Simon: King Of the Witches! Code Red Catch-Up, Part 6 (DVD/ Blu-ray Comparison)

Admittedly, this next entry is a bit new for a "Catch Up" post, but I figured, who's gonna complain about coverage of a too recent release?  Simon: King Of the Witches made its HD debut in blu-ray just this Fall thanks to the collaborative efforts of Shout Factory and Code Red.  Before that, it only had one DVD release, but a pretty good one - widescreen, uncut special edition - from Dark Sky.  So how much is there to improve on?  If you've got the DVD, is it worth double-dipping?  I've got them both laying right here beside me, so let's find out!

Simon: King Of the Witches is a surprisingly good movie.  Like, not just in the sense that Code Red has unearthed a bunch of neat, weirdo cult gems.  This is a really good movie in classical terms.  If you have a stuffy old film professor who questions why you watch horror movies, you could show him Simon and he'd have to concede, okay, that one had some genuine merits.  In fact, on the audio commentary, the moderator is a bit floored when the director explains to him that they built these elaborate sets and all because he's so used to covering these off-the-beaten-trail obscure indies.  Simon's certainly off-the-beaten-trail and obscure, too; but it had a major studio behind it; and so the quality in the craft really comes through.

To enjoy something like, oh say, I Drink Your Blood or The Blind Dead movies, you have to be ready to see past the technical limitations and amateurish aspects to find what's so good about it, or maybe embrace those aspects and laugh with their charms.  But not here.  You could play this film alongside the artiest Woody Allen or Eric Rohmer movies and not miss a beat.  But it's still wild and outrageous enough to entertain the lowest brows in your horror audience.

But odds are good you've never even heard of this movie before, so what is it?  The title role is played by Andrew Prine, a gifted actor whose career was unfortunately derailed by a serious accusation of murder.  Well, I suppose how unfortunate it is depends on whether or not you think he did it.  But if you look him up, he's never really stopped working, with television credits as recent as 2015.  Anyway, he's Simon, a homeless drifter who lives in a storm drain and claims to be a witch.  There are echoes of George Romero's Martin here (though Simon came first), with the audience on the fence about whether Simon is actually a witch or just a delusional fraud.  He winds up spending a night in jail with a young hustler who takes him to a high society party held by a socialite who collects eccentric personalities like his.  Simon is only too happy to take them for their money, reading their fortunes and selling them cheap baubles and charms.  But Simon also has bigger plans: to transition to a higher plain and take his place as an equal among the gods.  And when he's challenged to place a death curse on an enemy, his new friends begin to fear there may be more to his claims than they believed.

For the most part, this is a smart horror film that gets over on its dialogue and ideas more than flashy gore or creature effects.  But the effects there are tend to be opticals, including one particularly wild sequence that feels like the 2001 "star gate" sequence, in no small part because it's by the same team!  Performances are great all around, though you might initially be thrown by their unusual mix of high drama and snarky humor, including a little cultural caricature.  Some secondary characters might take it a little too far, even, but Prine is a powerful anchor keeping the film grounded at all times.  Andy Warhol's Factory girl Ultra Violet steals the spotlight for one hell of a sequence as the head of a rival coven.  The story structure will have you off balance (I remember seeing this for the first time and thinking, can we still be in the first act an hour and ten minute into the movie?), but by the time it all dovetails into the slick conclusion, it will have all made some kind of perfect, impossible sense.

2008 US Dark Sky DVD on top; 2017 US Shout/ Code Red blu-ray below.

Dark Sky brought us a really nice, anamorphic, widescreen (non-interlaced) DVD.  So I was a little skeptical if Code Red would introduce much of an improvement bringing this to HD.  A little compression cleared away, sure; I wasn't anticipating an upconvert.  But would this essentially be the same master on a higher res disc?  Nope, not at all.  Code Red has given us a brand new 2k scan from the original IP, and it looks great.  Both discs are in 1.78:1, but you can see the framing's shifted a bit, and I would say it's pretty consistently for the better.  Colors have also changed.  The two shots above show a bit of a hue overcast on the blu, but actually most of the film looks decidedly better than the DVD.  Look at the rest of the shots in this post (all taken from the blu); the colors look natural and attractive.  And it's obvious the DVD did a lot of contrast boosting, flaring out the whites and tinkering in other ways to try and pull out a clearer image from a dark, murky image.  Dark Sky did a good job with what they had for standard def, but the HD clarity, which really sharpens the image and refines detail, let Code Red ride out with the original, more subtle palette in 2017.  It's a new age. Enjoy.

Both films preserve the original mono in 2.0.  Code Red's is lossless, naturally, but there's not a world of difference between the two.  Dark Sky also included English subtitles, which were disappointingly neglected on the blu.  Not that CR usually bothers with subtitles, but with Shout Factory's involvement, I hoped they might've pushed 'em through.  Oh well.

An interesting area to get into with these two releases, though, is the special features.  Both discs have strong, unique extras.  We'll start with the DVD.  Dark Sky enlisted the help of Red Shirt Pictures to produce on camera interviews with director Robert Kessler and Andrew Prine himself.  They're both the fun, tightly edited pieces we've come to expect from Red Shirt.  And if you poke around for Easter eggs, you'll find a bonus, little clip of Prine talking about a fun connection between this film and The Sorcerer's Apprentice.  The DVD also includes the original theatrical trailer, a radio spot that plays over a cool photo gallery of lobby cards, and an insert that mostly just advertises other Dark Sky releases, but at least matches the color scheme and art design of the DVD case.

Unfortunately, Code Red didn't or couldn't license any of Dark Sky's great stuff.  But they produced their own, also with director Robert Kessler.  They've got him for an on-camera interview, an audio commentary, and even a fun introduction with the one and only banana man (no offense Katrina and Maria, but I think Code Red has found their sweet spot in the hosting department).  This is all both fun and highly informative, and with all this material from Kessler, it's not such a blow that they don't have his interview from the Dark Sky disc.  He pretty much says everything on here that he did on there.  But losing Prine is a bummer.  We also lose the radio spot, but Code Red makes up for it by adding a second, low quality trailer.

So Code Red and Shout come out big winners, and not just by virtue of being in HD.  Substantial PQ improvement (when, again, the DVD was already pretty nice), mild sound improvement and the best extras.  But, still, if you have the DVD, hang onto it for those nice little Red Shirt featurettes.  I wouldn't go so far as to recommend picking up both.  The blu is enough, since the Kessler interviews are pretty redundant.  But if you're a big fan who really appreciates this film, having both is essential to charging both your magnetic and electric essences and passing through the god's radiant walls to seize their magic fire.  💫

The Ecstatic Truth of Derby, Code Red Catch-Up, Part 5

It seems like I do a lot of bouncing back and forth on this site, between weird Code Red flicks and documentaries.  Well, who says those have to be such extreme polls?  Why can't they meet in the middle, like, say, a weird Code Red documentary?  Derby is just that, one weird but rather wonderful documentary, but put by Code Red.  This isn't their only documentary, they recently put out the infamous Being Different doc, and I guess if you want to count Urban Legends and The Art of Nude Bowling as documentaries, there's that disc.  But while Being Different promises something exotic and fascinating with its premise, it's actually quite drab and conventional.  And Derby is the opposite.  On its face, it looks like one of the most tedious, boring films of all time.  Some dated, low budget expose on roller derby?  That sounds like the kind of film you make a classroom of students watch as a punishment.  But it's actually nothing like you'd expect and utterly fascinating.

I said something along these lines while talking about another doc, but what really sets a great documentary filmmaker apart from the majority is the ability to make a compelling movie for audiences who have no interest in the subject matter.  You know, if you're a massive model train enthusiast, you might get excited by the prospect of a documentary that shows a bunch of rare, highly sought after but almost never seen trains.  But you've gotta be in that niche audience because everybody else would be bored to tears.  And if a film's got a topic with broader appeal, like a controversial true crime that everybody's already desperate to learn more about, it'll reach a wider audience.  But only the real masters can make a film about a niche subject that still works for everybody.

...Well, that, or you've got to just get super lucky and have the wildest, captivating shit just randomly unfold in front of your cameras.  Derby's probably the latter, but no less spell-binding for it.  Look closely at this next screenshot.

Derby starts out as a very conventional documentary about roller derby.  And okay, with it's penchants for random fights breaking out during high speed racing, it's not exactly the most boring sport to cover.  But I promise you, nobody could be less interested in roller derby footage than me, and yet I am 100% sold on this film.  Very early on as they're filming a roller derby event and doing some interviews with the athletes, a local young man makes his way backstage, determined to join the roller derby.  And so the bulk of this movie - it does go on a few other interesting tangents as well - picks up and follows this man on his quest, capturing his completely unfiltered, middle American life in the process.  And that's how it becomes one of the greatest American documentaries of all time.

This is the kind of film they could never make today, because people are too savy.  But in the early 70s, in Nowhere America, his bank just lets him walk in with a crew and film his experience trying to negotiate a bank loan.  It starts to feel like Louis Malle's Humain, trop humain when we follow him into the tire factory as he talks his boss into letting him forgo wearing safety glasses and beg for time off to train for the derby.  But again, "unfiltered" is really the key word here.  We follow this man to the seedy local strip club with his friend, swap stories at the local bar, his brother argue with his mom against getting a job while idly flipping through an issue of Playboy in bed.  Nobody in this day and age would let themselves be filmed in these positions, but here they just live their lives nakedly.

And there's really no limit.  When his wife and her best friend march over to another woman's place to accuse her of cheating with her husband, they have a long, unbridled argument right before our very eyes.  It reminds me a lot of Errol Morris's early films, like Vernon, Fl or that scene in Gates of Heaven where the old woman goes on a brilliant, unprompted monologue about her grandson on the front stoop of her trailer.  If you appreciate those works of documentary art, well, this film has every bit of magic those films do.  And it also has some more conventional derby coverage, too.  But they get some great footage and pull some pretty interesting interviews out of that material as well.  And the fact that this crazy, un-glamorous sporting world is the dream this guy is turning his life upside down for ties it all together.  It winds up with an utterly unpretentious expose on class in this country that frankly deserves an Academy Award, but instead has gone widely unnoticed and unappreciated, only rescued for DVD by cult maverick Code Red.  In terms of sheer artistic merit, this could just as well go in The Criterion Collection, though admittedly it certainly doesn't have the pomp or prestige one normally associates with them.

2009 US Code Red DVD.

Code Red's DVD is the only release of this film. It has a couple notices that pop up on start-up: that this is the director's original R-rated cut (apparently there was a shorter version made for TV at some point), taken from a 35mm archival print from UCLA (the film was shot on 16mm and blown up to 35), and that it's full-screen, which is the director's intended aspect ratio.  So all that's great.  I bet the director didn't intend for the interlacing problem this disc has, though.  That's a clear, unfortunate flaw.  But apart from that, sure this is in SD rather than HD, but as a 16mm blow-up, the film probably wouldn't look that much better in the hands of Criterion or anybody else.  There's a little dirt and chemical spots, naturally, but the only serious problem is the interlacing.

Audio just consists, as any Code Red aficionado could predict, of the original mono track in 2.0 with no subtitle options.

Special features, though, are surprisingly rewarding.  We get two audio commentaries - one by director Robert Kaylor and one by producer William Richert - and they're both great.  They're full of energy, have a lot of good behind-the-scenes info to share, and they're well moderated, though these two guys don't seem to need it.  And not only do they still have the original trailer (which, unfortunately, is in very low definition), they interview the original editor who cut the trailer.  Interestingly, the voice-over narrator for the trailer is none other than Roy Scheider.  There's also a whole ton of Code Red bonus trailers.  But that's still not all.

Wait a minute. I'm sensing a theme in Kaylor's work.

We also get Robert Kaylor's first film, Max Out.  It's a short film, but not that short at 45 minutes.  And this time it's not a documentary but a drama, cast entirely by ex-convicts.  And despite it's obviously minimal budget, it's actually rather good and holds up quite well.  I don't hold it in quite as high regard as I do Derby, and it's probably not a film I'd buy on DVD on its own.  But it makes for a nice bonus feature and is definitely worth the watch.  Unfortunately, it is also interlaced.  But on the plus side, Max Out also features an audio commentary by Kaylor.  Code Red really dug deep for this release.

So overall, this is a great DVD that unfortunately was never going to find its audience.  And so it's become one of those titles sitting on sale in the Code Red cartel that everybody passes over.  But I treasure it.

I Drink Your Stigma: Code Red Catch-Up, Part 2 (DVD/ Blu-ray Comparison)

I Drink Your Blood is a screwy, demented horror romp I dig more and more each time I revisit it.  It might be a bad movie, but it's also a great movie.  And if you're anything like me (and I hate to tell you, but if you've found yourself on this site, it's almost certainly too late to pull out of it now), you want to find more, some other film that taps all the same veins.  And what better place to search than the filmography the same writer/ director, David E. Durston?  Durston was a television writer in the 1950s, who graduated(?) into filming his own independent films in the 60s and 70s, including I Drink Your Blood, and another film very much like it almost immediately after: Stigma.

A lot of break-out filmmakers wind up imitating their initial successes.  Think of David Cronenberg following up Shivers with Rabid, or George Romero presenting The Crazies like a re-imagining of Night Of the Living Dead.  In fact, there's a lot of influence from all four of those films in Durston's Blood and Stigma pairing.  Really, Stigma just has one key detail that separates it out from the pack: it's not a horror movie.  There are a few moments laid out to instill tension or unease, and plenty designed to shock.  And, just by virtue of retreading so much of I Drink Your Blood's structure, it retains some of the trappings of a horror film.  But really, this is not a scary film - or a film trying and failing to be scary - and it's not a body count film.  It's absolutely an exploitation film, and I stand by my claim that if you really like I Drink Your Blood you're bound to like Stigma.  Just don't come in expecting horror or you're honestly going to bummed out.

So, if it's not horror, what is it?  Well, again like Blood, it's a genre-bending "something of everything" kind of flick.  It often gets lumped in with blaxploitation films, and it's certainly got some of that.  Philip Michael Thomas, Tubbs of Miami Vice, is a big city doctor who takes over a practice in a small, racist town, where everybody, including a very Boss Hog-like sheriff, is against him.  So there's a lot of that element.  But nearly as soon as he arrives, a powerful strain of syphilis breaks out, and much like the rabies in Blood, it starts making everybody in town go crazy... just a little less homicidal.  So Thomas has to investigate, who's spreading it and who's covering it up?  The crazy old lighthouse keeper?  The veteran just back home from the war?  The madam and her brothel?  The crooked cops or the hippy teens with their unbridled free love?  So that gives us sexploitation, action, melodrama... the film even stops to show us an educational film strip with gross-out medical photos.  Several members of the supporting cast of Blood and all of the wacky sensibilities Durston displayed in that film are on hand here, just with less of a violent edge.

Stigma used to be relegated to cheap, fullscreen DVD compilation packs of public domain, blaxploitation flicks from labels like Brentwood, Platinum and Echo Bridge.  But Code Red did it right in 2011 with a special edition DVD sporting a brand new, high def master from the original CRI, as well as some very cool extras.  Then, this time last year, Code Red did it even righter with a blu-ray upgrade sporting an even new 2k scan of the original CRI.  Just how much righter?

2011 US Code Red DVD on top; 2016 US Code Red blu-ray underneath.

With the way the descriptions were worded, and the fact that they both came from the same source, I was expecting a nearly identical transfer of the DVD on the blu-ray with just that subtle boost in clarity that comes naturally with HD.  You know, like Trick Or Treats.  Especially since - also like Trick Or Treats - Code Red's DVD was quite good, and not exactly in need of extensive repairs like a lot of DVD upgrades we tend to see here.  But no, Code Red has done more here, taking the opportunity to further improve the already strong PQ.  First of all, both editions are presented in strong, anamorphic 1.78:1 ratios.  But that doesn't mean the framing is identical.  It's actually shifted vertically, and comparing the two, the blu looks much more correct, with the DVD cropping very tightly along the bottom.

^See how the DVD crops chins and blows out the reds of skin tones?

The colors, which again already looked pretty well corrected, have been further improved on the blu, toning down areas that looked just a little over-saturated before, and making skin tones more authentic.  Plus, of course, it's that extra sharpness and clarity that comes with HD replacing SD.  In short, the DVD wasn't exactly calling out for any fixes, but it got some good ones anyway.

Audio-wise, things aren't too different, but it sounds like the background hiss on the DVD has been reduced for the blu.  Both disc's tracks are reasonably clean and robust, though.  And of course, neither have subtitle options.

But one of the most exciting aspects of Code Red's restoration of Stigma is the fact he's given it a special edition in collaboration with David Durston.  If you watched either of Grindhouse's I Drink Your Blood releases, you know that he's quite a character.  And while he doesn't go quite so far as to sing an impromptu song about thrilling audiences as a horror director, he certainly comes off as a charmingly eccentric personality here, helpfully explaining things like, "you are born with so many female hormones, and so many male hormones.  And if it's a little over the top on the female hormones, you become a homosexual."  He provides a very fun and genuinely informative on-camera interview that's just under twenty minutes long, and a fun audio commentary track where he chuckles along with moderator Jeff McKay.  The DVD also included two trailers, a TV spot, and some bonus trailers.  The blu-ray retained everything except one of the trailers, the TV spot and the bonus trailers (despite still listing them on the back of the case).  It's no crushing loss, but it seems like an arbitrary disappointment to drop off the TV spot and second trailer.  What for?  Oh well.  It's a minor nitpick; we're just talking about secondary trailers.

Stigma is certainly not for everybody, including horror purists.  It's downright goofy and you can find its picture in the dictionary next to the word "dated."  But there's an audience out there for this picture, and they should really know about it.  And in particular, they should know about the excellent treatment Code Red's given it.

Extra Rare: Herzog On Music

Now this is the kind of release I really made DVDExotica to cover.  Yeah, I'm following up my last post with some more imported Werner Herzog, but features some even rarer films, on this very cool, widely overlooked release.  It's a little boxed set called Herzog On Music from 2008, only released in Australia, and at this point out of print and a little hard to find, but a must for serious fans. It's a two-disc set of three Herzog films, one of which isn't particularly rare at all.  But the other two?  That's where things get exciting.  No, they're not in Shout's big boxed set, or BFI's, or even the one Herzog sells directly from his own website.  They've only ever been released by Shock.

So let's start with the not-so-rare one.  The main feature on disc one is a 1995 documentary called Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices.  Carlo Gesualdo was a 16th century Italian composer who was apparently an insane murderer as well as a musical genius.  Herzog spends most of the time exploring the Gesualdo castle, interviewing locals, filming concerts and yes, pursuing a woman who claims to be Gesualdo's wife resurrected.  Sure, you'll enjoy this documentary more if you have a real interest in this centuries old music, but you know Herzog infuses a lot that will be of interest anyway.

Gesualdo was originally released on DVD in the US back in 2002 by Image, a disc I used to own.  Unfortunately I sold it off long before started this site, but from memory it was essentially the same as the Shock disc: anamorphic widescreen and barebones.  Then Shock released it in 2008, of course.  And more recently, Art Haus released it on DVD and blu in 2016.  It's a blu I was seriously considering getting myself until DVDTalk revealed that it was an upscale and that the audio commentary promised on the packaging doesn't actually exist and it's as barebones as ever.  Apparently, it has better audio options, but in this economy, that ain't enough.

The packaging lists this film as 1.33:1, but happily, it turns out to be properly anamorphically widescreen at about 1.73:1 when you actually play the disc.  I never did a proper comparison, but I did stick the Image disc and the Shock disc in my player one after the other and concluded at the time that they looked identical for all intents and purposes.  This disc is not interlaced or anything like that.  It does look soft and compressed, just like the Image disc, which is why I had high hopes for the blu-ray.  But if it's an upscale of the same transfer, might as well just stick with this disc set.  Especially since you'll want to get this release for the other two films, anyway.

Also like the Image disc, Shock's DVD features just the English audio track, with Herzog oftentimes translating the Italians' spoken dialogue as part of his narration.  That's where Art Haus apparently excels, including the English track, the German track where Herzog does his narration in German, and a third track that leaves off his narration and lets you hear the original speakers uninterrupted.  The subtitles are only in French and Spanish, though, so really the additional audio choice is more of a novelty than a worthwhile way to view the film.

Oh and no, none of the releases of this film ever had any extras, not even a trailer.

Well, unless you consider the fact that it has the second film of the set, a never before or since release Herzog documentary called Pilgrimage on the same disc as an "extra."  Then it has one of the greatest extras of all.  And before you get concerned about two films taking up too much space being on the same disc, Gesualdo is only an hour long, and Pilgrimage is a short, clocking in at just over eighteen minutes.  So that's not a problem.

Pilgrimage is what it sounds like, a documentary look at people going on religious pilgrimages in Mexico and Russia, made for the BBC in 2001.  True, it has nothing to do with music, so if you're wondering why it's in a set called Herzog On Music, it's because this is an entirely word-less film, and all we hear is the music of BBC Symphony Orchestra.  But there's some gripping footage of people crawling across lakes of ice and traveling miles on their knees, and you know Herzog is a master at marrying image and music.  It's definitely reminiscent of pilgrimage sections he'd later capture in Wheel Of Time.

Pilgrimage is widescreen at 1.77:1, but unfortunately, as you can see in the first shot above, it's not anamorphic, so it's a small SD image floating in a sea of dead space.  But what're you gonna do?  Watch this on another company's release of Pilgrimage?  It doesn't exist, so like it or lump it.  Otherwise, the picture's not too bad.  Some scenes have interlace combing throughout every frame, as you can see in the second shot, but other scenes don't have any at all.  This leads me to believe it's just a question of cheap, low quality camcorders having been used to capture some of the footage on location.  It's a documentary shot on the spot in some far corners of the world back in 2001, so you're gonna get that sometimes.  Still, there's no reason the footage couldn't have been encoded anamorphic.

Anyway, there's just one basic audio track and no subtitles, since, again, there is no spoken language in the movie at all.  Also, there are zero extras.  It's almost more of an extra in itself.

Finally we come to the third film, a feature length film that hasn't been released anywhere else in the world.  It's called The Transformation Of the World Into Music, a 1996 documentary made for German television.  It's a behind-the-scenes look at the production of three Wagner operas at the Bayreuth Festival.  You can see Herzog is a great enthusiast as he interjects himself behind the scenes, interviewing the actors and directors, intercutting rehearsal and performance, snooping around the theater after dark with a flashlight and even surreptitiously whispering with the crew hunkered down in the dark during major productions.  It almost feels more like a Wiseman documentary, except intrusive with a healthy dash of Driving Me Crazy thrown in.  Even if you're not fussed about opera, the impressive set-pieces and Herzog's enthusiasm will keep you entertained.

The back of the case again claims to be 1.33:1, which I guess this time is technically right if you count the non-anamorphic dead space.  But really the film presentation here measures an unusual 1.62:1.  It's a bummer this one's non-anamorphic, but otherwise it's not bad for DVD.  It's not interlaced or anything, and the picture looks like a fairly faithful capture of the original film image.  The film is presented in the original German with optional, removable English subtitles.  A few scenes, where the interviewees speak English, have burnt in German subs, but those moments are few and far between.  Again, there are no special features.

Now, as I've said, Pilgrimage and The Transformation Of the World Into Music are only available on these OOP, region 0 discs from Shock.  But, strictly speaking, they're not only available in this Herzog On Music set.  In 2009, Shock released a big, 10 disc boxed set called Werner Herzog: Documentaries and Shorts, which included these two discs repackaged along with 8 other discs worth of Herzog docs.  But that's equally out of print, plenty more expensive, and you'd mostly only be adding a bunch of other Herzog films which have seen much better releases.  So it's certainly not a bad set - very much like the box Herzog sells directly from his site, but with a slightly altered selection and fewer international language options.  It even has a couple of unique special features.  So you might want to spring for that if you're a completist.  But for most people, especially anyone who already owns a lot of the other films, I'd recommend picking up the smaller, cheaper Herzog On Music box for the exclusives, and then getting the other films via other releases.  But either way, to get Transformation and Pilgrimage, these Shock discs are your only option; and they're really good films, so it's worth the trouble.

Fellini's Casanova: Why You Should Import and Avoid the US Version

It used to be, the best DVD edition of Federico Fellini's Casanova was from the UK: a nice 2-disc set from Fremantle, which I've still got. But that was twelve years ago, and now we're in the age of HD remasters. And now? Well, it's a bit of a tie between the French and UK blu-rays, but one is out of print and only available used at inflated prices. So Mr. Bongo's new blu keeps the the trophy in the UK. But is it an essential upgrade, or just another a minor improvement in compression? Let's have a look!

Update 1/25/16 - 10/24/17: Between the Fremantle DVD and Mr Bongo blu-ray, Universal did manage the bare minimum of squeezing out an MOD DVD-R release for the US market as part of their "Vault Series."  It's obviously not in HD, but what's its transfer like compared to the others? Aren't you curious?  I was, and looking at it was somewhat enlightening, if not exactly pleasing.

I don't love all Fellini films. They all certainly have their virtues, typically visually, but they don't call grab you the way his masterpieces do. Juliet Of the Spirits, for example, seems like an excuse to play around with his colorful set-pieces more than tell an engaging story.  Satyricon would probably make a better coffee table book than a film. And his pre-La Dolce Vita work largely strikes me overwrought yet dull at the same time.  But Casanova has the power of its source material. Not that Casanova's a favorite story of mine, but coupled with the right adapter - see Dennis Potter's excellent mini series - it can be quite effective.

And I think Giacomo Casanova has found the perfect director in Fellini, someone able to exceed the excess of Casanova's bawdy tale with crazy, ribald imagery and dreamlike set pieces. Fellini takes it farther over the top than any previous version, with Sutherland seducing a mechanical woman or making his lover's bed literally spin and fly up into the air. Meanwhile, the original writing, coupled with a terrific leading performance by Donald Sutherland, are able to repay the compliment of Fellini's vivaciousness with intelligent commentary on human nature and crafting the unenviable downfall of a man you wind up genuinely caring about. The garish absurdity of the comedy is played so strong, it winds up contributing to the tragedy.

Fremantle's 2005 DVD top; Universal's 2011 DVD-R mid;
Mr Bongo's 2015 blu bottom.

Fremantle's DVD is at least anamorphic, which sets it apart from some of its contemporaries, but it's still a far cry from the new HD transfer. It just looks so digital and unreal in comparison. The UK DVD is slightly pillar-boxed at 1.73:1, whereas the blu-ray is slightly letterboxed to 1.85:1.  The result being: the blu gains a little extra picture along the bottom, and the DVD is actually slightly horizontally compressed. There's really no competition between the old DVD and blu, it's a big upgrade. And the Universal release, perhaps predictably, falls somewhere in the middle.  It might actually have the best colors of the bunch.  Look at the singers' white costumes in the first comparison, or the more natural skin tones in the second; the blu by comparison has a bit of an undesirable yellow/ green push to it.  But Universal's still in SD - in fact, as a DVDR, it's even further compressed, and looks it.  And despite being the same aspect ratio as the blu, it actually crops the image tighter and loses more image information than either of the other discs.

So Mr. Bongo's is still the way to go.  I could see a fresh 4k scan uncovering a little more detail and clarity, to be honest, but it's unquestionably the transfer to go with given what's available. I do sort of miss the extreme bold colors of the old DVD in a way, though, and the Universal shows they could've at least tweaked them a little further.

Both the UK DVD and blu give you the option of the English or Italian audio tracks, with optional English subtitles, which is great.  Oh, and the Fremantle DVD also has a third, French dub.  You'll surely wind up opting for the English in any case, as that's the one where Sutherland dubs his own voice.  Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange) even wrote the English language dialogue.  And that just makes it all the more disappointing, then, that the Universal's Vault Series disc only has the Italian track, with burnt-in, unremovable subtitles.  Boo!

A far more compelling reason to hang onto your DVDs, though, is the second disc of extras. Mr Bongo's blu-ray is completely barebones, as is Universal's MOD release (which doesn't even have a menu). The DVD however, has that whole second disc.

The main extra is a documentary called The Magic of Fellini. It's about an hour-long and pretty good, but as its an overview of his whole career, it's maybe a bit superficial, breezing by without stopping anyplace for too long. Plus, it barely touches on Casanova.  Still, it's full of good interviews and film clips, and worth the watch for any Fellini fan.  It's also worth pointing out that this documentary is also on several Australian Fellini DVD and blu-ray releases, however, and released as its own DVD by Image in the US; so there's a chance you'll already have this.

Of more interest to me personally was the interview with Donald Sutherland. This is also just a little under an hour, and as such comes off as quite thoughtful and in-depth. He talks about his whole career, but focuses a lot on Fellini and Casanova. This isn't one of those frustrating interviews that covers his entire body of work and ignores the film they're making the DVD of.

The only other extra is a stills gallery.

So, that answers that: definitely a worthwhile upgrade! Still, you'll want to hold onto your Fremantle DVD for the extras, or even double-dip for them if you haven't already got it, because they're good. And it helps that Mr Bongo's blu is nice and cheap. You might be tempted to save yourself the hassle of importing and just grab the Vault Series disc; but don't - it's a trap without even the English audio track.  Of course, if you do come across the French blu you could get that instead. It has some exclusive extras, but they don't have English language options, so it wouldn't net you much more than Mr Bongo's. But definitely one blu-ray and the UK DVD for the extras is the way to go.