truck driving through the zombie horde is cut quite short), particularly around the reel changes (as is the case with the late-film dialogue scene concerning Barbara’s crashed car, which is missing several lines). These Movielab prints have always been splicy, and I’d wager that most if not all of the ones that still exist are now incomplete, but it wouldn’t have been that much trouble to restore the more substantial losses from alternative sources. Indeed, I suspect Network may well have compounded the issue by removing some of the more excessively damaged frames outright – there’s not a reel change marker or splice to be seen, but the footage associated with them also appears to be gone.

Grain is at low levels, either by virtue of the multi-generation source or mitigation efforts on the part of Network, but the end result didn’t appear overly waxy or digital to these eyes (as is often the case with their HD masters of The Prisoner television series). Unfortunately the Mpeg-4 AVC video encode is of lesser stuff than Optimum‘s, and while the bitrate is only slightly lower (19.6 Mbps on average) artifacting is much more noticeable. It’s not to the point that it ever really distracted from my viewings, but it is there, and the larger you screen the disc the more obvious it will be.

Note: The screenshot comparison for this article is rather big, so I’ve opted to move it to the end of the text instead of its usual place here.

With regards to audio, the Optimum release is mastered from the better source and, as should be expected, sounds quite good in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 monophonic English. Dialogue has always been pretty flat throughout this film, a limitation of the original production, but the looped library music has some nice punch at times. Network‘s edition sounds better than I expected in 16-bit LPCM 2.0 monophonic English, but is hindered by the limitations of both the production and the multi-generational source print. The loop score can still sound strong at times, but the track is thinner overall, and the pop and crackle expected of old theatrical prints can be heard at times. That said, the phasing issues that have plagued past Network audio restorations (Things to Come, The Prisoner) are blessedly absent. Neither disc offers subtitles, SDH or otherwise.

Neither release offers much of anything on the supplemental front either. Die-hard Night of the Living Dead fans no doubt already own the feature-length One For the Fire documentary, which was produced for the Dimension DVD in 2008 and amounts to the whole of the Optimum supplemental package. Network eschews anything substantial, but does offer a fresh 1080p transfer of the very rough, very high contrast theatrical trailer for the film. Network may win over on the packaging front, with an awesome original cover design and a style-consistent chapter listing on the interior side of the insert, but Optimum earn props for sticking by the excellent original poster work (They Won’t Stay Dead!). In terms of price each is quite affordable, with the the cost of import to the US (through Amazon UK) running roughly $15 for the Optimum Blu-ray and a slightly lower $13 for the more rustic Network, standard shipping included, at the time of this writing.

In the end I suspect it’s regional playback limitations that will decide for most of you – the Optimum is locked to Region B, while the Network is all-region compatible. For the rest I present the screenshot comparison below. For my part, I bought both, and am happy with each on their own merits. Anything beyond that is up to your personal preferences.

Blu-ray screenshots were taken as full 1920×1080 resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 97% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Optimum Home Entertainment Blu-ray | Network Blu-ray

Select the appropriate cover below to purchase the respective edition:

 


On Blu this week: Two from Twilight Time

March 12th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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On March 13th limited edition home video label Twilight Time will be releasing the latest in their Blu-ray line, one deep catalog release each from the libraries of 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures:

First up is 20th Century Fox’s lavish extra-wide 2.55:1 CinemaScope follow-up to 1953′s The Robe, the 1954 sword and sandal smash Demetrius and the Gladiators starring Wtf-Film favorites Victor Mature, Michael Rennie, and Ernest Borgnine, and directed by Delmer Daves (the original 3:10 to Yuma). From ScreenArchives:

DEMETRIUS AND THE GLADIATORS (1954) (PRE-ORDER) (BLU-RAY)
Starring: Victor Mature, Michael Rennie, Richard Egan, Ernest Borgnine, Susan Hayward, Debra Paget, Jay Robinson
Directed By: Delmer Daves
Composed By: Franz Waxman

VIDEO: 1080p High Definition / 2.55:1
AUDIO: English 4.0 DTS-HD MA
LANGUAGE: English
1954 / Color
101 MINUTES
NOT RATED
NTSC REGION FREE
Limited Edition of 3,000 Units

“Spectacle, action, sex, and reverence.” — The New York Times

“Compelling screen story, and equally compelling direction…the trial of a man’s faith by the temptations of an amoral woman and a pagan Rome.” — Variety

“Spiffing gladiatorial combats…it’s a lot of fun.” — Time Out Film Guide

The thrilling sequel to The Robe (1953), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) follows the further adventures of the Christian slave Demetrius (Victor Mature), sentenced to servitude as a gladiator in the Roman arena. There, his faith is tested in to-the-death combat and by the wiles of the seductive Messalina (Susan Hayward)—all under the obsessive eye of the mad Emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson). Director Delmer Daves brings epic sweep to the tale, supported by the bravura score of Franz Waxman (available here as an isolated track).

Enjoy the extensive Julie Kirgo liner notes and film art packaged with the Blu-ray disc.

Demetrius and the Gladiators is available as a limited Blu-ray edition of 3000, retail price $29.95, and is currently purchasable exclusively through Twilight Time partner ScreenArchives.com.

Arriving the same day is Richard Brook’s Academy Award-nominated 1975 western Bite the Bullet, starring Gene Hackman, Candace Bergen, James Coburn, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Ben Johnson, with a musical score from Alex North (Dragonslayer). From ScreenArchives:

BITE THE BULLET (1975) (PRE-ORDER) (BLU-RAY)
Starring: Candice Bergen, Ian Bannen, Dabney Coleman, Gene Hackman, James Coburn, Ben Johnson, Jan-Michael Vincent
Directed By: Richard Brooks
Composed By: Alex North

VIDEO: 1080p High Definition / 2.35:1
AUDIO: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA
SUBTITLES: English SDH
LANGUAGE: English
1975 / Color
131 MINUTES
NOT RATED
NTSC REGION FREE
Limited Edition of 3,000 Units

“A finely crafted, epic Western…a film that reexamines and reaffirms the Western myth. Brooks is a proven master.” — Roger Ebert

“An excellent, literate action drama probing the diverse motivations of participants in an endurance horse race.” — Variety

In Bite the Bullet (1975), writer/director Richard Brooks (The Professionals) gives us a Western on a grand scale, focusing on a 700-mile horse race across the bleakly beautiful landscape of the American Southwest. Entrants battling desert and mountain, freezing cold and blistering heat—not to mention their own inner demons—include a former Rough Rider (Gene Hackman); his old comrade-in-arms, now a gambler (James Coburn); a feisty onetime prostitute (Candice Bergen); a weary saddle tramp (Ben Johnson); a wealthy English toff (Ian Bannen); and an arrogant kid (Jan-Michael Vincent) looking to make his reputation. Featuring a score by the one and only Alex North (available here as an isolated track).

Enjoy the extensive Julie Kirgo liner notes and film art packaged with the Blu-ray disc.

The Bite the Bullet limited edition Blu-ray retails for $34.95 and, like Demetrius and the Gladiators, is currently purchasable exclusively through Twilight Time partner ScreenArchives.com. Be sure to follow Twilight Time on Facebook and Twitter to receive the latest release news and updates, and check back here as well – Wtf-Film will have comprehensive coverage of both releases available as soon as our copies arrive.


The Deadly Spawn: Blu-ray Update

March 9th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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In case you’ve yet to read it, I unloaded some pretty hefty (if totally justifiable) criticism at Elite Entertainment’s Millennium Edition Blu-ray of The Deadly Spawn when it arrived early last month. That disc was, for lack of better words, an utter disaster. That said, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel for Spawn fans after all. A new disc appears in the works, though details of it remain sketchy.

What we do have is the below image, posted by The Deadly Spawn‘s producer Ted Bohus on the Blu-ray.com forum (unfortunately only as a scaled-down 100 k .jpg) and said to be sourced from a fresh transfer of the film from the original camera negative. As always, click on the image to see it at its full resolution.

The above image appears exactly as it was provided (though I did change the name). Now, to better compare this new image to what has come before I’ve taken the liberty of scaling it to full 1920×1080 and saving it to .jpg at a quality setting of 100% in Gimp. The result – shared below – should not be considered a true indicator of the transfer quality, but for my purposes it’s good enough.

And now, to the past releases – the Synapse DVD from 2004, and the Millennium Edition Blu-ray released last month. Exact frame matches to the above were captured from each as full-resolution .png in VLC media player, then compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 97% using the ImageMagick command line tool. I’ve included both the original 480p DVD image as well as a scaled-up 1920×1080 example of the same, for ease of comparison. The order is as follows: DVD / Upscaled DVD / Blu-ray.

Even given the compromised resolution of the sample Bohus provided the positive difference is unmistakable. The new image looks just that, considerably brighter with tighter contrast and detail and more heavily saturated color. Framing is also opened up noticeably on all sides.

Now it’s impossible for me or anyone else to judge anything based on how a single frame of it compares to that same frame in past editions, but having said that I’ll be damned if this doesn’t look like quite the improvement. At the very least there is a lot of promise here, and like other fans of the film who found themselves so disappointed with the Blu-ray I anxiously await further updates of this forthcoming new new edition.

UPDATE (3/17/2012): Bohus’ latest (quoted from the Blu-ray.com forum) is unfortunately less encouraging than the above:

“Well, after doing a bunch of tests, I’m just not happy with the grain situation. Some scenes are fantastic, but others are so-so. I know most of you here say you don’t mind grain…but I hate it. Still tryin’ stuff…I’ll keep yuz posted….”

As they say, one step forward and two steps back.


I thought we were an autonomous collective…

March 8th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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No film review to be seen here, kids, just my thoughts on the long-awaited Sony Pictures blu-ray of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, released Tuesday and presently available everywhere worth shopping (if you’re feeling especially charitable Amazon does swing a decent commission Wtf-Film’s way). For the moment I’ll not bother with the usual is-it or isn’t-it worth the upgrade arguments. Suffice to say, do you know how you can tell this release is a king?

Unlike the larger part of what I cover here I’ve actually had the opportunity to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail on the big screen, and from a well-maintained 35mm print to boot. This latest home video iteration compares to that screening very favorably, improving upon it a few steps in terms of clarity and cleanliness while preserving the crude aesthetic inherent to the production.

Presented at a spacious 1.66:1, noticeably more open than past domestic editions and in keeping with how the film would have been projected in its native England, Grail looks as splendid as I imagine possible in its high definition debut. The quality of the photography varies dramatically from scene to scene and often shot to shot – some of the footage (the scene with “a famous historian” for example) looks no better than blown-up 16mm, or worse, though there are certainly some lovelier moments about. Likewise, grain has always been on the heavier side for the production, which was filmed largely on location and with natural light. For its part Sony’s transfer has captured it all, and with precision to spare – those who know how the film should look will be thrilled.

Per the norm for recent Sony restorations, the excessive grain goes unperturbed by excessive digital video noise reduction while detail is allowed to fend for itself (I’m still surprised at how prevalent edge enhancement is on HD video, and Sony is to be commended for avoiding the practice). The end result is an image that looks wholly natural on those terms, and with healthy color and contrast to match. The video is Mpeg-4 AVC encoded at a slightly depressed average bitrate of 25.0 Mbps, but I’m hard pressed to find quarrel with it. Any encoding deficiencies were so negligible as to go unnoticed in my normal viewing, and I noted nothing at all untoward in my usual up-close inspection.

Given the problems that crop up in Sony’s earlier Monty Python’s Life of Brian (in which the grain frequently seems to suspend itself over the image to no good end) I was very pleased to see how Monty Python and the Holy Grail presented on Blu-ray. This looks exactly as it should, and I can’t ask for more.

Screenshots were taken as full resolution 1920×1080 .png in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 97% using the Image Magick command line tool.

Audio receives a considerable boost courtesy of a lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 English surround mix that’s honestly just too robust for this viewer, though it was lovely to hear the film’s soundtrack sounding so good after all these years. There’s some decent separation and I didn’t notice any obnoxious new foley work, but I suspect I’ll rely on the more familiar old monophonic mix (unfortunately only provided in lossy Dolby Digital 2.0) in future viewings. This all region disc comes with a decent array of dub options – French, Japanese, and Portuguese (all in lossy Dolby Digital 5.1) – and a host of optional subtitles – English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai. While I’d have appreciated a lossless monophonic encode a la Twilight Time’s releases from the Sony catalog I’m hard-pressed to find any genuine complaints here.

Supplements carry over quite a bit, though not all, of what was included with the 2-disc Special Edition DVD package from 2001. You get two feature commentary tracks (one with co-directors Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, the other with stars Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and John Cleese), The Quest for the Holy Grail Locations (47 minutes, SD), LEGO Knights of the Round Table (1:43, SD), two subtitled scenes from the Japanese Version (8 minutes, SD), How to Use Your Coconuts (3 minutes, SD), BBC Film Night (17 minutes, SD), the US re-release trailer from 2001 (3 minutes, HD), a cast directory photo gallery, previews for other releases (including Not the Messiah: He’s a Very Naughty Boy), and Blu-ray production credits. New to the mix, and by far the most exciting, are two collections of unused material – Lost Animation (12 minutes, HD) introduced at length by Terry Gilliam, and Outtakes & Extended Scenes  (18 minutes, HD) introduced by Terry Jones. Less useful, at least for this Linux-faithful PC devotee, is The Holy Book of Days Second Screen option, an iPad app that’s supposed to sync with your Blu-ray player and offer all manner of behind the scenes stuff. This went untested in my viewing, for obvious reasons, and I can’t see myself shelling out $400-$500 for the privilege any time soon. The disc is BD-Live enabled, which netted me adverts for The Smurfs and The Zookeeper (*shudder*) though not much else.

The exclusivity of The Holy Book of Days Second Screen thingamajig is disappointing, but I’ll live. Ultimately this is all about the presentation of the film itself, and on that count Sony have scored big. Add to that the previously unseen HD outtakes and unused animation and you have a Blu-ray release that’s worth every penny of the less-than-$16 most retailers are asking for it. Highly recommended!


Hammer Cares: Dracula Prince of Darkness BD/DVD replacement program up and running

March 7th, 2012 | article by | 5 Comments »
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Reports have been surfacing for a few days now with regards to audio sync issues on the (very) recently released Hammer / Studio Canal double play Blu-ray / DVD edition of Dracula Prince of Darkness. Those experiencing the problem will be happy to hear this, copied directly from Hammerfilms.com:

“We recently discovered a small audio synch issue within a couple of scenes of the Dracula Prince Of Darkness discs that were released on the 5th of March.

This problem occurred at the authoring stage where a fix was not implemented despite being supplied.

With this in mind we will be replacing any discs that have this issue present.

Please send your proof of payment and your address to enquiries@vdcgroup.com and we will endeavour to send a working replacement to you promptly.”

While I’d argue that such a fundamental issue should never have gone by un-checked in the first place, the fact that Hammer and Studio Canal have taken ownership of it so swiftly (just two days out from street date) is good enough. I’ve already sent in an email myself, and with the promise of replacements on the way any coverage of the release published here will come with some great big asterisks attached.

 


Fright Night

December 13th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1985  Company: Columbia Pictures   Runtime: 106′
Director: Tom Holland   Writer: Tom Holland
Music: Brad Fieder   Cinematography: John Kiesser
Cast: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse, Roddy McDowall, Stephen Geoffreys, Jonathan Stark, Dorothy Fielding, Art Evans, Stewart Stern, Nick Savage, Ernie Holmes, Heidi Sorenson, Irina Irvine
Disc company: Twilight Time   Video: 1080p 2.41:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 5.1 English
Subtitles: English SDH   Disc: BD25 (All Region)   Release Date: 12/13/2011
Fright Night is now officially SOLD OUT
Reviewed from a screener provided by Twilight TIme

“What would you do if you accidentally discovered the house next door was occupied by something not human… something horrifying… something unspeakably evil? No one believes you – not your mom, not your girlfriend, not even the police. It knows that you know. You’ll do anything to protect yourself, but it’ll do anything to protect it’s secret…”

It’s not often that one can rely on a theatrical trailer to give an honest description of the film it represents, but in the case of Tom Holland’s 1985 horror opus Fright Night the advertising makes such excellent work of it that I feel no remorse in letting it do that part of my job for me. With inspirations ranging from Hammer to Hitchcock, a smart script, and a superb cast of players, Fright Night ranks as one of the very best of the ’80s genre revivals and a damn fine film in its own right. In theme it recalls the distinct brand of sci-fi terrors Universal’s B-picture department specialized in some thirty years before (epitomized by 1955′s Tarantula!), in which all manner of fantastic horrors were visited upon small-town America, though in practice it’s a different beast all together. Standing in for the Cold War paranoia of then is a sexual anxiety fitting of Fright Night‘s teen leads, while the usual atom-born menace is lost in favor of one of the oldest fantasy threats of all – the vampire.

Taking place in an anonymous slice of Reagan-era suburbia, Fright Night follows the exploits of veritable every-teen Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale), a high school kid with a beer light in his room, porno mags shoved between his encyclopedias, a doting single mother, and a girlfriend named Amy (Amanda Bearse) who loves him to bits even if she’s horrified to go “all the way“. Charley idolizes his local horror icon Peter Vincent, washed-up host of the late-night schlock marathons from which the film takes its name, stumbles through his trigonometry homework, and oh yeah – he has a vampire living next door who knows Charley knows about him and wants to kill him for his troubles. With no one believing his story, not even Vincent, Charley rightfully fears for his life, but things get even more personal when the suave bloodsucker next door takes a shine to his virginal girlfriend…

It is with that last point that Fright Night, a terrific horror film on its surface merits alone, reveals what’s really on its mind – sex. Some (including Julie Kirgo, who contributes the excellent liner notes for this release) have read homosexual undertones into the vampire Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon as the ultimate in sensual and be-sweatered yuppie menace) and his relationships with troubled young outsider “Evil” Ed (Stephen Geoffreys, who made a career of gay porn in the ’90s) and his live-in familiar Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark), but the most overt of the film’s sexual substance is of the straight variety. Indeed, Holland pushes the subject from the very start, opening with a bit of intercourse that is not to be between Charley and his beloved. The vampire attack witnessed by Charley that starts all the trouble is an overtly sexualized affair and a later encounter between Dandridge and Amy (the spitting image of Jerry’s long-dead lover) is even more so, with Amy cooing in orgasmic bliss as blood trickles down her back. In this context the growing conflict between Charley and the dastardly Dandridge becomes less about survival than about who will collect the sexy spoils, and control the fate of Amy’s freshly-awakened sexuality.

Fright Night may have sex on the brain, but it’s still out for thrills and chills, first and foremost. Holland and company don’t disappoint. Though bolstered by terrific practical effects and creature design from Randall William Cook and Richard Edlund (Oscar-winning alumni of such productions as Ghostbusters and Raiders of the Lost Ark), Fright Night‘s most effective moments remain its simplest, like Charley investigating suspicious noises in the night, Dandridge suddenly appearing in the corner of a darkened bedroom, or “Evil” Ed running into the stalking menace in a misty alleyway. Holland shows a keen understanding for the genre throughout, both in his taught direction (this, his debut as director, remains his best work in that regard) and in the intelligence of his screenwriting, and never neglects the horror of the situation. Much more importantly, he never neglects the characters who make that horror tick.

To that end it’s impossible not to discuss Fright Night without also discussing its cast, perhaps the best in practice of any of the decade’s revival horrors. Roddy McDowall gives the performance of his later career (one he would reprise in Fright Night Part 2 three years later) as down on his luck horror icon Peter Vincent, whose career as cinema’s preeminent vampire killer has collapsed into a low-pay hosting gig on a late night television film show. Initially paid to help cure Charley of his vampire delusions, Vincent soon finds himself the unlikely ally of the child, and forced to summon the courage of a role he’d played so many times before to combat an evil all too real. McDowall balances Vincent’s tremendous charm and ego (his reaction to discovering Charley and his friends don’t want his autograph is priceless) with underlying insecurity and, ultimately, courage, and practically owns the picture in the process.

At the more malignant end of the spectrum lies Chris Sarandon as the devilish Jerry Dandridge, who, along with Kinski, Schreck, Lugosi, and Lee, exists as one of film’s most memorable vampires. Dandridge – who eschews the traditional cape for snazzy cable knit sweaters and has a taste for fresh fruit (fruit bat?) just as strong as his taste for the supple necks of prostitutes – is every bit a product of the decade in which the film was made, an upper crust yuppie bloodsucker with a penchant for remodeling homes and antiquing. He keeps up with the pop music scene, looks perfectly adept in the neon haze of a discotheque, and keeps a dark, wry sense of humor about himself that makes him seem all the more dangerous (“What’s the matter Charley? Afraid I’d never come over without being invited first?”). But Dandridge is more than just yuppie trappings and a handsome smirk, whistling “Strangers in the Night” as he stalks his prey. Sarandon’s ace performance lends the character an attractive outsider mystique and a feral magnetism that’s difficult to ignore. He’s a perfect villain, made all the more effective by just how tempting he makes the evil he represents appear.

Like Dandridge, Fright Night itself is very much a product of its time, though it’s no less successful a picture today for the polka dotted linoleum on its floors or the Ian Hunter on its soundtrack. It remains the best film of writer and director Tom Holland’s career (is that really The Langoliers I see in your filmography? Oy.), and easily makes my short list for most satisfying genre efforts of the ’80s. Among its often lamentable brethren Fright Night manages to be something different, something special, and for those keen on horror it’s an absolute must-see.

Fright Night proved a surprise success upon its release, becoming the second highest grossing horror film of 1985 (behind A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge), but times have clearly changed. Though still a popular cult item Fright Night has become just another among many victims of waning big-studio confidence in deeper library titles, however successful they may have been initially, and the lackluster returns of the recent remake (also to be released on Blu-ray today) have sealed its fate as far as owners Columbia / Sony are concerned. With no interest on the part of the owners to release the film to Blu-ray themselves, niche label Twilight Time have stepped in to take up their slack. While many may find the arrangement less than ideal, with Fright Night released as a limited edition of 3000 at a price point higher than might be expected of a wider issue, you’ll hear no complaints from me. If this is the future of library titles on Blu-ray then I’m in full support of it, and those wishing to see more marginal big-studio properties available on the format would do well to do the same.

But what of the disc, eh? Fright Night arrives on Blu-ray with an honest 1080p transfer in the original Panavision ratio that serves the intended aesthetics of its modest production quite dutifully. From the neon-drenched interiors of the discotheque and a beer-light illuminated teenage bedroom to the starker, more natural exteriors, the latest Sony-produced master of the title looks very good throughout. Damage is minimal, limited to some baked-in white marks and a bit of minor dust and debris, and while the level of detail can vary greatly from scene to scene the end results never appear unfaithful to the original photography. There’s a lovely layer of natural grain in evidence throughout, and though the modest encode (single layer AVC at an average video bitrate of 21.5 Mbps) results in some (very) minor artifacts there’s nothing here that’s so dramatic as to distract from viewing. This is another strong showing from Twilight Time, and fans of Fright Night should be very pleased.

Blu-ray screenshots were taken as uncompressed .png at full resolution in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Originally a Dolby Stereo show, Fright Night‘s visuals are served well by a new lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix. Those expecting directional effects to be bouncing about like ping-pong balls will be out of luck – what you get is occasional LFE umph and some minor separation, but a track that remains faithful to the overall aesthetics of the original recording. The moody synth score, dialogue and effects all sounded excellent to these ears, and appropriately vintage for a film now in its 26th year. I dig it. The most robust addition to the contractually-limited supplemental package (which otherwise includes only a pair of theatrical trailers, both in HD with lossless audio) is the isolated Brad Fieder score in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo which, though lacking the notable pop songs included in the film (I assume they were omitted due to the lofty expense of licensing them), sounds quite robust. Twilight Time leave very little to complain about here, and even include a set of optional English SDH subtitles in the mix.

In the short period Twilight Time have been active in the Blu-ray market expectations have already grown quite high for them, and Fright Night does not disappoint. Another excellent set of liner notes (remember when these were included with practically everything?) from Julie Kirgo round out the package, and even include the URL for a pair of Fright Night ’pirate’ audio commentaries (available from Icons of Fright) featuring much of the cast and crew. Awesome stuff! Whatever your thoughts on these limited edition niche releases, the bottom line is that you won’t find Fright Night looking or sounding better than it does here, and isn’t that what really matters? Fans and genre junkies are heartily encouraged to indulge.

in conclusion
Film: Excellent  Video: Excellent –  Audio: Excellent
Supplements: Isolated Brad Fieder score track. two theatrical trailers in HD, liner notes by Julie Kirgo.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case with booklet.
Fright Night is now officially SOLD OUT

Rapture

December 12th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1965  Company: 20th Century Fox / Panoramic Productions   Runtime: 104′
Director: John Guillermin   Writers: Ennio Flaiano, Stanley Mann, Phyllis Hastings
Music: Georges Delerue   Cinematography: Marcel Grignon
Cast: Patricia Gozzi, Dean Stockwell, Melvyn Douglas, Gunnel Lindblom
Disc company: Twilight Time   Video: 1080p 2.35:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 1.0 English
Subtitles: None   Disc: BD25 (All Region)   Release Date: 12/13/2011
Rapture is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com
Reviewed from a screener provided by Twilight TIme.

Young Agnes, an adolescent malcontent struggling to reconcile her childish nature with her budding desires, lives in isolation in her widowed father’s modest seaside estate. One day, after her father (himself obsessed with ruminations on “compassionate justice”) dashes her favorite doll on the coastal rocks in a fit of misplaced rage (“You’re not a child!” he screams), Agnes decides to construct a new companion for herself – a scarecrow made from one of her father’s old suits. A few days later Agnes, her father and their housekeeper witness the violent escape of a jailed man. When one stormy night that same man arrives in the family shed, having stolen the clothes from the scarecrow to hide himself from the authorities, Agnes becomes convinced that her manufactured companion has come to life.

The stranger-on-the-run is welcomed into the presumed safety of the home by the father, the housekeeper, and especially Agnes, though each for very different reasons. The promiscuous housekeeper takes him on as a lover, while the father uses him as a testing ground for his legal theories. Agnes, meanwhile, remains convinced that he is hers alone, and after throwing off his plans for escape (both from the police and the home) develops a more intimate relationship with him.

It’s rare anymore that I see a film so uniquely its own that it leaves me with no starting point from which to discuss it, but such a film is Rapture, director John Guillermin’s bleak yet sumptuous adaptation of Phyllis Hastings’ novel Rapture in my Rags. Transposed from the novel’s English countryside to the Brittany Coast to sate 20th Century Fox executive Darryl F. Zanuck’s taste for young French talent Patricia Gozzi, who would soon disappear from the film business all together, and produced by a largely French crew with American actors Melvyn Douglas and Dean Stockwell and Swede Gunnel Lindblom filling out the leading roles, Rapture is a film of strange international pedigree. That it was directed by a man (fittingly an Englishman of French lineage) best known for his contributions to the super-productions of mega-producers Irwin Allen (The Towering Inferno) and Dino De Laurentiis (King Kong and the much maligned King Kong Lives) only makes it stranger still.

Of course it’s not just the cultural diversity of the production that makes this film so unique, as good an initial indicator of such as that might be, but its substance and artifice as well. Ostensibly a coming-of-age drama about a confused young woman and the father whose misplaced anger threatens to obliterate their tenuous family ties, but with darkly fantastic overtones, a penchant for forbidden romance and art-house panache to spare, Rapture never comes across as being the usual cinema fare. Indeed, from the opening shots of a giggling bride on the way to her wedding ceremony to the final closing fade, I’m still not at all sure what to make of it, though it’s certainly a film I’ll never forget.

Portrayed magnificently by Patricia Gozzi, who was just fifteen at the time, Rapture‘s Agnes is the very embodiment of bewildered adolescence, and struggles to find herself under the domineering auspices of a father who at once demands she behave as a woman while treating her as though she were a child. Having spent most of her life out of school and in social isolation, with the threat of a nearby loony-bin forever looming, Agnes is predictably unprepared for the outside world. Her brief encounters with modern France, both during an early wedding and a later elopement, are claustrophobic, nightmarish affairs, with the trappings of metropolitan life (buzzing neon, busy streets, and dense, impenetrable crowds) skewed into horrific sights and sounds by her maladjusted perspective. By contrast her life on the depopulated French coast is appropriately rapturous, dysfunctional family dynamics aside, and spent splashing in the waves and reaching out for the greater freedom of the gulls fluttering above. Still the specter of her father (a troubled turn by the veteran Melvyn Douglas) lurks, omnipresent, waiting to lash out at her for any petty grievance.

With a torrent of lightning and rain (and a bit of overt Christian symbolism) the escaped prisoner Joseph (an enigmatic Dean Stockwell, who plays his cards close) arrives, signalling change for the conflicted family whether it’s prepared for it or not. Though he compells the father to contemplate that which torments him, and the roots of his revulsion for his youngest daughter, it is with Agnes herself that the change becomes most obvious – and disquieting. Joseph’s tryst with the housekeeper (Gunnel Lindblom in a hefty supporting role) inspires a fit of jealous rage in the teenager, who takes to her presumed competition with a shovel in hand and a homicidal gleam in her eye. The housekeeper survives, but wastes no time in seeing herself out of her job, and it is with her exit that things take a turn for the uncomfortable.

Agnes becomes romantically entangled with Joseph, a man twice her age (literally in the case of Stockwell), and takes up the outward trappings of womanhood (curling her hair, and dressing up and so on). While the sexual aspect of the relationship, however tastefully restrained in its conveyance, is undeniably disturbing, I found Agnes’ sudden transformation into a homemaker to be even more so. Though clearly unprepared for such a development, Agnes runs away with Joseph to an oppressive one-room downtown hovel in which she dutifully takes up her domestic responsibilities. It’s a depressing development made none the less so by its transience, and as Joseph piles more and more relationship burdens on Agnes (like handling the couple’s finances) it becomes quite horrifying. Guillermin and director of photography Marcel Grignon capture the experience with uncomfortable, inorganic angles and aggressive montage that makes us long for the wide-open seclusion of the seaside every bit as much as Agnes, even though we know as well as her that, after all that’s transpired, things can never be the same as before.

Meticulously photographed in black and white CinemaScope and related in an intense, personal manner, Rapture is about as far removed from Guillermin’s big-money spectacles as I’d imagine possible. It also speaks more for the director’s not inconsiderable talents than any of his better known films. Rapture practically oozes art-house appeal, and with that in mind it’s difficult for me to believe that the film, largely ignored upon its initial release, hasn’t garnered more of a reputation in the 46 years since. Far be it from me to say whether it’s great film making or not – coming-of-age dramas, however strange, aren’t exactly my area of expertise, and I’m still scratching my head over this one – but it’s certainly something different, and a beautiful something at that. Given the present era of over-hyped mediocrity that’s more than enough for me.

The second of Twilight Time’s limited edition Blu-ray series to be culled from the archives of 20th Century Fox, Rapture has finally received the quality home video presentation that has so long eluded it. Before I get into the technical details it’s worth noting that Rapture, like the rest of the Twilight Time catalogue, has been released as a limited pressing of 3000 and is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com.

Once again I’m left with very little room to complain. Rapture makes its high definition debut in a glorious 1080p transfer at the original CinemaScope aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and though only single layered I can’t say that things suffer much for it. Marcel Grignon’s ace photography is wonderfully replicated here, with all its lush 35mm texture blessedly intact. There’s a wide variety of imagery to take in, from the most expansive of landscapes to the closest of faces and everything in between, and all of it is delivered in that true-to-film fashion I crave. Yes, there is some damage, unobtrusive printed white marks and a bit of dirt here and there, and even a smattering of very minor encoding artifacts, there’s a lot of grain for an encoder to digest here and with some rare exception the AVC video encode at 24.5 Mbps average handles it quite well, but all things considered this disc looks very, very good. I’ll let the screenshots do the rest of the talking for this one. Bravo, Twilight Time!

Blu-ray screenshots were taken as uncompressed .png at full resolution in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Audio for the Rapture is presented in English via a simple and effective DTS-HD MA 1.0 track that perfectly replicates the film’s original monophonic recording. The sound design for Rapture is as memorable as the imagery in my mind, with crescendos in sound effects – not music – building up to its most impacting moments. Georges Delerue’s rich, oddly romantic score sounds quite good throughout, given the limitations of the original mix, but the accompanying isolated DTS-HD MA 2.0 score track – the disc’s sole supplement – is a revelation. If there’s a complaint to be made then its with Rapture‘s lack of a subtitle track, SDH or otherwise. Both Mysterious Island and Fright Night (review coming soon, I promise!) have subtitles, and I can only assume that none were provided by 20th Century Fox for this release.

Rapture is the sort of release that really drives home the importance of independent labels like Twilight Time, which are finally allowing some of the real surprises of the big studio libraries to see the light of day on home video. This Blu-ray is another quality package from the company, with a fine transfer, a great isolated score, and a superb set of liner notes from Julie Kirgo (some perspective on Rapture is really a must, and Kirgo does an admirable job providing it), and another easy endorsement from me.

in conclusion
Film: One of a kind  Video: Very Good +  Audio: Excellent
Supplements: Isolated Georges Delerue score track
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case with booklet of liner notes.
Rapture is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com

Mysterious Island

November 15th, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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Year: 1961  Company: Columbia Pictures   Runtime: 101′
Director: Cy Endfield   Writers: John Prebble, Daniel B. Ullman, Crane Wilbur
Music: Bernard Herrmann   Cinematography: Wilkie Cooper
Cast: Michael Craig, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill,
Herbert Lom, Beth Rogan, Percy Herbert, Dan Jackson
Disc company: Twilight Time   Video: 1080p 1.66:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 5.1 and 1.0 English
Subtitles: English SDH   Disc: BD50 (All Region)   Release Date: 11/08/2011
Mysterious Island is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com
The Wtf-Film Guide to Essential Blu-ray is the record of one man’s eclectic journey to uncover the very best of the weird and wonderful that Blu-ray has to offer. The special effects of Ray Harryhausen had to make it onto our list sooner or later, and we’re pleased as punch that it’s the former.

1961′s Mysterious Island begins with one of the great scenes of fantasy-adventure cinema. Imprisoned by Confederate forces in the midst of the Siege of Richmond near the end of the Civil War, Union Captain Cyrus Harding and his underlings, freed slave Corporal Neb and the cowardly Herbert Brown, decide to make a daring escape by the unlikely means of an observation balloon. With Union war correspondent Gideon Spillet and Confederate operator Pencroft in tow the men escape their cell and commandeer the balloon, only to launch themselves into the midst of ‘the greatest storm in American history’. Aloft for days and trapped on a steady course Westward, the escapees are savaged by weather and circumstance until the balloon itself finally gives way, ripping under the pressure of gale-force winds and plunging its crew towards the tumultuous Pacific and a mysterious, uncharted speck of land.

Buoyed by the descending bass and percussive clash of one of Bernard Herrmann’s finest fantasy scores, I remember thinking that this sequence was the most suspenseful, thrilling thing I had ever seen when I first chanced upon the film as a young child. The idea of these men, casting themselves out into the elements toward some unknown, foreboding locale, was harrowing stuff, and as their epic adventure unfolded I was filled with dread excitement. As they dangled from the balloon’s rigging over a seething sea I wondered with fatal curiosity, how would they survive, and who among them? And what if they did make it to that strange island. What then?

Of course Captain Harding and his rag-tag band of castaways do make it to the island, and what follows is a potent mix of survival adventure, science fiction and fantasy that thrills me just as much today as it ever has. Mysterious Island may follow the Vernian adventure on which it is based with only a middling accuracy, condensing and consolidating its events in an economical fashion and taking some pretty judicious liberties with it along the way, but it’s tough to complain when such diversions include the lovely Beth Rogan and her abbreviated lace-up goatskin dress (the height of Victorian fashion, I’m told). Oddly enough it’s one of the film’s many deviations from source that has gone on to make the film so beloved as it is – a sci-fi plot thread that could almost be of Bert I. Gordon’s invention, but which is elevated to the level of pulp genius under the creative auspices of effects wizard Ray Harryhausen – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Though with some obvious variation, Mysterious Island actually follows the basic circumstances of Verne’s story quite faithfully. Captain Harding and his fellows find themselves castaways on an uninhabited volcanic island, and are forced to allay those philosophical differences that plagued them in the civilized world so that they might join forces to survive. Through human ingenuity the five manage to scrounge together a rather satisfying existence, feasting on the island’s often bizarre fauna and taking up permanent residence in a comfortable cliff-side cave they call ‘Granite House’. Along the way they are aided by unlikely coincidences, like the discovery of a trunk loaded with supplies – tools, weapons, and even a copy of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. After a brief tangle with cutthroat pirates ends in the inexplicable destruction of the pirate vessel the source of the coincidences is revealed. The island is the home port of none other than Captain Nemo, who was thought lost in a maelstrom some years before. With his submarine Nautilus inoperable Nemo was forced to continue his mission for global peace from the confines of the island and its surrounding waters, stalling his terrorist action against the world’s military fleets in favor of eradicating of the root causes of human strife through scientific invention.

Though ostensibly escapist adventure, there are some underlying themes in Mysterious Island that, though largely ignored today, must have held broad appeal in a time of Cold War and civil rights unrest. Nary half a decade after Rosa Parks and Brown v. Board of Education Mysterious Island prominently features an African American (a freed slave fighting for the Union, no less) with the same rights and privileges as his white peers – a fixture of Verne’s novel granted a newfound timeliness in the film adaptation. Indeed, the screenplay by John Prebble, Daniel B. Ullman and Crane Wilbur also simplifies the politics of the Civil War, purposefully conflating its noble struggle to free men with the contemporary Civil Rights Movement. In the context of an ongoing Cold War, Mysterious Island offers the hope of reconciliation among political ideologies by virtue of the relationship between Captain Harding and Confederate soldier Pencroft, each of whom begin the film as a prisoner of the other side only to set aside their philosophical differences for a greater good. So, too, does the character of Nemo offer hope, in converting a destructive weapon (the submarine Nautilus) into a tool for peace – if contemporary science could create the atomic and hydrogen bombs that threatened the world, then perhaps it had the power to save the world from them as well.

All that said, Mysterious Island is still ostensibly an escapist adventure with overtones of fantasy and science fiction, and that which lends it thematic weight also serves as a catalyst for some of its most exciting moments. Captain Nemo’s efforts to eradicate human suffering through science have left his island teeming with an assortment of gigantic flora and fauna, from harmless overgrown plants and oysters to the giant crabs, honeybees and flightless birds that threaten the existence of Harding and his castaways. It’s a plot thread concocted purely to take advantage of the talents of effects artisan Harryhausen, who had pretty perfected his stop motion process (now touted as Dynamation) with the color spectacle The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. By 1961 Harryhausen was at the top of his game, precisely blending live-action back and foreground plates with his meticulously crafted stop motion armatures to create spectacular special effects scenes that even the more obscenely budgeted epics of the time couldn’t match.

In Mysterious Island his work feels like a response to the big bug pictures that had been so popular in the years just prior, with Harryhausen answering the poor travelling matte grasshoppers of Beginning of the End and the monolithic composited arachnid of Tarantula! with a few gigantic creepy crawlies of his own. In the film’s most famous sequence, stills of which populate no end of children’s monster books, Harding and his crew are forced to do battle with an enormous land crab – a scene which concludes with the castaways dining on the beast after it falls into a hot spring. Truer to the giant bug pedigree are a host of car-sized honeybees, which trap young heartthrob Michael Callan and hottie Beth Rogan in the mother of all honeycombs. Later on Harryhausen takes a moment to reference both Verne’s giant squid and his own past work, as a walk on the sea floor leads into a life-and-death struggle with a colossal chambered nautilus. More than just an homage to the sensational squid attack from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, itself entering film history in Disney’s spectacular adaptation, the creature design closely resembles that of one of Harryhausen’s own creations – the city-smashing cepholapod of 1955′s It Came From Beneath the Sea.

Aside from Harryhausen’s considerable talents, Mysterious Island also serves as a colorful showcase for all manner of practical visual effects techniques. Filmed partly on gorgeous coastal Spanish locations and partly on the sound stages of England’s Shepperton Studios, Mysterious Island bridges the considerable gaps between A and B and expands its fictional locale with exceptional matte paintings, composite and miniature work. Indeed, the epic balloon escape that so thrilled me as a child is accomplished through a succession of opticals and process shots, the transparency of which do nothing to impede the experience. With modern expectations in mind there is the temptation to label such vintage effects methods as crude or unrealistic, but as I grow older I become more acutely aware of just how overrated realism is in cinema – especially with regards to such overtly fictional stuff as this. While there’s a concerted effort by the technicians to ensure that the various mattes and miniatures match to the scale sets and locations the effects themselves are more suggestive than literal, the cinematic equivalent of the illustrated plates published in the stories and novels that came before. As such I’d suggest that those tempted to question the methods by which human conflicts with gigantic arthropods and impossible transcontinental balloon trips are related are perhaps missing the point of the experience, and would do well to occupy their time elsewhere.

For my money Mysterious Island is fantastic, beautiful stuff, and a pitch-perfect example of the lost art of fantasy filmmaking as it once was. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a full fifty years since it originally premiered, but the taught direction of Cy Endfield (Sands of the Kalahari, Zulu) and a screenplay that’s both wittier and more substantial than I remember have certainly helped it to age more gracefully than it might have otherwise. Much as the novel from which it was (freely) adapted has become a classic of literature, Mysterious Island deserves its place as classic of cinema escapism. For those keen on the rousing genre excursions of old it’s an absolute must-see.

Just in time to celebrate the film’s fiftieth anniversary, Mysterious Island makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of independent collector’s label Twilight Time (in conjunction with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) in a limited run of only 3000. This arrangement won’t be to everyone’s taste, particularly in that it means a high retail price point, a contractually limited slate of extras, and venue exclusivity (it can only be officially had through Screen Archives Entertainment), but the plain fact of that matter is that licensor Sony, after the marginal enthusiasm their previous Harryhausen Blu-rays inspired, had no great interest in releasing this film to Blu-ray themselves. While I’m sure their agreement leaves Sony open to releasing the film in the future, if they should so desire, those wanting Mysterious Island on Blu-ray now (and I’m among them) will find this Twilight Time release to be their only option. Fortunately it’s a good one!

There are those who may worry that Twilight Time have been left to their own devices with regards to the transfers they’re working from, but that’s happily not the case. They’ve instead been granted access to the latest studio masters of the titles they’ve licensed. In the case of Mysterious Island that means a comprehensive 50th anniversary restoration courtesy of Sony’s second-to-none archive restoration team. There is always talk of restorations bringing films back to their original luster, but effort here really goes beyond the call of duty. I can state unequivocally that Mysterious Island has never looked so good as it does on this disc, ever, and that fans of these colorful Harryhausen effects vehicles are in for a downright exhilarating experience.

Past editions of Mysterious Island have all suffered from a variety of damage, from flicker and general aging of the elements to the specks, flecks, dust and scratches that were baked right into the film’s extensive optical printing effects from the start. I know my comparison below is not ideal – I’m forced to rely on a compressed archival copy of the 2002 DVD, having seemingly lost my original – but it does reveal the obsessive extent to which the restorers have gone to remedy the issue of print damage. The third comparison set shows one of the film’s many optical effects, one which, like the rest, was possessed of a good deal of blemishes and imperfections from the start. You’ll note that in the new restoration practically every hint of damage has been successfully removed. Such is the case even with the classic Dynamation stop motion sequences, as evidenced by the final comparison set. Specks and blemishes present in the original back projection and rephotographed during the Dynamation process have been carefully removed, leaving the footage looking even crisper and cleaner than it was when originally produced. That isn’t to say that there’s absolutely no damage to be found in this new restoration of Mysterious Island, which does present with some minor white speckling at times, but the improvements in this regard are striking.

More impressive still is the attention paid to the film’s rich and at times eccentric color design, from the white sands and pure blue skies of the coastal Spanish locations to the fantastical studio interiors, punctuated with unreal shades of yellow, red, blue and green. Whether the result of the telecine process or of fading of the elements themselves, the 2002 DVD edition had some color shifting that resulted in an overly yellow appearance. Comparison set two shows perhaps the most obvious and widest breadth of improvement. Everything from Spillet’s light white undershirt to background rock, foliage, and water has lost its yellow tinge, resulting in purer shades of white, grey, green, and so on, while flesh tones have shifted from the overly orange hues of the DVD into more natural territory. Contrast is similarly improved, with what had before been a comparatively flat image alive with rich, deep blacks and more pronounced highlights (see the third comparison set again). The sum experience of the color restoration here is utterly breathtaking, with ace cinematographer Wilkie Cooper’s dynamic photography more vividly represented than ever. Other aspects of the restoration improve in a manner more typical to these comparisons between standard and high definition. Detail takes a healthy bump upwards, bolstered by the healthier contrast and increased resolution, and the at times considerable grain inherent to the original production is blessedly retained.

Beyond the source restoration, Twilight Time’s Blu-ray is a robust technical specimen as well. The 1.66:1 1080p image is spread comfortably over a dual layer BD50, with the feature plus audio taking up more than 30 GB of space on disc. The image is AVC-encoded with a strong average bitrate of 33.2 Mbps, and the encode frequently lazes about in the upper 30s. You’ll have to look long and hard to find any technical deficiencies in the image, as Twilight Time have ensured that the film receives a very strong presentation. Thanks to its meticulous restoration and beefy technical specs Mysterious Island may well be the strongest a Harryhausen film has appeared yet on Blu-ray.

HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool at a quality setting of 95%. The three DVD screenshots are sourced from my compressed archive copy of Columbia Tristar’s DVD from 2002 (my original disc is somehow missing in action – sorry!), and were captured in .png format in VLC, upconverted to 1920×1080 and saved as .png in GIMP, then compressed to .jpg using the same method as for the HD screenshots.
DVD | Blu-ray

More Blu-ray Screenshots:

While it may be the best looking, Mysterious Island is inarguably the best sounding of the Harryhausen films currently available on the format. The primary track for the feature is a new, restored 5.1 surround mix presented in lossless DTS-HD MA at an average bitrate of around 3 and half Mbps. I’m generally not much a fan of these 5.1 remixes, but this track is a stunner, with more breadth and depth of auditory potential than anything that’s come before – none of that even comes close! The foley work remains consistent with the original monophonic recording, never sounding out of place for a film of this vintage, and all of the dialogue and effects come across crisply and cleanly. The biggest beneficiary of the bump to 5.1 DTS-HD MA, however, is Bernard Herrmann’s tremendous score – for my money the best of the four he composed for Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen. The opening theme, repeated throughout with some variation, blew my mind when I first saw Mysterious Island as a child, and no other viewing of the film has touched that nostalgic experience until now. As Herrmann’s score clashed forth over the classic Columbia logo I felt a chill run down my spine – terrific stuff. With purists in mind Twilight Time have also preserved the originally monophonic recording courtesy a lossless DTS-HD MA 1.0 track. Though it obviously loses the LFE of its 5.1 counterpart, which is particularly notable in the music department, this restored track still sounds very good, and is well in advance of the 2002 DVD. Whether you’re fond of original recordings or surround remixes, Twilight Time has you covered. They’ve even included a set of optional English SDH subtitles, leaving me no room to complain.

As noted earlier, Twilight Time are contractually obligated with regards to the supplements they can provide, so Mysterious Island is predictably limited in that department. In terms of complementing video the disc presents both the original theatrical trailer and an imaginatively bizarre 1-minute television spot, each of which are presented in native 1080p AVC encodes (at 1.66:1 and pillarboxed 4:3 respectively) with lossless DTS-HD MA 1.0 audio. The only other extra is a big one, an isolated original score track (in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo!) that accompanies the feature. There’s an interesting mix here, with some cues accompanied by sound effects (a la the old Laserdisc edition) and others not. For its part the music here sounds terrific, and those who don’t already own the soundtrack will find much to love here. My one complaint is that the isolated score only appears to be accessible from the disc’s main menu (there is no pop-up that I could find), and plays as a separate timeline from which the audio for the film is likewise inaccessible. Small potatoes, but some may find it bothersome. The package is accompanied by a lovely booklet of film stills and liner notes (all too rare a thing these days) by Julie Kirgo, and my order arrived with a Mysterious Island refrigerator magnet (which replicates the attractive cover art for this release) as well.

There has been some grumbling about the rise of short run ’boutique’ labels like Twilight Time and Olive Films in the home video market, much of it arising from the perceived high price of their releases. In my mind that’s just the cost of doing this sort of business, and if Warner can charge $20 a pop for burned DVD-R of their own catalogue titles then $34.95 for an independently produced limited run Blu-ray of a big-studio title like Mysterious Island seems fair enough. I’ve put my money where my mouth is in this case, happily shelling out the nearly $40 it cost to put a copy on my shelf even though I knew I had a screener en route. It’s a matter of principle. I want to support those companies that release the movies I love, especially when they’re doing it well, and so long as Twilight Time continues to release them so proficiently as they have here I’ll have their back all the way. Now, if they can just find their way to The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and The First Men in the Moon…

in conclusion
Film: Excellent  Video: Excellent  Audio: Excellent
Supplements: Isolated Bernard Herrmann score track, Theatrical Trailer, Television Spot
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case with booklet of liner notes.
Mysterious Island is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com

Next week’s notable releases – Bruce Dern, Santa Claus, and Evil Dead too!

November 10th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Perhaps the biggest release of next week, at least in my humble opinion, is that of Douglas Trumbull’s green-minded science fiction epic Silent Running, which will be making its limited edition Blu-ray debut courtesy of Eureka!’s Masters of Cinema line on Monday. I remember staying up late to catch this one on television many a time as a kid, enthralled by the fantastic imagery, unique narrative and exuberant score (courtesy of Peter Schickele with contributions by Joan Baez), and still have the 13-year-old Image Entertainment DVD release of it on my shelf. Those tempted should note that MoC’s Blu-ray release is to be Region B locked, and will require an all-region setup to play outside Europe. Wtf-Film considers it must-have material all the same.

The director-approved limited edition Blu-ray and even limited-er Steelbook editions of Silent Running street on Monday, 11/14, and can be pre-ordered through Amazon.co.uk as well as through Eureka directly.

From Masters of Cinema: Three years after helping to achieve some of the most amazing imagery in cinema history with 2001: A Space Odyssey, special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull made an auspicious directorial debut at age 29 with the environmentally themed science fiction classic Silent Running.

In the distant future, plant life on our planet is extinct. Remaining specimens are cultivated in vast greenhouse-like domes orbiting in space. Bruce Dern stars as Freeman Lowell, dedicated botanist aboard the “Valley Forge”, awaiting the call to refoliate Earth – despite the scorn of his crewmates. When an order comes to instead destroy the domes and return home, Lowell takes matters into his own hands, beginning a long and lonely voyage into the unknown.

With its remarkable special effects (especially the robot drones Huey, Dewey, and Louie); glorious score (including songs performed by Joan Baez); memorable sound effects (created by Joseph Byrd from the cult band The United States of America); a screenplay co-written by Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues), and an impassioned central performance from Dern, Silent Running remains a uniquely contemplative and haunting adventure that continues to make hippies of young children, even today. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present a new Blu-ray special edition to celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary.

Special Features:

• Exclusively restored beautiful high-definition 1080p transfer

• Full-length commentary by director Trumbull and actor Bruce Dern

• Isolated music and effects track

• Optional English SDH subtitles on the feature

• The Making of Silent Running, a 1972 on-set documentary [50:00]

• Two video pieces with Douglas Trumbull [31:00 + 5:00]

• A Conversation with Bruce Dern, a discussion with the actor [11:00]

• Original theatrical trailer [3:00]

• A lavish 48-page full-colour booklet featuring rare photographs and artwork from Trumbull’s personal collection, and recollections of the film’s cinematographer, special designs coordinator, and composer

Next up, releasing Tuesday, is the high-definition debut of a guilty pleasure of epic proportions. Directed by Rene Cardona Sr. and imported to America by schlockmeister K. Gordan Murray, Mexico’s bizarre Santa Claus finds jolly old Saint Nicholas fighting the devilish villain Pitch from his workshop in space with assistance from legendary magician Merlin and some Christmas-loving kids. Famously lampooned on TV’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, Cardona’s Santa Claus is must-see insanity of the highest possible order.

The Collector’s Edition Blu-ray from VCI Entertainment finds both the original Mexican and American import versions of Santa Claus available on on disc, and streets on Tuesday, 11/15. The disc is currently available for preorder through Amazon.com for just $13.99.

From VCI Entertainment: The producers packed every magical, wacky, and just plain weird, holiday oddity known to man in to this wild-n-wonderful, and strangely charming, children’s classic! It’s not enough that Santa must deal with the usual suspects – the good little boys and girls, and the not so good little boys and girls – but this season Lucifer himself is out to ruin Christmas and has sent his chief minion, Pitch, on a mission to Earth to turn all the children of the world against Santa. But wait, there’s more! Santa’s workshop is located high above the North Pole in a Toyland castle in outer space, where he plays the organ and keeps watch over the children on earth through specialized equipment, while readying his mechanical reindeer for Christmas Eve action. Santa also enlists the aid of Merlin the Wizard, who provides him with magic sleeping powder and a flower that makes one disappear. But wait, there’s even more! Santa also receives a magic key that will unlock any door on Earth from Vulcan himself!

Special Features:

Contains both the American K. Gordon Murray and Original Mexican Versions on one disc; Commentary by Daniel Griffith (K. Gordon Murray Historian), and more!

Notes: According to information posted at the Monster Kid Classic Horror Forum, the VCI release is sourced from the original Mexican film negative at the intended aspect ratio of 1.85:1. The film itself was erroneously advertised as being in MexiScope, which has led many to believe that the film was originally 2.35:1 – an idea perpetuated by what VCI itself has said of their release.

Last but not least, on Tuesday Lionsgate will release a 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray of Sam Raimi’s classic comedy of gore Evil Dead II, both a sequel to and remake of Raimi’s earlier low-budget horror opus The Evil Dead. Released disappointingly in hi-def by Anchor Bay some years ago, this Lionsgate effort will not be without its controversy (preliminary screenshots show that at least one memorable special effect flub has been fixed). But it is reportedly the first video edition to be sourced from the original negative, and will feature some hefty new supplemental content to boot.

The 25 Anniversary Blu-ray edition of Evil Dead II streets on Tuesday, 11/15, and is available for pre-order from Amazon.com at the low low price of $9.99.

From Lionsgate: Ash (Bruce Campbell), the sole survivor of THE EVIL DEAD, returns to the same cabin in the woods and again unleashes the forces of the dead. With his girlfriend possessed by the demons and his body parts running amok, Ash is forced to single- handedly battle the legions of the damned as the most lethal – and groovy – hero in horror movie history! Welcome to EVIL DEAD II, director Sam Raimi’s infamous sequel to THE EVIL DEAD and outrageous prequel to ARMY OF DARKNESS!

Special Features:

• Audio Commentary with Writer-Director Sam Raimi, Star Bruce Campbell, Co-Writer Scott Spiegel and Special Make-Up Effects Artist Greg Nicotero
• “Swallowed Souls: The Making of Evil Dead II” Multi-chaptered feature-length look at the making of the film
• “Road to Wadesboro: Revisiting the Shooting Location of Evil Dead II” – NEW
• “Cabin Fever” Featurettes from original production video taken on the set of Evil Dead II – NEW
• “Artifacts of the Dead” – Extensive Still Galleries – NEW
• Theatrical Trailer
• Archival Featurette: “The Gore The Merrier”
• Archival Featurette: “Evil Dead II: Behind-the-Screams

Sneaking in as an honorable mention is Eureka! Masters of Cinema’s upcoming Blu-ray of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, which features no fewer than three cuts of the film spread across two dual-layer Blu-ray discs. This is another Region B locked title, and though I’ve not pre-ordered it myself (I only have so much money to spare in a month that’s seen all of the above and Twilight Time’s Mysterious Island too) it’s too historically important a release not mention it here.

Touch of Evil, which streets on Monday 11/15, is available for pre-order on limited edition Blu-ray through Amazon.co.uk and Eureka directly, or as a limited edition Steelbook exclusive to HMV.

From Masters of Cinema: Touch of Evil begins with one of the most brilliant sequences in the history of cinema; and ends with one of the most brilliant final scenes ever committed to celluloid. In between unfurls a picture whose moral, sexual, racial, and aesthetic attitudes remain so radical as to cross borders established not only in 1958, but in the present age also. Yet, Touch of Evil has taken many forms. The film as released in 1958 was certainly compromised from Orson Welles’ vision, but a lengthy, arresting memo written by Welles to studio heads in 1957 – taking issue with a studio rough-cut – had some influence on a subsequent preview version shown to test audiences (and rediscovered in the mid-1970s) as well as the 1958 theatrical version. Forty years later, in 1998, Universal produced a reconstructed version of the film that takes into meticulous account the totality of Welles’ memo, and ostensibly represents the version of the film that most closely adheres to his original wishes.

Charlton Heston portrays Mike Vargas, the Mexican chief of narcotics who sets out to uncover the facts surrounding a car bomb that has killed a wealthy American businessman on the US side of the border. As Vargas investigates, his newly-wed wife Susie (Janet Leigh, two years before Hitchcock’s Psycho) is kidnapped by a gang out to exact vengeance for the prosecution of the brother of their leader (Akim Tamiroff). Meanwhile, Vargas’ enquiries become progressively more obfuscated by the American cop Hank Quinlan (played by Welles himself, in one of the most imposing and unforgettable screen performances of his career), a besotted incarnation of corruption who alternately conspires with Susie’s captors and seeks solace in the brothel of the Gypsy madame (Marlene Dietrich) who comforted him in bygone times.

Welles’ final studio-system picture has at last become secure in its status as one of the greatest films ever made. It remains a testament to the genius of Welles –– a film of Shakespearean richness, inexhaustible. The Masters of Cinema Series attempts to honour Welles with this special two-disc, Blu-ray only edition of Touch of Evil, with the film presented in multiple versions and aspect ratios.

Special Features:

• New high-definition masters of five variants of the film: the 1958 Theatrical Version in both 1.37:1 and 1.85:1, the 1958 Preview Version in 1.85:1, and the 1998 Reconstructed Version in 1.37:1 and 1.85:1

• 4 x audio commentaries, featuring: restoration producer Rick Schmidlin; actors Charlton Heston & Janet Leigh, with Schmidlin; critic F. X. Feeney; and Welles scholars James Naremore & Jonathan Rosenbaum

• The original theatrical trailer, which includes alternate footage

• Bringing Evil to Life + Evil Lost and Found – two video pieces [21:00 + 18:00]

• Optional English SDH subtitles on all versions of the film

• A 56-page booklet featuring essays by Orson Welles, François Truffaut, André Bazin, and Terry Comito; interview excerpts with Welles; a timeline of the film’s history; and extensive notes on the film’s versions and ratios


Horror Express

November 5th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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a.k.a. Panico en el Transiberiano
Year: 1972  Company: Benmar Productions / Granada Films   Runtime: 87′
Director: Eugenio Martin   Writers: Arnaud d’Usseau, Julian Zimet   Music: John Cacavas
Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alberto de Mendoza, Silvia Tortosa, Julio Pena, Angel del Pozo, Telly Savalas, Helga Line, Alice Reinhart, Jose Jaspe, George Rigaud, Victor Israel, Faith Clift, Juan Olaguival
Disc company: Severin Films   Video: 1080p / 480p 1.66:1   Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 (English, Spanish)
Subtitles: None   Disc: BD25 / DVD9   Release Date: 11/29/2011
Reviewed from a screener provided by Severin Films (thanks Nicole!).
Available for purchase through Amazon.com

The last of a three picture deal between American producer Philip Yordan (Crack in the World, 55 Days in Peking) and Spanish director Eugenio Martin (The Ugly Ones), and conceived largely as a means of making use of the expensive passenger train sets devised for the epic Poncho Villa, 1972′s Horror Express is a compact and economical slice of Euro-cult mayhem that benefits from the recycled illusion of production value and a magnificent headline cast. The inimitable duo of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing join forces once more as a pair of catty, big-headed men of science who must contend with a supernatural sci-fi menace on the Trans-Siberian Express.

The story, penned by the men behind the devilish British actioner Psychomania, follows professor Sir Alexander Saxton’s (Lee) discovery of a 2 million year old ape-man frozen in the chilly north of Manchuria. Determined to provide the remains as proof-positive of the theory of evolution, Saxton loads the crated beast onto the next train towards Europe – a train populated not only with hundreds of disposable personalities, but Saxton’s professional rival Doctor Wells (Cushing) as well.  Soon after the train departs on its long snowbound journey the baggage man is found dead, his eyes a boiled to a ghastly white. Saxton’s empty crate provides ample evidence for the cause – his 2 million year old specimen was not so dead as had been presumed, and had awakened from its frosty slumbers and murdered the baggage man. With the creature at large a concerted, but quiet, effort to find and detain it is mounted, but it soon becomes obvious that there’s more to the monster than meets the eye.

Once the beast is tracked down and killed things take a turn for the decidedly silly. An impromptu dining room investigation of its eye fluid reveals a host of unlikely images suspended there – images of our planet’s biological past, including a brontosaurus and pterodactyl, and a mysterious view of Earth from space. Further autopsies on the creature’s victims, whose brains appear to have been scrubbed clean of all knowledge, leads to an astounding conclusion: The ape-man discovered by Saxton was not the monster, but merely a shell for some malignant alien force capable not only of absorbing the intelligence of others but of possessing their bodies as well.  With the truth of the matter revealed doctors Saxton and Wells are faced with a terrifying fact – not only is the extraterrestrial menace  quite comfortably alive, but it’s hiding in the guise of one of the Trans-Siberian’s passengers!


This film’s got stars, and dinosaurs, in its eyes…

Playing a bit like They Came From Beyond Space by way of Who Goes There by way of Murder on the Orient Express, Horror Express is an uneven genre pastiche that never really capitalizes on its own capacity for thrills, chills, mystery and paranoia. Rather than focus on the mechanics of the genre, writers d’Usseau and Zimet instead lead viewers on a string of oddball diversions that include a bit of international espionage and the ravings of a mad monk in the mold of Rasputin (coincidentally, a part played by star Christopher Lee in an earlier Hammer production). None of it ever amounts to much, but it does pass the time between the various monster attacks and ludicrous plot developments. To be fair, d’Usseau, Zimet, and indeed the whole cast and crew, seem perfectly aware of the absurd nature of the project, and an underlying sense of good humor on the part of all involved goes a long way towards keeping Horror Express from feeling so tired, pointless, and repetitive as it easily might have.

Indeed, stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing look to have had a wonderful time with the alternately strange and hilarious material, particularly when it offers them an opportunity to needle one another. The two also bring a wealth of genuine thespian ability to the production, largely occupied with overdubbed Spanish performers otherwise, and each is possessed of that unique talent for making even the dumbest of lines sound reasonable – a skill that’s indispensable to a film that so frequently asks its audience to believe the darnedest things. The supporting cast is largely disposable with the exception of Alberto de Mendoza, who all but steals the show as an insane monk who drops his godly ways and starts following the alien “devil” at the drop of a hat. Telly Savalas (TV’s Kojak) received high billing in the films advertising and is listed third on this video edition, but only appears briefly as the memorably crazy Cossack Captain Kazan. Savalas’ dialogue is perhaps the most ungainly of the whole script, and while none of it makes much sense on its own terms the actor’s unhinged delivery gives it plenty of oomph.

Horror Express will never be confused for great filmmaking, and is possessed of the same cold and languid quality that makes much of the Spanish exploitation of the time so unappealing to me, but its excellent casting and proclivity for the humorously bizarre make all the difference. As a film about an eye-boiling brain-stealing alien intelligence loosed upon long-distance rail travelers it remains the best, and only, of its kind, and genre aficionados should find it well worth checking out.


There’s something about that guy that just doesn’t look right to me…

Taking a cue from a good number of independent English video labels, Severin Films have chosen to present Horror Express as a combination Blu-ray and DVD package. While we’ll be covering the latter later in this section it is the former, with which the film makes its high definition debut, that rightfully commands the most attention. Severin present Horror Express on Blu-ray in full 1080p at its native theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1, sourced from a positive 35mm Spanish print of some dubious lineage (provided you believe the packaging, it was unearthed in a Mongolian film depot…). The print is in decent shape if far from pristine, though I don’t know that anyone was honestly expecting better.

In addition to some printed white damage and splice marks, the print also presents with a healthy assortment of darker debris, scratching, and even the odd tear here or there. This may distract some viewers, but I’d argue that it’s just part and parcel for this sort of low budget exploiter. The source also has its weaknesses with regards to color reproduction and contrast, the latter of which can vary quite a lot depending on the original photography. The image has obviously aged a good deal in the nearly 40 years since Horror Express was originally produced, with the color shifting, at times quite heavily, to the red. I’m not sure what the original photographic intentions were on the part of the director and cinematographer, but it’s impossible for me to believe the flat, over-warm appearance Horror Express currently exudes is accurate. An ounce of restorative attention – some color grading here, some tweaking of the contrast levels there - could well have helped to mitigate the issues with the color and contrast, but these film-based limitations are still far from fatal flaws.  Unfortunately that’s not the end of the story.

Limited though Horror Express‘ source materials may be Severin Films look to have managed a decent high definition transfer of them, particularly in terms of detail. It’s all the more a shame, then, that they’ve bungled things so badly with regards to its presentation on-disc. The numbers hint at the bad things to come – Horror Express limps onto Blu-ray at a total disc size of 21 GB, with a paltry 11.7 GB of that dedicated to the feature and its three accompanying audio tracks. The AVC encoded video averages out at a middling bitrate of just 17.2 Mbps, well less than half of the format’s potential, but even that low figure doesn’t  account for such dreadful results. This is one of the poorest high definition encodes I’ve seen in a while, and it presents with a laundry list of defects that distracted from my viewing at every turn. Most notable in motion are aliasing artifacts that are every bit as frequent as they are ugly. The hounds tooth patterning on Christopher Lee’s suit provides the most obvious examples, with the encoder failing time and again to properly resolve it.


A rough approximation of how this disc’s encode made me feel.

More frustrating on closer examination is the encode’s treatment of the transfer’s grain structure, and vicariously its fine detail. The long and short of it is that there just isn’t much grain or fine detail, as the majority of it has been obliterated by persistent blotchy digital artifacting. The final comparison set below demonstrates the problem most obviously, with the details of the wooden floor disappearing into blotchy artifacts and patches of digital noise, but it is evident to some degree in every shot in the film. There are even some chroma aberrations to be found, tucked away in the lines and patterning of people’s clothing. It’s a hell of a mess all told, and certainly not what I was expecting for a release so oft-delayed as this one – surely in all the months since Horror Express was officially announced someone could have been bothered to check the disc encode? It’s impossible not to feel as though Severin have dropped the ball here, and hard, leaving the video side of the Blu-ray’s feature presentation a very tough sell in spite of some modest improvements over the DVD.

The accompanying DVD is something of a technical improvement given the constraints of its format, but still far from ideal. The disc is sourced from the same hi-def transfer at the same aspect ratio (16:9 enhanced 1.66:1) and features the same inherent deficiencies with regards to color and contrast. Fortunately this disc is dual-layered, a step in the right direction, and while the image still looks substantially weaker than I’d have expected it to (things just aren’t as well resolved as they should be) at least it doesn’t show its artifacting to the same degree as the Blu-ray.  Unfortunately both editions showcase many of the same ugly digital pox marks, as evidenced by Christopher Lee’s suit in the first and next-to-last comparison sets. I’d say it’s a draw as to which is the better way to view the film – the better encoded but visually flat DVD, or the better-resolved but awfully encoded Blu-ray – with neither being particularly appealing in the long run. Amusingly (or distressingly, depending on your frame of mind) both the DVD and Blu-ray share the same menu designs to the point of failure – whoever authored the Blu-ray either forgot or purposefully neglected to include even the most rudimentary pop-up menu during feature playback. That alone is barely worth mentioning, but it is indicative of the breadth of shortcomings that hamper what had the promise of being a fine release.

Blu-ray screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool.  DVD screenshots were captured as uncompressed .png in VLC media player, and are provided here in both their native resolution (compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool) as well as upscaled 1920×1080 (scaled in GIMP, saved as .png, and converted per the rest to .jpg) to offer the best range of comparison.
DVD 480p | DVD 1080p | Blu-ray 1080p

While the Blu-ray video was impaired to the point of distraction, at least it got the bump to HD. No such luck is to be had with the audio. Horror Express is accompanied in each of its video iterations by lossy Dolby Digital tracks, either 2.0 monophonic English or 2.0 stereophonic Spanish, each at 192 kbps. John Cacavas’ interesting musical score is served best by the better-preserved 2.0 Spanish track, but both sound flat and unremarkable otherwise. I’m not sure that a lossless encoding could have improved much upon that in the Blu-ray edition, but as things stand now I’ll never know. Adding to the disappointment is Severin’s failure to include any subtitles whatsoever, making the secondary Spanish audio track more a vestigial feature than a legitimate viewing option for the majority of the release’s potential audience.

With the feature presentation a disappointment on practically every front, I’m very happy to report that the supplemental package is quite exceptional. Things begin with Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express, a 14 minute interview with director Eugenio Martin. Though Martin’s accent is thick and his handling of English at times lacking, the information he provides is all quite good. Next up is a wonderful half-hour archival interview with late screenwriter Bernard Gordon (The Day of the Triffids), who served as producer on Horror Express, in which he discusses the Hollywood blacklist, his involvement with producer Philip Yordan and his work on the Samual Bronston epics of the ’60s. There’s nothing whatever about Horror Express here, but I couldn’t be bothered by that – it’s a fantastic interview. Telly and Me grants composer John Cacavas a few minutes to talk about his friendship with actor and singer Telly Savalis and their work toghether on this film and elsewhere. The undisputed king of the supplements is an interview and question and answer session with the inimitable Peter Cushing, circa 1973, which runs for a whopping 80 minutes (!) and serves as a sort of commentary track for the feature presentation. I’ll not spoil any of the goods here, but Cushing fans will be over the moon – the disc may be worth picking up for this alone. An introduction to Horror Express by Fangoria editor Chris Alexander (6 minutes), a theatrical trailer, and three trailers for other Severin titles (Psychomania, The House That Dripped Blood and Nightmare Castle) round out the disc.

Horror Express is a fun little footnote in the annals of Euro-horror, and one that I remember seeing many, many times on discount video racks as a kid. I had exceedingly high hopes for this release from Severin Films, hopes that were effectively dashed as soon as the Blu-ray disc began to play.  The issues with the feature presentation are so distracting as to make a recommendation on its merits difficult, but the supplemental package certainly makes this release tempting.  Given the low asking price it currently commands (just $13.99) fans will likely want to indulge for that reason alone.

in conclusion
Film: Good silly fun  Video: Fair +  Audio: Fair   Supplements: Excellent
Harrumphs: You’d do better to ask what isn’t wrong here.  The wealth of supplements is the saving grace.
Packaging: Standard two-hub Blu-ray case.
Available for purchase through Amazon.com

Dead Alive

November 2nd, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
a.k.a. Braindead   Year: 1992  Company: Wingnut Films   Runtime: 97′
Director: Peter Jackson   Writers: Stephen Sinclair, Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson
Music: Peter Dasent   Cast: Timothy Balme, Diana Penalver, Elizabeth Moody, Ian Watkin, Brenda Kendall, Stuart Devenie, Jed Brophy, Stephen Papps, Murray Keane, Glenis Levestam, Lewis Rowe
Disc company: Lionsgate   Video: 1080p 1.78:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 2.0 English
Subtitles: English, English SDH, Spanish   Disc: BD25 (Region A)   Release Date: 10/04/2011
Available for purchase through Amazon.com

Before he found himself tooling around Middle Earth in the most expensive and protracted LARP session in history, writer and director Peter Jackson was cutting his cinematic teeth on genre-bending exploiters the likes of which the world had never seen.  It may be difficult for some to grasp that the man behind The Fellowship of the Ring was also responsible for the demented The Muppets take-off Meet the Feebles and the drive-through alien insanity of Bad Taste, but there are just as many of us who became Jackson fans strictly because of his unhinged past works.  After working with tiny budgets in the latter part of the previous decade Jackson’s company Wingnut Films finally came into some substantial financing in the early ’90s, and the immediate result was the director’s first film to receive any real worldwide exposure – the gloriously outrageous gross-out masterpiece Dead Alive (or Braindead to all of you lucky enough to have the film in its original title).

Written by Jackson, his wife Fran Walsh and their sometimes collaborator Stephen Sinclair, Dead Alive follows the budding relationship of reclusive mother’s boy Lionel and the lovely Pequita – a romance pre-ordained by a stack of tarot cards and Pequita’s creepy grandmother.  Standing in the way of any hope of happiness for the young lovers is Lionel’s mother, an insufferable nag who’s not quite herself these days.  After an unfortunate run-in with a vicious and purportedly cursed Sumatran Rat-Monkey at the city zoo, mum devolves into a putrescent sack of homicidal idiocy that Lionel deals with as best he can.  Veterinary tranquilizers do the job for a while, but unexpected encounters with punks, nurses and the local clergy soon find Lionel stuck with a basement-full of troublesome stiffs, and the arrival of estate-hungry uncle Les and his gaggle of hard partying cohorts only makes things worse.  As the situation spirals further and further out of control Lionel and Pequita are forced into drastic action to save both themselves and their fated romance…

If there’s one thing that leaps out at me every time I sit down to revisit Dead Alive, it’s how obvious it is that Jackson and his co-conspirators love film – Dead Alive is the sort of production that really wears its inspirations on its sleeve.  The film begins on King Kong‘s Skull Island, far west of Sumatra, with an asshole explorer running afoul of superstitious natives in his quest for a rare beast – the bothersome Sumtran Rat-Monkey – which is brought to life, naturally, through stop-motion animation.  Back in Wellington, Lionel hearkens to Anthony Perkin’s portrayal of immortal screen Psycho Norman Bates, albeit with a potential for heroism taking the place of homicidal mania, while Jackson and company hint at secrets in his past with flashes of Deliverance-style hand-out-of-the-water illusions.  Once Lionel’s mum is infected the film treats audiences to a veritable parade of zombie genre homage, referencing everything from the Dead works of Romero to Raimi’s more slapstick take on the material – Jackson and effects man Richard Taylor take particular relish in the “total bodily dismemberment” of the latter.  There are broader references as well, like the famed cemetery-bound kung fu battle between some zombie punks and the inimitable Father MacGruder (“I kick ass for the Lord!”), and one bit for the real nerds among us – a brief glimpse of a poster for Johnny Weismuller in Jungle Moon Men that foreshadows Lionel’s final act of macho heroism, swinging to safety by belt as he and his beloved share a kiss.

More than just paying lip service to their inspirations, Jackson and crew were also clearly enamored with the very act of making film.  Dead Alive often feels a though it were handled by a hyper-active grade-schooler who’d finally been given the opportunity to figure out his latest toy.  The camerawork, care of photographer Murray Milne (Meet the Feebles), is brimming with vitality, with the camera swishing or panning or craning in any number of directions and as often as was possible.  The compositions themselves are just as variably vivid, from the diffused soft-palette exteriors of fantasy Wellington circa 1957 to the eccentric neon-hued, comic-inspired interiors of the more horrific later segments.  Perhaps the greatest example of the enthusiasm of the men behind Dead Alive can be found in the breadth of technical effects exemplified throughout – more than just the eccentric splatter that comes to dominate the film, Jackson toys with conventional and large-scale puppetry, suit-mation, and even a bit of clever miniature work to expand his retro Universe.  Carefully photographed miniatures of a vintage Wellington no longer extant, complete with cable cars decorated in period-appropriate advertisements (and at least one building baring the Wingnut company name), merge perfectly with the modern location photography.  The temptation now seems to be to go overboard in creating a sense of location, with loads of CGI overproduction and perhaps a bit of gimmicky 3D immersion.  Dead Alive‘s old-hat techniques manage the feat without drawing too much attention to themselves, and are all the more satisfying for it.


The house where evil dwells…

All of that is good and well, but with a hyperbolic blurb like “The goriest fright film of all time” flaunted across the top of the box art it’s impossible to discuss Dead Alive without also discussing the excesses that have made it (in)famous.  While I might contest the “fright film” designation (this is comedy born of horror rather than any kind of horror outright) the rest of the statement is hard to argue with.  Dead Alive dishes out its visceral delights in such quantity that adjectives fail it – this may well be the bloodiest show on Earth.  While early gags are geared towards gross-out giggles – mention “pudding” in the context of this film and most anyone who’s seen it will give you a laughing, half-shuddering reaction – Dead Alive quickly transitions towards one-upping itself with its own over-the-topness.  This is, after all, a film famous for a scene in which a priest with a taste for the martial arts unceremoniously rips the limbs from his zombie opponent and beats him with them, and that’s just a start.

Those attempting to find logic or reason in Dead Alive‘s zombie hordes are out of luck as any sense there was to the thing quickly falls victim to the all-important gag.  It’s a welcome change in a subgenre that enjoys strangling itself in rules and regulations – “aim for the brain” doesn’t seem such a helpful piece of advice when the critter creeping your way has a lawn gnome for a head!  While some of the violence is undeniably rooted in genre conventions, as in the case of a neck-bite or two, the vast majority aims for hitherto unseen levels of absurdity.  Jackson’s creativity flourishes here in a ways that it just hasn’t in his more recent work, and its these demonstrations of his imagination unchecked that attracted so much of us to his filmmaking in the first place.  Faces and scalps are ripped whole from screaming skulls while men devoured up to their waists kick bloodied skeleton legs – one victim is so mangled that he comes back from the grave looking more than a little like a brachiosaurus.  In perhaps the classic attack of the film a young woman has her face ripped literally in two by a fiendish infant who then uses her corpse as a sort of full-body puppet!

If the zombie violence itself is extreme then that perpetrated against them is even more so, with heads and whole bodies exploding blood and nameless pulp about Lionel’s respectable Victorian abode.  One poor chap, having been cut in two, is reduced to using his legs for stilts while his whole set of internal organs, which have been granted their own bizarre life, are left to chase people about on their own!  Lionel eventually decides that he’s had enough of all that nonsense and takes matters into his own hands.  With most of the zombies gathered in the foyer, Lionel enters with a lawnmower draped over his neck and shoulders with a bit of rope.  ”Party’s over!” he announces, and so begins the single most epic scene of wanton bodily destruction in the history of film.  Here the effects are thrilling in their efficacy, with assorted limbs, faces, and torsos butchered by the rumbling blade of the mower and spewed out in a stream of vivid red glop.  Never missing an opportunity for another gag, the film allows Lionel to reach the other end of the room safe and satisfied, only to look back and realize that he’s only mowed down one row of zombies and that there’s a whole horde of them left behind.  Mowing down the dead is evidently every bit as tedious and time consuming as mowing the lawn, and as Lionel turns to finish the job Peter Dasent’s synthesizer accompaniment swells into something melodious and balletic.  This is grand guignol as it might have been directed by Vincent Minnelli, and in its own way it’s every bit as genius as any of those other revered moments in cinema.

On their own gore and gags do not a terrific film make, and Dead Alive earns audience sympathies by packaging its more eccentric material within an old fashioned love story that’s actually quite touching and sweet.  In this way Dead Alive plays as the sort of pitch-perfect escapism only film can provide, offering up a happy ending that never feels trite or condescending.  We want Lionel and Pequita to be together, not because some goofy cards told us it would happen but because our investment in the characters makes us think it should.  In the end Dead Alive may be the most hopeful horror picture ever made – if these two can fend off the forces of darkness amassing against them then surely there’s a little hope for us all.  Just be sure to keep your lawnmower handy, as you never know when you might need it.


Grrrrrrrrr…

Dead Alive creeps, leaps, and splats onto Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate who, to be perfectly fair, have dropped the ball on a couple of key points.  Firstly, the cut of the film included is the slightly abbreviated 97 minute version (allegedly preferred by Jackson, though I could find no primary source for this – help!) that premiered at the 1992 Toronto Film Festival.  I’m not especially bothered by this – it’s the version that I have become most familiar with over the years – but the opportunity to include both the longer 104 minute version and this unrated 97 minute cut, preferably as seamlessly branched viewing options, was sorely missed.  Secondly, Dead Alive‘s high definition home video debut is woefully lacking in supplemental heft.  All that is included is the original American trailer in upconverted HD, and an interminable slate of Lionsgate previews that starts the disc.  A special edition this isn’t, though at least the packaging (a slight update of that for the Trimark DVD from over a decade ago) is honest enough not to lead consumers into thinking otherwise.

With no uncut version  and effectively no supplemental content to distract from it, the presentation of the 97 minute feature is very much front and center, and while I wasn’t expecting much by virtue of the low pricetag I found myself reasonably impressed, if with some reservations.  My apologies in advance for the paltry DVD comparison in this review – I no longer own the Trimark DVD and was forced to scrounge around online for the grand total of two uncompressed .png captures sourced below.  I’ve included two captures from the horrifically encoded Laser Paradise ‘Blood Edition’ for posterity, so that a more precise comparison can be made with regards to the film’s proper framing.

Lionsgate present Dead Alive under its American export title by way of a gritty 1080p transfer at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 – slightly cropped from the intended 1.66:1.  Compared to the DVD editions this new transfer adds, substantially at times, to the left and right of the frame, as well as to the top and bottom in comparison to the 1.85:1-cropped Trimark DVD.  A marginal amount of headroom is lost compared to the 1.66:1 “Blood Edition”, but not to the extent that it proves catastrophic to the framing, and while I’d have preferred a more open presentation the Blu-ray does offer a reasonable middle ground compared to what has been available before.  While the 1080p transfer can appear quite weak at times, overly grainy and softly focused with a subtle color palette and plenty of pox marks, I don’t think there’s much here that can’t be explained away by the source materials themselves.  The soft and grainy qualities of the image appear for the most part to be a product of the original photography, which is often done with wide-angle lenses and heavy diffusion filtering – this is not something that’s ever going to export a terrific amount of clarity and detail.  There are exceptions to the the norm here, with some effects takes appearing quite clear, apparently having been shot through different lenses and possibly on entirely different stock.


Case in point – the grain in this effects close-up is still visible, but much less pronounced. The darker areas of the frame seem especially crisp and clear compared to other samples from the film.

Then there is the frequent damage, which offers viewers a persistent parade of minor speckles and larger blemishes that seem excessive for even this modestly budgeted production, which is less than 20 years old as of this writing.  While there are black bits of dirt and dust to contend with the majority of the damage appears printed right into the materials themselves, showing as white flecks of varying sizes, including the odd white printed hair.  It’s all frame-specific, but the quantity was a bit surprising, and those sensitive to such things should note that Lionsgate have obviously attempted no restoration.  Color and contrast will likely also fall below most’s expectations.  With the exception of the over-the-top conclusion, with its wealth of vibrant reds, colors can appear quite flat, and while I suspect that much of this is intentional on the part of the filmmakers (looking to create a sort of soft fantasy version of 1957 Wellington) the flatness has been compounded by the transfer’s low level of contrast.  Black levels are quite weak for the most part, with plenty of grain (and a bit of noise as well) lurking behind every shadow.  A bit of tweaking could easily have resolved this situation, resulting in an image that looked just that much more healthy and robust.

Technically the disc is only middling, occupying  around 17 Gb of a single layer BD-25 with the AVC-encoded feature sporting an average video bitrate of just 19.6 Mbps.  I was hard pressed to find any fatal encoding flaws, but the image still doesn’t hold up as well in close examination as I’d like.  All said, I’m not really that put off by any of the above – in motion I’d say Dead Alive looks pretty decent, particularly in the final twenty minutes or so.  While I believe Lionsgate could have improved a bit, either by sourcing from the original negative or by tweaking the transfer they had, I’m hard-pressed to think they could have improved upon it drastically. For the $13 it presently demands I’d say this looks good enough, and substantially more accurate to the source materials than some other recently lauded presentations (I’m looking at you Zombie and House By the Cemetery).

HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool.  Screenshots from the German Laser Paradise “Blood Edition” DVD were captured in .png format in VLC, upconverted to 1920×1080 (black bars were added to the left and right to fill the frame, and the original 4:3 letterboxing removed – note that the original letterboxing is very imprecise, with warping along the top and bottom of the frame, and that thin amounts of black information were left in some areas to prevent the loss of image information in others) in GIMP and compressed to .jpg format at a quality setting of 95%.  The two Trimark DVD comparison shots were found online in their original uncompressed .png, then upconverted and compressed at the same settings as the “Blood Edition” DVD (excluding the de-letterboxing and addition of black bars).
Blood Edition 4:3 letterboxed PAL DVD | 16:9 1.85:1 Trimark NTSC DVD | Lionsgate Blu-ray

More Blu-ray Screenshots

Gore!

In the absence of any appreciable funding having been thrown at this disc’s production, at least I don’t have an underwhelming 5.1 bump to contend with in the audio department.  What the disc does offer is the film’s original stereo recording, soundly related in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0.  The icky sound effects, which are every bit as delightfully sickening as the visuals, shine, as does Peter Dasent’s (Meet the Feebles) alternately cheesy and inspired synthesizer score.  There’s a bit of depth and even some appreciable stereo separation to be had, and Lionsgate manage to one-up many of their competitors by complimenting the track with three sets of subtitles – English, English SDH, and Spanish.

So there you have it – Dead Alive in its slightly shorter American cut (at least it’s not the bastardized 85 minute R-rated version) on Blu-ray in a somewhat uninspired but relatively source accurate presentation with strong lossless audio and no supplements beyond the theatrical trailer.  Were the asking price more than that of a modest lunch out I might have been more compelled to complain, but as things are I find myself reasonably pleased.  Yeah it could have been better, but the DVDs can’t touch it and I know damned well it could have been much, much worse (Near Dark anyone?).  For fans this is tough not to recommend, weaknesses and all.

in conclusion
Film: Excellent  Video: Very Good –  Audio: Excellent   Supplements: Poor
Harrumphs: No supplemental weight whatever, and a transfer that likely could have been improved upon a bit in more capable, or loving, hands.
Packaging: Standard-size Blu-ray Eco case.

Horror Express, MST3K, and Mysterious Island on the big screen!

November 2nd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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First off, a friendly reminder that the good folks at Severin Films will be releasing the Euro-horror classic Horror Express, starring the legendary duo of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, as a special edition Blu-ray / DVD combo pack on November 29th.  Though much delayed this release is finally happening, and it sounds like it’s going to be a great piece of work.

From the press release: Severin Films is pleased to announce the Blu-Ray debut of 70s terror classic HORROR EXPRESS starring genre titans Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing with an unforgettable supporting turn from Telly ‘Kojak’ Savalas. Loved by fans and critics alike, with Dread Central declaring it “One Of Our Absolute Favorites”, this gory masterpiece has been transferred in hi-definition from the original camera negative and is packed with exclusive new special features as well as the first in-depth interview with Cushing ever to emerge on disc, unearthed from a British archive. The film will be released as a Blu-Ray/DVD 2-disc combo pack.

Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing star as rival turn-of-the-century anthropologists transporting a frozen ‘missing link’ aboard the Trans-Siberian Express. But when the prehistoric creature thaws and escapes, it unleashes a brain-scarfing spree that turns its victims into the eye-bleeding undead.  Can the crafty colleagues stop this two million year old monster, hordes of zombie passengers and a psychotic Cossack officer (Telly Savalas) before terror goes off the rails? Silvia Tortosa (WHEN THE SCREAMING STOPS) co-stars in this all-time fright favorite from director Eugenio Martín and the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters of PSYCHOMANIA.

Severin Films, founded in 2006 with offices in Los Angeles and London, has been called  “well on its way to becoming the greatest indie label of all time” by BlogCritics.org. Their DVD and Blu-ray releases include Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, the unrated Director’s Cut of Just Jaeckin’s Gwendoline, Richard Stanley’s restored Hardware, Enzo Castellari’s original Inglorious Bastards, Oscar®-nominee Patrice Leconte’s The Hairdresser’s Husband, Don Sharp’s Psychomaniaand Roman Polanski’s What? Severin’s upcoming HD restorations include The Wild Geese, Ashanti and Zulu Dawn. The company’s theatrical releases include Birdemic – Shock & Terror, Devolved, and the forthcoming horror anthology The Theatre Bizarre.

Horror Express
1972 • 90 minutes • Color • 1.66:1, 16×9 • SRP $29.98 • 1 DVD, 1 Blu-Ray

EXTRAS:

• Murder On The Trans-Siberian Express: New Interview With Director Eugenio Martin
• Notes From The Blacklist: Producer Bernard Gordon Discusses The McCarthy Era
• 1973 Audio Interview With Peter Cushing
• Telly And Me: New Interview With Composer John Cacavas
• Introduction by Fangoria Editor Chris Alexander
• Theatrical Trailer

The Horror Express DVD / Blu-ray combo pack can currently be pre-ordered through Amazon.com at the considerably reduced price of $13.99.  For the latest updates be sure check out Severin Films on Facebook and Twitter.

Next up, Shout! Factory have another fantastic box of DVD goodies on the way for fans of the cult television phenomenon Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Wtf-Film already has its review copy in hand, and can say unequivocally that Volume XXII  – which debuts on December 6th – is another winner.  Expect a review shortly.

From the press release:  Our long cultural nightmare is over. On December 6, Shout! Factory, in association with Best Brains, Inc., will release Mystery Science Theater 3000: XXII, a 4-DVD set that includes Time Of The Apes, Mighty Jack, The Violent Years, The Brute Man and a cornucopia of extras worthy of the holiday season. All four episodes are previously unreleased on DVD, and Time Of The Apes and Mighty Jack are two of the most beloved and most requested episodes of the comedy phenomenon!

Disc 1 of Mystery Science Theater 3000: XXII features Time Of The Apes, which enjoys a mythical cult status among MSTies. Adapted (i.e., shredded and stitched into incoherence) from the 1974 Japanese series Saru No Gundan, Time Of The Apes follows the travails of a scientist and two small children who are accidentally frozen and thaw into a future ruled by apes. The plot may sound familiar, but the riffs are absolutely unique.

Over on Disc 2 we have the long-awaited Mighty Jack, one of the funniest episodes of one of the funniest TV series ever made. The Japanese apparently had a license to kill television when they handed this prized Tsuburaya production to Sandy Frank. Long before “junk bond” joined the English lexicon, the 007-ish exploits of Mighty Jack — a government organization created to defeat the notorious crime syndicate known as “Q” — took everything that was bad about cool and thrilling espionage movies and threw the rest out. Fortunately for us, Joel and the ’bots had a license to riff. And fortunately for you, Shout! Factory has a license to release it on DVD.

Next up, The Violent Years is a tale from 1956 of girls gone wild. Mike and the ’bots take on this low-budget black-and-white potboiler about a neglected rich girl and her hardened gang of babes who, thanks to inside information from her unwitting father, always manage to stay one step ahead of the police. In this delirious episode, we find the Mads “softening to reach a wider audience,” which includes performing their new theme song, “Living In Deep 13.” The DVD also includes the 1952 short film A Young Man’s Fancy, wherein a visiting young man prefers the household electrical appliances to the teenage daughter.

Last but not least, Mystery Science Theater 3000 presents The Brute Man. Rondo Hatton plays a disfigured man, a/k/a “The Creeper,” who hunts down and kills the people responsible for his deformity. During his downtime, he falls for a blind woman and engages in some light felony by stealing to pay for an operation to restore her sight. She may regret that. The DVD includes the 1948 short film The Chicken Of Tomorrow. Remember the stylish sequence in Casino that takes us through the mechanics of the operation? It’s like that, except with chicken farming and without the style.

***
Bonus Features Include:

New Introduction By Mary Jo Pehl
Origin Of The Creeper: Birth Of A B-Movie Icon
Introductions By August Ragone, author of Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters
The Making Of MST3K (1997)
Mystery Science Theater Hour Wraps
Ed-ucation: Archival Interviews with Delores Fuller & Kathy Wood
The DVD Menus of MST3K
4 Exclusive Mini-Posters By Artist Steve Vance

Mystery Science Theater 3000 volume XXII is currently available for pre-order through Amazon.com at the reduced price of $37.99, or through Shout! Factory directly for $41.97 (ships with a free MST3K stress ball not available through other retail outlets).  For the latest updates be sure to follow Shout! Factory on Facebook and Twitter.

Last, but certainly not least, newfound home video label Twilight Time will be releasing the Charles H. Schneer-produced Ray Harryhausen effects classic Mysterious Island, directed by the great Cy Endfield, on Blu-ray on November 8th (next Tuesday).  Mastered from the latest Sony Pictures high definition restoration, Twilight Time’s limited edition of 3000 is not to be missed!

From Screen Archives: Mysterious Island (1961) opens with a spectacular clash of signature Bernard Herrmann brass; from then on, it’s a headlong rush from one thrill-packed set-piece to the next. This classic fantasy adventure tale, the best of many screen adaptations of Jules Verne’s sequel to his own Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, is the inspired collaboration of a superb action director—Cy Endfield, who would give us one of the greatest of all true-life epics, 1964’s Zulu—and an authentic Hollywood genius: Ray Harryhausen, inventor of the film’s “SuperDynaMation” stop-motion animation process and a “total” filmmaker, spearheading the story, art direction, and design of such masterworks as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

Legend has it that Harryhausen’s producing partner, Charles H. Schneer, hit upon Mysterious Island as the team’s next project after reading a public library survey indicating that the book was the “most looked-at” item on the shelves. But the film was also Columbia Pictures’ vigorous answer to two successful Disney movies: an earlier Verne adaptation, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and the more recent Swiss Family Robinson (1960). Mysterious Island would provide the best of both: the Verne fantasy element, featuring the return of the mad genius Captain Nemo (incarnated here by the impressively dignified Herbert Lom), intertwining with a tale of ship/balloon-wreck survival. The extra added attraction, of course, would be the mind-boggling creatures crafted by Ray Harryhausen.

Unlike some of the more fantastical wonders in Harryhausen’s arsenal—drawn from myth or legend, from a prehistoric past or an alien-invaded future—the “monsters” of Mysterious Island have a new kind of strangeness: they are, for the most part, eye-poppingly enlarged versions of everyday fauna, the products of Nemo’s experiments in what he calls “horticultural physics.” As usual, the Captain’s goal is as huge as his gigantic bees, crabs, sea snails, and fowl: where once he attempted to end war by perversely constructing its ultimate instrument, the death-wielding submarine, Nautilus (which makes a cameo appearance here), now he’s focused on conquering what he identifies as war’s causes—famine and economic competition—by guaranteeing “an inexhaustible food supply.”

It’s certainly a big food supply—and one that provides most of Mysterious Island’s most delightful chills and thrills. The castaways—a motley collection of Civil War-era POWs, a newspaperman, and a lone Rebel sentry who’ve all made an exciting escape from a Confederate prison in a storm-tossed balloon, plus two shipwrecked English gentlewomen who propitiously arrive to sew, keep the cave tidy, and provide a bit of pulchritude—not only have to battle nature in order to survive, but a gargantuan nature, transformed by Nemo (read: Harryhausen) to fascinating if terrifying proportions.

Video: 1080p High Definition / 1.66:1
Audio: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English Original Mono
Subtitles: English SDH
Special Features: Isolated Score Track (2.0 Stereo) / Original Theatrical Trailer / TV Trailer Spot #1
RT: 101 Minutes
NOT RATED
Region-Free
3,000 Unit Limited Edition

***

Note: Sony Pictures and Twilight Time will also be hosting a special 50th Anniversary screening of Mysterious Island on Sunday, November 13th at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, CA.  Grover Crisp (VP of Sony Pictures Archive Restoration), Twilight Time’s own Nick Redman and award-winning effects artist Randall William Cook will be on-location for a post screening Q&A, and copies of Twilight Time’s Blu-ray of the title will be available for purchase as well.

The all-region Mysterious Island Blu-ray is available exclusively through Screen Archives, and available for pre-order now.  Twilight Time have a host of other fantastic titles slated for Blu-ray and DVD release in the near future, so keep posted on the latest updates by following them on Facebook and Twitter.


Heavy Metal

October 30th, 2011 | article by | 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Year: 1981  Company: Columbia Pictures   Runtime: 90′
Director: Gerald Potterton   Writers: Daniel Goldberg, Len Blum, Dan O’Bannon,
Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Angus McKie, Jean Giraud
Music: Elmer Bernstein, Riggs, Blue Oyster Cult, Donald Fagen, Stevie Nicks, Journey,
Cheap Trick, Nazareth, Don Felder, Sammy Hagar, Trust, Black Sabbath, Devo
Cast: Rodger Bumpass, John Candy, Jackie Burroughs, Joe Flaherty, Don Francks, Martin Lavut,
Marilyn Lightstone, Eugene Levy, Alice Playten, Harold Ramis, Susan Roman, August Schellenberg,
Richard Romanus, John Vernon, Caroline Semple, Al Waxman, Harvey Atkin, Glenis Wootton Gross
Disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment   Video: 1080p 1.85:1
Audio: DTS HD-MA 5.1 English, DTS HD-MA 5.1 French   Subtitles: English, English SDH, Spanish, French
Disc: BD50 (All Region)   Release Date: 06/14/2011   Available for purchase through Amazon.com

The Wtf-Film Guide to Essential Blu-ray is the record of one man’s eclectic journey to uncover the very best of the weird and wonderful that Blu-ray has to offer.  This edition is also our contribution to the Skeletons in the Closet roundtable, the inaugural group-think event of online pop culture consortium M.O.S.S.

A fleet of bombers slice through occupied airspace in the last Great War, ack-ack blooming about them and fighter fire riddling them, and their unfortunate crews, with holes.  The bomb bay doors open, the payload is dropped, and the bombers – crippled and leaden with the dead-weight of expended flesh – creep back towards the safety of Allied territory.  We focus in on one bomber in particular, in which all but the pilot and co-pilot have been killed.  As the co-pilot inspects the damage a strange, green-glowing sphere approaches and enters the plane, bathing the dead crewmen in its unnatural, unholy radiation.  We see one of the dead men’s hands in close-up – it boils and bursts, oozing fluids and dissolved flesh until only a menacing skeletal claw remains.  As the co-pilot makes his way back to the cockpit he realizes that the bodies of his comrades have vanished, leaving no trace of themselves behind.  Where could they possibly have gone, and how?

When he hears a rustling in the bomber’s central ball turret his curiosity gets the better of him.  He opens the hatch, expecting one of his fellow men to emerge.  Instead he is grappled by a pair of monstrous arms, and his body splattered lifeless about the turret’s walls.  The pilot, suspecting too late that something is wrong, opens the cockpit door to see what has become of his fellow soldiers – on the other side he is greeted by a gang of inhuman things, piles of bones and organs stuffed into bomber jackets and creeping with grim determination towards his position.  The pilot slams the door to isolate himself from the horror and fires his side arm into the approaching horde, but it’s no use.  The creatures pummel the door to pieces, and as it falls from its hinges a mass of zombified flesh-hungry ghouls spill into the cockpit.  The pilot survives only barely, escaping the doomed bomber by parachute in the nick of time.  As the plane plummets into the Pacific he lands safely on the shores of a tropical atoll – but the safety is only illusory.  Awaiting him is a graveyard of aircraft of all generations, as well as the damnable creatures their passengers have become.  The pilot screams, but it’s too late.  The beasts surround him, leaving no possibility for escape…

These images, etched indelibly into my brain during my impressionable youth, were my first encounter with the alternative animated 1981 vignette-epic Heavy Metal - as they filtered out of my family’s seemingly monolithic tube set (a 32″ Sharp in an oversized black plastic box – huge to me at the time, but soon replaced with a 54″ monstrosity) into my unsuspecting, unprepared mind, I was horrified.  I’d never seen anything like it before, and nor had I expected to, particularly not from a cartoon.  As the scene’s nihilistic conclusion loomed I slammed my prepubescent fist into the power button, thus saving myself from what promised to be more such terror.  Even at that young age I knew I had seen something strange and different, and something I knew darn well I shouldn’t have.  One thing I could hardly have fathomed was that, had I only left the television running, I’d have likely seen a few other things that would have blown my growing male mind1…

It is only with the above experience related that one should judge the unflappable adoration the present I holds for Ivan Reitman and Leonard Mogel’s alternately crude, juvenile, prurient, and fantastic production – itself modeled on Mogel’s magazine of the same name, the domestic answer to the French publication Metal Hurlant.  Reitman and Mogel’s Heavy Metal was hardly the first alternative animation to burst forth into the American social consciousness (I can only imagine what things might have replaced the writings on these pages had I chanced first upon Ralph Bakshi’s Felix the Cat or Coonskin instead) but it remains one of the most accessible and popular, likely a result of its sidestepping of the sharp satire  and cultural observations of Bakshi’s work in favor of knock-down drag-out pulp madness.  More than once have I earned perplexed glares from Disney fans after they discover that my favorite of the studio’s work is the grim live action fantasy DragonSlayer - how much more disgusted those reactions might have been had those same people only known that my favorite animated film was Heavy Metal!


So beautiful and so dangerous. Who could ever say no to a face like that?

Comprised of a series of stand-alone vignettes, some original and some adapted from stories which had appeared in the magazine, Heavy Metal flirts with a variety of styles and genres – science fiction, film noir, western, fantasy, horror – with little but an overriding sense of adolescent glee holding it all together.  The individual segments – each farmed out to its own team of talented independent animators – are never quite in harmony with one another, even though a framing device in which an evil green orb relates the film’s six stories certainly tries, but the incongruousness of it all quickly becomes part of the film’s charm.  Heavy Metal shifts willfully and wildly in tone and style from one segment to the next, from the eroticized Burroughs-ian universe of Den to the futuristic scum-metropolis of Harry Canyon to the vast, inhospitable fantasy wastes of Taarna, and yet it works, both as an oddball assortment of self-contained narratives and as a jubilant celebration of genre excesses.  The sum experience is the cinematic equivalent of thumbing through the magazine from which the film takes its name – no more and no less than what Reitman and Mogel had always intended – and, much like the ancient Loc-Nar, the magnitude of its appeal and influence should not be underestimated.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the future-noir Harry Canyon.  Set in the rundown sprawl of New York, New York circa 2031, the story follows a world-weary street-smart cabbie who runs afoul of the Venusian mob after saving a red-headed show stopper from a shootout on the front steps of the Museum of Natural History.  The mobsters want the ancient Loc-Nar, the red-head wants to sell it, and Canyon just wants her.  The story by Daniel Goldberg (Cannibal Girls) and Len Blum (Stripes) is a 10-15 minute reduction of the narrative sensibilities of Taxi Driver and the MacGuffin-fueled drama of The Maltese Falcon with plenty of fantastic violence, raunchy cartoon sex and contemporary rock tracks thrown in for good measure.  If the story – a cab driver and a red-head on the run from unseemly elements on the hunt for an ancient artifact in future New York – sounds familiar, it should.  Whether credited or not, Harry Canyon plays like a step-by-step blueprint for much of Luc Besson’s later pop sci-fi epic The Fifth Element - a film which also prominently features a talking orb that is the embodiment evil.  Recently Heavy Metal ‘s influence has been glimpsed in other high-profile projects, notably in the bleak and over-contrived SuckerPunch (whose writer and director, among others, has been mentioned in association with a new Heavy Metal feature) and, more directly, in the 12th season South Park parody Major Boobage.

To that latter end, Heavy Metal is often negatively criticized for its decidedly adolescent sensibilities, including its grade school attention span and subject matter that seems culled straight from the doodlings of a 14 year old boy.  While I can hardly argue with the point – this is, after all, an exceedingly adolescent film - I’m similarly hard pressed to see it as a burden to the production.  Heavy Metal is a film in which cars drive home from outer space, cheeky alien robots have sexual affairs with Earth secretaries, and a pair of intergalactic hippies take a stoned-out trip around the Universe in a giant flying smiley face.  It’s an out and out celebration of whooshing rockets, spurting blood, and bouncing bare breasts – the very staples of the young male imagination brought to life in vivid, living color.  I certainly can’t fault anyone for not liking it, but to hold Heavy Metal‘s juvenile proclivities against it, when they are the very thing it exists to serve, seems more than a little silly2.

Every bit as senseless as you could possibly imagine but more intelligently conceived than you likely thought, this one makes about as good an argument as can be made for smart people making dumb entertainment.  The fun factor here is through the roof even twenty years on, and I’m sure that producers Ivan Reitman and Leonard Mogel are plenty pleased with their crass animated legacy.  The late Dan O’Bannon’s short horror segment B-17 still appeals to me most here, if only for the childhood memories it recalls, but there are more than enough fantastic developments along the way to appeal to genre fanatics of all kinds.  One could go on interminably about how Heavy Metal isn’t for all tastes, but that’s really the point of it all.  I say give it a try – the worst you can do is hate it.

1 Live and learn, I suppose, but the thin static haze separating family fun from outright pornography in old-school satellite programming would expose me to that other forbidden world soon enough…
2 Yes, I know. I’m sure I’ve made similar arguments against other films.  Then again, I never said I wasn’t silly.

Boo!

Heavy Metal was actually the first DVD I ever purchased, and to be perfectly honest that 1999 Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment edition has held up pretty well over the years with its decent anamorphic image, healthy encode, and substantial slate of supplemental content.  While I’ll be keeping that disc on the shelf for nostalgia’s sake it’s safe to say that it’s not going to be getting much play in the future – this Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Blu-ray blows it right out of the water.  Originally released as a Best Buy exclusive, the disc is now out in wide release and well worth picking up.

Given the highly variable nature of its animation, all of which was produced outside of any major film animation outlets, I had very grounded expectations going into Heavy Metal‘s Blu-ray debut, but I needn’t have worried.  Presented in 1080p at its original theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio, this new HD transfer is a modern marvel as far as I’m concerned.  Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the upgrade is the color reproduction, with both saturation and the depth of hues taking some huge steps forward – the 1999 DVD can look quite faded and yellow in comparison.  The colors here really have some pop (just look at the sky in the first comparison or Taarna’s lips in the final one below), and are backed by a richer, darker contrast and a substantial uptick in clarity and detail.  Each segment is a revelation, from the trash-noir Harry Canyon to the brilliantly bizarre Den to the all-too-brief B-17, and while the crudeness of some sequences is all the more obvious the more awesome moments shine all the brighter.

The overall quality of the film elements seems to have improved a bit as well, and while there is still some damage to contend with (mostly speckling and dust, much of it a product of the original animation and effects process, still more the result of age) the image here is considerably cleaner than on the DVD edition.  The delicious texture of the original photography is also maintained, much to my delight, with variable levels of legitimate film grain present throughout.  It’s refreshing to see that Sony haven’t skimped on the technical front, either.  The AVC-encoded image receives substantial bitrate support at an average of 34.2 Mbps, and the feature spreads comfortably into dual-layer territory.  I noted nothing in the way of artifacting or other encode troubles, and the image retains its lovely film-like aesthetic even under close examination.  The bottom line is that Heavy Metal looks better here than I’d have ever thought it could, and I doubt most theatrical screenings could touch it.

For the sake of full disclosure, HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool.  After comparing to the original .png files the results appeared quite transparent to these eyes, even when zooming in 2-3x.  DVD screenshots were captured in .png format in VLC from the 1999 Columbia Tristar Home Video edition (I don’t own the Superbit edition to compare), upconverted to 1920×1080 in GIMP and compressed to .jpg format at a quality setting of 95%.  In the five comparisons below DVD screen shots appear first, followed by the Blu-ray.  The rest should be self-explanatory.

More Blu-ray screenshots:

The all-important audio receives a healthy bump to DTS HD-MA 5.1 in the original English (a second DTS HD-MA 5.1 track in dubbed French is also included), and I’ve never heard Heavy Metal sound better.  The crude sound effects have a wonderful vintage about them, and sound very much of their time, as does the voice recording.  The HD track offers considerably more breathing room than on past editions, sounding neither so muffled as the Dolby Surround 2.0 stereo track or as frail as the Dolby Digital 5.1 included on the 1999 DVD, and feels considerably more substantial for the trouble.  The vintage rock tracks have great punch, with Felder’s Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride) and Hagar’s Heavy Metal both sounding hilariously awesome in their lossless iterations.  Benefiting even more so from the bump is Elmer Bernstein’s tremendous score, which offers some of the best genre work of its kind in segments Den and Taarna.  Heavy Metal finally sounds as big as it should on home video, and while I’d have loved a lossless track in the original stereo for posterity’s sake I’m hard-pressed to complain.  The disc comes with a decent array of subtitling options – English, English SDH, French and Spanish – and, according to the back of the case, should be playable in all Blu-ray regions.

The only area in which the disc seems to be lacking is in the supplemental department, and those who already own the Collector’s Series edition from 1999 won’t find anything new here.  Included is the original feature-length rough cut of Heavy Metal, which runs 90 minutes in 480p and is available both with or without commentary from Carl Macek, a small selection of deleted scenes – the unfinished Neverwhere Land sequence (3 minutes, 480p) and the alternate carousel framing story (2:38, 480p, and with or without Carl Macek commentary) – and the excellent documentary featurette Imagining Heavy Metal (36 minutes, 480p).  While all this is retained, a large selection of material was also left behind.  Lost, but available on the 1999 DVD, are a host of image galleries, including portfolios of pencil art, cell animation, production photos, and a massive gallery of Heavy Metal magazine covers spanning from 1977 to 1999, as well as an audio recording of Carl Macek reading from his book The Art of Heavy Metal: Animation for the Eighties that originally accompanied the feature presentation.

While Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have clearly skimped on the supplements, which is a real shame with regards to the art galleries (these would have looked fantastic bumped to HD), they have spared no expense with regards to the feature presentation, and given the low price this release currently commands that’s more than enough for me.  If I had my way this disc would be sitting on a shelf in every home in America, but finding myself in the absence of godly powers of influence I’ve added it to our shortlist of Blu-ray essentials instead.  So there you have it.  Heavy Metal on Blu-ray is an essential.  That means you have to buy it, right?

in conclusion
Film: Awesome  Video: Excellent  Audio: Excellent   Supplements: Good +
Harrumphs: Limited supplemental weight.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.

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