4K Mini Consumer Guide, Special Halloween Edition

Equipment: Sony UBp-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.

 Army of Darkness (Shout Factory 4K Ultra)

One has to give Sam Raimi credit: after the editorial mangling and critical drubbing he endured with Crimewave, in 1992 he invested the commercial credibility he’d regained with 1990’s Darkman into making another live-action cartoon, placing it in the context of his popular not-quite franchise (at the time) as a form of insurance. Army of Darkness can get pretty grisly but, thanks to the absurdism of the effects and the slapstick energy of lead actor Bruce Campbell, it’s ultimately much more a comedy than a horror movie. Not so much Monty Python and the Holy Grail as A Connecticut Yankee Misses King Arthur’s Court By Several Crucial Decades and Endures Magical Curses That Might as Well Have Been Conceived by Tex Avery. Which is a roundabout way of saying that while the movie remains startling in parts it is much much much more a comedy than a horror movie. That it, it’s not scary. It is pretty groovy though. The 4K rendering, from the original negative, foregrounds that Good Celluloid Grain…and also lays bare the ways many of the process shots are process shots, which some viewers may find distracting.  We will encounter this issue again at the end of this column. —A-

Cat People (Shout Factory 4K Ultra)

Once you’ve accepted that this 1982 movie is — not to be commonplace about it — what it is, it looks better — more stubborn, more perverse, more relatively uncompromised — with every viewing.  I like the original camera negative scan particularly for its rendering of the diverse Weird And Fancy Colors, from the oranges of the ancient (or dream) cat world to the red of the blood that splashes on Nastassja Kinski’s shoes in a particularly “aiiieee” sequence. I’d never listened to the commentary Paul Schrader recorded for the movie in 2002 or so until I got this editions. Apparently part of the reason he made it was because Universal was remaking old RKO sci-fi/horror pictures for some reason — Schrader links this up with Carpenter’s The Thing, released the same year. Holy cow, an early iteration of the DARK UNIVERSE? Anyway. Schrader’s not specific about how he evolved Alan Ormsby’s original script, but I bet the Beatrice theme was Schrader’s: the idea of a zookeeper who’s heavy into Dante’s “La Vita Nuova” isn’t entirely improbable, but it’s definitely a conceit. But of all the performers, John Heard, as said zookeeper, seems the most hemmed in somehow, while Malcolm McDowell executes his Catman moves with clear relish. Reflecting on the movie’s themes in the commentary, Schrader reflects that as he speaks, people are more shocked and upset by them than they were in the early ‘80s; and he predicts that the pendulum would soon swing back from prudery he saw around him at that time. BOY WAS HE EVER WRONG. And his new film, Master Gardener, is partially his screw-you response to that. Might make a good double feature with this almost-classic. And one thing about this picture, you definitely cannot say that the sex scenes don’t move the plot ahead. —A

 The Fog (Shout Factory 4K Ultra)

Maybe I’m just a sucker for John Carpenter’s neo-classical stagings and compositions and camera movements, but where the critics of the day found the horror stylings here to be conventional and stale, I walked out of my first viewing of this 1980 vengeful-ghost story saying, “These satisfactions are permanent.” And I say that again every time I rescreen the movie. This version (touted as a “4K restoration by Studio Canal” as opposed to an OCN scan) is pretty dark, make sure your ambient lighting is low to nonexistent for best results. —A-

The Funhouse (Shout Factory)

First rate picture. This 1981 Tobe Hooper item concludes his casual trilogy of Extremely Disturbed Dads (of a sort) begun with Texas Chainsaw in 1974 and continued with 1976’s Eaten Alive. It can also be be enjoyed as a higher budget, more “professional” but not necessarily less sleazy rethink of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies!!?. Seasoned and nationally renowned professional actor Kevin Conway, playing a demented carny barker with multiple identities, is almost as effectively creepy as regional luminary Jim Siedow was in Massacre. And poor Elizabeth Berridge suffers almost as much as Marilyn Burns, beginning with a shower attack from creepy little brother Joey, who not only shouldn’t be playing with rubber knives but shouldn’t be looking for ways to see his sister naked, either. What year was this movie made? Oh, right, 1981, when nobody “called” you “out” for this sort of thing. Anyway, in a more ruthless mood Hooper would deliver to Joey the comeuppance he had so richly earned. But this “dark ride” excursion is not lacking in gnarliness for all that, and with The Fog is probably the most outright genuinely scary movie in this batch. The accompanying Blu-ray disc contains a cornucopia of extras (and this is true of all the other Scream Factory discs treated here) and the 4K Ultra disc, again from the OCN, looks just right. — A+

The Lost Boys (Warner 4K Ultra)

I declined to see this when it first came out. It had something to do with coming down from an acid trip on a summer morning in 1987, and seeing Corey Haim and Corey Feldman on Good Morning America, wearing these head scarves that made them look like Jim Henson’s Duran Duran Babies. Kind of freaked me out. So the new 4K was a first time for me. Hey, I’d forgotten that Alex Winter was in this! This made me more kindly inclined toward the picture, but unfortunately the picture itself kept intruding on my kindly inclinations. There’s that first absolutely not frightening vampire attack, for instance. There’s that terrible Echo and the Bunnymen cover of “People are Strange.” And I like Echo and the Bunnymen, too. Then there are the little asides that I’ve come to think of as “Jeffrey Boam touches” (and indeed, Boam was one of the screenwriters), such as “You know what it means when there’s no TV? No MTV.” Oof. The suspension of disbelief director Joel Schumacher tries to extract from the audience with respect to the idea that the bodybuilder sax player they snapped up from 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome (Tim Cappelo is his name) can actually sing is more of a stretch than any of the supernatural stuff. I think the overall problem with the picture, not to put too fine a point on it, is that no one involved in its writing and staging seemed to have any idea what a horror movie was, let alone how to make one. On the positive side, the 4K disc looks quite spectacular. And the 98 minute film is pretty pacey, even as it threatens to turn into The Goonies by its last third. And the cast is appealing. I didn’t “get” Jamie Gertz back in 1987, but I can see it now, not that you’re interested. Kick my grade up two notches if you’re an unrepentant ‘80s nostalgist. —B+

Night of the Living Dead (The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra)

Still the greatest. This is a 4K rendition of the fantastic 2016 restoration that I wrote about here. As Robert A. Harris has pointed out, this upgrade might, to aficionados, feel like a redundancy: “There is simply no 4k imagery here to reproduce.” And he still rates it as Highly Recommended, because the restoration itself is that good and the movie is that good. The clarity of the image really underscores the commitment and inspiration of the filmmaking. We now can fully understand that the movie is not “crudely powerful,” as some felt obliged to put it at various points in its critical history. It’s just POWERFUL. —A+

Poltergeist (Warner 4K Ultra) 

I rather enjoyed this when I saw it in a theater in 1982 but sat out the whole “who really directed it?” business, in part because I never watched it again after that, for whatever reason. Looking at it now, I’m hardly surprised at how Spielbergian it is — after all, Spielberg did not just produce, but he co-wrote both the story and the screenplay. And so the story and the screenplay continue the preoccupation with suburbia that marked Close Encounters and E.T. The theme is Spielbergian (traumatized/transformed family) the resolution is Spielbergian (everybody lives — at least in the movie itself; two of the younger cast members suffered tragic deaths in subsequent years), and the direction is…not unlike that of Tobe Hooper, the director of record. (A television set in this movie, before it goes kerblooey, also reflects Spielberg’s preoccupation with A Guy Named Joe, which he will remake as Always in a few years.)  When you get to the meat of it, dated special effects notwithstanding (and in 4K, they can’t help but look more dated) the movie gets a reasonably grisly and galvanizing job done. (I also noticed that the catcalling pool installer — who’s catcalling a high school girl for heaven’s sake [what year was this made? Oh, 1982] is played by Sonny Landham, who also played the ingratiating Billy Bear in Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs. the same year.) —A-

Tenebrae (Synapse 4K Ultra)

Two Evils Eyes (Blue Underground 4K Ultra)

The 4K Adventures in Argento continue to pay off. Rewatching the titles from his best run of films — those between and including 1975’s Deep Red and Two Evil Eyes, the 1990 double header, with one hour of Argento and another of Romero — I’m struck over and over by just how downright nasty Dario’s pictures are. The excess is the point, as I’ve mused before, but there’s a dimension of the sadism that’s just so unadorned that the movies disturb in ways that few other films can manage. And maybe that’s a good thing? (That few other films can manage, I mean.) The bloody murders in Tenebrae have significantly startling imagery one could defend on the grounds of surrealism — but they’re also resolutely anti-social. One supposes it takes something akin to conviction to be so “et voila” in the presentation of this kind of material. It’s complicated! And I suppose what draws people (including myself) to such things is also complicated — it can’t just be genre loyalty, can it? And yet of course like so many of my generation of horror hounds I can’t stand the Saw films at all and despise the likes of Clown. Any way. Of these two releases, both are less than carefree Halloween entertainments: the relentless misogyny depicted in Tenebrae and the simulated cat torture in Argento’s Harvey-Keitel-fueled revision of Poe’s “The Black Cat” in Evil Eyes leave definitively queasy aftertastes. Both are spectacular-looking renderings, however. Pick your poison, as they say. — A+

