Hard to Kill (1990)

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Biographies-Cast
Rating
Year Of Production	1990
Running Time	92
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Sided	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Programme
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Bruce Malmuth
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Steven Seagal Kelly Le Brock Bill Sadler Frederick Coffin
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$24.95	Music	David Michael Frank

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Pan & Scan	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French Italian Dutch Arabic Spanish Portuguese English for the Hearing Impaired Italian for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Steven Seagal movies are very much like porno flicks, except that most of the gratuitous sex has been replaced with gratuitous violence. The plots and the dialogue are of the same standard, which is to say that they are completely superfluous to the action on screen.

    In fact, the plots of Steven Seagal movies are always the same - law enforcement officer Seagal has had his family shot or threatened and he is out for revenge or to protect his family. Lots of gratuitous violence occurs. Minor characters are killed seemingly by being slapped in the face or by some other trivial mode of injury. More important characters are killed in more novel and more spectacular fashions. Seagal comes out on top. The movie ends.

    Mason Storm (Steven Seagal) is a Los Angeles detective who gets some dirt on a prospective Californian Senator. The Senator gets wind of what is going on, and Storm's family is killed. Storm is left for dead, but after being in a coma for seven years, he wakes up and is quickly back to his old self. Of course, he wants revenge, so with the aid of a bizarrely-accented Kelly Le Brock, he goes and gets it.

    Steven Seagal movies work on several levels. Firstly, they work on the gratuitous violence level, of which there is plenty in this movie. Secondly, they work on their unintentional comedic qualities. Both the dialogue and the delivery of the dialogue in his movies is so bad that they are hysterically funny. Action, and unintentional comedy - what a combination!

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, 16x9 enhanced. The other side of the disc carries a Pan & Scan presentation of the movie.

    The transfer was mostly clear and sharp, though a number of scenes here and there were a bit on the grainy side. Shadow detail was lacking, with most dark scenes just being black with little detail in them. Nonetheless, no low level noise spoiled these scenes.

    The colours were a little on the oversaturated side, but were generally acceptable.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. Film-to-video artefacts were non-existent. Film artefacts were present more often than I would have expected, but they were always minor and acceptable.

Audio

    Dialogue was a little on the muffled side, but remained clearly understandable throughout, not that this matters much in a movie of this ilk.

    There were no audio sync problems with this disc.

    The musical score was by David Michael Frank, and sounded very dated indeed.

     The surround channels had little to do in this movie, with the mix essentially being centre channel for dialogue, left and right front for music, and ping-pong left and right front for special effects. This was a very poorly integrated mix, as the mix tended to distract from the on-screen action by virtue of the extreme placement of effects to the left or right for no apparent reason.

   The .1 channel received a limited amount of signal at times but was basically silent.

Menu

Cast Biographies

    The Region 4 version of this DVD misses out on Production Notes and Trailers for other Stephen Seagal movies - nothing of any consequence. Call this one even.

    The video quality is good, especially considering the age of the movie.

    The audio quality is passable.

    The extras present are very very limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall