Region 4 Winners and Losers

     The Osterman Weekend has been released in Region 1 US and Region 2 UK in similar versions expect for some slight audio differences (both have dts soundtracks). Both those releases include the same featurette included in Region 4, stills galleries and a booklet. The main significant difference between these releases and our local Region 4 version is that both the others include on the second disc a 116:28 version of the film termed Sam’s First Cut derived from a Betamax tape.

     While it can be argued that this is a significant loss, the extra scenes in that cut are included as the deleted scenes on the first disc of our Region 4 set, where in fact the poor video quality is obvious. So while it would have been better to have seen the director’s version (or at least one of them), what we have is not too bad. While the dts tracks can be considered an improvement, it must be remembered that The Osterman Weekend was originally released with mono sound.