DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The transfer features a widescreen letterbox version rather than an anamorphic one but it still for the most part preserves a film that is visually outstanding in its original aspect ratio, perfectly capturing the deliberately stylized blend of darkness and primary colors that makes for a striking, garish comic-book design in its speculative realization of Jungian mythology. With cleverly surreal effects, the film evidences a strong sense of production values and is a marvel within its genre – Hooper here is unbridled, and at his most ferociously colorful. Using wide angle lenses for added distortion the film nicely charts the explosion of color and energy at night, making the sequences of apocalyptic London some of the most disturbingly realized scenes of mass panic in the horror genre. The frequent sight of the nude May makes for a sense of disturbing sexuality that deliberately allies the male viewer’s desire to the paranoid fear of catching a plague that will decimate the body and the psyche: it is a cleverly calculated use of nudity. Detailed sets and miniatures are well integrated into the narrative as Hooper’s editing rhythms manage to make the film both brooding and relentless, an ambitious stylistic mix that is truly difficult to maintain but fascinating when achieved. The transfer has some problems as blacks look a little murky towards the bottom of the frame: however, few films have linked color and energy so forcefully.
Sound
The sound transfer has been upgraded and enhanced to Dolby Digital 5.1 although some of the enhancement has a rather obvious and somewhat disorienting artificiality. For the most part, however, it invigorates and updates the original aural design. Ambient details are thus distributed well and there are suspenseful, if decidedly unsubtle, directional sound effects throughout. Transitions between scenes often have a deliberately jarring, even contradictory quality as Hooper likes to build up a soundscape and quickly introduce silence, making for a suspenseful abruptness to his scare tactics. There is a nice distinction to voices in person and over the radio as judicious additional jarring effects contrast quite nicely to natural lulls and contemplative pauses that build to even more intense scenes. Hooper is one of the few masters at the notion of uncontrollably nightmarish propulsion and here structures the loss of control, societal and individual, exceptionally well. Isolated sounds are effective – the cries of the recent vampire-zombies being nicely enhanced for a fuller spatial presence that is suitably unnerving. Likewise, the final chaos of the apocalyptic scenes is a well-sustained auditory experience and immersing directional frenzy, making this a true home theatre spectacular: although, to restate, its enhancements lack subtlety – however, subtlety is never the dominant order of the day in a Hooper film. read more
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