https://roninflix.com/collections/code-red-blowout Everything I want I've already got but I hope it's of interest to some of you.
Great news everyone, Dark Force is going to fuck up putting Forced Entry on BD again! They announced that they got the negative, which supposedly contains all but 2 minutes of footage from the VHS version, but then shortly after confirmed that they couldn't be bothered to put the extra 2 minutes back into the movie. Didn't the previous BD have some VHS sourced footage included in the movie? In other Dark Force news they've pulled the Magdalena release altogether because apparently dealing with the defective slipcover was too much for them. Not sure why they couldn't have just thrown out the slipcovers and sold the movie without them but whatever, now I have a rare release that will surely be worth a lot of money someday! Dark Force has, relatively speaking, been acting like a normal label for a while so I guess we were overdue for some idiocy and wound up getting a double dose.
Fucking idiots. Isn’t it better to have a complete uncut version, even if the quality drops during those two minutes? At least give us the option to choose watching the full uncut by using branching. There is something called AI upscale, that can clean up and sharpen low res video sources. Sure it will never look like HD, but it can improve the image quality a lot. Though this would of course force them to put some actual effort in the release. Something I wish that Shout Factory had done with the uncut footage of F13 part 2. If fans can create excellent fancuts, including VHS footage, why can't these labels go that extra mile?
Yes, but it looks exceptionally bad, above and beyond it's source limitations. Whoever was tasked with converting and/or conforming NTSC-sourced footage into 1080P did an exceptionally poor job, because the footage loses a bunch of frames and comes out really choppy, as a result. Very similar to the SD-inserts in Scream Factory's Hell Night release.
One thing I've recently been told after years of being ignored by labels when suggesting or asking why they can't just use seamless branching for things like this is that it supposedly costs money, in addition to the general BD licensing fee, to use the seamless branching feature on a disc. I don't know for sure if this is true but it wouldn't surprise me and if it is true then it explains why this feature is basically treated like it doesn't exist. Not that I agree with it being so woefully underused but I was glad to finally have a plausible explanation as to why labels might not be using it aside from the fact that it would mean the additional, albeit likely trivial, work of segmenting the footage and creating more than one playlist for the movie. Thanks for confirming, I was too lazy to check last night but could have sworn this was the case.
