Tag Archives: Vinegar Syndrome

Infernal Rapist (Vinegar Syndrome)

Very nice video. No complaints.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, it’s over-subtitled and the translation is lacking.

We don’t need the entire Lord’s Prayer subtitled. It’s a pretty standard execution scene. Just this line, ending with an ellipsis, is enough.

The Spanish word for “no” is “no.” Do not subtitle cognates.

The title character’s nickname (“El Gato”) should be “The Cat” in English. (Though, in this example, the cop simply calls him, “Gato.”) We say “Mack the Knife,” not “Mack Messer.”

Coloring the subtitles pale yellow is a nice touch. I approve.

Demonoid (Vinegar Syndrome)

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…

Magic Crystal (Vinegar Syndrome)

A light touch, but there’s so much damage, that it would’ve looked fine without any repairs. This is a bad restoration not because damage remains, but because the repairs are ugly, creating their own artifacts.

Interpolation:

Hideous interpolated eyes.

Interpolated spot repair. These scenes are over an hour into the movie. Up to this point, I wasn’t even noticing repairs bad enough to take notes until large areas of grain suddenly started warping as if due to terrible compression:

Frozen temporal cloning:

Opening and end credits use some other source, which looks like a recreation, de-grained and filtered to death. Check out that aliasing!

The included interviews use clips from this older, altered source. First, a sample from VS’s version:

Vinegar Syndrome BD

Now, this older version, clipped from the Wen Chao-Yu interview. No wires and no grain:

Previous release.

It could have been so much worse.