Scream Factory does not do good telecines. That is a given. (At least they didn't have to do color timing on this one, as that's the one area they seem to revel in screwing up.) And I didn't think the 35mm sources they used were all that terrible. It's the best we've ever had on home video, though that may be saying little given what we've had on home video. But the film prints themselves are as good as the picture looked when you saw it on the big screen in 1983 or 1984. The non-inclusion of the "Carnivore" cut, however, was a major lapse in judgment on their part, and the main reason I was miffed. It is rather different from "The Final Terror" cut, not just in terms of being a pre-MPAA version without the 20 seconds of cuts needed for an "R" rating and without the MPAA certificate, not just in terms of the title card, but also in terms of opening credit billing (Rachel Ward and Mark Metcalf are flipped), in terms of one exterior shot, in terms of portions of the closing credits, heck, even in terms of who it is copyrighted to (The Watershed Co., rather than Samuel Z. Arkoff), and thus both cuts should have been included. I've seen Scream attempt to do composites before, too - not that they've ever done it well but they've attempted - so the fact that they didn't in this case, while being candid and upfront about the source material which I didn't have a problem with, simply tells me that they couldn't be bothered to learn that there was another version.
On the bright side, they didn't screw up "Sleepaway Camp," so there's that.
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