Region 4 Winners and Losers

    This film has been released in Region 1 twice. Once in 1999 by Anchor Bay (I have a copy of this one), and then again in 2003 by MGM. By the reports I can find, the two discs are essentially the same. Both are double-sided discs, with a full-screen version on one side, and a wide-screen (1.85:1, not 16x9 enhanced) on the other. Neither have subtitles, and the only soundtrack is English Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround encoded, at 192kbps.

    This R4 offering is roughly equivalent to the wide-screen side of the R1, save that the R1 is single layered, and this one is dual layered. The R1 is a bit sharper (which is not what you might expect), but it still has plenty of aliasing. There are no extras on the R1 disc.

    The R1 transfer runs 129:00, compared with the 129:02 of the R4. The R4 is definitely PAL, and the R1 is NTSC. That suggests that the R4 is a video conversion from NTSC to PAL, because a fresh film transfer would have resulted in an R4 transfer that runs a bit under 124 minutes. As confirmation, the watermark on Dominic's face at 43:24 in the R4 is also present in the R1 at 43:25 (the 1 second discrepancy could well be due to different opening logos) — that's fairly convincing. So probably some of the softness of the R4 is actually due to converting lower resolution NTSC into higher resolution PAL.

    Out of the R4 and the R1s, I have to award this one to the R1, because it's a slightly better transfer, but I don't think any of these discs is good enough for a film like this. I note that there's a Region 2 disc that is 16x9 enhanced, so that might be a better choice, but I don't have much in the way of information about it. I hope someone has the sense to release a good transfer of this film in Region 4 some time soon.