Deaf Crocodile’s BD of Benny’s Bathtub (1971) does not have a proper subtitle track, only closed captioning:
Typos:
Poor placement:
Additionally, the timing is poor. Lines appear too early, stay too long, and overlap dialog. All this makes following the movie very difficult.
The included episodes of Cirkleen suffer from the same subtitle problems.
Video quality, though, is very nice.
Two main issues: broken pulldown and microloops. The source print is step-printed and the video was stretched further for the BD, resulting in a very clumpy pulldown. You can see the strobing at the climax is completely broken.
The elements are there for a good presentation. Nice scan, nice encoding, no artifacting, but the technicians didn’t make the effort to fix the pulldown, even taking into consideration that they stretched to 24fps.
Microloops at
The source looks like a circulating repertory print with characteristic dirt buildup. I’m puzzled why Flicker Alley didn’t physically clean it before scanning.
Storm Over Asia runs at 6-24fps and is encoded at 24fps. The included Chess Fever is upscaled.
Click here for the first movie in the set.
For a 2013 movie, I expected this to look better. My guess is an inadequate camera. Look at that aliasing!
The running time is 141 minutes, not the 134 stated on the box.
The first movie in the set that looks good.
However, the subtitles are horrible. There are typos throughout the set, but those for Invasion are the worst.
Another nice transfer.
These are probably fascinating in Farsi, but I was bored, and not having any of it by the time I got to Careless Crime. All the walking, monotonous dialog, and reading was just too taxing. I would be very interested to see Invasion, maybe even Fish & Cat, dubbed in English.
Overall, very nice picture quality. Good grain, looks natural.
However, the 2.0 LPCM sound decodes as surround, not mono. It’s easy to fix, but something that should’ve been caught before the disc was released.
The restoration was also pretty good. I wasn’t noticing any obvious processing artifacts, until, at 1h24m:
Sloppy, 3-frame, quick-reversed, misaligned changeover cue removal (but only one of them). I don’t get the hatred for changeover cues. You’d see them if you went to a screening of a print. They are authentic and accurate. If all that exists has cues, then that’s okay. Leave them alone, especially when the retouching isn’t flawless and invisible.
This was the only restoration artifact I noticed. I’m sure there were more, but they didn’t stick out like this one.
The improper surround sound, though, was a serious error.
Overall, Milestone’s presentation of Filibus (1915) on BD is very nice and free from restoration processing artifacts. However, it has some editing and mastering errors.
During the feature, there are three instances where a blank green image flashes on screen, as if the video tracks used for tinting the titles got misaligned. They occur at 21:57, 25:38, and 25:48, shown below:
I appreciate the new English intertitles and the attempt to emulate the look of film, complete with grain and cement splice jumps.
An easy-to-miss error happens at the very end. The last frame is mistakenly placed at the beginning of the final shot (frame numbers in yellow):
The bonus films included on the BD are hard subbed. Hard subs are always disappointing, but if you’re going to use them, the safe area still matters:
I watched it with the fine Mont Alto score, but I recommend listening to Donald Sosin’s with Joanna Seaton’s vocals first. Sosin wrote a delightful theme song that fits the pulpy and slightly goofy film wonderfully.
Filibus is transferred at 18 fps and encoded at 24 fps. Its intertitles run at 24 fps.