Vinegar Syndrome Restores Sanity To the Rabid Grannies, If You Can Believe It

Rabid Grannies is a fun little horror comedy. It lives up to its title, which is a lot more than you'd expect. A snobbish, aristocratic family gathers together for a birthday celebration. Turns out they've left one out, though, who just so happens to be a Satanist. He sends the family a gift which, when opened, turns the films two matriarchs into demons. So the rest of the family must run and fight for their lives as the grannies dispatch of them in supernatural and very gruesome ways. This film's got some really nice production values, a great location, quality special effects and a big cast. The acting gets a bad rap, because this film is dubbed... and it doesn't help that everybody is playing it broad for the satire. But it's actually a pretty strong cast and a genuinely amusing script with more great kills than you can shake a stick at.  Unfortunately, it's had a tough road on DVD.

Update 12/28/14 - 1/12/15: Let's do it right.  I'm adding screenshots and details of Troma's original DVD to the comparison.

Update 11/8/23: Ah, sanity has been restored to the madness, and this page has been completely overhauled accordingly.  I've been waiting for Vinegar Syndrome to come and save the day with this title since they first started going through Troma's catalog.  Well, it took a long time, but it's finally here: Rabid Grannies restored in 4k on blu.

Troma released it in the US, but heavily edited and with an ugly. full-frame. It was released by European/ Japan Shock on identical Holland and Japan discs, widescreen and uncut, but with conspicuous, unremovable subtitles burnt into the image, and still a murky, unimpressive picture. So in 2012, I was really excited to hear that the film's original producer Johan Vandewoestijne (a.k.a. James Desert) was releasing it via his company Zeno Pictures, as a 25th Anniversary Special Edition. A loaded, 2-disc cut with a new edit of the film. Wait, what?

Here's what they said, "In the original version, the horror starts after 36 minutes. Now we made a re-edit and everything that what we called ballast is thrown out. So now the horror starts after 12 minutes. All the original gory scenes remained. We made new credits  EVERY SINGLE shot was resized to a scope version. But we made sure that during the resizing 'no heads' were cut off." Uhh, not so sure about this "re-edit" notion... But fortunately the set also includes the original cut on the other disc, so everybody wins, right?

Holy cow.

Let's start with disc 1. The discs are only labeled "Disc 1" and "Disc 2," so you have to put them in your player to find out which version of the film you're going to watch. But, that's a piffling, nitpicky criticism, no time to get bogged down in little issues like that. We've got to get to Disc 1, let's see which version it is.

Why, it's the old European Shock disc. I sure didn't see that one comin'. Literally, it's the same disc, with the same menus, features and even Shock's company logo at the start.

One of many shots only in the uncut version.

Now, previous to this edition, as I said, the Shock DVDs were the best way to go for this film. Soft and non-anamorphic with huge Dutch subtitles burned into the picture. But at least it's widescreen and uncut - a lot better looking than the muddy Troma VHS-sourced presentation. And so I suppose it's not so terrible that Disc 1 is exactly what we've had before.

And it even has a couple little extras, taken from the Troma disc. There's a very brief, three minute interview with producer Vandewoestijne full of Troma graphics and weirdo edits... but at least he's talking about the movie. And there's also an interview with the "Original R. Grannies." That sounds promising until you find out it's actually not an interview with the original Rabid Grannies stars at all. It's a silly 2 minute interview skit with a random woman Troma hired to pretend to be a rabid granny. There's also Troma's VHS trailer and a junky photo gallery.

You might recall that Troma's disc had an audio commentary as well, by writer/ director Emmanuel Kervyn. Well, that was never on the Shock discs and it's not here either. Part or all of the issue there is surely that the commentary was recorded for the heavily censored shorter cut (not to be confused with the new, even shorter cut made for this 25th Anniversary), so it wouldn't sync up here. Troma included the gore footage only as deleted scenes outside of the main film. But for this big, special 2-disc set; it would've been nice if they squeezed the commentary in somewhere.

So anyway, that was weird. They just gave us the Japan Shock disc. Okay. Now onto Disc 2 - time for that amazing new cut of the film that's going to look smashing! A brand new transfer, now in "scope," boy oh boy oh boy....

2012 Shock DVD, disc 2.

Oh yeah, now we're cookin'. It's, uh... wow. Where to start? Well, to start with, they certainly didn't go back to original film elements. No, this transfer was made using... well, the Shock disc transfer from Disc 1, I think. It looks like they just up-scaled it, so it's anamorphic now. But there's no additional detail or anything, because it's just Disc 1 ripped and encoded an additional time to make it 16x9.

'So, they literally didn't do anything to it? It's just disc 1 made anamorphic?' Oh, no, no. They certainly did... things to it. They cut about twenty-two minutes out of it, for a start. Yeah, the back of the box and the advertising all call this new cut 75 minutes, but it actually only runs for 66. Tighter pacing? I guess, but you'd have to really dislike the original to think it's a better film in this cut. Literally an entire third has been removed, often in big chunks. Sure, there's films I dislike and think the only way to make it better would be to make it shorter and shorter; but I generally don't buy those movies on DVD. Who is this set being marketed to? "If you hate Rabid Grannies, you'll hate this less. Only $25!"

They also altered the colors, often heavily tinting a scene to be a certain color. And they upped the contrast, generally tinkering around with it in an editing program like Final Cut. You could argue that aspect of things looks better. Maybe, in some shots (we'll come back to this). The boosted contrast at least makes the blacks blacker. Some shots look alright. It's not faithful or respectful of the original film; but it's not terrible work in that department.

But the framing! Oh, let's talk about the framing! Yes, it's in "scope" now, roughly 2:18.1. Of course the film wasn't shot to be screened in that ratio, so why is it now? I guess the producer (Kervyn was not involved with this release) just thought it looked better in scope, right? Actually, no, I don't think so. Another possible reason bears its head once you compare at these discs. Assuming the print was taken from the Shock disc because Vandewoestijne had no access to any film materials that the rest of us in the general public have, well, the Shock disc had huge, burnt in subtitles, right? So to get rid of those big subtitles, he'd had to have cut the bottom of the picture off!

Shock version on the left; new "scope" version on the right.

They cut off practically a third of the picture, mostly from the bottom and some from the top. I mean, I guess you'd have to give the guy a little credit just for having the gal. The sides are also padded out with slightly colored pillarboxing just to fill the screen. Er, I mean, it's in "Scope!" You'll have to travel far and wide to find a movie mistreated worse than this one is here. ...And does the new color timing really look better? Sure, the Shock disc is faded; but where did their eyes go? You can't see their faces in this new "improved" version which crushes out a lot of detail, presumably in an attempt to hide the old disc's flaws.

And the new credits they speak of are pretty immaterial... the original and new ones are both just simple white text against a plain black background. The new credits are just made to replace the lower quality of the original transfer (video shakiness and blurriness), and most of the credits have simply been removed entirely from the new version.

To add frustration to the fire, Disc 2 features a new, 37 minute "Behind the Movie" documentary. But there is no English audio or subtitling. Ahh! It looks really interesting (even though they stretch their behind the scenes VHS footage from 4:3 to 16x9); but I guess I'll never know. Oh well. As a fan of Rabid Grannies, I would actually have loved to watch that.

In 2015, I thought we were saved when Troma announced Rabid Grannies' HD debut on a new blu-ray release... until it turned out they were just releasing that awful 66 minute "producer's cut!"  That makes it one of the incredibly rare instances where the BD was actually worse than the past DVDs.  But eight more years later, and Vinegar Syndrome have done it right, restoring it in 4k from the original 35mm interpositive (yes, this film was shot on 16, but they blew it up to 35 for distribution).  I was beginning to worry that the original film elements were lost (hence the crap-sourced discs everyone had been releasing), but no, all's ended well.

1) 1999 Troma DVD; 2) 2012 Shock DVD disc 1;
3) 2012 Shock DVD disc 2; 4) 2023 Vinegar Syndrome BD.

(There's no screenshot from the producer's cut here
because this shot isn't in the producer's cut.)

As you can see, and as we already knew, the Shock disc is widescreen at 1.60:1, and the Troma disc is fullscreen at 1.30:1. Troma's disc is not open matte; it's clearly chopped off on both sides. And we've already discussed how much more butchered the producer's cut is.  VS's new blu is slightly pillar boxed to 1.67:1, with more vertical and horizontal picture than any previous release.  Shock 's DVD is clearer, warmer and more distinct than Troma's, but it's not a huge gap - it's at least nice that the subtitles aren't burnt into the Troma disc.  That and the fact that Shock's DVD is non-anamorphic makes it almost a tie between the two, though at the end of the day, the purist in me has to give it to the latter.  Especially since the real Achilles' heel of the Troma disc is that it's cut, which really slices the fun out of this movie.  Anyway, it's all academic now, because VS's new blu is the clear and obvious winner, with vastly improved detail and properly delineated colors.  It finally looks like a real movie!

