Blue Underground recently sent me a batch of their latest Blus to review. I was blown away by the Zombie and Django ones! Still have to watch their upgrades of The Crazies and Machine Gun McCain :)

Blue Underground's 'Zombie' Blu-Ray is the 'ultimate' for Fulci fanatics. - Boston Movie | Examiner.com

Django! Blue Underground releases a classic Spaghetti Western in high definition - Boston Movie | Examiner.com

On a pinky violence kick, so ordered up Lady Snowblood Terrifying Girls High School and Female Prisoner Scorpion from Amazon! Yessa! :cool:

Great pick-ups! :thumb:

quote from ted A bohus regarding the deadly spawn...

" The elite entertainment blu-ray release of this film is about the best you can get. it's only as good as the material available. The deadly spawn was shot in 16mm and we probably used over a dozen film stocks and i'm sure some were outdated. We stole, er, borrowed stock from film schools, old refridgerators or anywhere we could get it cheap, or free. So the color imperfections and grain you see is from the pre-print material."

Basically according to mr bohus, this is the best its going to look. Well clearly the material wasnt there to warrent a blu-ray release!

I think some people are twisting my arguments, in some cases outright distorting it. I'm NOT against cult films coming to blu-ray (nor was I against the upgrade dvd, i was one of the early uptakers of the format.) It's just theres occasions (like this) where a film simply isn't served by getting a blu-ray release. Its like the weird notion put forward of sticking code reds back catalouge out on blu-ray, something that would be very expensive to do, offer very minor improvements at best to the movies and probably alienate all the fans who already forked out a ton of cash to buy the dvd's. All i'm saying is it probably pays to be a little bit more discerning which titles get the blu-ray treatment based on the materials available. Evil dead and texas chainsaw both look great on blu-ray and both were 16mm movies, it seems apparent however the materials were there to warrent the upgrade. With deadly spawn and lustigs maniac i'll probably go back to watching those movies on dvd with upscale.

oh and argento did piss his career away. Stendahl syndrome, phantom of the opera, trauma et al were rubbish, though I think sleepless holds up somewhat. :lol:

I'm sorry but I disagree with that. Admittedly I've only seen screenshots but the bluray looks worse than the dvd. And thats silly. It's not to do with the source material, it's to do with the way it's been treated. I understand that some films might not be worth the bluray upgrade due to the quality of the materials but the difference between the dvd and bluray of The Deadly Spawn has to be down to the way the materials have been treated, not the materials themselves. They may have used the best copies of the film and over a dozen film stocks but they digitally ruined it and gave it a smeary, waxy look.

VHS vs DVD vs Bluray, there's only one way to settle this......FIGHT!!!!!!
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I can't quite agree with this. You see, if a BD looks worse than its DVD counterpart, then something went horribly wrong when transferring the film for BD. You see, an SD trasnfer is still compressed to put it on DVD, so even an uncompressed DVD should look better than the version on the DVD. Now add in some extra resolution that BD affords and you should have a significant upgrade over the DVD. Like I say, even an uncompressed SD transfer will look better. Upscaling a DVD can't add in detail that simply isn't there to begin with, so whilst it's a sharper picture, the stored image remains exactly the same. All BDs should look better than their DVD counterparts - and if they don't, then someone encoded/transferred the film shoddily.

The Stendhal Syndrome is one of his three or so best films, in my book. Trauma is pretty decent too.

I still reckon that in ten or twenty years a lot of people will have changed their tune over many of his post-Opera films...


Anyhow - the Blu-Ray of Destroy All Monsters? Buy it. It's Region A though.

The article I was reading was written in '76/'77, I don't think many of us would have said he'd made a bad film up until that point. But my point was at the time of release, lots of people, genre journalists included, thought that Argento's films were rubbish. That is the mainstream opinion. I've shown friends some top tier Argento and they all thought they were rubbish and inaccessible. So that is the mainstream consensus. When I told a couple of friends I'd upgraded some of them to BD, they said they couldn't see the point of putting films like that on BD. Would any of us agree with that? No, of course not. But people in the mainstream would.

You only have to read the thread on bluray.com about Blue Underground to see the many, many comments by people saying these films shouldn't grace the format and that they couldn't possibly offer any upgrade over the DVDs. Because, well, you know they're old films and they can't possibly look good in HD. Agree with that too? No, of course not. But your comments about how some films should remain DVD-only is the thin end of that wedge. You're only a step away from what these people are saying about BU and the like.

In the case of Deadly Spawn, there's been quite a hectic thread over at blu-ray.com with Don May Jr and Ted Bohus participating as well. The Synapse DVD went back to the 16mm negative and by all accounts looks better. This new transfer isn't. Don May Jr has basically offered a Synapse BD release but using the original negative to make sure it's done properly. Considering he did an amazing job on Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 16mm, I'd be more than inclined to give it to him.