Blu-ray Consumer Guide: Special Holiday Gift Guide Edition, Installment #1 (Maybe)

“Since our last report many things have changed; indeed it would be fool­ish to assume that is could be otherwise.”—Throbbing Gristle, sleeve notes, D.O.A. The Third And Final Report Of Throbbing Gristle, 1978.

Oy. 

When last we spoke, things were get­ting on track for this to be a monthly fea­ture again, but then, you know, actu­al pay­ing work, and my domest­ic play­er broke and all that. And then I star­ted get­ting quer­ies about am I doing a Holiday Gift Guide, which made me think, “Well, there’s a hook,” as if I needed a hook when the whole point was to get this back to being a monthly thing, and then…

And in the mean­time as I’m get­ting new equip­ment and pre­var­ic­at­ing the discs are pil­ing up, bless them. And really, as you’ll see, they’ve been of really high qual­ity, which is always nice. So here’s 34, reviewed and rated, and I’ve still got a pile to go, and I hope to get that done before the actu­al hol­i­day itself, but I make no prom­ises. Enjoy. 

Equipment: Playstation 3 (broken noisy fat mod­el replaced by quieter skinny mod­el) and OPPO BDP 83 the play­ers, Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30 the dis­play, Pioneer Élite VSX-817 AV the amp. 

3 Women (Criterion)

A pretty straight­for­ward upgrade from the standard-def edi­tion same extras) with a BIG uptick in image qual­ity; Chuck Rosher’s cine­ma­to­graphy here reaches the apo­gee of “impres­sion­ism” that most cinephiles with a minor in the ‘70s tend to asso­ci­ate with Vilmos Zsigmond; look at those aquas in the pool mur­al, etc. In its odd way this is one of Altman’s most per­fectly real­ized films, that is, whatever it is, it’s exactly what he wanted to put across. My Lovely Wife: “It’s a very inter­est­ing film and I’m glad I watched it. I nev­er want to have any­thing to do with it again.”— A+

The 10^th Victim (Blue Underground)

Elio Petri’s futur­ist­ic quasi-Marxist satire is no Death Lays An Egg, but it’s sharp­er and bright­er and fun­ni­er than, say, The Running Man. You’ve heard of this, it’s the one where Ursula Andress wears a bra that shoots bul­lets, got pop-art sets, all that. It’s actu­ally a good deal more sub­stant­ive than its rep indic­ates, but the real news here is the trans­fer: So gor­geous, smooth, yet film­like, And it’s a 1965 pic­ture. Which some­how, to my mind, once again evokes the ques­tion of what the fuck is the deal with the Argento Blu-rays. One sali­ent fea­ture of the pic­ture qual­ity here is that there’s zero speck­ling in the whites, and there are a LOT of whites. — A

Le Beau Serge (Criterion)

Chabrol nuts (I’m one) are suit­ably grat­i­fied that Criterion is put­ting out this and Les Cousins (see below), the pro­lif­ic, per­verse maestro’s two open­ing fea­tures, a criss-crossing duo, them­at­ic­ally. This 1958 debut, in which frail city mouse Jean-Claude Brialy goes back to the provinces and reenters the life of his child­hood buddy of the title, a dis­sol­ute and surly Gerard Blain, is decept­ively simple and plain and very beau­ti­ful.   The Blu-ray image is impec­cable; the winter-gray sky of the French vil­lage is so crisp it’s chilling. Very con­sist­ent through­out. The com­ment­ary by Guy Austin is inform­at­ive albeit rather form­al. —A+

Ben-Hur (Warner)

I under­stand the party line on big-studio sword and san­dal and Jesus epics is that they stink because they’re all life­less and such, and that the ones dir­ec­ted by one-time stu­dio greats such as William Wyler stink even more because…well, I’m just not get­ting into all that again. As for me, I think my prior-stated sen­ti­ments of affec­tion for the likes of Quo Vadis and even The Robe testi­fy that I have a thing for this sort of stuff. And I do. And as Johnny LaRue would say, it’s not a gay thing, and even if it was, what busi­ness would it be of yours? I dunno, some­thing about all that pro­duc­tion value and the attendant/inadvertent cine­mat­ic iner­tia that res­ult s in mak­ing sure it all gets on screen cre­ate in an atmo­sphere that I find per­versely enga­ging. Also, I like Charlton Heston and I don’t care who knows it. This grand anniversary edi­tion of the remake of the General Lew Wallace vis­ion is a spec­tac­u­lar Blu-ray real­iz­a­tion, for bet­ter and/or worse (check out the “swarthy” makeup on that Arab dude who yells “Roman pig” [no, he really does!] dur­ing the chari­ot race). Hence, that afore­men­tioned atmo­sphere, per­fectly trans­posed to home view­ing. Hooray!— A+

