DVD DETAILS:
Vision
In style, the film makes for a kind of anthropological grotesquery, nicely preserved in this lush 16:9 enhanced widescreen transfer, with only sporadic frame-edge problems. Beginning with an exceptional credits sequence, the film is increasingly full of odd angles and nervous tension. Indeed, in design, tempo and style, the film explores a kind of intense imbalance, a descent into a nightmarish, but almost campy, otherworldliness. Aptly, the World War Two type ruinous design for the beast people’s compound particularly recalls the island setting of Frankenheimer’s 1969 flop The Extra-Ordinary Seaman. The notion of being thrust into an unstable, absurd universe persists throughout Moreau, in the end depicting a most ironic island paradise. The beast-people’s makeup effects are fascinating, wholly bizarre in their combination of the human and the animal, as are the glimpses into the kind of culture and society that these hybrid creatures exist, or subsist, within. Brando’s choice of look for his character is strange and amusingly disconcerting, furthering the grotesquery of patriarchy theme. The film is a stylish showcase of weirdness, and the descent into anarchy is chilling as the simultaneous transgression and transcendence in patricide makes for a disturbing and symbolically revolutionary set-piece. Moreau’s first appearance is a stunning sequence in the annals of bizarre cinema.
Style
The sound transfer in Dolby Digital 5.1 is often remarkably effective. It is always vibrant, increasingly disorienting and full of eerie, unnerving directional effects which often serve as precipitators to the ensuing chaos towards the end of the film. It is crisp, and without major distracting source defects. In keeping with film’s visual grotesqueness, the sound use always enhances the instability, the judicious score and unusual song selection (from Enigma to Einsturzende Neubauten) always contributing to the sense of progressive abandon. Thus, the sound and original score carries the film through into its eventual anarchic imbalance, as order collapses into sound and fury. This descent into anarchy is an aural experience as much as it is a visual one. It is full of unusual sounds, and in the voices and growls of the beast-men makes for a most distinctive notion of the voice of evolution – which when allowed to express itself unrestrained is truly frightening. The evolutionary balance of these poor creatures is measured in the way many of their voices alternately hold onto both articulate and inarticulate forms of expression, in the end chronicling a form of regression. There is both force and pathos in the hyena-man’s despair. The final scenes are suitably frenzied, making for an unusual home-theatre experience. Indeed, for bizarre, but always purposeful, home-theatre sensation, this DVD is something of a standout. read more
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