Obscure Cinema

HD DVD review: Wolf Creek

Over a year later and Optimum have delivered a version of Wolf Creek that fails to improve on the older US release from the Weinstein Company and, in many ways, constitutes a step back. For what it is, it's not a bad disc, but, unless you absolutely feel the need to own the original shorter cut, my advice would be to avoid this one and pick up the US version.

Optimum continues to serve fans whose interests lie slightly off the beaten track with an HD DVD release of Wolf Creek, Greg McLean's nasty and effective shocker. Review at DVD Times.

It's real

http://www.dvdmaniacs.net/forums/showthread.php?p=534200#post534200

Specs here.

High definition hootenanny

A handful of discs have landed on my doormat over the last couple of days. First up, on Tuesday, was a check disc for Optimum's UK HD DVD release of Wolf Creek, replacing the Blu-ray release which wouldn't play in my Japanese Playstation 3 thanks to a strange bug called region coding. I've taken a quick look at it in advance of putting together a full review for DVD Times, and I can report quite categorically that those who already own the Weinstein Company's US release should stick with it. Optimum have inexplicably decided to encode their version using MPEG2, and the result is a heck of a lot of artefacting. You still get a nicely detailed picture, and some shots do look flawless, but the number of shots that show excessive macro-blocking make this a less than immersive experience.

Oh, and the menus appear to be bugged, at least for Xbox 360 users: the scene selection screen won't load. The on-screen overlay disappears, leaving the background footage to play in an infinite loop, requiring the disc to be ejected and reinserted.

Then, on Wednesday, while I was out at work, the Blu-ray release of Masters of Horror: Season 1, Volume 3, containing Don Coscarelli's Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, Tobe Hooper's Dance of the Dead and Larry Cohen's Pick Me Up, arrived. Then, today, this was supplemented by the fourth and final volume of Masters of Horror's first season, containing Takeshi Miike's Imprint (the episode which so horrified the executives that they refused to air it in the US), Joe Dante's Homecoming and Mick Garris' Chocolate. Given that the only episode I've watched so far is Sick Girl in Volume 2 (having previously seen Jenifer one and a half times, which was more than enough), it looks like I've got quite a bit of viewing ahead of me.

How low can you go?

Just when you thought the whole Kane & Lynch: Dead Men fiasco couldn't get any worse, publisher Eidos Interactive has been caught with its pants down yet again. As reported by Kotaku, someone at the company marketing department seems to have decided that, if they can't get a positive review from Gamespot, then they'll damn well make up their own and falsely attribute them to other review sites. Care to guess what's wrong with the image below?

If you answered "Eidos pulled these quotes and scores out of its collective anus," you'd be half way there. As Kotaku explains:

GameSpy did not say "It's the best emulation of being in the midst of a Michael Mann movie we've ever seen" in their review of the game. They said that in their E3 2007 coverage. In other words, a preview. They also did not give the game five stars. They gave it three.

As for Game Informer, same deal. The highlighted quote does not appear in the review of the game. Nor do they give it five stars. Game Informer don't even score in stars. They gave it a 7/10.

Head over to Kotaku for the rest of the story.

Um... say what?

Now, I'm no stranger to publishers using reviews in - shall we say? - creative ways. I have seen certain publishers post extracts of my reviews on their web sites with certain parts edited out to make my overall appraisals sound more glowing than they actually were. I've also seen quotes attributed to myself (or, more often, DVD Times) appearing on the backs of DVD covers that could only have been compiled by pasting together a word here and a word there. (I mean, come on, does "A little seen gem... with nudity, gore and three Bond girls!" really sound like something I would write? It is, according to Blue Underground's packaging for The Black Belly of the Tarantula. Well, at least they chose a film that I was genuinely impressed by rather than attempting to make out that I was lavishing praise on something I hated.) This is on an entirely different level, though. I suppose, if the DVD distributors had as little integrity and self-respect as Eidos, I could expect to see quotes like "It's... very [good]! [Bianchi's] camerawork is... as accomplished as... Argento's [most] impressive endeavours!" and "You have to admire Dr. Boll. He consistently churns out [masterpieces]! Alone in the Dark was merely foreplay!" attributed to myself appearing on new releases of Strip Nude for Your Killer and House of the Dead respectively.

It's nice to know that Eidos is seemingly intent on digging an even deeper hole for itself. Add to that the fact that Gamespot members, protesting against the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, have taken it upon themselves to award Kane & Lynch 1/10 ratings en masse, and you now have a game that, in all likelihood, was nothing more than hopelessly mediocre, but, thanks to Eidos and Gamespot's dodgy dealings, has now acquired a far worse reputation than it would ever have had if they had simply elected to keep their noses out and let the reviewers get on with reviewing.

Nice one, guys.

Thanks to Lyris for the tip-off.

HD DVD review: Les Triplettes de Belleville

It's great to see more traditional animation becoming available in high definition, particularly when it's a film as good as Les Triplettes de Belleville. With its solid audio-visual presentation, this release is a must-have for HD DVD-ready animation aficionados.

"Swinging Belleville rendez-vous..." I've reviewed the recent French HD DVD release of Sylvain Chomet's excellent Les Triplettes de Belleville.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of November

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• A Clockwork Orange (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Eyes Wide Shut (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Fly (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Full Metal Jacket [remastered edition] (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Mario Bava Collection Volume 2 (R1 USA, DVD)
• Pan's Labyrinth (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Peep Show: Series 4 (R2 UK, DVD)
• Ratatouille (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Shining (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Soldier of Orange (R0 UK, DVD)
• The Stendhal Syndrome: Special Edition (R0 USA, DVD)
• Tokyo Godfathers (R2 UK, DVD)
• Les Triplettes de Belleville (R0 France, HD DVD)

A good month for high definition, this, and another expensive one too.

I've run out of Pan puns

Another day, another HD gallery. This one is for Optimum's recent UK HD DVD release of Pan's Labyrinth, a film which looks decent but falls short of brilliance. As I said in my review:

It's a good transfer, but one with some noticeable flaws, most noticeably a strange "eroded" appearance that appears to be the result of attempting to suck out the film grain. As a result, textures tend to look a bit waxy and "cut-out", particularly faces, while a lot of the fine detail has been removed from the foliage in the scenes taking place in the woodland. It's a strange effect, as it means there is a superficial sense of crispness, but not the sort of detail you would expect from an image so sharp.

Pan's Labyrinth
(Optimum, UK, VC-1)

HD DVD review: Pan's Labyrinth

Optimum's HD DVD release of Pan's Labyrinth is a good one, and one which improves substantially on all current DVD releases in terms of image quality. It does have its shortcomings, however, particularly with regard to the problem of audio synchronisation, and looks set to be superseded by New Line's substantially meatier US release, due out towards the end of the year. If you want your HD fairytale fix now, however, you could do a lot worse than picking up this release.

I've reviewed the recent HD DVD of Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, released in the UK by Optimum on a feature-packed disc.

Two worlds collide

I've just discovered that Michael Brandon, who played the protagonist, Roberto Tobias, in Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet, has a guest role in this Saturday's episode of Casualty (source: Yahoo! TV UK). This strikes me as incredibly weird in a quite fascinating way. Now, the question is, will he play a progressive rock drummer who incorrectly believes that he has killed a man who was stalking him,

Highlight below to reveal spoiler text for Four Flies on Grey Velvet:

Given some of the stories we've been getting on Casualty recently, I wouldn't consider that to be too far-fetched.

Pan's pipes

I received a couple of review copies of upcoming high definition releases from Optimum on Friday: Wolf Creek on Blu-ray and Pan's Labyrinth on HD DVD. Both titles are coming out on both formats (the Blu-ray versions were released on November 19th, whereas the HD DVD versions have been delayed a week, until November 26th), and I'm fairly sure HD DVD versions were requested for both, so I'm not sure why I got a Blu-ray Wolf Creek. In any event, I'm not able to review it, because it is coded for Region B only, and, as you may know, my Blu-ray hardware (Playstation 3) is Region A. As far as I'm concerned, Optimum is merely shooting themselves in the foot here, as they are simply denying themselves sales. It makes particularly little sense when you consider that region coding doesn't exist for HD DVD, so anyone in the world can play their HD DVD titles, whereas only the privileged few who shelled out for overpriced European Blu-ray players will be able to play their Blu-ray titles.

Anyway, I may not have been able to look at Wolf Creek, but I have given Pan's Labyrinth a cursory glance. The image quality is a bit uneven, with a strange "eroded" appearance that appears to be the result of attempting to suck out the film grain. As a result, textures tend to look a bit waxy and "cut-out", particularly faces, while a lot of the fine detail has been removed from the foliage in the scenes taking place in the woodland. It's a strange effect, as it means there is a superficial sense of crispness, but not the sort of detail you would expect from an image so sharp.

Extras, by the way, seem to mirror Optimum's UK DVD release, with only the bonus trailers for The Devil's Backbone and cover art of Cronos missing in action. Of course, the only audio option provided is a Dolby Digital-Plus 5.1 track, so I suspect many people will prefer to wait until New Line release their own version in the US on December 26th, for its DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 track and PiP visual commentary. More significantly, the picture on this release seems to be lagging slightly behind the audio at all times, resulting in some noticeable lip synchronisation errors (particularly apparent given the rapid-fire Spanish in which most of the characters converse).

Expect a full review at DVD Times in the not too distant future.

Poster pleasure

What's with Japan almost always getting the best film artwork? Time and time again, they seem to end up with much better posters and DVD covers than the rest of the world. A case in point is the Japanese poster for Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, one of my favourite films, whose French poster (the café exterior variant) already adorns my wall.

As much as I like the French art, however, I found that the Japanese version appealed much more to me as soon as I came across it during a random perusal of AllPosters. The poster was no longer available to buy from there, and, at some point during the last couple of days, its entry has been deleted entirely, but I was able to find an auction for it on eBay, and it now adorns the wall behind me, alongside my giant Opera poster.

Musical madre

I received the soundtrack CD to Mother of Tears the other day. I've had a chance to sit down and listen to the CD from beginning to end a couple of times now, and broadly speaking, I like it, with some reservations.

This is a very eclectic score, and Simonetti borrows liberally from other compositions, including his own contributions to the Argento universe (lots of shades of Phenomena), as well as Keith Emerson's work on Inferno, Jerry Goldsmith's score for The Omen and some of James Bernard's work for the old Hammer films - all very worthy references to use, if you ask me. There are probably more, but they passed this relatively non-musical individual's ears by.

The best track by far is the one that accompanies the opening credits ("The Third Mother (Main Theme)") - it's very Hammeresque, and I love that grand gothic sound with lots of brass and menacing chanting. The worst, meanwhile, is that truly awful Demonia/Cradle of Filth song that accompanies the closing credits. It's essentially a metal remix of the opening title theme, with Dani Filth's tuneless rasping layered over it - that description alone should give you some idea of how bad it sounds. I can't believe Argento actually agreed to have it attached to the film - it completely wrecks the tone and is far, far worse than any of the heavy metal pieces he used in Phenomena and Opera.

As for the rest of the score, I like it, but I do find that the electronic elements, which are very much like those in The Card Player, jar with the more orchestral parts. It's not a patch on the music for either Suspiria or Inferno, but it's a good, solid gothic horror piece that goes quite well with the visuals I've seen for the film so far.

DVD debacle

I was out today at university, seeing my MLitt dissertation supervisor for a discussion about my PhD progress, the proceeds of which have left me with plenty of food for thought as regards various avenues that I can explore from now on. While I was waiting for the bus home, I decided to browse the shelves of Fopp, and came away with a couple of books which may or may not prove interesting and/or useful - Best Movies of the 70s by Jürgen Müller and Revolution! - The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s by Peter Cowie. Oh, and I also picked up a copy of Tokyo Godfathers on DVD - one of the few anime films that I really like. Oh, if only Sony had released it on Blu-ray instead of director Satoshi Kon's most recent film, the incredibly disappointing Paprika.

When I got home, I discovered a package from DVD Pacific waiting for me, containing The Mario Bava Collection Volume 2. This is an incredibly generous package, containing seven films (the cover lists eight, but I'm not really convinced that Lisa and the Devil and House of Exorcism should truly be counted as two separate titles, particularly given that Rabid Dogs and Kidnapped have been counted as one in the same package).

I've taken a brief look at all of the discs, and the best-looking appear to be Lisa and the Devil, Rabid Dogs/Kidnapped and Four Times That Night, while the worst-looking are Bay of Blood and 5 Dolls for an August Moon, with Baron Blood and Roy Colt & Winchester Jack somewhere in the middle. A real patchwork of sources has been used, with the transfers for Bay of Blood and 5 Dolls for an August Moon looking suspiciously like DVNR'd versions of the same transfers used for the old Image Entertainment discs (I haven't seen the earlier versions of Baron Blood, Roy Colt & Winchester Jack or Four Times That Night, so I can't comment on them). Lisa and the Devil definitely has a brand new transfer (House of Exorcism looks much poorer, but is anamorphic, unlike the old Image version, so I doubt they are from the same master), while the Rabid Dogs/Kidnapped disc appears to be the same one that Anchor Bay released separately earlier this year.

This is a six-disc set, with Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism and Rabid Dogs/Kidnapped sharing a disc each, while, for some bizarre reason, 5 Dolls for an August Moon and Four Times That Night are to be found on either side of a solitary double-sided disc. Weird.

Anyway, looking forward to catching me some Bava, along with some Tim Lucas commentaries.

I love my diatribes

So far, I really haven't said much about my PhD work on this site. The main reason for that is that, recently, with me having been feeling under the weather, I really haven't had the energy or motivation to get cracking on it. Now, however, two things have conspired to change that. First of all, I'm feeling quite a bit better, and can now turn my mind to things other than my constant nausea (which, mercifully, I've been clear of for nearly a weak now) and pains (which are now much less severe than they were this time last week). Secondly, the supervisor of my MLitt dissertation, who is currently away on leave, is having a catch-up session on Wednesday and asked me if I would be interested in meeting up with her to discuss my progress. Of course, I said yes, and decided to use the opportunity to get something written so that, when I traipse into the university on Wednesday, we won't both be staring at a blank sheet of paper.

I always find that I work best when I have a deadline. It's not that I can't motivate myself, but I tend to find that I'm at my most lucid when I know I've promised to hand in x number of words by y date. The last 24-48 hours before a deadline are often when I get my best work done, and I'm not sure why, as I don't typically make a habit of leaving everything to the last minute. Still, my current supervisor (the one who isn't on leave) had suggested to me that I get writing as soon as possible, so that I don't get into the habit of letting the work pile up and suddenly find myself in my final year of my PhD with nothing down on paper.

At our last meeting, it was agreed that I'd put together a piece of writing explaining (a) what a giallo is and (b) why I think this is a worthwhile field of study. I was originally to discuss it with him last week, but my ill health put paid to that, so it was only this afternoon that I finally completed the assignment. It's just over 4,200 words long, approximately 3,000 of which were written today (I'm definitely one of those "bang it out quickly" people), and, while I doubt that any of it will be used in my final thesis, and it doesn't even touch on the issues of gender and identity that I hope to begin to explore in the near future, it has helped me to crystallise some thoughts and, perhaps more importantly, has eased me back into the process of academic writing, which I hadn't done in over a year. Anyway, I'm reasonably satisfied with what I've written, even if I'm still not entirely sure how it fits into the grand scheme of things. I often find that, once I've completed a project, whether it's a review, an essay or whatever, I feel strangely fulfilled, so, right now, I'm feeling light-headed and quite pleased with myself. Come tomorrow, I'm sure I'll be able to find a million things wrong with what I've written, but right now, I'm just glad to have made what I feel is a decent enough start at what is going to be a long, long project.

Oh, and I got to use the phrase "academic snobbery" in an academic essay. I wonder how that'll go down.

DVD review: The Stendhal Syndrome

If you already own a copy of the Italian release of The Stendhal Syndrome, then whether you consider this new edition to be a worthwhile purchase will be dependent on whether you feel that the price is worth paying for a slightly improved transfer and new bonus materials. If, however, you only own the poor quality Troma or Dutch Film Works releases, then I would definitely recommend this release.

I've reviewed Blue Underground's recent release of Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome, presented for this first time uncut in North America in this 2-disc special edition, courtesy of DVD Pacific.

Oh, nausea!

I got through the whole of today without feeling sick once. I put this down to my decision to stop taking the Regulan (which my GP told me was probably a wise move when I suggested it to him), which was emptying my bowels at an impressive rate but leaving me feeling like crap for several hours after each, erm, evacuation. By the way, the GP (a different one from the one who put me on the stuff in the first place) gave me a pretty thorough examination, but could find no obvious explanation as to why I have been experiencing the pains I've been feeling. He said there was a possibility that it had been brought on by a varicose vein, which would correct itself in time, but otherwise couldn't offer any definitive diagnosis, and so has referred me to the hospital for an ultrasound, x-rays and the like. I'm feeling somewhat less worried now, though, because he obviously didn't consider it to be anything life-threatening, and the pains do seem to have abated somewhat over the last 24 hours, which makes me wonder if they were partly being accentuated by anxiety. I know that, if you constantly worry about something, it's always going to seem worse. Conversely, I managed to forget my aches and pains at various points throughout the day, which I take to be a good sign.

