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I ended up getting the disc for completions sake, and it's both good and bad news. The video transfer is pretty good... so long as you view the disc in interlaced mode. Hopefully, Anchor Bay will offer a corrected replacement that is flagged for progressive scan playback, as the film-to-tape transfer isn't really at fault here, it's the encoding that was messed up...
The real treat are the extras. The interview with Argento is very good. For a man who isn't very good at giving commentaries (at least in English), he offers up some very illuminating and informative comments here. What's most surprising is how much he seems to like the film, given how poorly it was (at least initially) received. The behind-the-scenes footage from Savini is also very good, albeit short. I wish this had been a 2-disc set as there'd be room for a lot more of his footage. What I've listened to thus far of Alan Jones's commentary is also very good.
The deleted scenes are sadly only the additional scenes from the Italian print, and pretty poor quality at that. I'm at a loss as to why these look so bad, as Cecchi-Gori released a very nice looking anamorphic DVD of TRAUMA in Italy that has these scenes intact, and in fact it looks as though that was the source for the Anchor Bay DVD deleted scenes... so why do they look so bad here? Were they duped to VHS tape before being mastered to this DVD or something? Also, as noted above, why no additional deleted scenes from the workprint, and why no effort to dub over the additional scenes from the Italian print with the English audio from the workprint?
My favorite thing about this disc is that Anchor Bay has included the entire, unedited 'Ruby Rain' song over the main menu. I could sit here all day listening to this haunting track on a loop, I'm glad they got this right. Now if only they'd have gotten the encoding right, included all the deleted scenes, reinstated the extra scenes from the Italian print with the audio from the workprint remixed for the dialogue track into the main feature, and included more of that terrific Savini behind-the-scenes footage. There's also a wonderful half-French/half-English interview with Asia Argento from the French DVD release, as well as a vintage walking-tour of some of TRAUMA's Minnesota locations also included on the French disc. How hard would it have been to license these?
Vincent
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