Dead Calm (1988) |
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Dead Calm (1988) |
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| General | Extras | ||
| Category | Thriller | Main Menu Audio | |
| Rating |
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| Year Of Production | 1988 | ||
| Running Time | 92:20 | ||
| RSDL / Flipper | No/No | Cast & Crew | |
| Start Up | Menu | ||
| Region Coding | 2,4 | Directed By | Phillip Noyce |
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Studio
Distributor |
 Warner Home Video |
Starring |
Sam Neill Nicole Kidman Billy Zane |
| Case | Amaray-Transparent | ||
| RPI | $24.95 | Music | Graeme Revell |
| Video | Audio | ||
| Pan & Scan/Full Frame | None |
English Dolby Digital 2.0  (192Kb/s)French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
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| Widescreen Aspect Ratio | 2.35:1 | ||
| 16x9 Enhancement |
 |
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| Video Format | 576i (PAL) | ||
| Original Aspect Ratio | 2.35:1 | Miscellaneous | |
| Jacket Pictures | No | ||
| Subtitles |
English French Italian Dutch Arabic Spanish Portuguese German Romanian Bulgarian English for the Hearing Impaired Italian for the Hearing Impaired |
Smoking | No |
| Annoying Product Placement | No | ||
| Action In or After Credits | No | ||
Whilst at sea, they come across a black schooner that at first appears to be abandoned. While John is below on the radio trying to raise the schooner, Rae spots something. They soon discover that it is a man, rowing furiously from the schooner towards them. When he comes aboard, he immediately goes below. Rae and John find him huddled in a corner. He introduces himself as Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane), and tells them the story of how he came to be alone on the schooner.
John is suspicious of Hughie's story. While Hughie is sleeping, John locks the cabin in which he is sleeping, and goes to check out the schooner. Rae starts to get nervous, so she starts up the yacht's motors and heads towards the schooner. Hughie wakes up on hearing the engines and goes to join them on deck. He finds that his cabin door has been locked, so he looks through a window and sees that they are headed back to the schooner. This puts him into a frenzy. He breaks out of the cabin and starts to steer the yacht away from the schooner. Rae tries to stop him, but in the ensuing struggle she is knocked out.
Hughie sails off, leaving John on a sinking vessel. The rest of the movie deals with John's struggle to keep the schooner afloat and Rae's attempts to save John from a watery grave.
The foreground sharpness was magnificent throughout, with buckets of detail, however the background detail appeared to be lacking on a couple of occasions. This may have been due to deliberate de-focussing of the background during filming. The worst examples of this can be found at around 3:30 and 84:47. The shadow detail was excellent, being natural and well-balanced. No low level noise was noticed.
The colour is perfect. No edge bleeding or excessive edge enhancement was noticed.
There is some distracting and unacceptable grain present during a couple of the darker scenes, such as at the train station and the hospital. Thankfully, almost the entire movie is brightly lit, so these couple of instances become more tolerable. As usual, this graininess is basically invisible when viewed on a TV set using composite input.
No MPEG artefacts were noted, apart from some trivial posterization at 57:56, 58:53 and 76:13. Aliasing is a problem with this transfer, especially from 10:16 - 19:47, but generally it is not too bad. There were three instances where the water seemed to shimmer unnaturally. One of these occurrences (13:02 - 13:10), was severe, and looked awful. I paused and then stepped through this section in an attempt to find the cause, but it looked completely natural, so I can only conclude that this shimmering was caused by aliasing. The other two minor instances of shimmer can be found at 10:35 and 77:57. A couple of trivial moiré effects were seen, but these were mostly induced by the aliasing. There was also some trivial telecine wobble present during the opening credits, but this disappeared as soon as they finished. There were quite a few small film artefacts present, but there is enough time between them so that they do not become bothersome.
| Sharpness |  |
| Shadow Detail | |
| Colour | |
| Grain/Pixelization |  |
| Film-To-Video Artefacts | |
| Film Artefacts | |
| Overall | |
The dialogue was mostly clear and easy to understand. However, quite a few scenes sounded muffled. Fortunately, none became unintelligible. No audio sync problems were noticed with this transfer.
Graeme Revell's musical score suited the movie and added to the on-screen tension.
The surround channel usage was good. Some of the more enveloping scenes can be found at 1:50, 2:30, 67:37, 73:19 and 78:30. The soundstage was very good, with no discernible problems.
The subwoofer was only lightly used throughout the movie.
| Dialogue | |
| Audio Sync | |
| Clicks/Pops/Dropouts | |
| Surround Channel Use | |
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| Overall | |
NOTE: To view non-R4 releases, your equipment needs to be multi-zone compatible and usually also NTSC compatible.
The audio is good with no problems - it is basically as good as the original soundtrack.
There are essentially no extras.
| Video | |
| Audio | |
| Extras |  |
| Plot | |
| Overall | |
| Review Equipment | |
| DVD | Sony DVP-725, using Component output |
| Display | Sony Projector VPH-G70 (No Line Doubler), Technics Da-Lite matt screen with gain of 1.0 (229cm). This display device is 16x9 capable. |
| Audio Decoder | Built in to amplifier/receiver. Calibrated with Video Essentials. |
| Amplification | Onkyo TX-SV919THX |
| Speakers | Fronts: Energy RVS-1 (3), Rears: Energy RVSS-1 (2), Subwoofer: Energy EPS-150 (1) |