Devil’s Bride (1974, Deaf Crocodile)

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The technicians used interpolation in an attempt to remove all splices at each cut on the top of the frame:

And on the bottom:

Sometimes, retouching at the bottom doesn’t match at all, causing explicit screen tearing:

Retouching is so poor that the cement line is still present. Leave the flaw alone if you can’t do a flawless repair:

Frame blending on thrown grapes:

Full-frame interpolation. Not only is it ugly, at full speed, the picture appears to freeze:

See the mark that disappears in the upper-left corner? That’s part of the texture and supposed to be there:

Interpolation:

Interpolated spot repair propagates the scratch:

In motion, interpolation looks completely unnatural. Replacing one flaw with another is not an improvement.

Processed by Lithuanian Film Centre.

Edit 1/20/26 : The color looks absolutely bizarre. Is this really what it actually looks like? (I HAVE MY DOUBTS.)

Demonoid (Vinegar Syndrome)

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No complaints. Video looks good.

I really wish Vinegar Syndrome wouldn’t attach their noisy logo to the end of every movie, though.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, my BD player (Sony BDP-S6700) did not like the disc. About halfway through, it started occasionally dropping frames as if the video was a crude 25->24fps conversion. In slow-mo it looked ok, and when I later checked the files on my PC, they were fine. Anyone else have this problem? Seems that model overheats. Lucky it’s lasted as long as it has. I really don’t want to buy a new player…

Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 2)

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For part 1, click here.

Disc 2 is a lot better, but not without errors.

Hypocrites

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Sunshine Molly

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Too Wise Wives

Microloop. Clipped directly from the BD.
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Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 1)

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Kino’s set is a mixed bag. Some movies look great. Others are restored to death. I’ll be focusing on the latter. I give lots of examples, but this post is by no means comprehensive.

Mixed Pets (1911)

Editing error:

Corrected to 60fps

Frozen, splotchy, misaligned cloning. Terrible in every way:

Some shots are untouched, but frozen cloning is pervasive:

Intertitles look super fake, but this one has an erroneous line peeking through:

Processed by Library of Congress and Dayton Digital Filmworks.

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Le Beau Mec (Altered Innocence)

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Opening titles are very blurry and smoothed, as if de-grained and filtered to death. However, the video soon clears up and is generally very nice all the way to the end.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The notes say that the primary source is the original reversal negative, which looks like it could benefit from more physical cleaning. I’m fine with dirt, but there comes a point when I’m sitting in a theater watching a fine but dirty print, and I want to yell to its owner, “Clean your print!”

I complain, but I still prefer to see dirt instead of artifact-inducing temporal cloning.

There weren’t any repairs that made me stop the disc, but I did catch this spot where a frame was held for the duration of three extra frames:

Frame number in yellow.

Instead of freezing, I’d much prefer to edit the sound, see black frames inserted, or, best, see the original damaged frames.