Universal Classic Monsters: Icons of Horror Collection Volume 2 (Universal 4K Ultra)

Speaking of being a horror hound, Universal Home Video knows a mark when it sees one. Once more they (okay, we) are asked to reinvest in long-owned material for a potentially utopian upgrade. Am I NOT going to own Bride of Frankenstein in 4K? No, I am not. Have I ever not been in near-narcotic thrall to Freund’s The Mummy? No, I have not. Both these titles look divine herein — and I don’t think any future format is going to wring more detail out of them than what we get here. So I’m DONE, Universal, you hear me? DONE. Don’t try to 8K me on this stuff whenever there’s 8K. Just don’t. The two weak links in this 4-film set are the 1943 Phantom of the Opera and 1954’s The Creature From the Black Lagoon (which is offered in 3D only on the Blu-ray of the set, which contains both 4K Ultra and BR discs). This was the first time I even watched this Phantom — my horror sensei Carlos Clarens, in his great An Illustrated History of Horror and Sci-Fi Films, discouraged me as a kid by complaining, first, that here “the excellent Technicolor photography served to support the spectacular, rather than the horrific aspects of the story,” and later that the movie “divested the Leroux story of all fantasy and mystery, turning the redoubtable Phantom into a fatherly musician with an acid-scarred face.” To which I will add, after this viewing, too much opera, not enough Phantom. Despite Claude Rains giving it the old college try. The Technicolor does look good in 4K, however. As for Creature, it’s a movie that contains many resolution-compromising process shots, and the 4K version underscores this to a sometimes uncomfortable degree. By this time in the studio’s history, horror stories just didn’t have the same kind of care lavished on them as in the 1930s. Still, the great Ricou Browning’s performance as the Creature is a masterpiece of super-powered pissed-offedness. Who knows what this guy wants, right? Is there even a point to his kidnapping Julie Adams? I don’t think there is.  In any event, the greatness of the first two titles pretty much compensates for whatever quibbles one might have about the other two. —A-

Comments

[mike schlesinger]

When I finally broke down and got a Blu-Ray player, my motto was "I. Am. Not. Buying. This. Again." Well, almost. I did rebuy the Legacy collections, but only because it was an Amazon Black Friday sale and they were all around $12 each, plus there were enough new bonus features to compensate. But yeah, that's definitely it. And it's doubly aggravating when you think of the literally thousands of their own and Paramount titles Universal is letting gather dust. Kino and Shout! are doing their best, but it's not enough.

[george]

I've never been a big fan of the 1943 Phantom of the Opera. I prefer the 1962 Hammer version with Herbert Lom (which has its own flaws but is worth seeing).

[OfficeIcarus]

Poltergeist (1982)
David “Begelscam” Begelman’s lone blockbuster during his brief reign at MGM (albeit demoted to UA by the time of its release; jettisoned, completely, shortly thereafter, e.g. David Mcclintick‘s essential ‘Indecent Exposure’ published)
Fun fact: Begelman’s talent agent counterpart/brethren, Freddie Fields, also briefly under two-year contract at MGM, would go on to produce the 1986 sequel, The Other Side; Fields tried claim Front-titles crawl accreditation for himself, only to be shot down (c/o MGM’s Alan ‘Laddie’ Jr.) — yet Poltergeist II remains, to this day, “A Freddie Fields Presentation,” if only in subtext, well below the primary/legitimate, “A Victor-Grais Production”

[Titch]

It's been an awful long time since I put anything in the tip jar Glenn, and I can't keep posting how much I enjoy your disc reviews, without remuneration. So $20 for this and thanks!

[Glenn Kenny]

Much obliged!

[Brian Dauth]

The amazing thing about MASTER GARDENER is how it advanced Schrader's Christian narrative into Buddhist territory. He traded in forgiveness for unattachment.