Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions

For our second Scream Factory pairing, well, I just couldn't leave out this essential Clive Barker film any longer.  Not that it's his only other worthwhile picture... I was pleasantly surprised with that Midnight Meat Train movie.  But this completes the trilogy of the only films he's actually directed, plus nipping at the heels of Hellraiser and Candyman, the trilogy of his best work on film.  So let's see what Scream Factory did with it.

Update 2/16/19 - 8/14/25: Scream Factory's done more with it this summer, with their 4k Ultra HD upgrade.  Let's get into it.

The premise feels a little self-indulgent, but Barker manages to pull all the elements together to work more effectively than they really should.  Scott Bakula plays an archetypal NY private eye. straight out of a 40's noir, hired by a mysterious and wealthy love interest (Famke Jannsen) to come to Hollywood and "help me help my husband... I know he's in some kind of trouble."  Said husband's a celebrity magician (the comic relief guy from The Mummy and Deep Rising, here for once in a convincing serious role) who's somehow mixed up with an evil cult in league with actual magical forces.  It gets pretty convoluted, with misleading illusions, classic noir plot twists and a huge cast of characters; but Barker manages to keep it all straight.

It's actually based on one of his Books of Blood stories, called The Last Illusion, but the story here goes in completely different directions.  It's full of eye candy, traveling from one exotic location to another, including the real Magic Castle in LA.  There's an army of vicious killers, an elaborate Vegas-style magic show, overt hetero- and homo-eroticism, secret doors, a killer monkey, flying monsters, gory special effects... clearly, Barker aimed to give audiences they could possibly want and mostly succeeds.  Not that it's a perfect film.  It's a detective story where we're introduced to all the villains before the hero, so the audience is mostly just waiting for the protagonist to get caught up and figure out what we already know.  And while most of the special effects are beautifully crafted by KNB, it also suffers from a terrible case of the Bad CGIs, being one of horror's earliest adapters and throwing some awful animation in our faces for what should be the film's biggest money shots.

a frame only in the theatrical cut

a scene only in the director's cut

And I suppose I should also talk about the two cuts of the film.  There's the original, R-rated theatrical cut, and then an extended director's cut that largely replaced it on home video.  It's a solid eight or so minutes longer, and movie-censorship gives a nice scene-specific breakdown of the distinctions.  But in short, the film was clearly cut for two different reasons at the same time: length for the studio and violence for the MPA.  So the extended cut gives us a nice dose of extra bits of nastiness as well as dry "regular" scenes that enrich the story and characters.  Barker's stated, and I strongly agree, that it's the preferable cut of the film.  The theatrical cut has very little unique footage, just a few trims and frames as specific edits are different - it's mostly just missing stuff.  Frankly, I see very little reason to ever revisit the theatrical cut; but hey, if labels want to give us the option, I'll take it.

MGM first issued Lord of Illusions on their DVD, which contains the director's cut, way back in 1998.  And except for them occasionally porting that disc over to another region, that's been all we've had right up until 101 Films commissioned it for blu-ray in 2014.  They put out a new HD transfer with a separate blu for each cut, and that's also what Scream Factory released State-side the same year, but with their reliably more fleshed out special features package.  Recently, the BD rights wound up in the hands of Sandpiper, who licensed a bunch of the MGM titles, and in 2024, they put out a barebones theatrical cut-only disc, which I guess is okay for a budget alternative?  But now in 2025, Scream's gone the opposite direction, releasing the director's cut on UHD, with all of their previous extras plus a little something more.  Yes, this is yet another instance of Scream releasing only one cut in 4k when they'd previously released two, but in this case they chose the right one, so it's all good.

1) 1998 MGM DVD; 2) 2014 SF theatrical BD;
3) 2014 SF director's BD; 4) 2025 SF UHD.

Unlike our last post, the difference between MGM's DVD and Scream's BD is huge.  That might be just as much about how surprisingly poor MGM's DVD is, though, considering it's a major studio disc of a modern film ...though it is a pretty old disc.  Anyway, it has a real murky look to it, almost like a tape source (but not) except with a bunch of artifacting, too, just in case you thought details weren't obscured enough.  Possibly they just up-res'ed the laserdisc?  It's at least anamorphic widescreen, and free of interlacing, but the DVD is distinctly below par, giving Scream an easy win.  For their part, the box just refers to their version as an "all-new, high definition transfer," and considering how light the grain is, this clearly isn't a fancy 2k scan or anything, but it's a pretty solid HD transfer that, again, stomps all over what came before it.  Besides the obvious boost in clarity and fine detail, and cleaner digitization, it also smartens up the color, which felt a little washed in a heavy red hue.  And they tighten up the aspect ratio from 1.77 to 1.84:1 (despite claiming 1.78:1 on the case).  Oh, and for the record, the theatrical and director's cut transfers are for all intents and purposes identical, though I did spot a little more film dirt/ damage on the few moments unique to the TC than the rest of either cut,  But even there, it's just a few sporadic moments, like the black spots you can see on the upper right of that TC screenshot I posted above.

That's all academic now, anyway, as Scream has struck an all new 4k master from the original camera negative, and issued it on a proper 4k disc in Dolby Vision HDR.  Grain is finally represented, so the image looks far more filmic, and more actual picture detail is discernible for the first time.  Look at dude's eyes in the first set of shots, for example.  Everything's just softer and less finely captured.  And the aspect ratio is now exactly 1.85:1, showing a little, but not unnoticeable, more picture along the left-hand side.  The color scheme for this movie is surprisingly muted, full of browns and gray shadows.  But the colors on the UHD still come off as more vivid and lifelike than ever before.

All the MGM and Scream discs feature a robust 5.1 mix, boosted to DTS-HD on the blus and UHD, with optional English subtitles.  But Scream has also gone back and recovered the original stereo mix, also in DTS-HD on the BD and UHD, which is a very nice touch.

And in terms of extras, Scream Factory certainly topped the 101 blu-ray, which only included the old commentary.  But they still came up surprisingly light in the special features department for this movie.  Almost all of the extras are legacy, which certainly doesn't mean that they're bad or anything, but I think we're just used to SF cooking up more goodies, especially on their "Collector's Edition," like this one. So yeah, the MGM has the commentary by Barker, plus a handful of deleted scenes, also with optional commentary by Barker.  He's a little stiff, but as the man so clearly behind all aspects of this production all the way back to the original short story, he has a lot of great insight to share.  They also have a text intro by Barker (definitely a laserdisc-era thing), an isolated music track, the trailer and an 8-page booklet.  And speaking of laserdiscs, as a former owner of the original 1996 one, I didn't notice until making this comparison that MGM dropped the 17-minute 'making of' featurette.

So one nice plus of the Scream disc is that they not only hold onto all the DVD stuff (except the isolated score... they dropped that for some reason), they bring back that little 'making of.'  And they dug up a substantial, hour long collection of behind-the-scenes footage, which is completely engrossing.  But in terms of newly produced features, there's just one thing: a 12 minute on-camera interview with the storyboard artist.  It's a good interview - even if you think storyboard artist doesn't rank high enough to pique your interests, I recommend giving it a watch - but that's it.  Well, that and a photo gallery, reversible cover art and a slipcover.  But for a Collector's Edition of such a high profile title, it kinda felt like the budget got somewhat slashed.

I suppose that's the case with the UHD, too, especially since we're down to a single disc.  But it's got everything from the 2014 edition plus a new interview with composer Simon Boswell, bringing us at least a little closer to a fully flush feeling special edition.  It's basically audio-only though (there's about 10 total seconds of black and white webcam they barely show), which is disappointing, but it's the first time we've heard from him regarding this film, so I'm glad to have it.  This 2025 comes in a slipcover, too, but no reversible artwork this time.  You do get an 18"x24" poster, though, if you order direct from Shout's site.

Scream's BD was already the best edition going, and an absolute must-upgrade over the DVD, unlike some of its peers (again, see how their Bubba Ho-Tep blu stacked up against MGM's initial DVD).  For such a widely released Barker film, you'd expect this film to have gotten more lavish treatment every step of the way.  But this upgrade to 4k levitates Lord of Illusions to a higher plane and feels more worthy of a permanent spot in our collections.