A few words about...™ Fright Night (1985) -- in Blu-ray

In spite of my many previous protests I'm having a hard time fighting this one off.

 

Make that 2,997 unaccounted for Robert. 

 

Can't wait to sit down with this, one of my favorite horror films.

 

2,996 -- and as I've already posted in Ron's thread, it's a blind buy.  Looking forward to my 106 minutes.

make it 2995 and counting got mine in the mail today

It might be the ambien talking but I think I'm going to go for it tomorrow. And grab one. I watched a few Minutes on Crackle and i guess it wet my appetite for the blu..
Maybe I won't remember. Well ambien says good night.

Just ordered mine, Robert, on your and Ronald Epstein's enthusiastic endorsement...

I enjoy Fright Night very much as a movie but from my experiences reviewing this debut on blu-ray from Twilight Time i am undoubtedly taking back about the quality as a whole. The film restoration/transfer is it's best attribute. But to say that it ranks as being a perfect restoration i would say there are plenty of elements of the film to improve upon. The over all presentation is soft. The 5.1 dts-hd ma re-mix of the original dolby stereo track is really where the blu-ray falls to just above an average release. Most of the sound stage is mixed only to the front center channel, surrounds are not enveloping, and the .1 LFE channel is rarely ever used. There are no special featurettes or makings of the movie to speak of other than an isolated score. TT has also forget to implement a most important navigation feature that 99% of blu-rays include. Scene selection/Pop Menu is missing. Charging a premium price of $30 and issued as a limited edition release i would have expected Sony/TT to exceed fan's expectations. I am in awe at wondering what a real special edition release of Fright Night could have been.

Despite my misgivings about the price, I am sorely tempted to get this one.

My biggest fear is that when Twilight Time have sold theirs, Columbia will turn around and issue a regular blu with the extras they're sitting on.

An alternate review :

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Fright-Night-Blu-ray/25032/#Review
Edited by Michael Allred - 12/12/11 at 6:45am

Wow, Michael. I did not know that TT were actually a sponsor on this form. I have been posting back and forth to a few other forms on the FN release and my general consensus is that there are many sponsors, employees, and supporters of TT assigned to these forms to make sure consumers and fans think that the release is of the best quality and more then justified for the premium price. The sponsors go on to say that there are no other authoring studios that could have done such a stellar job on the picture transfer to blu-ray like TT has and that we all are so fortunate to own this release. Fright Night is one of my favorite horror movies, but i am afraid what i have bought into is purely just an over priced little bit better than average wanted to feel special limited release of the film! I am pretty sure that only the diehard fans of FN will even consider purchasing this average release with no extras.
Edited by moonchild69 - 12/9/11 at 1:20pm

Michael,

 

I am getting tired of you disrupting this forum with your

less than positive input.

 

It's going to stop immediately, I promise.

 

Nobody on this forum is doing Twilight Time any favors by

giving Fright Night a glowing review.  Neither Robert Harris

nor I are going to put our own personal reputations on the 

line to write what you refer to as review full of "hyperbole"
to support a company we associated ourselves with.

 

We also associate ourselves with Fox and Paramount,

who are also INSIDERS on this forum and I can tell you

that I have personally written some rather negative things

about both studios from time to time as has Mr. Harris.

 

All our reviewers are instructed to be honest with their 

assessments even if it means they have to pan the disc

and publicly call out a studio for having a bad transfer.

We align ourselves with the studios and bring them on as

insiders here so they can read and communicate with the

membership when they want.  They consider this forum

to be a valuable marketing tool.  However, they absolutely

realize that we are not here to praise product that does not

meet the critical standards our members expect.   

 

You find one reviewer on a competing website who has

a less-than-perfect review of this disc and you start pointing

fingers at Robert and I for trying to hype up this release for

the benefit of trying to sell discs?  

 

Neither Robert nor I are going to put ourselves in a bad

position by highly recommending a title like this to our 

membership and then have them come down on us for 

not being honest.  Personally, I am not going to sit here

and be responsible for luring our members into buying a

$40 disc if I felt the product didn't look absolutely great.

 

Fright Night looks great!  You heard it from me, you 

heard it from Mr. Harris.  If you want to go by the review

of someone else, so be it.  Don't sit here and question

our integrity for praising the quality of this title.  

 

I try not to make it a point to publicly point fingers at 

someone who is being problematic, but your accusations

and aggressively negative behavior here is not appreciated.

The original audio for this film was 2.0 stereo. How much rear-channel activity do you suppose there was in that? For me, as long as the audio replicates what the original mix was, that is all I want or need. What was done after the fact is of little interest to me. "The overall presentation is soft" - did you see this film in the theater during its original run? If so, you would know that this transfer is perfect and perfectly replicates the look of the film - in fact, it betters it as the release prints were obviously not of the generation used for the transfer, but several away. You cannot sharpen (without resorting to artificial means) that which is inherently not sharp like today's films. That was the 80s - stock, diffusion, etc.

I posted this in my original review....

 

Anyone who has the original DVD release needs only

to compare it to this new Blu-ray transfer to see the

night to day difference.

 

I have seen this film so many times on DVD that I

knew what transfer has looked like and was immediately

jolted by how much it has been improved upon.

And you are absolutely correct. This release looks better than the release prints did - I don't know what anyone else could want or expect. Mr. Crisp is the berries - he really knows his stuff.

The days of $10 BDs will soon come to an end. No one is buying them. Best Buy even has those huge $5 barrels now, with BDs tossed in like so much landfill material. Do you think anyone is really making any money on these? Pressed BDs of most catalog titles as a mass-market product is doomed. No question about it. If you think otherwise you have a rude awakening coming to you. Boutique labels with higher price points and streaming are the future.

Sony has been routinely putting out BDs sourced from state-of-the-art 4K scans with little or no discernable digital finagling after the fact. Fright Night and Mysterious Island even have the original mixes and original poster art on the packaging (minus the title font for Fright Night). That's all I want from the movies I buy and if I have to pay $25 or $30 to a boutique label to get it, fine.

The more I think about it, the more I think that some of those titles would be better off in the hands of niche labels, especially after the train wreck of My Fair Lady. I have mixed feelings about Twilight Time's model but in this economy and with the contempt that current management of many studios seem to have for back catalogs becoming more painfully obvious to me, it's better than nothing.

Ronald, how can your review on Fright Night be unbiased when you and robert gave perfect ratings on it's picture quality. I agree that the video quality is very good but not without obvious flaws. Blu-ray.com has an open minded review that stresses upon film quality issues with some accuracy i must say. This release of Fright Night is by no means an overall great quality release that warrants a $35 premium price tag. The audio and lack of extras pretty much stresses that case wholeheartedly. What i really bought into is a little but better than an average release. How can a successfully standard back catalog studio title be so much when any consumer can buy A-listed blu-ray movies everyday from $15 to $25 with even better quality performances.

I'll bite: What are the "obvious" flaws. I'm genuinely interested. Please list them so I can look for them.

And just for reference, here is what my pal Jeffrey Kauffman says about the transfer: Fright Night was filmed on a fairly paltry budget and the bulk of this film exhibits signs of less than superior film stock and some less than ideal filming conditions. Despite what was evidently a new high-res scan for this release, the overall image here is a bit on the soft side, though there appears to have been no noise reduction and while soft, the image retains a suitably mid-80's cinematic look. Colors are acceptable, though never really brash. There is some occasional crush in the dark scenes, notably the finale in the cellar of Jerry's home. But close-ups reveal above average levels of fine detail, and this is certainly a sharper presentation than the film has ever had before. The opticals, including some of the special effects, contribute to some of the softness on display, as might be expected.

What he is saying in no uncertain terms is the film looks like it's supposed to - low-budget (it was), 80s film stock (it was), less than ideal filming conditions (quick, down and dirty) - no noise reduction (good), the image retains a suitably mid-80s cinematic look (check). Colors are acceptable, though never really brash (check - they never were brash). Don't agree about the "crush" because I don't see anything that isn't a part of the look of the film and that always was - close-ups reveal above average levels of fine detail (check), and this is certainly a sharper presentation than the film has ever had before (double check).

And here is the most important sentence:

The opticals, including some of the special effects (I would adjust that to say ALL of the special effects, since they're all multi-pass old-fashioned opticals), contribute to some of the softness on display, as might be expected (BINGO).

