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-