Breaking Mrs. Dalloway Out of DVD Prison

Here's a perfect little case study for why everybody should go region free: Marleen Gorris's/ Viriginia Woolf's excellent Mrs. Dalloway.  And it's not just the fact that it's only available as a region locked import blu.  Even if you took a "I'm fine sticking with the DVD for this one," because for some reason people think the most important films to see in HD are big action films, even though explosions, movement blur, constant cutting and shaky camera actually hide lower resolution issues more than any kind of footage.  In fact, steady and languid shots that stay focused on close-ups of fine detail are where you're really going to notice unwanted compression.  But fine, Mr. Stubborn, you still insist you're fine with just standard def for dramas and comedy.  Even then, you're not going to be okay with the US option and you'll need to import a region 2 DVD.

Marleen Gorris is probably best known for her previous film, Antonia's Line.  That's the one that won the Academy Award.  Well, I haven't seen it since the 90s, and I remember it being a good movie, but my recollection is that it was pretty schmaltzy from an era where critics seemed to be singling out charming, cutesy foreign films along the lines of Like Water For Chocolate, Amelie, Little Voice, Chocolat, A Very Long Engagement and so on.  Maybe that's not fair; I haven't seen it in decades, and it's not like I'm trying to say those movies suck.  My point simply is: Mrs. Dalloway is not that.  If you're not super familiar with Virigina Woolf, you could be forgiven for expecting just another feathery, period romance, like Notting Hill for grandmothers starring hopelessly out of touch British aristocrats.  No.  The very first scene is a graphic, slow-motion depiction of a man being blown apart by a landmine, as if Morris is specifically saying to us: whatever delicate little box you've got this movie pigeonholed into, my film is not that.

Mrs. Dalloway, the film and the character, is packed with complicated layers.  Even the structure of the film is bouncing around three disparate stories, seeking out their unexpected connections.  A romanticized past, and an anything but romanticized present filled with regret and thoughts of a life lived wrong, and then a contemporaneous young WWI soldier suffering extreme PTSD returned to a genteel London.  The first is a young and wealthy Mrs. Dalloway and her friends, unwittingly making decisions that would set the course for the rest of their lives.  Then Vanessa Redgrave plays the Mrs. Dalloway who's lived out those decisions, now lost in revery and indecision for over what might have been, her greatest potential now being in a dinner party she endlessly frets over.  Will anyone attend?  All that's put into perspective when she observes Rupert Graves at the end of his rope, permanently traumatized by the sides of life she's never had to acknowledge in her carefully shielded experiences.

Perhaps inspired by Emma Thompson's break out success with Sense & Sensibility, not to mention her own involvement in the development of Upstairs Downstairs, Mrs. Dalloway's screenplay was actually penned by actress Eileen Atkins.  There's plenty of terrific, ever-reliable supporting players including Robert Hardy, Alan Cox, Cersei Lannister herself Lena Headey and a particularly sympathetic Michael Kitchen.  And it's all set to an unforgettable theme, with elegantly photographed English locations.

Mrs. Dalloway debuted on DVD back in 1999 from Fox Lorber Films, and if you're a regular on this site, you've probably learned to wince at DVDs that date as far back as the 90s.  They tend to be pretty grubby, and this is no exception.  I'm talking about non-anamorphic widescreen, the whole bit.  First Look reissued it in 2004, but unfortunately it's the same transfer in new packaging.  Meanwhile, over in Region 2 Land, Artificial Eye released a properly anamorphic edition with a little making of doc and the whole bit in 2003.  And that's been the whole story until the HD age, when one country released it on blu, Germany, courtesy of Alive and Alamode Film in 2013.  Of course, you know what region that makes it.

1) First Look DVD; 2) Artificial Eye DVD; 3) Alive BD.

Firstly, this might be a good time to throw in a reminder that a non-anamorphic DVD isn't just annoying for the extreme window-boxing, and the way it makes modern players distort its aspect ratio.  A non-anamorphic widescreen DVD is inherently lower resolution.  So while a DVD generally sits at 720x480 pixels, in this particular case, it has been shrunk down to 535x293, in order to fit the film's proper aspect ratio into the fullscreen box.  And if those numbers seem a bit off, that's because they still don't get the AR exactly right, coming in at 1.82:1.  Artificial Eye's disc not only doesn't have the non-anamorphic issues, it widens out the image to 1.86:1, most noticeably adding more picture on the left.  You'll notice only AE's disc has an extra tower to the building behind them in the second set of shots.  But there's a bit more on the left as well.  It seems to be slightly horizontally squished, however, since Alive widens the image a tad further, to 1.87:1, but still loses that extra info on the sides.  Frankly, they're all slightly off, and a fancy new restoration could probably fit all that info and slivers more into a proper 1.85:1; but these framings are serviceable enough.

Meanwhile, each disc climbs in resolution.  Alive's blu looks like an old master, with only sporadic film grain and a bit of softness to it.  But it's certainly clearer and sharper than AE's DVD, which in turn preserves more detail than First Look's.  The colors also become increasingly less faded, with First Look appearing particularly low contrast with decidedly gray blacks.  The blu is single-layered, 1080p.

All three discs feature a fine Dolby stereo mix.  The back of the blu-ray case has the DTS Master Audio logo, and all the websites seem to credit this disc with DTS-HD, but what's on the disc itself seems to actually be a lossy AC3 encode.  None of the releases offer English subs either, so if you need those, tough luck.  First Look does, however, throw in Spanish subtitles, and Alive naturally has German, along with a complete German 5.1 dub, which is also in AC3.  So, no, that doesn't explain the DTS thing either.  😕

Extras are nothing special, but not nothing at all.  First Look just has the trailer, but Artificial Eye has the trailer plus a fifteen minute 'making of' featurette.  It's promotional and nothing amazing, but it's genuinely informative and worth the watch, catching interviews with many of the cast and crew filmed on location.  Thankfully, Alive keeps the featurette, but despite promising the trailer on the case, loses it, instead only offering a bunch of bonus trailers.  But the featurette's the main thing; as long as that's present, I'm happy.  AE's DVD also includes reversible artwork, and technically so does Alive, as they do that typical German thing, where the reverse is the same thing minus the garish ratings square.

So as you can see, it's not the most amazing blu-ray in the world.  But I think the odds of this getting a fancy 4k restoration are pretty low, and this is the best we've got.  More to the point, however, the US DVD is intolerably poor.  So if you care about this film (and you should), you've got to break those region 1/A chains.

Controversial Blus: Psycho From Texas

Oh boy, I have been super excited at the prospect of finally getting Psycho From Texas since Dark Forces first announced it, and... I guess we got it?  PFT arrives for the first time on blu, as volume 6 of Dark Force's Retro Drive-In Double Feature series, paired with The Gates of Hell (I've also just updated that page, so for a proper comparison of Gates/ City Of the Living Dead, click that link).  Dark Force's response to fans' concern that this release could wind up being an upscale, "[w]e do not divulge our process but we create new high def masters from the best available remaining elements and have a team of the top technicians to restore and do the color correction on them resulting in what will be the BEST AVAILABLE VERSION ON THE MARKET. Trying to harbor on details of how we achieve that is immaterial," [my emphasis] does not exactly inspire confidence.  But advance word of their color correction at least seemed promising, and it's not like there's any other blu-ray release of this film on the horizon; so at the very least, their claim of this being the best version on the market is probably true.  So fingers crossed, this double-dip will be worth it.

2014 Code Red DVD top; 2019 Dark Force BD bottom.

Well, I guess the first hurdle to get over is whether Psycho From Texas is worth adding to your collection in the first place.  Originally released as Wheeler in 1975, Psycho is a bit of a hybrid slasher horror and crime drama.  It shirks the typical Hollywood story structure largely because it's actually based on a(n uncredited) true story.  On April 11, 1967, two middle-aged men in El Dorado Texas broke into the house of George James, then kidnapped him, forcing him to write checks before he eventually escaped and his captors were arrested.  And I have to say, once I learned that they were telling a true story, a lot of the filmmakers' decisions started to add up and it does make the proceedings more compelling.

2014 Code Red DVD top; 2019 Dark Force BD bottom.

Then things get even clearer once you know that additional scenes of sex and violence were shot and added to the film five years later to spice it up and take it from a PG to an R, hence the retitling to Psycho From Texas.  There's a great write-up over at Cool Ass Cinema that tells the whole story of how this film was also then taken from the director and re-edited by the production company.  And yes, it's this spiced up and recut version we have on disc today.  I'd imagine the original version was far more Fargo than Friday the 13th.  So that's another reason everything feels a little strange.  For conventional audiences, this can easily be dismissed as a flat-out bad movie.  But for the enthusiast, who will appreciate the quirks and shirking of conventions, there are enough positive qualities to make this film worth examining.

2014 Code Red DVD top; 2019 Dark Force BD bottom.

John King III clearly dived deep into his performance as the titular Wheeler, also the titular psycho, in a film that's primarily interested in exploring his motivations and inner workings.  This is partially a character study and possibly a study of how a true crime unraveled.  The guy who plays his partner is genuinely creepy, too, once things get dark; and this film isn't afraid to get as grim and sleazy as its real life counterparts presumably did.  But it has a sense of humor, too.  Plus, PFT is one of scream queen Linnea Quigley's earliest film appearances (she only entered the picture in the additional 1980 scenes).  But on the other hand, some of other performances have a clunky, amateurish feel, some of the humor is highly questionable, and the movie is saddled with a somewhat charming but undeniably cheesy country soundtrack that lays thick and heavy over the on-screen action.  Plus the fact that one character chases another through the woods for nearly a half an hour of screen time (admittedly, they do cut away to other scenes during this part) is a real test of audiences' patience.

2014 Code Red DVD top; 2019 Dark Force BD bottom.

Psycho From Texas more or less debuted on DVD in 2014, as part of Code Red's 2-disc Six Pack Volume 3 collection (follow that link for a more in-depth look at that release and the five other films).  I say "more or less" because, strictly speaking, Linnea Quigley has been selling autographed DVD copies of Wheeler (which I'm guessing is a rip of the old Paragon VHS) on her website long before that.  And now in 2019, Dark Force has joined forces with Code Red, and used their same master "featuring extensive scene by scene color correction," to deliver this film's blu-ray debut.

2014 Code Red DVD top; 2019 Dark Force BD bottom.

Both releases present the film at 1.78:1, although the DVD has minor pillarboxing in the overscan areas, and is very slightly squeezed, leaving 1.76:1 of actual picture.  Dark Force fixes that and shifts the image slightly, revealing an extra sliver of info along the top.  As you can see in the first set of shots, the credits suggests this transfer has been slightly misframed, so I guess that shift corrects that by 1% or so.  For anyone really curious about this movie's framing, like I was, I grabbed a shot of the fullscreen transfer from the 2011 documentary Screaming In High Heels[left], where you can see slightly more vertical information with the mattes removed, but it crops substantially more off the sides.

Anyway, all the framing and the prolific print damage is identical across both releases because they've not only used the same source 35mm print, Dark Force has used the same scan Code Red made for their DVD.  The mystery is whether that scan was truly HD, which would determine whether Dark Force's blu is truly an upscale or not.

2014 Code Red DVD left; 2019 Dark Force BD right.

And to that end, well, I've gotta say, I don't see any restored detail on the blu, and it has the same, soft look.  Though grain is a little stronger in spots.  That said, there's no question that the color correction makes a big difference, and really enhances the quality of the image.  Everything from skies to flesh tones are much more natural, shadows are deep and what was faded is now (mostly) vivid.  It gives a nice, bolder separation to elements in the image that at least lends it the illusion of boosted resolution.  Dark Force is right that this is the best available version on the market, but that doesn't mean this isn't an SD image upscaled for an HD disc.  And as we can see when we get in close, there's some weird combing going on around the images (look at the hairline, or under the eye), like they used some kind of sharpening filter.  Perhaps that's the process they don't want to divulge.  Well, at least it's dual-layered.

Both discs feature the original mono track, though it's in uncompressed DTS-HD on the blu.  There are no subtitles on either release.

The Gates Of Hell

There are no real Psychos From Texas extras, but of course we get more than just the one movie.  Code Red's Six Pack, of course, features the five other movies and a bonus trailer.  And Dark Force's is a double-feature with The Gates Of Hell.  Again, you can see a proper comparison to multiple other releases of that film on its own page, but here's a quick screenshot.  In brief, it's a decent scan of a 35mm print.  It's fairly damaged, with lots of green chemical lines, and it leans pretty blue.  Naturally, it falls short of Arrow's recent restoration of the OCN, and has none of the special features or alternate language options, but at least it has a naturally filmic transfer that's clearly a higher quality scan than PFT is sporting.

The only other feature on the disc is the option to watch this in "Damon Packard's Drive-In Mode," which plays both movies in a row as a double feature.  And in between the two films, this feature adds about fifteen minutes worth of vintage drive-in ads and theatrical trailers.  This release also comes in a very attractive, glossy glow-in-the-dark slipcover.

2014 Code Red DVD top; 2019 Dark Force BD bottom.

So, when all's said and done, how happy am I with this?  Well, the color correction really does help a lot, so this is a genuine upgrade.  But considering how expensive this release is, I really can't recommend it to anyone except die-hard Psychos From Texas fans (all four of us).  The Gates From Hell half of this double-bill really is pointless considering the film's already been restored from the OCN, but the fact that it's a higher resolution scan just points up how frustrating this situation is.  Imagine if they'd spent that money to re-scan Psychos instead.  Even if there's no better source than the print Code Red used in 2014, it would still look better than what we've just been given.  But what-if's aside, this is less of a jump from DVD to Blu than it is a jump from one DVD to a better DVD.  If you need the best available version on the market, this is it.  But in Wheeler's case, that ain't sayin' much.

Update #4, Every Secret Thing's Extra Secret Upgrade

Every Secret Thing has finally arrived on DVD. After having one of those experimental deals where it was available for streaming at the same time it played in theaters, Amy Berg's film adaptation of the award winning novel by Laura Lippman has now hit the home video market via Anchor Bay's brand new DVD. And blu-ray, of course, right? Nope, just DVD. Hmm. Well alright, let's put a pin in that and focus on what we've actually got here.

Update 8/10/15 - 8/20/19: Here's one I bet you guys weren't expecting to see return for Update Week! It was a real bummer when this movie turned out to be DVD only, but in 2018, one country heard us... Italy! Can't say I expected that either, but let's not question a good thing. Every Secret Thing is in HD and it's... English friendly enough.  I'll explain.

This film appeared on my radar early, when one of my favorite filmmakers - Nicole Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing, Enough Said) - mentioned in an interview that one of her upcoming projects was going to be something different, an adaptation of this dark crime novel. First time producer but long time, Oscar winning actress Frances McDormand had acquired the rights, and wanted Holofcener after Nicole had directed her in Friends With Money. Holofcener didn't wind up directing the film - that went to documentary filmmaker Amy Berg, who'd made a film I was very impressed with: Deliver Us From Evil, and one I was disappointed by: West Of Memphis. She's done a couple other documentary films, too, but they all seem to be in various states of unavailability (...at least as of 2015. In 2016, her documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue has been probably her biggest success yet, and is readily available all over). So, anyway, that was a pretty interesting choice, Holofcener still had full screenplay credit, and I was interested in what McDormand would choose to produce, so I've been eagerly awaiting this one.

And I'm not at all disappointed. It's technically a mystery, and it will genuinely have you guessing right up until the last minute as surprising but very fitting things are revealed. But it's more of a quiet drama that just happens to circle around a few characters who were involved in a crime. We find our two leads, Dakota Fanning and Danielle Macdonald, who's particularly good, as two young women who've just returned home after being released from juvenile for a crime they committed against a baby when they were young children. Yeah, this film's pretty heavy. Anyway, their new lives seem to be dysfunctional enough - and they've grown completely distant from each other - before it turns out a very similar crime has just happened again, and naturally they're the two biggest suspects. Diane Lane hits it out of the park as Macdonald's mother, and rapper Common, formerly Common Sense, is surprisingly effective, too, as the baby's father. Some impressive child actors, too. Only Elizabeth Banks, as one of the two police detectives on the case, feels awkward and miscast. She actually gives a pretty respectable performance, but she just doesn't fit into the otherwise very natural, real environment, but rather like a very television CSI/ NCIS/ SVU idea of a cop. Everything else, however, is natural, touching, smartly written and completely pulls you in.

So, I was pretty surprised to see this not get the standard DVD and blu-ray double release. When I first saw it was DVD only in the US, my first thought was to hit up the foreign Amazon sites and see what was coming from Artificial Eye or Studio Canal or anybody, but... nothing (at the time). I guess it has to do with the early streaming release, DVD labels figure it devalued the film's home video rights, which I can see. A lot of people might've just bought it on ITunes rather than waiting for a DVD or blu that hadn't even been announced as coming yet. And Anchor Bay's sole DVD is pretty featureless and selling for only $7.88, brand new, on Amazon. The whole thing's just weird.  In 2018, though, one of those foreign Amazons finally paid off.  Specifically, Amazon.it, as it's now on blu over there from Koch Media!

2015 US Anchor Bay DVD top; 2018 IT Koch BD bottom.

Just having a DVD was disappointing. The slightly letterboxed 1.85:1 (more like 1.83, really) transfer is fine, of course. As a brand new film, I'm sure the filmmakers just handed AB a finished digital transfer ready to be slapped onto a disc. But not having a blu-ray option is a real bummer, especially considering its already been available online in HD all this time. Like I wrote about That Guy Dick Miller, casual viewers who just catch this streaming on Netflix or where ever get to see it in full quality, but serious fans who pay for the collector's edition are left to watch this all compressed? Boo.

So thank goodness for the Italians.  The slightly off aspect ratio is corrected to a proper 1.85:1.  The framing hasn't changed; turns out the DVD was slightly squished.  So that's fixed.  Otherwise, of course, it's the same master, but this is now a true HD image with an obvious boost in clarity.  The DVD had a frustrating softness and unfortunate artifacting, which is nicely smartened up on this 1080p dual-layered BD.

Both discs feature the original 5.1 English audio, which is now in lossless DTS-HD on the blu.  The blu-ray also features a 5.1 Italian dub and optional (removable) Italian subs, which the DVD naturally eschewed.  The DVD did have optional English (and Spanish) subtitles, though, which we lose.  But as long as you're not hearing impaired, the Italian BD is English friendly enough.

The only area we didn't see a gain in is the special features, and the DVD's already pretty dry. It comes in a nice slip cover and even has an insert, which is admittedly just advertising the book, but at least it hides the cut out of the "eco friendly" case with relevant artwork. But beyond that and a couple "bonus" trailers that autoplay on start, there's actually one very worthwhile extra. A seven+ minute collection of deleted scenes. These are actually pretty great, two or three in particular really add a dark but resonating shade to the lead character, and it's a real shame they were cut from the film. For pacing? The film actually flows very breezily and could definitely have stood to take on a couple extra minute of footage as good as this. I won't give the details away, though I suspect fans of the novel are already familiar with them and were missing them on screen... fans of this film should definitely seek these scenes out.

That's it, though. Not even the film's actual trailer. The "Deleted Scenes" option looks very lonely and isolated sitting alone in a vast emptiness of negative space of the "Special Features" sub-menu. I suspect whoever designed the menus anticipated a lot more things going into that space when he submitted it to his employers. Yeah. It's alright, guy, we all did.

And Koch?  Well, we finally got that trailer, though it's only got the Italian audio.  And the deleted scenes?  Gone.  We've actually regressed in this department, the one real disappointing aspect of this blu.

At the end of the day, the blu is really the only way to go.  And the ideal situation is to cop both.  I know it seems crazy to buy a second disc just for seven minutes worth of extra content, but considering just how cheap the DVD is (as of this writing, it's down to $2 something used on Amazon), it's not much of a hit to take.  Then you can just take the DVD out and slip it in the blu-ray case alongside the BD.  Because I'll be very surprised if we ever get anymore of a proper special edition than this.  But hey, start with the blu and see how compelled you are to add on.  It's a good little film, though.

Update #3, The Latest and Greatest Night Of the Creeps

Night Of the Creeps came out right on the cusp of me getting a blu-ray player. So it's one of those last titles I bought the DVD of instead, and then quietly regretted it for years. I'd keep looking up online blu-ray prices online every so often, hoping it would suddenly go on sale for some bargain basement price... Who wants to double-dip on a DVD they just bought new for a simultaneous release with no new features or anything? But it was also annoying being stuck with the standard def version of a favorite horror film I'd grown up on since I was a kid. Well, finally, Umbrella Entertainment has come along with a brand new blu-ray edition, which isn't all that far beyond the Sony's 2009 blu-ray. But it is an improvement, the best edition yet, and that was enough for me to shake loose the old DVD.

Update 5/1/16 - 8/19/19: Another new edition??  Yes, Scream Factory has picked up Night Of the Creeps so they could release it this summer with a giant action figure or whatever.  Or you can also just buy their new 2-disc set by itself... but would you want to?  It's Update Week, so there's literally no better time to find out!

Night Of the Creeps is pure crazy, 80's fun. Slugs from outer space turn a bunch of college students into homicidal zombies. It's full of fun set pieces and shifting tones, but it never loses sight of its characters, or stepping too far into the comedy that it stops being effective as a horror film. Tom Atkins steals the show as a Mike Hammer-esque detective who's finally gone off the deep end, but the three young leads, including European Vacation's Jason Lively, are all charming and well-rounded enough to carry the heart of the picture. Round that off with a great supporting cast, including Dick Miller and David Paymer, a catchy soundtrack, clever script and the special effects work of KNB, and you've got yourself a genuinely great movie.

It's a delicate balancing act that takes some serious talent to pull off, but first time director Fred Dekker rises to the challenge. He went on to create another masterful blend of humor, heart and horror with Monster Squad, but that one's a little too kiddie for me. It's like a well made Disney film; I can appreciate how well made it is on all these different levels, and even laugh at some of the jokes; but give me something a little edgier and more adult. Except this time, he already had given it to me in Night Of the Creeps. Unfortunately his third film, Robocop 3, was a colossal misfire and he hasn't directed since, which is a real shame, because the world could've used a string of similar, smart and atmospheric cult films over the past two decades.  Though he's recently started making a bit of a comeback working with Shane Black, co-writing a TV movie called Edge and the latest Predator sequel/ reboot, The Predator.  Maybe it'll lead to something.

Night Of the Creeps took forever to come out on DVD; especially for such a beloved cult title. This was one of those titles where the laserdisc kept going for good money, because it was still the best release there was, well into the 2000s. I remember being really excited to find a bootleg of a high quality TV rip that also included the original ending, which was different than the one that had played on cable and VHS for all these years. So when the special edition DVD/ blu-ray was finally announced for 2009, with a heap of extras and the original ending restored, I was through the moon. And even more so when it turned out to be the official debut of Dekker's Director's Cut, with the original ending (and that's the only difference, by the way, between it and the regular theatrical cut). So I've got that DVD for us today. Then even better, I've got Umbrella's 2016 region B blu-ray special edition (which is also of the Director's Cut), with a little something extra over the US Sony blu.  Still not enough?  Okay, how about Scream Factory's latest 2019 2-disc BD set?  It's two discs because they include the director's cut and the theatrical cut, which includes the other ending most of us grew up on.

1) 2009 Sony DVD; 2) 2009 Sony BD; 3) 2016 Umbrella BD;
4) 2019 Scream Factory theatrical BD; 5) 2019 Scream Factory director's BD.

So we see that these subsequent Umbrella and Scream Factory blu-rays are essentially the same as the Sony.  Same framing (slightly matted to 1.85:1), same colors... same original master. And that's alright, because Sony made a pretty high quality release the first go around, so we weren't exactly gasping for an improvement.  Of course, they both trump the DVD, as there's naturally a compression difference. Look at the close-ups: that's a pretty strong HD boost from DVD to BD. Look how much better defined the image on either blu is. Not just the girl's face, but the hand and bottle in the lower left. Detail is much clearer and more accurate here, with visible film grain as opposed to the digital mushiness on the DVD. But from there on, it's almost exactly the same across the line, with only slight variance in encoded pixelation.  There's a bit more of a shift on Scream Factory than there was between Sony and Umbrella, but it's hard to declare one objectively better or worse than the others, and it's the kind of distinction you'll only see in zoomed-in screenshots anyway.

A more important distinction comes in the audio department, however.  Sony's DVD, Sony's BD and Umbrellas BD, all feature a remixed 5.1 track, with the latter two in lossless DTS-HD.  Scream Factory has the same track, too, but they're also the first to restore the original stereo track, also in DTS-HD.  So that's pretty sweet.  All four discs also have optional English subtitles.

It's time to talk extras! Sony's release (both their DVD and blu have all the same bonus content) is pretty packed. There are two audio commentaries, one by Fred Dekker and one by the four lead actors, the latter of which is fun but pretty light on content. Every time Steve Marshall starts to an anecdote or bit of information, the rest of the cast interrupts him to keep laughing and kidding around. Then there's a great hour-long documentary, which is broken up into five sections and winds up interviewing pretty much everybody involved including Dekker, producer Charles Gordon, stars Jason Lively, Jill Whitlow, Tom Atkins & Steve Marshall, editor Michael Knue, effects artists Howard Berger, Robert Kurtzman & David Miller, and composer Barry De Vorzon. Then there's a featurette just dedicated to talking with Tom Atkins about his entire filmography, film by film. Then there are several deleted scenes used in the extended television version, plus the alternate ending most of us were familiar with before the director's cut. Plus there's a subtitle trivia track and the original theatrical trailer.

A shot from Dekker's incomplete film, Baton.

All of that, right down to the trivia track, has been carried over to the Umbrella release. All it's missing are a couple of autoplay bonus trailers and an annoying commercial for blu-rays. But it has one really nice new addition. It's a 32 minute HD featurette called Creator Of the Creeps, and it's primarily a sit-down interview with Dekker. This was made more recently than the other extras, but yes, he does cover a lot of the same ground he does on his commentary and in the documentary. But he has some new stuff, too, including his script for House. And one of the best parts is that, in both his previous commentary and interview on the doc, he talks about how a lot of the ideas and a couple of the lead characters for Night came from an independent science fiction film he started shooting but never finished called Baton. He only shot about five minutes of it, he says, but we get to see some of it for the first time here in this feature. So it's a little redundant, but still a pretty great new feature, and it's exclusive to this release. Umbrella's blu also has reversible cover art, with the original art shown above and this crazy original piece [right] on the reverse. Both of Sony's covers suck, so Umbrella gets an extra point there, too.

Horror's Hallowed Ground rocks!

But there's a new contender in town.  Scream Factory has everything from the Sony release, except technically for bonus trailers and the alternate ending, because of course, they have the entire second disc with that ending attached to their theatrical cut.  Then, they've also come up with a whole bunch of new stuff.  Mostly what they've added is a series of upbeat HD on-camera interviews, with Jason Lively, Alan Kayser who played The Bradster, Ken Heron who played the 50's kid who becomes the first zombie, Vic Polizos who played the coroner, Killer Klowns' star Suzanne Snyder, who played a bit part as a sorority sister, and editor Michael Knue.  They're all tightly edited and include many people left out of the documentary, so these are very rewarding additions.  Then there's a brand new episode of Horror's Hallowed Grounds, where they revisit almost all of the film locations, with Dekker and Lively showing up to add some additional backstory.  This version also includes reversible artwork and a slipcover that finally uses the classic cover art.  Kudos to Scream for not sticking us with more cheap comic book art.  If you look at all the covers up top of this page, you can watch the artwork slowly evolve from terrible to excellent.

Oh, and of course, you could've sprung for the deluxe limited edition version with the 8" action figure, plus a (rolled, not folded) poster and second slip cover.  About the only thing it doesn't have is Umbrella's still-exclusive Creator Of the Creeps.

So yeah, we can't say Night Of the Creeps isn't well represented on blu.  I didn't recommend replacing your Sony blu for the Umbrella just for their one featurette ...though if you didn't already have the Sony, it did make Umbrella the preferable choice.  But now that Scream Factory's here, you might want to replace your Sony this time.  Having the option to watch either ending actually attached to the film is nice, the original stereo mix is great for purists, and the new extras are substantial and compelling.  It's definitely the new, definitive release for anyone looking to pick this film up for the first time.