Near Dark – Blu-ray Disc Review

February 9, 2010 – 6:07 PM - Posted by: James Segars

Tags: Adrian Pasdar, Bill Paxton, Jenny Wright, Kathyrn Bigelow, Lance H, Lance Henriksen, Lionsgate

has an average rating of 7.0 on IMDb
1080p in AVC MPEG-4 on a 25gb disc
DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio
are very minimal
–
– 1987
– 94 minutes
– Lionsgate
–
This uses 18.1GB for the movie out of 21.1GB total.

Overall Verdict – Give It A Rent First

Buy it for $11.49 @ Amazon.com

— Review written by: James Segars —

Trailer:

The Movie Itself is directed by Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Point Break).

Twenty some odd years before Kathyrn Bigelow would set foot in The Hurt Locker, she was out and about making a western vampire flick, Near Dark. How do the two compare, you might ask. Well, suffice it to say, Bigelow has grown immensely as an artist in the decades between the two films, which is a very nice way of saying that I didn’t care for Near Dark much at all.

But first a brief recap: A young cowboy (Adrian Pasdar) hits on the wrong girl (Jenny Wright) and ends up getting bit and turned into a vampire. He has no choice but to run with her derelict, rag tag family of everlasting delinquents out of a need to feed and ultimately survive. However, he doesn’t share the same blood lust or penchant for violence that the deranged band of vamps has, so a moral dilemma ensues, which begs the question: what’s a good-hearted vampire, to do?

Without going into any more detail or spoiling the ending for you, I’ll get right to the point. This film has heart, but the execution is all wrong. It is unfocused, meandering, and not the slightest bit compelling. I can see how the original concept might have been appealing on paper, but the end result is far from exciting. In order for the film to work, I think that Caleb’s (Adrian Padar) father should have been removed from the story entirely. Sure he becomes relevant in the final minutes of the film, but the entire resolution feels half-baked, tacked on, and completely unnecessary.

I realize it sounds like I’m pulling this film to pieces, and I suppose I am, but it’s really only because I love her later work so much (particularly The Hurt Locker), and I’m amazed that these two films — Hurt Locker and Near Dark — came from the same creative mind. There seems to be little to no consistency between the two, in any way. In the end though, I really did enjoy this film for what it was worth. There were moments that were great, and there were moments that were awful, but I look at this film as if it were a wonderfully awful student film. You can see the passion, and the promise, but the execution of the ideas and the overall result is rather lacking. In other words, the substance is mostly there, but the form simply hasn’t been perfected yet. Then again, if the film had been directed by someone other than Bigelow, it might have been a total wash.

Rest assured though, Kathryn Bigelow’s latest (Oscar nominated) film, The Hurt Locker, is flawless in virtually every way, proving that she has long since graduated from the directorial days of Near Dark, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

Video Quality on this release is 1080p using the AVC MPEG-4 codec on a BD-25‘s (25 gigabyte single layer Blu-ray Disc) presented in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

At first glance, Near Dark looks passable, maybe even great for an 80′s flick, but if you look deeper (peep the screenshots below) you will find that not all is fine and dandy on the surface. What seems to be the primary culprit is the pervasive use of digital noise reduction. While I was watching it in motion, the defect was far less apparent to me because I simply attributed the lack of fine object detail to the low lighting photography, and poor upkeep on the film stock. However, it seems that is not the case, or at least not the case entirely. No, somewhere down the chain a rather liberal amount of DNR was applied to this picture, resulting in an overly smooth, waxy looking image that is stripped of all natural grit, grain and substance. Some people won’t care, or hell, they might not even notice, but I find this degree of DNR application to be very offensive. Be warned.

Sadly, in other areas, the video presentation doesn’t make great strides either. The black level throughout the film is rather dim and light — or should I say “near dark” — which consistently pulled me out of the film. I’m not about to suggest crushing the blacks, and ultimately sacrifice picture detail, all in the name of deeper/inkier blacks, but it is paramount in a horror movie that the level of black be as deep as possible to draw you in, and set the stage.

On the upside, there didn’t seem to be much, if any use of edge enhancement filters, and the print itself seemed to look rather clean, which was a nice surprise. I fully expected the frame to be littered with specks of dirt and the occasional hair from time to time, but so far as I could see, it was more or less spotless.

All in all, Near Dark isn’t a groundbreaking visual achievement, and its offensive DNR scrubs whatever fine object detail was originally captured on film off the frame and into the netherworld or lost image data. However, it’s far from the worst visual presentation I’ve ever seen, but then again, it’s pretty far from good too. And so I see no other reason to give this anything higher than a “2 Star Rating” for overall video quality.

Audio Quality on this release is presented in DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio.

Oh brother, where art the high def goodness? Not here, that’s for sure. Sadly, Near Dark’s lossless mix sounds flat, stagey and altogether harsh. Flat because the track is hardly what I would call dynamic, and the LFE (Low Frequency Effects) track rarely gets put to use. Stagey because the dialog lacks any degree of depth or realism in its reproduction/delivery. And harsh because the sound effects littered throughout — and the musical score — are all mixed too high (hot) or simply lack clarity and depth, resulting in loud, one-dimensional crashes, slashes, gunshots and explosions that grate on your eardrums.

I wasn’t expecting a revelatory mix, but there are many other films from the 80′s (particularly the late-80′s) that sound better than this does here. Granted, the film had a relatively small budget, but just because you have a small budget doesn’t mean you should sacrifice sound quality in the mix.

Whatever the reason, the lossless mix here does the best it can with the shoddy source material, but the results are far from pleasant. Fans of the film that know the mix inside and out will likely appreciate — perhaps adore — this new lossless mix, but I on the other hand, a newcomer to Near Dark found it to be rather unpleasant. Nonetheless, there are no glaring errors or defects, and I can’t imagine the mix sounding any better than it does here, so I’m willing to give the audio presentation a “2.5 Star Rating” for overall audio quality, which I think may be a tad too generous but what the hell, I’m feeling generous.

Bonus Materials on this release are presented in Standard Definition video, using Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo.

• Commentary with Director Kathryn Bigelow
• “Living in Darkness” (47:17) – A rather long featurette. I’m guessing most fans of the film will have seen this before, but if you haven’t you might find something worthwhile here to watch.
• Deleted Scenes (1:18) – A single deleted scene that was shot entirely in infrared in order to simulate the vampire’s night vision. I feel like this should have been left in. It looks pretty cool.
• Trailer 1 (1:33)
• Trailer 2 (2:08)

Overall, I don’t think we get anything new, but the supplied supplements were more than enough for me to remain satisfied. However, die-hard fans will likely be upset that no new material made its way to this release and HD-junkies (like us) will certainly turn their noses up at the SD resolution of the bonus material.

Blu-ray Disc packaging:

Screenshots:

NOTE: The full-sized 1920×1080 files are in a .PNG file format and uncompressed. Bare with the slow loading times, keep in mind these files are at least 1MB (1 megabyte) in size each.

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