So, what would you have? The film looks like the film is supposed to look. And that makes it a perfect transfer - that is what a transfer is supposed to do. I would posit that a transfer that doesn't do that is a failure. It's not going to look like a film made today. It's not going to look like a film made on stock from the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s. It's going to look exactly like a low-budget 1980s film - to have it look like anything else would be false and bad. So how is this an average release, Moonchild? What should they have done differently? Pumped up the sharpness artificially? Boosted the colors so they resemble day-glo op-art colors that were never there? So, please list for me, if you will, the "obvious" flaws that you see.
Edited by haineshisway - 12/9/11 at 11:05pm

deleted
Edited by Michael Allred - 12/12/11 at 6:44am

Michael,

 

There is no overreaction.  This situation involves two separate

threads concerning this release that you have been actively

involved with.

 

You have been repeatedly telling people over and over again

not to consider buying this Blu-ray release because it will be

released again at a lower price point.  You have no basis for

this information.  I don't mind such an opinion being posted, but 

when it is being done over and over again it becomes an 

agenda.

 

Fact of the matter is that you don't own the disc.  You don't

know what it looks like.  Yet, you introduced a link to a review

on another site and immediately started pointing fingers that

ours was not accurate.  Additionally, in my review thread, you

made a point of saying that the competing site's review is not

full of hyperbole, strongly suggesting mine was. Whether you

meant it or not is exactly the way it came across.

 

You then bring into suggestion that since Twilight Time

is an Insider here that we are possibly providing glowing

reviews for the benefit of selling discs.

 

Meanwhile, there are already members who actually own

and have seen the disc that are chiming in and saying 

that it looks great.  

 

I am personally looking forward to hearing more reviews

from people who have bought the disc and compare it to

the original DVD release.  I think, without question, there is

a remarkable improvement to be seen.

I got this in the mail today, and just finished watching it.

Wow, it looks great!
I cannot comment on the audio. My wife was asleep, so i used the TV speakers. But the picture is pure 80s joy. Time to retire the 10 year old DVD at last!

I AM VERY HAPPY.

Thanks to Sony, and Twilight Time for a fine release. It was worth the money.




I watched this on a 52 inch Sony Bravia LCD, played on a Sony 1000ES Blu-ray player.

I'm not trying to stir up anything, but I've only been coming here a few months and after reading some of the reviews here, I'm totally convinced that HTF's reviews are more accurate 95% of the time than blu-ray.com's reviews. Truthfully, blu-ray.com is actually about 4th behind HTF, HighDefDigest and DVDBeaver. To my mind, they lost any credibility when one of their reviewers(I know his name but I will not name him out of decency) more or less stated that The Blues Brothers having a lossy audio track was perfectly acceptable because the track was really good. I don't agree with that and I will never agree that lossy audio is acceptable on a blu ray disc. Especially for a film that is so totally driven by audio like The Blues Brothers and all other musicals are.

I don't know who Mr. Crisp is, but I would like to shake his hand and thank him. Fright Night has always been one of my favorite 80's films. To see such a fantastic image is a game changer. I have now watched it twice on Blu-Ray, and I feel like I'm discovering it for the first time. The Makeup, and creature effects are seen like never before. Everything from the superb background props, and set design to the makeup on all the actors is as clear as crystal...almost to a fault. I would very much like to discuss this transfer with other fans.
This my friends is what Blu-Ray was intended for.

Fright Night, like many films shot in the 1980's, used a good deal of filtration on the camera lens. This film doesn't look soft because it had a low budget, it looks soft because thats the way it was intended to look. In addition, Fright Night reportedly had a budget of about $9 million, which while it isn't huge, surely isn't a low budget by the standard of 1985. That would have been considered a medium budget film at the time.

Doug

Nobody's mentioned EE or any other kind of sharpening commonly used on catalog titles so I'm assuming none of those "tools" were used here. Just out of curiosity, does Screen Archives send out shipping confirmation emails? I haven't gotten one and I preordered a copy during the first days it went online. While I don't think this title will sell out, despite the glowing reviews, I still hate to be in the dark as to whether or not there's a copy coming my way.

No, based on my viewing of the disc, the "hyperbole" of Mssrs. Harris and Epstein , and the Blu-ray.com review that critiques the "soft" appearance of the film, I'd say very minimal to no sharpening tools were used in this transfer. You won't be disappointed.

Yes, SAE does send shipping confirmation emails. They are shipping a ton of Blu-rays out now, as you can imagine, but they'll get to you.