Unfortunately, the people responsible for mangling Suspiria (see my previous post on the issue here) seem to be doing their damnedest to make me feel as ill as possible. I got home from work this evening to find screen captures of the upcoming French 3-disc collector's edition from Wild Side waiting for me, and, judging by them, the new French transfer looks just as bad, if not worse than, the Italian "definitive" DVD. I've cancelled my pre-order - if it looks this bad, then all the bonus materials in the world won't convince me that it's worth shelling out €30 for.

In more positive news, my HD DVD of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket arrived today from Amazon.com. I haven't seen the previous 2006 HD DVD release of this film, but apparently it looked like crap, so I'm happy to report that this new remastered edition looks excellent, along the same likes as 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining rather than A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut. Detail is excellent, and this is definitely one of the best-looking discs Warner have put out, regardless of when the film itself was made (they've put out plenty of HD releases of 2006 and 2007 films that look vastly inferior). This is another "major" film that I've yet to see, so I'm looking forward to sitting down to watch both it and The Shining at some point in the near future.

Edgar Wright on Suspiria

Edgar Wright, director and co-writer of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, has contributed audio commentaries for the international and US theatrical trailers to Dario Argento's Suspiria over at Trailers From Hell. This is a very interesting little project that I wasn't aware of until now, essentially having several "gurus" (including Joe Dante, Mick Garris, John Landis and Rick Baker) discuss a variety of trailers for genre pieces. Both of Wright's commentaries are very entertaining, and, for the record, I completely agree with his assessment of their relative strengths and weaknesses.

International trailer
US trailer

Credit for discovering this goes to Pete M at Dark Discussion.

DVD debacle

I picked up a couple of DVDs on my lunch break the other day: Paul Verhoeven's Soldier of Orange and Series 4 of Peep Show.

Again, sorry for the sluggish updates. I thought I was on the mend, but it turns out I may have been mistaken. The pains in my stomach have now gone, but I'm still getting all sorts of aches from the waist down on my left hand side, and, to make matters worse, last night, while lying fully stretched out in bed, I could literally feel the circulation in my left leg being cut off and the entire limb going to sleep. I was only able to get the circulation going again by bending it at a 90 degree angle - so, as you can probably imagine, I didn't sleep particularly well last night. Oh, and I'm feeling absolutely rotten again today (nausea and stomach cramps), so I suspect I'm going to try to get another appointment with the doctor tomorrow.

Blu-ray review: Oldboy

It's great to see more non-Hollywood content appearing on Blu-ray, particularly a solid film like Oldboy, but it's hard not to feel somewhat shortchanged by Tartan's failure to port over all of the bonus content from their 2-disc DVD set, while the image, despite being a definite step up from every prior release of the film, falls short of the high standard set by their Blu-ray release of Black Book.

I've reviewed Tartan's recent UK Blu-ray release of Oldboy, Chan-wook Park's critically acclaimed revenge flick. This Region 0 release features decent if not outstanding transfer and audio treatment, while some but not all of the extras from the DVD release have been ported over.

Alan Jones on Mother of Tears

Reviews of Dario Argento's Mother of Tears have been pouring in for some time now, some good, some bad, some split right down the middle, but, for many fans, the review they have been waiting for is the one penned by all-round Argento expert Alan Jones. After much anticipation, he has finally written a few words on the film, as well as its Rome premiere on Halloween.

As to the film itself, well, it's not the conclusion to the SUSPIRIA and INFERNO trilogy any of us wanted to see.

[...]

While it's easy to criticise LA TERZA MADRE (occasionally different to the US MOTHER OF TEARS version) for what it isn't rather than what it actually is - a gory, campy supernatural romp - the main problem with the film is simple. The layers of ethereal artifice given by lush cinematography and arch style to the prior two classic films lent their fractured stories a further atmosphere of palpable fever dream unreality. Stripped of that, and saddled with Fasano's dull realism (his DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK photography was superior), the film's equally episodic narrative comes off as contrived, crude and kitsch. Why on earth didn't Argento use again the vivid colour palettes that made SUSPIRIA and INFERNO so fabulous to look at? He had the chance in Jace and Adam's jewel-bleeding concept, but axed it as too fairytale instead of embracing its rich atmospheric possibilities.

[...]

Claudio Argento said it best at the premiere performance. He told me, "For the general public it's a good solid movie, for Dario's fans I'm not so sure".

For the full piece, which includes several photographs from the premiere, head over to Dark Dreams.