Quote:
Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs  All those stills from DVD Beaver sell the set more than the review posted yesterday. At least for me. Reading about lower quality materials used for the prints is off putting but the majority of the stills shown looked quite nice. |
Sixteen out of twenty-six films are either entirely or mostly sourced from film elements (fifteen from 16mm,
Bloodstream from Super 8) and look terrific (even
Bloodstream looks startlingly good given the format). Two more are sourced from HD video (
Nekros, The Return of Alan Strange) and three from digital SD video (
Roxi, Skare, ZK3). In all cases, that's how they were originally shot.
The five that are substandard in this respect are
Quälen, Avalon, Legend of a Hero, Death Run and
Second Sight. With regard to the middle three, we know for certain that the only film elements were lost in a storage facility fire - fortunately, after they'd been telecined (and, even more fortunately, this applies to both cuts of
Legend of a Hero). With
Quälen and
Second Sight, we couldn't find the 16mm elements for love nor money, and all trails went cold - although, again, they'd been telecined for posterity. (Murphy invariably shot on reversal film stock, so there's no negative - the 16mm elements are literally the only film materials.)
But I honestly think that if someone watches a film as flat-out demented as
Death Run and all they can do afterwards is complain about the picture quality, they're probably not watching it in the spirit in which it was intended!