Blue Velvet (MGM/UA)

It looks great, but giv­en how many times I’ve seen this well-projected in a theat­er, I can’t say it’s rev­el­at­ory. The big news here is the sole extra of note, almost an hour of deleted scenes, some of them so fully real­ized (scored and everything) that they must have come out fairly late in the post pro­cess. Good, weird, Lynchian stuff it is, too, and demon­strat­ive in hind­sight of what a resource­ful recycler Lynch is: you see a lot of things that would go, in some form, into Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, those “Rabbit” sequences of his online videos and INLAND EMPIRE, and more. The odd thing, or really not so odd, is that you nev­er get the impres­sion that hav­ing these scenes in the film prop­er would have sub­stant­ively improved it. (Admittedly the whole jet­tisoned sub­plot involving Jeffrey’s col­lege girl­friend Louise IS pretty hil­ari­ous.) Great to see it though. — A+

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Paramount)

I’ve seen scads of prints of this, 16 mostly I sus­pect, and I’ve nev­er seen it look down-and-out awful, but the bright­ness and detail of this ren­der­ing really is eye-popping and deliv­ers a really great view­ing exper­i­ence. God DAMN Mickey Rooney is grat­ing though.   —A+

Cape Fear (Universal)

Shot by Freddie Francis, production-designed by Henry Bumstead, dir­ec­ted by Martin Scorsese in an attempt of sorts at mak­ing a main­stream work (if not product), this comes across well on Blu-ray; the most sali­ent fea­ture for me is see­ing Scorsese doing some of his sig­na­ture cam­era moves and shock cuts with such slick sur­face mater­i­al. This is maybe my least favor­ite Scorsese film; there’s some­thing tense and unpleas­ant about it that has little to do with the ten­sion and unpleas­ant­ness of the actu­al sub­ject mat­ter. Try as he might, Scorsese can’t quite key into the film’s “ordin­ary” char­ac­ters, so he throws all man­ner of effects into his mix (image going to neg­at­ive, etc), while sim­ul­tan­eously allow­ing DeNiro to turn his Max Cady into Freddie Krueger. By the end the whole thing seems like an exer­cise in mas­ochism for pretty much every­body involved. There’s still strik­ing stuff here, and the meagerly-appointed disc sports a first-rate image.—B+

Carlos (Criterion)

Vicissitudes of con­tem­por­ary film­mak­ing: While dir­ect­or Olivier Assayas and cine­ma­to­graph­ers Yorick La Saux and Denis Lenoir shot this in 35, the U.S. the­at­ric­al run of this pic­ture (a tele­vi­sion mini-series ori­gin­ally), such as it was, nev­er saw a 35 pro­jec­tion, and don’t quote me on this, but I don’t think there were a whole lot of 35 prints struck for the European mar­ket either. So the visu­al qual­ity of your exper­i­ence of this film (which, as you may have noticed, is one I’m pretty crazy about) is entirely reli­ant on the qual­ity of its digit­iz­a­tion, as it were. And the qual­ity here is, as you might expect, first rate, as are the extras. It’s a com­mon argu­ment these days that the qual­ity line between cinema and tele­vi­sion is dis­ap­pear­ing because Breaking Bad. There are cor­res­pond­ing (or is it con­com­it­ant? Or neither?) views that movies where there aren’t a lot of shots at Dutch angles aren’t “cine­mat­ic” because Some Dude™ doesn’t think The Descendants is all that. Sigh. I look at stuff such as Carlos, and at stuff like Fassbinder’s World on Wire (made for German tele­vi­sion in the early ‘70s for heaven’s sake, and com­ing soon from Criterion) and think, well, hell; cinema is where you can find it. And Breaking Bad ain’t cinema. But that’s an argu­ment for anoth­er time. This rules. —A+

Citizen Kane  (Warner)

This amaz­ing rendi­tion is not just the res­ult of les­sons learned about too much DNR applic­a­tion and such. Word on the street is that a new ele­ment was found, and giv­en some­thing along the lines of the Zhivago treat­ment. (See here.) The res­ult is the most com­puls­ively watch­able ver­sion of the film ima­gin­able, or close, I guess it depends on the lim­its of one’s ima­gin­a­tion. What’s as impress­ive as what you see I what you don’t see—Welles’ old-age makeup for Kane doesn’t “pop” as makeup the way it did in the pri­or standard-def edi­tion. One poten­tial pit­fall of the geni­us here is that you’re apt to start telling your spouse or room­mate that you’re going to send him or her to Sing Sing, do you hear me, Sing Sing. —A+

The Collector (MGM)

Here’s a Wyler pic I’d be hard-pressed to accept any argu­ments against, although it is true that they don’t make ‘em like this any­more on any num­ber of levels, so unusu­al is the bal­ance between old school and new that it poises on (the year was 1965, and it was only Wyler’s second film after Ben-Hur). No way in hell they’d get away with the end­ing today, that’s for sure. This is a very hand­some disc, solid…good hair detail on Samantha Eggar and bet­ter freckles! The film, or its mak­ing, is also the source for the cov­er of the Smiths’ 1984 single “What Difference Does It Make,” so, you know…—A

Les Cousins (Criterion)

Haven’t seen this puppy, Chabrol’s second fea­ture, in maybe 40 years (I remem­ber watch­ing it as a kid on “Cinema 13,” my loc­al PBS station’s invalu­able film series) but it must’ve made a huge impres­sion on me, as I remem­ber the final shots almost exactly. Weird. Here the country-mouse/city mouse scen­ario is reversed, although Brialy and Blain play roles that both cor­res­pond to AND invert their roles in Chabrol’s first.  It’s great, it looks great, get it. The com­ment­ary here is licensed from the Australian issue of the film on the Madman label, and fea­tures Down Under quasi-tyro Adrian Martin, who really does sound almost exactly like who­ever used to do the voi­ceover for the American Foster’s beer ads. At one point Martin trans­lates the French title of Chabrol’s debut fea­ture thusly:  “The Good Serge, The Good Lookin’ Serge, some­thing like that.” Very funny. —A+

Despair (Olive)

Very sol­id, not a jaw­drop­per, just con­sist­ently very good over­all qual­ity, no print dam­age, none of the soundtrack issues that have cropped up on pri­or Olive issues. I’m work­ing on a longer piece about this inter­est­ing con­flu­ence of Fassbinder, Nabokov, Stoppard, Bogarde,Ferreol, et. al., so I won’t say much else here except that if you think you liked this movie back in the day, it’s worth anoth­er look; it seems even more inter­est­ing eccent­ric­ally multi-layered than it did back in the late ‘70s.  —A

Dumbo (Disney)

I’ve been wait­ing on this for Blu-ray for a long time and now I’ve got noth­ing to say about it. Just beau­ti­ful, everything I’d wanted it to be. I really wish the stu­dio would recon­sider Song of the South, not to men­tion put­ting some odder stuff—Three Caballeros, etc.—on to Blu-ray. And also uncensor­ing all the tobacco-based humor in the mater­i­al. You can’t have everything. You SHOULD, how­ever, have this. —A+

Fanny and Alexander (Criterion)

Whaddya know, anoth­er piece of cinema made for European TV. On the off chance that you know a lot of Bergman skep­tics, I’d say this is the work of his that you’ll want to throw in their faces. It’s quint­es­sen­tially Ingmar but by the same token so much more, well, well-rounded than the more severe (and to some, strained) Scenes From A Marriage. It’s also a film in which every frame seems more beau­ti­ful than the last, par­tic­u­larly in this thor­oughly aston­ish­ing Blu-ray trans­fer. —A+

The Four Feathers (Criterion)

As adven­ture yarns go, this is hardly as rip-roaring as, say, Gunga Din; it’s a little more staid, a little heav­ier, which is one reas­on its rep is on the more sub­dued side. Still, it’s got its crack­ling bits, and the Blu-ray ren­der­ing is just beau­ti­ful. As opposed to Gone With The Wind, released the same year (1939), this is a study in the del­ic­acy of Technicolor. Look at the blue of C. Aubrey Smith’s eyes. (There’s a sen­tence you’ve nev­er read before, I bet.) Check out the wine glass, the pine­apple in the early din­ner scene. Whoa. —A

 Go West/Battling Butler (Kino)

Two very clean ren­der­ings of a couple of minor Buster Keaton clas­sics, each one a great deal of fun. Like everything with Keaton attached to it, essen­tial. —A

The Guns of Navarone (Sony)

Apparently restor­ing this was a real bear of a task, as mater­i­als were all over the place and ori­gin­als of everything were, well, pretty much nonex­ist­ent. The res­ult­ant Blu-ray is of inter­est­ingly vari­ant qual­ity.  Skin tones are kind of all over the place rel­at­ive to day/night scenes, and that goes wheth­er shot with rear-projection or on loc­a­tion or not.  The storm at sea scene right after they kill all those poor Germans is a par­tic­u­lar study in the mal­le­ab­il­ity in appear­ance between effects shots and real-life stun­t­work stuff. It’s all kind of fas­cin­at­ing, tech­nic­ally, if you look at it with an eye to that sort of thing. If you don’t, it’s still very sat­is­fy­ing in that old movie-movie fash­ion (the 5.1 sur­round soundtrack is mixed so as to sound appro­pri­ate to a 1961 film, if you fol­low me).—A

Identification of a Woman (Criterion)

The first shot-on-film fea­ture Antonioni made in his nat­ive Italy in nearly two dec­ades, 1982’s Identification is a bit of a puzzle film that, rather puzz­lingly in and of itself, relates most dir­ectly to…well, Il Grido, if it had been made about an intel­lec­tu­al film dir­ect­or rather than a work­ing­man. Visually, it’s got some strik­ing stuff (not least of which is female co-lead Daniela Silverios), but, my friend John Powers’ book­let essay’s claims not­with­stand­ing, it doesn’t hit, for me at least, the same highs as The Passenger, or Red Desert. Still. Seminal cinema in the highest home video format, it’s kinda like put­ting two and two togeth­er.  —A

 Island of Lost Souls (Criterion)

Awesome! The film itself is dis­cussed by myself in some detail here. The Blu-ray present­a­tion is quite impress­ive espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the pic­ture is almost 80 years old. Where it really comes to life are in the dark­er scenes, those on the tit­u­lar island, which itself seems plunged into what you’d call a Stygian absence of light. The vari­et­ies of shade and detail are fab­ulous. —A+

Jackie Brown (Miramax/Lionsgate)

A few months ago the mis­sus expressed a desire to look at this, and I said, “Let’s wait for the Blu-ray.” A good idea, that. Very smooth, sol­id, punchy high-def present­a­tion. And a ter­rif­ic film, not just a high point for Tarantino but, along with Yates’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a kind of object les­son in how to trans­pose a first-rate genre nov­el to the screen. I could quibble about how not all of the extras are in 1080p, but what’s the point, bey­ond a docked notch? The play’s the thing, and this pho­to­play is quite the thing. Check it out. —A

Jurassic Park Ultimate Trilogy (Universal)

“I hate com­puters,” remem­ber that thing that Sam Neill says at the begin­ning of the first pic­ture?  Ha ha ha ha. Man, I’d for­got­ten how studio-generic a lot of the first one looked; Dean Cundey’s a sol­id pro, for sure, but man, this is work­man­like at the level of sol­id pro. And the open­ing: too much music, tele­graphed thrills. For a ground­break­ing pic­ture, this is one of Spielberg’s weak­est. The second one’s tight­er and taut­er and with less child-in-peril bore­dom, and a more dis­tinct­ive look (thank you Mr. Kaminski) the third kicks out the jams with no wait­ing, pay­ing homage to the B movies it was essen­tially inspired by, and which I myself still prefer. Not a bad look­ing (or sound­ing) set of Blu-rays though. — A-

Kuroneko (Criterion)

Certain critics/Asian cinema mavens aren’t all that crazy about this movie, and I can under­stand why; its stol­id cam­era styl­ings aren’t exactly what you’d call cine­mat­ic­ally dis­tinct­ive. Still. It’s got spooky female corpses, black cats, evoc­at­ive forest sets, and really fab­ulous atmo­spher­ic light­ing for black-and-white, which this Blu-ray disc abso­lutely nails. Another study in atmo­sphere, then. —A 

