Barbara Crampton Takes Us Back To Miskatonic In Suitable Flesh

If you're not familiar with Suitable Flesh, allow me to bring you into the fold.  In brief, it's an HP Lovecraft adaptation (specifically of "That Thing On the Doorstep") Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli had been trying to get funded since the 90s.  Think of his Shadow Over Innsmouth project if Dagon never finally got made.  Well, apparently, Barbara Crampton, who's been having a very gratifying scream queen comeback thee days, has enough pull with Shudder now to get a project funded.  So she reached out to Paoli, who gave her the screenplay, which she is now producing and starring in, along with Brian Yuzna, who's executive producing.  It played in a bunch of horror festivals last year, went to Shudder and just now came out on a special edition blu from RLJ (formerly Image) Entertainment.

But, of course, Gordon didn't get to actually direct this.  Instead they enlisted Joe Lynch, who frankly, I was worried about when I saw his name attached.  I mean, Mayhem is perfectly watchable if you don't go in expecting too much, but this is the guy who turned Wrong Turn into a cornball reality TV parody, did that ridiculous hitman flick with Salma Hayek where she breaks the fourth wall to make lame quips and the title Knights of Badassdom speaks for itself.  I was worried.  But Joe Lynch has proven an excellent steward for Stuart's vision.

That's not to say this is 100% the masterpiece that Re-Animator or From Beyond were, but it's better than Castle Freak and absolutely worthy of their company.  Heather Graham, of all people, stars and proves willing to go as far as out as this movie needs her to.  If you know the Lovecraft story, you can anticipate some of the body-swapping hi-jinks everybody gets up to, but of course Paoli and Co. have to crank things up a notch or two before the show's over.  A lot of this plays like a fun Tales From the Crypt episode, with whole cast having fun with its murderous premise.  But then it pushes the envelope with the sex and violence... maybe not quite as gonzo as Gordon would've taken it, but definitely in that same, demented direction.  And they manage not to lose the thread and get silly, helped by composer Steve Moore, who does a nice job capturing the spirit of what Richard Band would've done, if perhaps just a little more subtle.

2024 RLJ BD.

RLJ's blu preserves Suitable Flesh's very wide 2.35:1 aspect ratio.  This is a new release, presumably taken right from a DCP; so there's not a lot for this blu to have gotten wrong and happily they don't.  Things actually look kinda soft, but that may just be down to the look of the film itself (i.e. to look less digital and hue to its 80s predecessors).  Because this is a lot clearer than when I watched it streaming in 1080p, and we've been given a dual-layer disc for a relatively short flick, so I don't think compression would be at issue.  It's always a little tougher to gauge without film grain, how much detail is missing from a modern digital transfer.  Heck, I'd love to see a UHD of this, even without HDR, but generally I think we're lucky to even be getting BDs of these Shudder titles, so I have no complaints.

And we get a nice, bold DTS-HD transfer of the 5.1 track with optional English subtitles.  There's even an audio descriptive track, as well as Spanish and French subtitles, so RLJ has us covered.

And definitely that includes the special features department.  For starters, there's an audio commentary by Lynch, Crampton and co-producer Bob Portal.  Lynch, of course, is co-host of the Movie Crypt podcast, so he's great at doing commentaries, especially with Crampton and Portal to bounce off of.  Then there's a making of, which is fairly substantial.  I was expecting one of those ultra-brief promo featurettes, but this is a good little retrospective with Lynch and most of the cast, reminiscent of the featurettes Scream Factory creates.  Good stuff.  There's also a Zoom-style interview between Lynch and Steve Moore, a look at the storyboards (with a video intro by Lynch), a blooper reel and a couple of bonus trailers (though not the trailer for Suitable Flesh itself).

So this is a really satisfying release of a really satisfying little horror flick: the kind of thing they don't make much of anymore.  Admittedly, if you come in holding this to the extreme expectations of Gordon's all-time greatest moments in cinema, I suppose this could be a little disappointing.  But if you're not at least having fun with this title, you've brought the wrong attitude.  Everybody involved got it right and managed to deliver us one more exciting chapter from what we thought was a long finished necronomicon.

Stuart Gordon's Screaming Empire of Dolls

For my money, Dolls is the best of Stuart Gordon's non-Lovecraftian adaptations, and maybe even better than one or two of those. It already received a pretty nice DVD from MGM, with an excellent OAR transfer and two strong audio commentaries. But still, a special edition with no video extras (i.e. any documentaries, deleted scenes, interviews) feels a little incomplete. So I was happy to see Scream Factory filling that gap when it came time for their blu-ray upgrade.

Update 2/14/15 - 7/47/17: I just picked up an interesting 2011 DVD set from MGM, called 6 Horror Movies.  Dolls is one of those six, so I'm adding it to the comparison.

Update 8/11/23: Arrow has decided to show Dolls a little more love, giving it a fresh 2k scan and all new special features in their fancy new 'Enter the Video Store' set.  Is it enough to justify tracking down a copy of this immediately OOP and very pricey box?  Let's open it up and see.

This film has more of an almost family-friendly, children's' story feel to it, even though it's still a pretty gruesome story. It's a dark and stormy night when a little girl, her father and wicked stepmother (played to the hilt by Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) wind up having to spend the night with a creepy old couple who live in an old, isolated mansion with no telephone. The house is full of Victorian-style porcelain dolls because the old man is a toy maker living in seclusion. A cheerful salesman (Stephen Lee, who you probably remember from Gordon's Pit & the Pendulum) soon also arrives with two colorful punk rock hitchhikers, and they wind up stirring the dolls, who are actually little killer monsters who have a really negative reaction to rude behavior.

Dolls has an interesting production history I didn't realize until watching the extras. Apparently, as they were about to begin filming From Beyond, Charles Band gave him the script to Dolls and asked him to shoot it on the same sets first. So that's why it's not written by Gordon's usual guy, Dennis Paoli (though Brian Yuzna is still on board as a producer). And even though he shot it first, it didn't come out until after From Beyond, because the film took so long in post-production, adding insert shots and especially David Allen's awesome stop-motion imagery of living dolls. Everything here is just about having fun with the horror genre, often with a very classic, early Hollywood feel. The fantasy sequence at the beginning with the killer teddy bear is worth the price of admission alone, one of my favorite horror moments as a kid that still plays just as well watching it again today.

MGM released this as a pretty sweet special edition in 2005.  Remember when they used to put out all those sweet Midnite Movies discs of all their cult and horror titles, and they'd be there on the shelf at all your local stores?  Ah, I miss those days.  Anyway, I've got that here, and it's a two-sided flipper disc, with a fullscreen version on the other side.  I've also got MGM's 2011 6 Horror Movies collection, and its Dolls disc is also a flipper, but loses its fullscreen side in favor of being backed with another of the six films (they do six films on three discs).  Scream bumped this deserving title to blu in 2014 as one of their signature Collector's Editions.  And now in 2023, Arrow has brought the title back as part of their limited 'Enter the Video Store: Empire of Screams' 5-film boxed set.

1) 2005 MGM DVD; 2) 2011 MGM DVD;
3) 2014 Scream Factory BD; 4) 2023 Arrow BD.

Scream Factory's 2014 blu looks great, but they really didn't have to do much beyond taking MGM's already top notch transfer from their original 2005 DVD and putting it on blu.  It's clearly the same master, with identical 1.75 framing, colors, etc.  And unsurprisingly, MGM's 2011 DVD is a precise match for their the 2005 DVD - no differences there.  Scream's blu obviously benefits from the upgrade to high definition of course, making everything cleaner and more attractive, which especially helps in a film like this, with a heightened, stylized look.  But Arrow's latest scan (and encode) is a distinct cut above, with film grain neatly captured and finally making this film look truly filmic for the first time.  But with that said, the adjusted 1.85:1 geometry is just barely perceptible even when directly comparing screenshots, and the colors (it's a shade brighter and cooler), detail, etc are nearly the same across editions.  There were never any issues like edge enhancement, DNR or interlacing down the line that cried out for fixing.  So whether you can appreciate the upgrade will depend almost entirely on your screen size.

2005 MGM DVD.

Oh, and for the curious, the full screen version is another one of those semi-open matte deals. It gives us a little more information vertically, along the bottom. But it cuts off chunks of the sides, too. I suppose they're trying their best to make it look good for 4:3 TVs by splitting the difference; but it winds up being less interesting than a standard open matte, as it doesn't even give us much more picture for curiosity's sake.

The DVDs, both full and wide, offer the original Dolby stereo track with optional subtitles in English, French and Spanish.  Both blus have that stereo mix, in DTS-HD on the Scream and LPCM on Arrow's, and also a new 5.1 remix, in DTS-HD on both blus.  Scream and Arrow also have just the English subtitles.

MGM's DVDs already started strong (yes, the 6-pack retains all the extras from the solo releases, which is absolutely appreciated) with two audio commentaries.  The first is a really informative one by Stuart Gordon and screenwriter Ed Naha. And the second one is a more upbeat cast commentary by Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, Stephen Lee, Ian Patrick Williams and Carrie Lorraine, who played the little girl. The latter might've benefited from a moderator, as it often gets stuck when the actors can't think of anything to say; but they do have a lot to offer when they start gathering momentum.  Besides that, there's the trailer, a photo gallery and storyboard comparison.  All of which Scream carried over to their edition.

Oh, MGM's discs also had an additional commercial for their horror line of DVDs and opened with one of those annoying "YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A HANDBAG" [silly, how else do they think I pay for all their DVDs?] anti-piracy commercials.  Thankfully, Scream let those go.

But the real treat is that they've also created a new 30-minute retrospective documentary called Toys of Terror: The Making of Dolls, featuring interviews with Stuart Gordon, Charles Band, Brian Yuzna, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, Ian Patrick Williams, effects artists Gabe Bartalos, Gino Crognale, and John Vulich. It really does add a lot of depth to the release, and while it is sometimes a little redundant, repeating facts and stories that we already heard in the commentaries, it's kind of fun to hear how Gordon's tale of inspiration has changed over the years.  In the commentary, he and his wife talk about how he was looking at a collection of very old dolls late at night in a museum and thought to himself, wouldn't it be scary if he'd gotten locked inside? In the documentary, he flat out says he was locked inside the museum and had to spend the night with the dolls.

Scream Factory's blu also features a couple bonus trailers, reversible artwork and a slipcover with their then-typical comic book-style cover, which I don't think ever suited these movies.

Happily, Arrow preserves all of that.  And they've added more to boot.  First of, there's an excellent, in-depth interview with the editor, who has a lot of good memories and insight to share about working with Gordon.  And then there's a new audio commentary by David Decoteau (Creepozoids, Nightmare Sisters), "Empire alumnus and friend of Stuart Gordon."  He starts off talking about his connections to Gordon and Dolls through Empire (i.e. he cast Guy Rolfe in Puppet Master 3 based on Gordon's recommendation after working with him in this), but is mostly just a rambling disquisition about his own career.  Curiously, the box credits two moderators, despite Decoteau clearly being alone during this recording.  He has plenty of fun anecdotes, and I still enjoyed the experience, but this is a commentary for fans of Decoteau, not Gordon.  It makes a little more sense when you remember this BD is part of the Empire boxed set, but it's something you'll probably want to bear in mind before dedicating the your evening to it.

Dolls also includes two additional trailers, a fold-out double-sided poster, three art cards and reversible artwork.  It doesn't come with its own booklet, but the set itself includes an 80-page hardbound book with writings on all the films and Empire in general.  That box also comes with a giant slipcover and a replica video store membership card.

So is it worth it?  Well, like I said about Scream's disc in 2015, "it's not some fancy restoration, since we didn't need one here. It's simply the basic boost from SD to HD, plus a nice, new documentary to sweeten the deal.  A very good release for a very good movie."  Well, now we've got the restoration, and it is an improvement.  And the new extras are nice, especially the interview with the editor.  If you love Dolls, this is the ideal version, no question.  We've gone from a very good to great release.  But if you're looking at a $150 EBay price-tag, and you're not particularly interested in the other four films, Scream's blu will still probably prove to be good enough for most folks.

Brace Yourself For the Dentist 1 & 2

It's a great month for Brian Yuzna fans.  We just had a major new From Beyond upgrade from Vinegar Syndrome, and now we've got all new blu-rays of both Dentist movies from Vestron!  And heck, it was just over a month ago they gave us the blu-ray debuts of his Silent Night, Deadly Night movies, too.  Could this mean Progeny is just around the corner?  Now, these aren't technically The Dentists' HD debuts... there have been German mediabooks and dubious Spanish blus before this (and I wouldn't be surprised if they used the same masters), but The Dentist Collection 2-disc set presents their first official US releases, and Vestron has turned them into proper special editions with a bunch of first-class features.

I hadn't seen The Dentist since it debuted on HBO in 1996, and the sequel since I rented it from Blockbuster in '98.  I've never been super enthusiastic about them, but I remember Corbin Bersen being pretty great in the titular role, and the first film having an entertaining madcap vibe.  And it's a killer premise - who hasn't felt at least slightly terrorized by a trip to the dentist?  Still, I remembered them as largely perfunctory slashers, and I wouldn't have bothered with The Dentist Collection if it wasn't for the extras (if nothing else, the story behind the making of these movies should be interesting) and the great price Vestron sells these at (I got mine on release day for $11.99 at Best Buy).  But having revisited them, and in widescreen for the first time, I have to say I'm quite glad I did.

The original Dentist especially is not just a slasher; it isn't the lower budget Dr. Giggles with dental-specific puns I feared.  For one thing, it's based on a screenplay by Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli.  And instead of a bunch of generic partying teens running afoul of a serial killer, it's a real (demented) character study told from the perspective of a dentist obsessed with eradicating decay... from teeth, from his clothing, from his marriage.  Events pile up and eventually he's left trying to cover up a series of murders he's committed at his dental office, from his patients and staff alike.  It's even more madcap than I remember.  The supporting cast is packed with great character actors like Molly Hagan, Earl Boen and a young Mark Ruffalo.

Not that it doesn't have its flaws.  By the third act, it loses its motivation and stops building to a meaningful climax so much as just adds a random series of extra events.  And there's a whole subplot with Ken Foree as a police detective on Bersen's trail that only serves to pull you away from the drama and make you sit in an empty police procedural.  From the extras, we learn that most of these additions were done in a rewrite by another, and it makes me wish they'd stuck more closely to the original story.  I'm not saying all the changes are bad or that they were completely wrong in their assessment that the original script needed work (I've never read it, after all), but I think they've thrown out at least some of the baby with the bathwater.  Still, forgetting about what could have been and just accepting what we actually got: what we have here is a lot of fun and consistently rewarding little horror flick.

The Dentist 2, though, not so much.  Gordon and Paoli didn't have a hand in this one, and it shows.  It's still not a generic slasher - Yuzna and especially Bernsen bring a lot of great energy to the show.  It's nice that they follow the story of the original enough to bring back a second key character besides just Bersen's.  Clint Howard pops in for a good scene.  But this is basically just a generic thriller with the Dentist IP haphazardly poured on top of it, losing most of the magic of the first film to fit the mold of a hundred other DTV little pot boilers, winding up somewhere in between The Stepfather 2 and 3.  It's not a film I'd buy on its own, but it's great to get it in support of the original feature.

2023 Vestron BD.

In one of the audio commentaries, Yuzna mentions looking at this film in 4k, but I really don't believe that's what this is.  Both Dentist movies seem to be from old high def masters (which, after all, is frequently Vestron's MO).  But, still, for the two Dentist movies in a $12 double-feature, it's fine.  They look reasonably good - The first film is ever so slightly pillarboxed to 1.77:1, and the second is windowboxed to 1.90:1.  Both were shot on 35mm, but grain is merely hinted at, represented more by soft digital noise than actually captured grain.  But the image is clear and generally free of defects.  There's light print damage, mostly on the first film, but nothing distracting.

Both discs present the original 2.0 mix in lossless DTS-HD with English, HoH and Spanish subtitle options.

Before I get into the weeds of the features, let me just warn you that the extras on the first movie's disc spoil the Hell out of Part 2, so watch both movies first before coming back to the goodies.  Seriously, that was pretty careless, and I'm frankly a little disappointed in Mr. Felsher.  But that's really my only criticism, because it's all great stuff.  Both films feature audio commentaries by Yuzna and his effects supervisor who are very open about all the pros and cons of their experiences with these films.  Would you believe Chevy Chase and Bruce Campbell both came very close to landing the role of the dentist?  I'd love to see those movies, although I still wouldn't trade what Bersen gave us for them.

Bersen is also quite forthcoming in his on-camera interview.  He's a great sport and I'm glad Vestron was able to get him to come in for this.  We also get the effects team from the first film in a joint featurette, Dennis Paoli who I always love to hear from, Part 2's Jillian McWhirter and producer Pierre David.  They're all great interviews; don't skip any of 'em.  And we get two more of those composer/ isolated score tracks Vestron has consistently crafted, this time also with DoP Levie Isaacks and editor Chris Roth.  I'm happy to see these tracks branch out into more than just the music.  There are also stills galleries and trailers for each film, and the set comes in a glossy slipcover.

The Dentist Collection started out as something I just picked up because it was cheap.  But having watched it now, I'd recommend it at twice the price.  The first movie in particular is better than I expected/ remembered, and Vestron has done a lot to make this a really satisfying package.

H.P. Lovecraft's From Beyond: Dragon to Vinegar Syndrome

We may've completed the Re-Animator trilogy, but we haven't run out of Brian Yuzna/ Charles Band co-productions of H.P. Lovecraft stories by Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, scored by Richard Band and starring Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton yet. And while From Beyond might not be quite the film the original Re-Animator was, it's pretty damn close. And it's got just as interesting a history on disc as the rest of 'em.

Update 9/27/15 - 2/11/23: And that history just got more interesting, as Vinegar Syndrome has upgraded From Beyond to 4k UHD, in a packed 3-disc set.

A fun fact about From Beyond: the original Lovecraft story is so short, that it's pretty much adapted in this film's pre-credits sequence. Everything after that, then, is extrapolation and invention. And inventive it is. It's a wild and imaginative story that stays true to pretty much everything that was great about Re-Animator in terms of tone, style, performance, etc. The only thing that holds it back, maybe, is that it's so much further out there. Re-Animator obviously had a supernatural element to it: you can't just inject dead people with green goo and have them sit up and start walking around again. But this film has a whole other dimension, shape shifting monsters and all kinds of craziness. It's still got a sci-fi, and of course Lovecraftian base, but it's really over the top, including the characters. So that's what keeps this film from being quite as top shelf as their first endeavor - Jeffrey Combs becoming a brain-eating monster isn't quite as intellectually satisfying as his coldly intellectual portrayal of Herbert West. But on the other hand, in terms of crowd-pleasing over the top effects and general B-movie shenanigans, this movie manages to take it even further, which is saying something!

The story, uh, well let's see. Two scientists discover that sonic vibrations can stimulate a gland the human brain to see another dimension. So they create a machine to do so, and find out it's full of nasty creatures and quickly shut it down. That's pretty much where Lovecraft ends. It's pretty much a "could you imagine?" scenario. But in the film, one of the scientists is changed by the experience and goes back, turning into a shape-shifting creature that wants to absorb more people. The other scientist, Combs, winds up in a mental institution because they think he killed scientist #1. But his doctor, Crampton, wants to take him back to the scene and discover the truth. Of course, she has no idea just how bonkers the truth is, and soon the three of them (including Dawn of the Dead's Ken Foree as Bubba, the cop who's there to supervise) are also changed by the machine and can't stop summoning back the original, sadistic doctor. In short, the whole movie's delightfully crazy and backed by a ton of talent.

So, for a long time, this film wasn't available on DVD, despite having a very strong reputation. Part of that may've been due to the fact that this film was known to be a cut down version of an even more extreme director's cut that had never been released, and included scenes like an infamous eyeball sucking. The German label Dragon put it out in 2003, though, and even made a bit of a special edition out of it. And despite it being full screen, that was pretty much the one to own until 2007 when MGM amazingly stumbled upon cans of the lost film and Gordon was able to restore it. Apparently, it's not 100% - there are still bits of his director's cut missing; but he was able to restore a bunch of it including, yes, the eyeball suck. That was quite a happy release, I must say, featuring a bunch of new exciting extras as well. Finally a definitive DVD release! And when it became blu-ray time, who else but Scream Factory had the connection to MGM's catalog to make create an even larger special edition? But now in 2023, that MGM master is looking a bit dated. So now Vinegar Syndrome is here to usher us into the latest format, newly restored in HDR from the original camera negative on 4k Ultra HD.

1) Dragon DVD; 2) MGM DVD; 3) Scream Factory DVD; 4) Scream Factory BD;
5) Vinegar Syndrome BD; 6) Vinegar Syndrome UHD.

So, there's six shots per because the Scream Factory release is a DVD/ BD combo pack, and VS is a BD/ UHD pack. It's a pretty natural progression down the whole line. Dragon's disc is fullscreen at about 1.30:1, but it's not entirely an open/ closed matte situation, since it does have extra info on the top and bottoms but is missing quite a lot more on the sides. Once MGM gets it, though, it's properly matted to 1.85(or technically, more like 1.83ish):1 with much more vivid colors. But then it drops the letterboxing and opens back up to 1.78:1 again once Scream Factory gets their hands on it for their DVD. Otherwise the images are fairly identical. Obviously I prefer the OAR of MGM's disc, but it's a literally slim distinction, and the upgrade to HD is much more important.

