Region 4 Winners and Losers

    Two different versions of Bride of Frankenstein have been released in Region 4 – this Universal release and an MRA release.

    The Bride of Frankenstein DVD released by MRA is pretty woeful in comparison to this one. Although the tape master seems to be based on a cleaner source print, the black levels are too bright, there are constant horizontal noise lines, the image is softer, lousy compression causes juddery pans in many shots, there are no subtitle tracks, and the feature is stored in two separate title chunks. The MRA release boasts a similar, if not the same, 2.0 mono soundtrack to the Universal release.

    Further region comparisons will be based on the superior Universal Region 4 release.

    The Region 4 DVD misses out on:

• 12 pages of Production Notes.
• Frankenstein theatrical trailer (1:44).
• Cast biographies for Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, Elsa Lancaster, Una O'Connor, Ernest Thesiger, Dwight Frye, Australian actor/director O. P. Heggie (the blind hermit), and James Whale, who is mistakenly listed as dying in 1959. In fact he drowned himself on the 29th of May, 1957.
• Universal Weblinks.

    The Region 1 DVD misses out on:

• More foreign language subtitles.
• The correct framing of the feature...no cropping at the top of the image.
• An anamorphic Universal logo intro with 5.1 Dolby Digital sound.
• The ability to swap between audio tracks.

    Although the US DVD has additional production notes and an extra trailer, which would be available on the Frankenstein DVD anyway, the Australian DVD wins because of its more correct framing.