Every disc just has the original mono track, except the producer's cut, which boasts a new 5.1 mix we're told by Desert is "now stereo and more dynamic."  Vinegar Syndrome goes back to the mono, cleans it up (the old ones have hiss and pops) and bumps it up to DTS-HD.  None of the DVDs have any useful subtitles, but Shock has burnt in Dutch subs on disc 1 and optional Dutch ones on the producer's cut.  Vinegar Syndrome gives us optional English subtitles for the first time.

2023 Vinegar Syndrome BD, commentary transfer.

I already talked about the previous discs' extras, but Vinegar Syndrome plays to win here, too, bringing back pretty much all of the legacy features and coming up with a bunch of great new ones.  So yeah, all of the relevant Troma stuff is here.  In other words, none of the Sgt. Kabukiman-type Troma shovelware (curiously, even the interview with Dario Argento from their Stendhal Syndrome disc was on that DVD), but the Kaufman intro, the Desert interview, the outtakes and the director's commentary, which plays over the old fullscreen transfer, though VS corrected it to 1.33:1. And that commentary is actually pretty good... He comes off a little self conscious and schticky at first, and he does sometimes explain what is obviously transpiring on-screen. But once he picks up his momentum, he winds up getting pretty informative and entertaining.

Happily, the 25th Anniversary 'Behind the Movie' feature is here, too, now with English subtitles.  And yeah, Desert repeats a few anecdotes, but there are a bunch of exclusive stories and looks at the original locations, too.  He also shows and talks about his producer's cut, so if you're curious but don't want to actually buy the Troma BD to see what it's like, you can still find out here.

Forgotten Scares: An In-depth Look at Flemish Horror Cinema

And then there's all the new goodies!  Desert comes back from a new interview, which is good but a little repetitive by now.  Better, then, are brand new on-camera interviews with the editor and Lloyd Kaufman.  One good thing about the extras is that nobody's afraid to be perfectly candid.  There's a new audio commentary by The Hysteria Continues guys, which is okay.  But far more exciting is a full-length documentary on Flemish horror films.  I went in thinking, gee, Rabid Grannies might be the only Flemish horror film I'd ever seen, but no, turns out I was familiar with quite a few of them.  Anyway, it's pretty great because it makes the effort to be comprehensive, and rather than just a bunch of British film critics telling us the history, this doc finds and interviews a ton of the original directors, producers and stars (including Desert, who not only talks about Grannies but some other horror outings he worked on over the years).  Honestly, this doc would be worth the price of entry in itself.

Seriously, don't be fooled by Troma's distribution.  They've acquired a lot of movies over the years, from The Stendhal Syndrome to Lucio Fulci's New Gladiators.  They're not the same thing as original Troma productions.  This has much more in common with The Evil Dead than The Class of Nuke 'Em High or whatever.  Yeah, Desert is a little bit right that the first half hour does over-explain that every family member is out for the aunt's money, which gets a little bit tedious.  But otherwise, this is just a really good, fun horror comedy and it's finally gotten a home video release it's always deserved.

Beware! Children At Play Like You've Never Seen Before

I know it's just March, but I think we may have found the biggest upgrade of the year.  Now, to earn that title really relies on two factors: first, of course, a beautiful transfer that exceeds expectations and all previous editions.  But then, if we're honest, a pretty terrible precursor.  Like, even if Warner Bros releases the world's most beautiful UHD of A Nightmare On Elm St. (and seriously, why haven't they already? Update: they have!), it still wouldn't be a contender, because the existing blu is still pretty respectable.  Not exactly cutting edge 4k, but still a good looking blu.  To elicit viewers to really exclaim, "wow, what a difference," you need the extra advantage of following up something awful.  But that's fair, because it means you're really filling a need.  Like, do we really need another edition of Carpenter's Halloween?  Sure, the mono track could use a good remastering, and maybe they could encode it slightly better.  But the options we already have are pretty strong.  That sure wasn't the case with Beware! Children At Play before Vinegar Syndrome stepped in.

