Fathers' Day

General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Running Time	95 minutes	Commentary Tracks	None
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Other Extras	Cast/Crew Biographies Production Notes
Region	4
Distributor	Warner Brothers
RRP	$29.95

    Pretty soon, Jack and Dale meet each other and figure out that they are looking for the same boy. They team up and quickly figure out that Scott is more than likely following the Sugar Ray Band on their road trip, and indeed they fairly quickly find Scott who is extremely intoxicated when they first meet him.

    They take Scott back to their hotel room and clean him up, in a mildly amusing but fairly predictable scene, and discover that Scott has $5000 in cash on him, which they discover is drug money. Scott escapes, and spends the $5000 on a piece of jewellery for Nikki (Haylie Johnston) with whom he is besotted. Nikki, unfortunately, cannot bear Scott. The drug dealers, meanwhile, are very upset with Scott for stealing their money, and their antics form another mildly amusing sub-plot.

    To round off the sub-plots, Bob (Scott's 'real' father) also comes looking for Scott, very unsuccessfully. Bob does provide the one belly laugh in the film as a result of his misfortunes with a Port-A-Potty.

    Finally, Scott is reunited with his family, and everyone leaves happy.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, 16x9 enhanced.

    The movie was pretty much razor sharp at all times. There were no problems with shadow detail, though generally this movie consists of bright scenes, except for a few short dark scenes. No noise was present to interfere with the picture quality.

    The colour was well-rendered and fully saturated without bleeding. There were many colourful scenes in the movie which were all excellently presented.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of very severe aliasing frequently throughout the transfer. The worst aliasing is seen early on in the movie when we seen an overhead shot of Jack and Dale crossing a bridge in Dale's car (14:17 to 14:37). The edges of the bridge shimmer severely and deteriorate into clearly visible steps during the pan. This is extremely distracting. Unfortunately, aliasing is frequent and severe throughout this transfer. Other examples of it occur at 16:17 to 16:27 (the marina) and 42:33 to 42:38 (Bob pulling into the roadside diner). There are many more examples of aliasing in this transfer, but I stopped taking note of them after this third severe episode. In this regard, this movie is almost as bad as the Die Hard 3 transfer (first master) and is unacceptable by current standards. Film artefacts were very rare, as is to be expected from a recent transfer such as this one.

Audio

    Dialogue was always completely clear and intelligible.

    The music is unremarkable but certainly created no problems.

     The surround channela were used mainly for music and occasional ambience. Given that there were little or no special effects in this movie, this was quite acceptable.

    The .1 channel was used to support the music.

    The only extras on this DVD are still frames for the cast and crew biographies, and still framed brief production notes.

    The video quality is unacceptable because of the frequent and severe aliasing. This is a pity as otherwise this transfer is fine in every other way.

    The audio quality is unremarkable - it is an acceptable soundtrack with no specific problems.

    The extras are somewhat lacking with only cast & crew biographies and production notes.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

Michael Demtschyna
3rd November 1998