Not that it's a huge boost, to be honest. I'm pretty sure Scream's just used MGM's high def master that they created back in 2007, so it's not floor show-level impressive. But it does sharpen things up and clear away compression lumps, giving the film a cleaner and more realistic look on blu. So it's a genuine step up to HD, but the minimum distance that step could take.  But now we've got VS's all new 4k scan - and hey, look, film grain magically appears!  Also, VS has re-framed the film to its proper 1.85:1 AR, and pulled out to reveal more picture along all four sides in the process.  Now it really looks like film; and only holds even truer on the UHD.  The HDR colors look more natural (or more unnatural, when it comes to the crazy pink and blue dimension crossing scenes), and aspects of the image that are blown out, like the papers on the desk behind them in the second set of shots, have all of their visual information restored.  This is a super satisfying upgrade.

1) Scream Factory BD; 2) Vinegar Syndrome UHD.

Oh, but I should talk about this, too: VS's new release comes with a disclaimer about the composited footage, which comes from a 35mm workprint, and how they went to extra lengths to retain its original qualities as best they could.  But that's obvious just from looking at it.  Grain is reasonably hinted at in these shots on the SF, but it's a stronger scan now, and all that much clearer on the UHD.  You can see that SF cleaned up some film damage, which is back on VS's presentation (notice the black marks around Jeffrey's upper hand), but I'll take that trade any day.  Oh, and VS has also matted theirs to 1.85:1 to match with the rest of their transfer.

The Dragon DVD just offered a standard stereo track (plus a 5.1 mix of the German dub), which MGM upgraded to a Dolby 4.0 mix. Scream gives both a 2.0 and 5.1 mix, in DTS-HD on the blu, both of which VS keeps. MGM, Scream and VS also include optional English subtitles.

There's plenty of extras on hand, too. Dragon started us off with two interviews: Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna. They're pretty good, but clearly recorded at some convention with omnidirectional mics, so the background sound really overcrowds the speakers. It also had a little booklet, but the text is all in German. MGM scrapped those and instead assembled a kick-ass commentary with Gordon, Yuzna, Combs, and Barbara Crampton, plus a short featurette on the restoration of the found footage and brief on-camera interviews with Gordon and Richard Band.  They also had some storyboard comparisons and a photo gallery.

Scream has all the MGM extras, plus a second audio commentary with Dennis Paoli. Writers are usually skipped over for commentaries, so that was a really nice surprise. They also created a 23+ minute featurette on the special effects, and on-camera interviews with Crampton, Combs and Charles Band. Plus they finally added the long conspicuously absent trailer. It adds up to a very satisfying, well-rounded special edition fans should love.

Re-Resonator: Looking Back at From Beyond

But Vinegar Syndrome must really want us to double-dip, because they came loaded for bear.  First of all, they have almost all of the special features from the MGM/ Scream Factory releases.  They're just missing the short featurette where Gordon (plus the telecine artist and a guy from Sony) speaks about how they found the lost footage ("this film had been castrated, and now it's got its balls back") and restored.  This is a shame because it answers a lot of fans' questions about these releases and isn't redundant, unlike many of the other extras we'll talk about.

Because VS also has a whole bunch of new material, most significantly, an all-new, feature length documentary on the history of From Beyond.  That's right, it's a whole new movie in itself, that talks to pretty much all the surviving major players, from the stars to Yuzna and Paoli, plus some people we never got to hear from before, like the editor even the foley artist.  It's enough that many fans might not even feel compelled to put in the third disc and explore the rest of the interviews.  But there's plenty, because VS has also ported over all of the interviews from Second Sight's UK edition.  So there's another interview with Gordon, another interview with Paoli and another interview with Crampton.  So I love how thorough it is, but it's also redundant and overkill.  Unsurprisingly, these guys mostly have the same memories to share about the film no matter which home video company was interviewing them.  I would advise just picking and choosing what you're most intrigued by rather than plowing through it all.  VS's release also includes reversible artwork and the first 7000 copies come in a limited edition slipcover.

We've wound up with a pretty ideal special edition. It's nice to hold out hope for the rest of the cut footage to be found, but realistically, this is surely as good as it's going to get, and better than I ever would've dared to imagine us getting twenty years ago when Dragon's DVD felt like a godsend.