D.A.R.Y.L. (1985)

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General		Extras
Category	Family	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1985
Running Time	96:01
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4,5	Directed By	Simon Wincer
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Mary Beth Hurt Michael McKean Kathryn Walker Colleen Camp Josef Sommer Ron Frazier Steve Ryan David Wohl Danny Corkill Amy Linker Barret Oliver Ed Grady Tucker McGuire
Case	?
RPI	$14.95	Music	Marvin Hamlisch Dean Pitchford

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Auto Pan & Scan Encoded	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	Arabic Bulgarian Czech Danish Dutch English Finnish French German Greek Hungarian Italian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Spanish Swedish Turkish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    D.A.R.Y.L. was one of those 1980s classics that, if you were like me, was an amusing kick to go to the movies to see with the boys. It had it all, coarse language, dead bodies, car chases, military conspiracies and a kid that could kick ass on a Commodore 64 (yeah, one of those really early 8-bit gaming systems we had long before PlayStation and Xbox came along).

    In short, D.A.R.Y.L. is the story of a boy who is thrown from a car in the opening scenes of the film, the driver of which is soon after despatched by the "black helicopter crew". When he makes it to civilisation, all he can remember is his name, Daryl (Barret Oliver). He is diagnosed as having amnesia, put up for adoption and soon fostered out to a young couple, Andy and Joyce Richardson, (Michael McKean and Mary Beth Hurt) unable to have children of their own. There he befriends the next door neighbour's son, Turtle (Danny Corkill). But it soon becomes apparent that Daryl is special – gifted in unusual ways, particularly with technology … such as it was in the 1980s.

    A contemporary of such other films that tried to anthropomorphise technology as Tron, Electric Dreams, and Short Circuit, D.A.R.Y.L. doesn't quite stack up against the more modern attempts at this genre (e.g. Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence) in terms of its story-telling and thematic undercurrents and has dated quite badly in that respect, but it holds its own against most of the aforementioned films of the 1980s and is still a fairly entertaining family movie all these years on … though for my money Tron still beats it, despite it religious overtones. It's big on family values, in a wholesome American conventional nuclear family unit way, but it's portrayal of children of the 1980s is pretty much dead on. I was a little older than Daryl at the time this movie came out, but I'm sure I was about as brattish.

    Not as good as The Goonies for its 1980s nostalgia value (but really, what 1980s kids film beats that one?), nor as good as that 80s classic The Neverending Story. However, this is still good fun to watch all these years on, particularly that sequence with the SR-71 Lockheed “Blackbird” (I’ll just sigh contentedly while my brain releases some nostalgia endorphins), and worth it for all those who were born between 1970 and 1980. I wouldn't recommend this so much for the youth of this generation who are likely to be more engaged by a Pixar animation or an extremely violent video game, or if you’re really, really really unlucky a boxed set of Pokémon. But if you have a penchant for 80s films, give this one a go.

Video

    Presented in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1, 16x9 enhanced, I watched it projected onto a 100” screen from a Sony VPL-HS60 upscaled to 1080i at 50Hz via HDMI. I also sampled some sequences scaled at 720p on a 42” Sony E-Series Rearpro via HDMI.

    This transfer suffers from a lot of compression artefacts due to being forced onto one layer of a DVD and not being terribly well encoded. It is highly prone to pixelation and excessive amounts of background noise and aliasing. The scaling chip and projector compensated as much as possible for this, but some shadowy scenes really do break up into moving squares of grey.

    The picture is also not especially sharp, and coated in a fair amount of grain.

    Colour is acceptable, but not the glowing rich saturations that we are used to with transfers of more recent films, and has a slightly brownish tinge to it, which all 80s movies seem to have (Was it something about the film stock, or the quality of light they used to light the sets? Your guess is as good as mine).

    There were quite a few film artefacts, but nothing dreadful or in the middle of the screen.

    This is a single layer disc.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Audio is available in English, French, German and Spanish in 2.0 Dolby Surround. I listened to the English track and sampled the others.

    The English audio is fairly front driven, and almost exclusively from the centre channel except for the music. The left and right surround got some use in a few of the action sequences, but the rears rarely came to life. There was no enveloping presence here.

    There seemed to be a little bit of popping static on the track in spots, but nothing too horrific. Most of it was probably from the source. I didn't find it distracting and it sort of added to the nostalgia factor (those old cinemas had pretty crappy sound by today's standards).

    No subwoofer use here.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menus

    All menus are presented in 1.78:1, 16x9 enhanced, static and silent.

    Thought released by Paramount in R1, content wise these appear to be the same, except that R4 has a lot more audio language and subtitle options. I have not read anything terribly negative regarding the video transfer of the R1 version, but so many reviewers don’t seem to specify the technology they are using to do the review.

    I’m going to call this a draw as our version is more multi-culturally friendly, but it’s a good chance that with the reduced audio options and subtitle streams there was less need to heavily compress this film in R1, whereas in R4 the compression artefacts are evident.

    D.A.R.Y.L. is a classic 80s film that has dated, but retained a certain nostalgic charm. Worth a look if you’re an 80s fan.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall