A Few Words About A few words about...™ Dog Soldiers -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers is a low budget film with a huge fan base.  And rightfully so.  It's one of those little films that shines beyond it's budget.

Scream Factory's new Blu-ray is as good as the master that was supplied to them, which is unfortunate, as the film's owners really need to go back to the basics.

In this case, the original 16mm elements.

While you can get a quality blow-up to 35mm from 16 A & B rolls, this is a case where the generational loss has left its mark, and things are on the dupey side.

That said, people who purchase this probably won't give a werewolf's whisker, and will be happy to have a decent looking Blu-ray, which this is.

Color is on the murky side.  Black levels are off.  Shadow detail is practically non-existent...

but no matter.

It's Dog Soldiers on Blu-ray, with a host of special features, and for under twenty bucks...

Image - 2.5

Audio - 4

Pass / Fail - just passable

My advice is to pull the 16 elements, and scan them for future use.

RAH

Vincent_P said:

There's always the possibility that they're not so much "lost" as "unavailable" due to overdue lab or storage fees.

Vincent

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FoxyMulder said:

I'm going to keep my Channel 4 HD recording, very good image quality and it blows this new blu ray release away.

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Vincent_P said:

Apparently the original 16mm elements are "lost" and they had to use a couple of 35mm theatrical prints. Kind of shocking that a film this recent could have "lost" original film elements.


Vincent

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bgart13 said:

Care to share some caps?

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Lord Dalek said:

Not to defend Shout! or anything but Dog Soldiers has ALWAYS looked terrible.

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TravisR said:

For what it's worth, this title was delayed for months (maybe even almost a year) so they must have tried to do something in that time.

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It seems myself and Scream Factory have been experiencing some major flack regarding the Dog Soldiers blu-ray release. So I figure I should fill in a bit of background here. First of all, I wholeheartedly support the Scream Factory release. The previous blu-ray (not available in the UK) was made without any involvement from me, and I remember when it came out the general consensus was that the picture quality was not great. All credit to Scream Factory for wanting to involve the film-maker in this process as much as possible.

When they first announced this blu-ray release last year, the original plan was to work with me to create a whole bunch of original extras based on new interviews with all the key cast and crew, but that the movie itself would essentially be the same version as last time. I asked them to delay the release because I felt that we could do better for the fans and try and track down some original film elements to make a fresh HD transfer. Since the movie never received a theatrical release in the US (although I believe it screened at The Egyptian for a week) I knew we’d have to turn to the UK to find the best possible elements available. What I didn’t know was that after an exhaustive search I’d discover the original negative was nowhere to be found. Neither the UK producer, distributor or film processing lab has any idea where the negative is. Without it we simply could not achieve the kind of high quality HD transfer I would have wished to deliver. Instead we managed to get hold of 2 original cinema prints, and despite being 13 years old and having a few scratches here and there, they represent the most accurate version of the original theatrical release that we could find.

However, as close as they are, they are just cinema prints, and in terms of colour timing for the new blu-ray we were limited to the parameters of the print itself. Which means, in basic terms, if the contrast is high on the print and the blacks are crushed (as indeed they are) then there is no more visual information to be gained from them. You can’t brighten up the image and see what’s hidden in the darkness like you can when you’re working from the negative or from digital. All that will happen is that the black will turn to grey and just give the movie a washed out flat look.

Another issue seems to be that one scene in particular now seems to be a daytime scene when it used to be a nighttime scene. Well, this is wrong on both counts. It’s meant to be a dusk scene, and since it features shots of the sunset then it’s graded accordingly - with a warm sunset glow that then gets cooler and darker as it fades into night. Again, this is all taken directly from the print. It was never intended to have such an extreme dark blue tint over it. We had major continuity issues filming this sequence because the weather kept changing from dull grey and rainy to bright sunlight. This is far from ideal for pulling off convincing day-for-night photography.

Like it or not, when the movie was originally released in the UK in 2002, the blacks were crushed, the contrast was high, the colours were rich and the image was grainy as fuck, because let’s not forget, this movie was shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm. So under no circumstances was a blu-ray of this movie ever going to look as smooth and pristine as a movie shot on 35mm or any of the hi-res digital formats we use today. In fact, transferring it to HD actually highlights the grain just as it does any other detail, so this version inherently looks more grainy than before. It’s unavoidable unless you have the money to do a full restoration and clean-up, but again, you need the negative for that.

So, is this version of Dog Soldiers the best it could ever be? No. Of course not. If we had the negative and a shit-load of cash we could have done a lot better. Is it the best it could be under the circumstances? Yes. Will it appeal to everybody? No. But that's movies for you!

At the end of the day everybody involved, myself included, put in a lot of work to give the fans a blu-ray worth forking out their hard-earned cash for. And nobody involved, myself included, got paid anything for doing it. There are no royalties, ancillaries or anything else. This is not an attempt to exploit the fans. It was, on my part, an attempt to give the fans something new and unique, and not simply a repackaged version of what’s already out there.

NEIL MARSHALL

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