Hard Rain (Remastered) (1997)

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General		Extras
Category	Thriller	Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1997
Running Time	92:59 (Case: 123)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Mikael Salomon
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Morgan Freeman Christian Slater Randy Quaid Minnie Driver Edward Asner Richard Dysart Betty White
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$36.95	Music	Christopher Young

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English for the Hearing Impaired Spanish Dutch	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

   Hard Rain is a lacklustre heist/chase film that has no brains, not much of a plot and certainly nothing to make it at all watchable.

    Christian Slater stars as Tom, an armoured truck driver doing the last cash collection before a town is evacuated due to rising flood water. Morgan Freeman plays the leader of a pack of robbers who plan to steal the booty once the truck gets stuck in the flood, and Randy Quaid plays the corrupt small town sheriff who wants the money for himself. There are plenty of other poor performances here as well - let's not forget about Minnie Driver as the damsel in distress and The Golden Girls' Betty White playing the ass-kickin' old lady who is too defiant and/or stupid to leave the town regardless of the 12 feet high flood water.

    Dotted with boring action scenes, corny dialogue, a flimsy plot, the completely unbelievable rate at which the flood water is rising, and more bullets than The Matrix, Saving Private Ryan and Hot Shots put together, Hard Rain is one of the worst films I have seen in a really long time.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, 16x9 enhanced.
 
     The sharpness of this film is very precise with fantastic shadow detail and rich blacks throughout the feature. With much of the film taking place at night, the clarity of the transfer and definition of the picture on-screen is immaculate.  At times, there looks as if there is quite a bit of grain about, but I found that mostly this is actually the film's rain effects.

    As mentioned above, the film is deliberately dark so there is not a lot of colour on show, but the palette is solid all the way through the film's 90 minutes. Often there are dark shots where a coloured light will flash onto the screen or the scene will be backlit - all of the colours in these shots are strong and come up on your display device beautifully. There are some scenes in the third act that take place in a church - at this point, the colours are strong and vibrant.

    There were no MPEG artefacts to be seen and aliasing was very mild when it did infrequently occur. There are constant negative film artefacts present throughout. While none of them are huge scratches, the constant appearance of them becomes annoying after a while.

    There is an English subtitle track present on this disc. I watched about 15 minutes of the track and found it to be a heavily simplified version of the dialogue on screen.

    This is a single layered disc.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The surrounds are used surprisingly well despite this disc's 2.0 treatment. They have constant rain sound effects through the channels, and work very well with a very strong signal.
 
    The subwoofer does not get used very much at all.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    There are minimal extras.

Menu

Theatrical Trailer

    This remastered Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;

• 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtrack
• Booklet

    The original Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;

• Nothing- but there player issues associated with this disc- see Michael D's review from 1999 here.

    The Region 1 version of this disc misses out on;

• 16x9 Enhancement
• Booklet

    There is no clear winner here, as each version of this film has its own unique shortcomings or critical issues. It is up to you to decide which version suits you best, but for my money after viewing this version and hearing the impressive 2.0 Surround soundtrack, I would give this remastered version the nod over its NTSC non 16x9 Enhanced brother from the US of A.

    The video transfer is very good.

    The audio transfer works well with what it is given.

    The extras are minimal.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall