DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The 16:9 enhanced widescreen transfer may reflect the inherent limitations of a low budget film and functional transfer but is effective within this field. Nevertheless, it is worn, indistinct and grainy at times and often murky after an oddly hallucinatory start that suggests a rather psychotic subjectivity through which the film unfolds as a nightmarish reckoning. The torture scenes are disturbingly explicit as some scenes flirt with faux snuff-film conventions, the film emerging as an unflinching look at human aberration. In this scheme of aberrant behaviour Macher’s cold performance is central, the man as professional as Bronson. Ironically, Macher has rather softer features than Bronson and indeed looks comparatively helpless. The South American settings are convincing (filmed in Mexico) and the slow transition from urban areas to undeveloped desert communities captures a mounting sense of moral desolation leading to a stunning conclusion in a mining development. This gradual change from urbanity to desert also suggests a step back in time to another order of moral reckoning (and perhaps inevitable moral regression) as the film starts slowly to resemble a kind of modern Western in its use of landscape. Having an immediate visceral impact throughout, the film is always convincing in look and production design, constantly stressing a cumulative inhospitability in order to keep the viewer edgy and uncomfortable.
Sound
The sound transfer is a functional Dolby Digital mono affair. It too reveals a film that is desolate and outraged in its design, searching in vain for some passion in the human voice amidst such horrendous developments. Ironically and most disturbingly, it finds such passion only in the sounds of pain under intense torture in scenes that are as unnerving to listen to as they are to watch. Pain is thus a key motif in this film. The tense, sparse score reinforces the disturbing qualities of the picture – it is not a pleasant entertainment, instead wholly resolute in despair and cynicism. Sadly, much of the vivid but understated background is flat in this transfer although at least nicely suggestive of such activity when needed, adding individuality to some of the more seedier settings utilized by Thompson. Voices are under-directed and when mixed with detailed, necessary diegetic sounds make for a deliberate low-key intensity, erupting into sudden and abrasively violent moments and then again retreating. It is almost wave-like in design and intention. The bass may seem to split up and vibrate on some levels but holds together most of the time. The score mixes the tense with the melancholic outrage Bronson gradually feels, contributing to the conjoined senses of desolation and desperation. The final use of echoing voices in the mine complex adds an unnerving quality as the entire film is a profoundly disconcerting experience. read more
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