Avoid the 16x9 DVD version

This DVD is listed on Amazon as "Surround Sound, Widescreen." It actually has MONO audio, and is NOT WIDESCREEN. The publisher MATTED a pan & scan copy.

This is one of my favorite low budget sci-fi films from this time period. I'd be proud, happy and thrilled to see a true widescreen or letterboxed transfer of this movie, regardless of the video quality. Alas, this DVD is not widescreen, but instead a very poor video transfer from an old washed out, pan & scanned 16mm TV film print. The source used for this DVD release came from an old tape, which is evident from the occassional video glitches. It's also obvious the tape copy was dubbed down a few generations before this DVD was mastered. Again, I could forgive all that, IF it were a true widescreen transfer. This pan & scan copy was MATTED to create a 16x9 aspect ratio. You could do the same thing by viewing a pan & scan movie and using your player's zoom function to fill your 16x9 screen. Of course you'll lose a big chunk of the top and bottom, and the picture will look terrible. That's exactly what we have here. Even reduced to letterboxed format on a regular 4x3 TV, it still looks terrible. Let's critique the video and audio quality, shall we? The picture is very soft, as a matter of fact it looks out of focus. This could be due to a 16mm dupe film print, or the video being dubbed down too many generations, or very likely both. The original film source has faded colors and contrast, and the hue has shifted far into the red. Quite often there are halos around areas with high contrast. The DVD mastering shows a great deal of video artifacts, probably caused by picture filtering, to eliminate film grain and video noise. The original video transfer used a very poor quality telecine. (film projector and video pick-up) Quite often, during cuts from one shot to the next, you see the frame division between the 2 shots fly up the screen. This is caused by different frame rates. Film is projected at 24 frames per second and video is displayed at 30 FPS. Old fashioned telecines use a rotating prism to compensate for the difference in frame rates. This usually results in a very subtle blurring, or ghosting from the previous frame. On a decent telecine this is almost unnoticeable, but on this video transfer, fast motion shows considerable blurring. That's enough about the video, here's a brief critique of the mono audio. It sounds like they tried to equalize it by lopping off the high and low frequencies. All that remains is the mid-range, which is stripped of fidelity. The front cover art on the DVD case uses a low resolution copy of the original theatrical poster. The backside has a few frame grabs from the video, to let you know what you're in for. The only positive thing I can say about the whole thing, is that there's a decent looking menu with eleven chapters. No extras on this disk. I have quite a few public domain titles on DVD, some of them with marginal picture quality, but this is the worst I have ever seen. My 20 year old "Video treasures" VHS tape recorded in SLP looks better than this DVD. I count myself lucky to have seen this several times in the theatre during the 1960's. I can attest, as to how good this film can look and how impressive it was on the big screen.

Save your money and keep your old pan & scan copies 'till this gets a proper widescreen release. Nuf said. Ask me how I really feel.