As a long time owner of Troma's DVD, I never imagined this film could look this goodnd the movie looking this good has raised it overall in my estimation.  I believe I've mentioned before that children are my favorite movie monster, so this movie was always going to be in my collection no matter what.  A thoroughly nutty plot with Jersey kids going psycho in the woods?  Sold!  So what if it's a thoroughly no budget junker with terrible acting and no technical merits?  It's no Who Can Kill a Child? or The Children... or even The Children, playing more like MST3K fare than a proper film.  There's a reason this film resides in the house of Troma.  But it's chock full of over-the-top kills, aspirations to medieval poetry and possibly the most deliriously, bloody climax in cinema history, at least in concept.  I had to have it.

But while the performances and costumes (Farmer Braun's fake grey hair and beard were a heck of a choice) are still just waiting to be Rifftrax'd, seeing this film restored, I take back the "no technical merits."  This film was shot on 35mm, and holy crap, is there steadycam in this thing?  Seeing this film matted into its proper widescreen shows that this film wasn't just mindlessly composed to fit the action into the shot; actual care was taken.  It's certainly a flawed, very low budget film, but once you start to see the qualities, you start to realize even some of the unintentional yucks the film provided were actually intentional.  Well, sometimes at least.  And yeah, Troma bought this film and has been distributing it since day 1, but it's not a Troma original.  So isn't mired in that hopelessly juvenile, everything is a Second Grader's dirty joke nature.  It's a silly horror film, sure, and a major part of its charm is its total irreverence regarding its child characters, but this isn't a "Troma movie."

Troma first put this out pretty early, back in 1998, just two years after their VHS release.  Even their tape was a special Tromatic edition, with an introduction by Toxie and the Tromettes.  Their DVD dove even deeper into all that craziness with a ton of Troma clips (though not the Toxie intro), but just barely improved on the VHS; you could certainly be forgiven for believing the film was shot on video.  So Vinegar Syndrome's new 2022 Blu-ray is a total transformation, and a loaded special edition to boot.

1998 Troma DVD top; 2022 Vinegar Syndrome BD bottom.

I mean, just look at this.  Where to start?  The ugly red hue cast over the whole picture, that VS thankfully cleaned up?  The nasty interlacing, which again, really made the old transfer look like a video tape source?  Of course, that's gone now, too, revealing some really deep colors and fine, photo realistic detail.  It's like night and day.  There are still some wonky moments, including a wildly out of focus overhead shot; but that's down to the movie, not the home video transfer, which is scanned in 2k from the 35mm original camera negative.  About the only good thing you can say for the DVD is that it's at least open matte rather than pan & scanned or just cropped to 1.31:1.  Although even then, VS's matting doesn't just restore the proper 1.85:1 framing to reveal the intended compositions, it actually does reveal a little more picture that had been shaved off of both sides.

Naturally, both discs just offer the original English mono, but VS clears it of a lot of hisses and hum while upgrading it to DTS-HD.  They've also included optional English subtitles for the first time.

Now, like I said, Troma's DVD is packed with stuff... just not much about the actual movie.  There's "the first ever interactive Tour of Troma Studios," and a bunch of odds and ends.  It's sometimes a little hard to discern which clips are part of the tour or not, but basically it's a whole ton of tongue-in-cheek video clips.  See the staff throw their papers in the air in their offices, Ron Jeremy interview an actress, a model perform various strip teases, and of course plenty of Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman.  There are trailers and sometimes just random snippets from their films, like a 30 second clip from The Class Of Nuke 'Em High.  But they do have a tiny bit pertaining to what we're actually here for, specifically the trailer and a four minute interview with the director.

Beware! Troma at play

Well, for whatever reason, VS lost the trailer, but they did hang onto that interview.  It's really just for collector's, though, because they also conducted a brand new interview with the director which covers everything he said in the old clip plus a lot more.  And he provides an audio commentary, but oh boy, I'd skip it if I were you.  It's 95% dead air.  At one point, I timed over eight minutes between one single sentence and another.  And that's not me cherry picking the most egregious example; that's just the time I finally decided, "this is madness!" and that timing a break was the only thing that hold my attention long enough to stay in my seat for the excruciating experience.  Although, to be fair, I have to say that there were a two or three points where, when he did speak, he actually dropped an interesting anecdote or observation that you won't find in any of the other extras.  But you'll have to work your way through an awful lot of awkward silence.

But don't get dishearted.  There's also a terrific, nearly hour-long documentary, which interviews a bunch of the cast, the composer and the special effects guys.  They found several of the kids now grown up, and everybody has great memories to share.  It's funny, but it's not just them taking the piss.  If anything, you'll probably come out of it appreciating Beware even more.  This doc is a treasure, and combined with the new director interview, more than takes care of all our fanboy needs.

VS's blu also includes reversible artwork and a limited edition slipcover with the first 5,000 copies.

So there you go.  It's just early March, but I'll be surprised if we see a greater leap in quality between releases this year than we just have.  I'm sure we'll see better looking releases; there are some exciting 4k UHDs I'm looking forward to.  But none of them fill as big a need as this.  Heck, most of 'em are just UHDs of the same 4k restorations released on 1080p blu a couple years ago.  But this one, boy, I had no idea how much Beware! Children At Play was dying for a restoration before I saw it.  It's actually kind of a real movie.

DVD Exotica Is For The Children!

Oh, wow.  This is one Vinegar Syndrome's had us waiting a while for, and it's finally here... The Children!  Ever since they acquired the Troma catalog and started making first class scans of their strongest horror titles, from Christmas Evil to Pigs, we've known this was coming.  When they did a Facebook poll at the beginning of the year for fans' most wanted titles, The Children was the definitive lead.  The ugly fullscreen DVD was screaming for an upgrade; and those of you who follow this site closely know kids are my favorite movie monsters, so my anticipation has been at peak levels for a super long time.  To the point where any title VS released that wasn't The Children was just starting to annoy me.  But thankfully, one of their two secret Black Friday horror blus turned out to be the one I've longed for most (the other was Mausoleum).  As of this writing, the limited slip cover edition is nearly sold out, but we can expect a regular edition minus the slip in the near future.

Now, if you're not familiar with this one, don't let the Troma name scare you off.  This is one of those films made independently and only picked up by Troma afterwords for distribution... like Rabid Grannies (another one pleading for rescue from Vinegar Syndrome) or My Dinner With Andre, as opposed to Troma originals The Toxic Avenger or Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD.  Not to wag my finger if you dig those flicks, but Troma films have a very distinct sensibility, and this is definitely something else.

Although that isn't to say there isn't any of the ol' Troma spirit to be found in this production.  It's audacious and particularly scrappy.  It's a very indie film with primarily amateurish acting that'll turn off any mainstream viewer looking for a slick, glossy experience.  But despite the courageousness of the plot, it still maintains a level of earnestness and dare I say maturity far beyond the juvenile gross-out humor of Troma.  This film is bonkers, but it takes itself seriously, even as each character introduced gets crazier than the next: the angry lesbian couple, where one of them is blind and spends all day playing the piano, the identical twin rednecks, the topless drug addict with a bodybuilding boy toy who thinks it's a hoot that her daughter has been kidnapped.  Actors' choices abound!  The one thing all these far out characters have in common?  Their children have turned into a pack of vicious killers who melt you with their hands!

This film is a blast, you've just got to know what you're in for.  The pacing is clunky and the 1980 photography is flat... although seeing this in widescreen for the first time, it does actually look more like a proper movie with some nice shots.  Dialogue and reactions are often cringe-inducing, but then Henry Manfredini provides a first class horror score that might even outshine his work on Friday the 13th.  But to really give you a sense of what The Children is like, when I learned how the protagonists were finally going to dispatch of their wicked offspring, I had to clap, just by myself at the screen.  It's pretty epic.

negative top; print bottom.

And what makes this release all the more exciting, is that this has turned out to be a longer, more complete version than ever previously released.  Vinegar Syndrome restored this film by going back to partial negatives, and filling in the missing footage from a fairly worn print.  And in those negatives were a whole subplot with the sheriff and this waitress [above] at a diner location never included on any prints or Troma's DVD.  Now, to be fair, you can see why they cut the scenes... the thread kind of gets dropped, and it doesn't really connect to the kids except to show how the chaos is upsetting the sheriff's life.  But it's still pretty neat to see them restored as the director (in the commentary, he says he never wanted them removed and only learned they were when he got a copy of the DVD).  VS also found the remnants of one more deleted scene, but it's not in the film proper, so we'll come to that when we get to the special features.

1) 2005 Troma DVD; 2) 2018 VS DVD; 3) 2018 VS BD.

Vinegar Syndrome presents The Children as a DVD/ BD combo pack, so we've got three versions to compare.  Their presentation gets off to a great start by correcting Troma's 1.32:1 framing to 1.85:1, yes, on both the DVD and the blu (many of the VS combo packs I've looked at previously have had 1.85:1 blus and 1.78:1 DVDs).  Now, Troma's DVD was mostly open matte, so it's more about cropping away excess dead space, but we can see that VS has unveiled a little more information along the sides as well.  They've also clarified the colors, which have a dull hue to them on the old DVD.  Of course, there's the standard boost in detail jumping from SD to HD - in this case another first class 2k scan by the masters - and an additional boost because Troma's DVD was interlaced, which VS of course fixes.

It's more complicated, of course, because VS is essentially giving us two transfers in the same film: the print footage and the negative footage.  I have to say, the two blend better than you'd think from the screenshots.  The print used has a lot of damage, and that's what makes the two sources stand apart the most.  You don't particularly notice a shift in grain or detail.  The negative has more vibrant colors and certainly looks higher quality in general, but honestly, the roughshod way the film was shot helps blend the two elements together.  Bottom line: the shifting sources isn't too distracting, and the viewing experience as a whole is much more filmic and vastly more satisfying than we've ever seen The Children before.

Both discs present the mono audio sounding fairly good.  VS naturally bumps it up to DTS-HD for the blu, but it's still a little rough.  The biggest issue is in the sibilance (when "s" sounds get scratchy), but it never gets to the point where I'd say it's an annoyance.  It's closer to Scream Factory's replacement disc for Black Christmas than the one they originally issued.  VS also includes optional English subtitles, which Troma, of course, did not.

One thing I'll say for Troma's DVD, is they actually compiled some surprisingly good special features.  Producer Carlton J. Albright was clearly heavily involved, providing an audio commentary, an on-camera interview, and sitting in on additional interviews with production manager David Platt, co-star Gil Rogers and his wife Patricia Albright, who's credited with watching over the children during the shoot; in fact, most of it seems to have been shot in his house.  The commentary's pretty slow and quiet (seriously, skip it), but the interviews are all a lot of fun, with him repeatedly laying blame for pretty much all of the faults on the film's director.  Troma also tracked down the director of The Children, The Musical, who cheerfully talks about the campy send-up he staged in the early 2000s.  Then they threw in their usual pile of unrelated Troma extras, including an intro by Lloyd Kaufman, an excerpt from Make Your Own Damn Movie!, and some other random commercials and trailers.  The trailer for Luther the Geek is fitting, though, since the actor who played Luther, Edward Terry, appears in and actually co-wrote The Children.

Thankfully, VS kept all of the Troma stuff that actually pertains to the film, and just drops the random Troma junk, so you can safely discard your old DVDs.  In addition, they've created a bunch of new special features.  There's a new audio commentary by director Max Kalmanowicz, who's quite a good sport considering how much Albright trash talked him in the old extras.  They've got a new on-camera interview with Albright and Platt, and they've got the audio for a deleted scene (the video for which is lost).  It's a bit of a shame it's not in the film, because it's somewhat important connecting tissue that makes at least one actress's performance make more sense.  So it's at least nice to hear it here.  And finally there's a delightful featurette by Fangoria's Michael Gingold where he visits the old filming locations of The Children.  The case has reversible cover art, and if you got the first limited edition release, a very cool slipcover.

I'm not saying it's an objectively great film, and it's certainly not something I'd recommend to general audiences, but I love it.  Combine that with Vinegar Syndrome's track record, and my expectations for this release were super high when it was finally announced.  And I have to say, they were met and exceeded.  I mean, who knew there even was a longer version of this film until they got it into our hot little hands?  And I'd've been thrilled with just a 2k scan of the print and the old extras, but the negative elements and the new special features make this an essential package.  It's crazy to me that Mausoleum sold out first.

You Better Watch Out for Christmas Evil! (DVD/ Blu-ray Comparison)

Christmas Evil is a surprisingly good entry into the holiday horror pantheon. Yeah, this is slow (and if you got it from Netflix, the print wasn't too pretty), but man... I was constantly surprised by how effective it was. It's hard to believe this came out well before Silent Night, Deadly Night, given how much that one seems to owe to this flick. In short, it's like Silent Night meets Maniac, focusing on the killer as the lead character and studying his growing dementia. You keep thinking "okay, I know exactly where this is going," then it surprises you by being better and more dramatically compelling each time.

This is the story of Harry (Brandon Maggart), a man who loves Christmas like no other. He has advent calendars on the walls, he dances around his apartment to jingle, dresses up as Santa Claus and even checks up on the local neighborhood kids to see if they've been naughty or nice. And by "checks up," I mean he watches them through their bedroom windows with binoculars. Yeah, there's something wrong with this guy and everybody knows it, especially his frustrated, put upon brother. But Harry manages to maintain his job at the toy factory, so everybody just leaves him to his own devices. But this Christmas, people's cynical and selfish treading on the holiday spirit is going to push him too far, and he's going to have to take the Yule into his own hands. He's ready to take on the mantle of Santa Claus himself, and make the people celebrate right if it kills them.

Yeah, it's cheap and looks it, but seeing one of the later restorations goes a long way to making it look more professional and deliberate. But it's still a far cry from a glossy studio film. This is more of an independent character study of madness and a fun, twisted holiday story. But it's not bloody; it's not even really a slasher. I'm not even sure this film needs its R rating. But it's smart, well acted and clearly made by a filmmaker who cared about what he was creating, which sets it well apart from most of its peers. And as dingy as it might look, got some decent production values when it needs them. Also, the ending is surprisingly terrific! No way you'll see it coming unless the marketing spoils it for you, so be careful watching trailers or even looking at posters for this one.

Now, there have been a number of DVD releases for this title, which as you can see, we're about to delve into big time. But one important distinction to note is that the 2006 DVD from Synapse is a new director's cut of the film. All previous releases were of the theatrical and traditional home video cut that played on TV and VHS. And now all subsequent releases are this new director's cut.

So what's the difference, you might ask? Not much. The title card has been changed from Christmas Evil to You Better Watch Out. Then the biggest difference is that one scene, at about 15:20, has been cut. It's the bit where Harry starts getting delusional and cutting himself on the assembly line. Yes, the director's cut is shorter and missing footage, not the other way around. And that's basically it, except for a few frame trims at the ends of a couple scenes. The most obvious one is at 27:50, where the director's cut's shot of Harry walking down the street towards camera has him taking about three steps less. The only noticeable cut is that assembly line scene, and I don't even get the point of that. The main complaint this film gets is that it's too slow or boring. And yeah, this really isn't the kind of movie for seekers of easy, short-attention-spanning thrills. But it works as a slow burn if you like that kind of thing. And if you don't, then then cutting just that one scene and a few odd frames certainly isn't going to change anybody's minds.

Christmas Evil used to lie in the muck of pseudo-public domain unenforced copyright Hell. There's plenty of cheap, grey market discs of this title, including in those 50 horror movie packs. In fact, I've got one of those for us tonight. Remember when I posted about the uncut version of Final Terror being on that dollar bin DVD double-feature from East West? Well, the other half of that double-feature was, you guessed it, Christmas Evil. But it was actually Troma that gave us the first special edition release of this title in 2000, and you can just imagine what it means when Lloyd Kaufman describes their edition as "lovingly mastered" in his introduction. But it was finally Synapse that restored Christmas Evil to its rightful owners (getting it taken off those 50 packs) and remastering it for the first time in its correct aspect ratio in 2006. And most recently, in 2014, Vinegar Syndrome gave it a brand new 4k scan for its blu-ray debut, and including all the extras from both the Troma and Synapse DVDs. So is there any reason to hang onto the older releases? Let's take a look!

Oh yeah, and Vinegar Syndrome's release is a combo pack, so we've got both DVD and blu-ray disc to examine there.

1) East West DVD, 2) Troma DVD, 3) Synapse DVD,
4) Vinegar Syndrome DVD, 5) Vinegar Syndrome blu-ray

So, there you go. Troma's special edition looks exactly like the grey market PD discs that came before it: fullframe, tape-sourced and even interlaced (it's a still shot, so it's not too obvious, but you can see it in the first set of shots). But at least it's open matte, so it's not really losing much on the sides. It's just boxy and misframed.

Synapse corrects that and provides a far superior widescreen image. They do actually manage to find a little extra info on the sides, but it's mostly about matting the tops and bottoms. But the real improvement is how clear and defined the image is, as opposed to the soft, smudgy mess of the old transfers. Christmas Evil no longer looks like it was shot on video; it's an actual film.

upper left: Troma, lower left: Synapse, upper right: VS DVD, lower right: VS blu.

But Vinegar Syndrome has found even more room to grow. This isn't just Synapse's transfer slapped onto an HD disc (although that wouldn't have been anything to complain about), it's a new 4k scan of 35mm elements, which I would say pulls out a little more detail and clarity, although a lot of that could just be down to the higher BD compression. Still, even though it gets to the point what's additional detail and what's grain, there's no question we see the most on the new blu. We can finally make out these kids' eyes. And this new transfer, which keeps the 1.78:1 aspect ratio, finds even more picture on the left, right and bottom. It also has a little more natural color timing, which kind of harkens back to the older editions; although those are bleeding messes, so it's hard to say. But you can see Synapse is decidedly warmer than the VS in the first set of shots, and cooler in the second.

Synapse did a good job cleaning up the old hissy mono tracks of the past DVDs with their Dolby 2.0 mono. But Vinegar Syndrome naturally trumps that with its lossless DTS-HD Master audio mono. None of these releases include subtitles, though, unfortunately. If you need those, you can import the Arrow DVD, which by all accounts is essentially a PAL copy of the Synapse DVD.

The one thing Troma did right was extras. The East West DVD of course has nothing, like all the other grey market releases, not even a trailer. Now yes, Troma's disc is full of junky Troma trailers, Kaufman interviewing a young man pretending to be mentally retarded and a "radiation dance." But it's also got good stuff, actually related to the film. Somebody there cared enough to put in the effort and expense to secure an audio commentary with the director Lewis Jackson and star Maggart. And they also recorded separate on-camera interviews with each of them; they're a little junky, but good. This disc also has a collection of storyboards and audience comment cards from the film's initial screening. And while the fold-out insert is mostly a catalog of other Troma DVDs, one side is dedicated to the film and its extras, which is nice. Troma also has the best cover, if you ask me. I mean, what is going on with VS's cover? There are no goblins in this movie!

Synapse couldn't get Troma's extras for their release of the director's cut, unfortunately (except for the storyboards and comment cards), but they did come up with a bunch more great stuff. They recorded a new audio commentary with Jackson to more or less replace the older one. And then they got another one with John Waters, who is apparently a huge fan of this film. So that's fun. And Synapse also has a nice insert with a personal note from the director. Then they include several deleted scenes (including the assembly line scene taken out of the director's cut) and over 25-minutes of audition footage. What's cool about that is we don't just see early readings by the stars of the film, which is interesting in itself, but auditions by many actors who didn't get roles in the film, including some pretty famous people like Larry Pine, David Rasche and JoBeth Williams!

Happily, Vinegar Syndrome has managed to round up all of the extras from both the Troma and Synapse releases. Admittedly, the three commentaries get pretty redundant, but none of us should have to choose between the input of Brandon Maggart or John Waters - we need it all! And we get it, although be careful if you're one of those guys who sells the DVD half of combo packs to offset the costs of the blu-ray, because VS put many of the extras only on the DVD copy. Now, HD couldn't have done anything to help Troma's video interviews or the old audition tapes anyway, but unfortunately that means the deleted scenes are SD only (and on top of that, like on the Synapse DVD, they're interlaced). So if you want to composite an ultimate theatrical cut, it's gonna be imperfect.  :P  One neat plus of the VS set, though, is they've finally included the trailer. No other release has had it, and yeah a trailer's just a trailer, but VS has done a high-end 4k scan of it, so it looks great.

So, at the end of the day, I kind of prefer the original cut to the director's cut, but the difference is minimal enough that it's not worth forgoing the excellent quality of Vinegar Syndrome's blu-ray, with its definitive transfer and collection of special features. It's the ultimate release I'd never thought we'd see for this offbeat little flick. But you know that East West DVD only costs a dollar, and it gives you both the uncut Final Terror and the longer version of Christmas Evil, and it retails for literally just one dollar (it's 65 cents on Amazon as of this writing!), so you might want to scoop that up on the side if you're a completionist like me.