Meek’s Cutoff (Oscilloscope)

Here’s the extent to which high-def tele­vi­sion tech­no­logy is trump­ing pro­jec­tion: I saw this for the first time in a Manhattan screen­ing room and I actu­ally found myself doing men­tal com­pens­a­tion for the image qual­ity. That is, I just KNEW that what I was see­ing was prob­ably not as strik­ing as what was sup­posed to be on screen. This wasn’t the first time I’d had this exper­i­ence, and I actu­ally know of at least one film­maker who’s pulled a film from that room because they weren’t screen­ing a par­tic­u­lar pic­ture at the cor­rect res­ol­u­tion. In any event, the Blu-ray of this strik­ing some-call-it-a-minimalist-Western makes the ver­sion I saw in that screen­ing room look dingy and dish­wa­ter­ish. This was one of the films cited by that Dan Kois char­ac­ter in his deplor­able “cul­tur­al veget­ables” piece; well, the bright­ness and the col­or val­ues shown here make it a ver­it­able VEGETABLE SALAD, there I did it please kill me now. But ser­i­ously, if you missed this in theat­ers and you’ve got the equip­ment, go this way as soon as pos­sible. —A+

Meet Me In St. Louis (Warner)

A ver­sion of the immor­tal clas­sic that we have always wanted. Very “film­like,” down to the occa­sion­al feel­ing of soft­ness; that is, not in terms of mud­died or not-sharp detail, but rather the way a film feels when you’ve got that con­scious­ness of light being thrown on the screen from some dis­tance. Spectacular. —A+

Mutiny on the Bounty (Warner)

I’ve read some carp­ing on this, that it ain’t 8K bril­liant, or some­thing. I was pretty sold on the ver­sion that was on the HD disc of the Milestone/Brando ver­sion way back in, when, 2007? So this, finally, would seem to be that ver­sion on a Blu-ray, and I’m still pretty sold on it. Vivid, col­or­ful, nev­er visu­ally dull. The film itself a bit of anoth­er mat­ter. Still, if you’re a fan of it, or of excel­lence in high-def gen­er­ally, this is abso­lutely sol­id and worth­while. —A

Mysterious Island (Twilight Time)

Ooh. A Cy Endfield pic­ture! With Ray Harryhausen spe­cial effects! A sequel, of sorts, to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, with Herbert Lom very appos­ite as Nemo. Boy, Gary Merrill looks TERRIBLE! In any event, once again the mavens at Twilight Time come through with a very enter­tain­ing pack­age at a mildly unpop­u­lar price, present­ing a stu­dio semi-classic that the ori­gin­at­ing stu­dio MIGHT get around to issu­ing on Blu-ray some time after the end of the world. The present­a­tion itself is sol­id, with lots of what they call  “good grain” and the stand­ard devi­ation when the stop-motion effects are optic­ally prin­ted on the live-action stuff. A first-rate present­a­tion of an under­rated pic­ture. Love it. —A+

The Phantom Carriage (Criterion)

Super fuck­ing awe­some, a high-def ver­sion of what I believe was the trans­fer that was on for­eign region disc, which I raved about back in 2008.  Original inter­titles on this baby. Amazing detail through all the tints, no “digit­al” feel. It’s got that elec­tron­ic KTL score and everything. Get this baby, con­fuse your friends; they’ll think they’re watch­ing Murnau. And then, after dis­cuss­ing this con­fu­sion, you can all sit around and think about what oth­er amaz­ing stuff in cinema his­tory has been lost, or lan­guishes in canon­ic­al obscur­ity. Depressing. —A+

The Rules of the Game (Criterion)

A fur­ther upgrade of this staple of cinephil­ia, a pic­ture which, I’ve been insist­ing since I was giv­en a pub­lished plat­form on which to insist (around 1987, I think), is entirely access­ible and pleas­ur­able and watch­able for any­one with eyes and a brain, cinephil­ic or not. While the disc is not the barn-burner that the Kane Blu-ray is, it’s damn fine. —A+

The Strange Case of Angelica (Cinema Guild)

This grace­ful and odd fantasy from 100-plus-year-old Portuguese dir­ect­or Manoel de Oliviera is remark­able in both its viva­cious­ness and mourn­ful­ness, which is why it’s so, you know, odd. This is one of two recent Blu-rays from the adven­tur­ous firm The Cinema Guild, and I’m very pos­it­ively impressed: the main fea­ture looks great, beau­ti­ful pas­tel col­ors high­lighted, over­all a  lovely impres­sion­ist­ic palette presents itself.  No video noise, either. The spe­cial fea­tures, includ­ing a 1931 silent short from the dir­ect­or, are also uni­formly excel­lent. Highly highly recom­men­ded. —A+

Strike! (Kino Lorber)

Eisenstein’s 1925 cel­eb­ra­tion of doing revolu­tion­ary stuff is a genu­inely odd piece of cinema par­tic­u­larly in those jux­ta­pos­i­tions that don’t quite con­sti­tute montage…you know what I mean, the anim­al iden­tit­ies of the pro­vocateurs and all that. Also fas­cin­at­ing to look at are all the planes cre­ated in the shoot­ing of the fact­ory set­tings. Despite the, um, mater­i­al­ism of the sub­ject mat­ter, the vul­gar vital­ity of its visu­al treat­ment yields to a kind of deli­ri­um; one can find a dis­tinct influ­ence from this film in Dreyer’s Vampyr, and that’s no acci­dent on sev­er­al levels. The Kino Lorber Blu is from a recent res­tor­a­tion and whole thing is so lovely it seems slightly churl­ish to com­plain about lack of ori­gin­al Russian inter­titles. But still, woulda been nice. —A

Touch of Evil  (Eureka/Masters of Cinema, U.K. import, region B locked)

Talk about OPTIONS. Orson Welles’ 1958 beyond-noir mas­ter­work was, like much of his oth­er work, sub­jec­ted to stu­dio tam­per­ing, leav­ing its release ver­sion, um, com­prom­ised. A sub­sequent 1998 “recon­struc­tion” from Welles’ notes yiel­ded great sat­is­fac­tion but of course also some con­tro­versy. And then there’s the bedev­il­ing aspect ratio debate: is the film Academy ratio or 1.85, and just because Russell Metty made it 1.85 for Douglas Sirk doesn’t mean…and so on. So, in the spir­it that anim­ated Criterion’s won­der­ful omni­bus edi­tion of Welles’ Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report, the MoC mavens give us FIVE ver­sions of the film: the the­at­ric­al and recon­struc­ted ver­sions in your choice of 1.37 and 1.85 ratios, the “pre­view” ver­sion in 1.85. Four dif­fer­ent audio com­ment­ar­ies are doles out over four ver­sions. Transfer qual­ity is superb through­out. Magnificent, a strong, cred­ible can­did­ate for Blu-ray of the year. —A+

Winnie the Pooh (Disney)

One of the too-unsung films of 2011, a really out­stand­ing expansion/appreciation of the design and anim­a­tion styles of the Disney Pooh adapt­a­tions of the ‘60s. The Blu-ray is about as beau­ti­ful and crisp as the film itself, which is to say, very.—A+

 Zombie (Blue Underground)

Quite a few of the Blue Underground Blu-rays have revealed val­ues that we might not have appre­ci­ated on the first go-round of the films thus treated. For instance, the fab­ulous cine­ma­to­graphy of The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, yclept Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. Or the fact that New York Ripper, while per­ni­cious exploit­at­ive garbage, had at one point been, and was now once more, per­ni­cious exploit­at­ive garbage in focus! Etc. Alas, this long-awaited high-def digit­al­iz­a­tion of Lucio Fulci’s walking-dead, erm, clas­sic, offers noth­ing like that in terms of rev­el­a­tion. Don’t get me wrong, it looks good, it mostly looks REALLY good, and Lord knows its set pieces—underwater zom­bie attacks top­less girl, but is in turn attacked by a shark, who he then BITES! Jagged over­size splinter pierces unpleas­ant woman’s eye­ball! Zombies walk across the Brooklyn Bridge!—still pack a punch. But it remains Zombie on Blu-ray, noth­ing more, noth­ing less. Worth not­ing is the pretty amus­ing 5.1 sound mix, the pans and reverbs of which are some­thing like the aur­al equi­val­ent of Italian hor­ror cinema’s over­use of the zoom lens. As with that visu­al tic, it’s some­thing you even­tu­ally get to like.  —A-