It looks...... alright.
At first glance I thought I was seeing film grain, but after a minute I started jumping through the movie a bit and decided against that notion.
Best guess... the source is a decent SD master, then some upscaling and sharpening was applied, then a layer of noise was added over the image to simulate film grain.
The end credits are clearly a standard definition source - you can see the deinterlacing artifacts through the entire credits plus there is a weird unnatural judder that you can also see in the prime video standard def stream, plus the obvious look of upscaled standard definition text.
If you look really close you can see some of the judder artifacts from the sd version throughout the movie as well, but not nearly as pronounced - look for a stationary object and you may be able to spot it shifting slightly up and down (example, just after an hour and eight minutes - watch he rows of books in the office). Once you see it, it's hard to not constantly spot, unfortunately.
For whatever reason, the standard def master of the film must have had some interlacing issues. The Blu-ray handles it WAY better than what was available on prime streaming which made the movie nearly unwatchable.
The intro credit titles also appear to be standard def, and you can see the telltale signs of standard definition there as well - even over the "hd" image when the background isn't black.
The other red flag I noticed - the look of natural film grain ebbs and flows through a movie, depending on lighting conditions, film stock, etc - here the look is constant throughout, as one would see with a blanket noise filter added to every frame.
Colors are muted throughout like a standard definition master as well.
The disc has a 4x3 version of the movie and a 16x9. Avoid the 16x9 version - it appears to be the 4x3 version with the top and bottom cropped off. As a result the 16x9 version just looks worse overall since it is basically zoomed in. A real 16x9 transfer would have the sides opened up slightly and be framed properly. Just forget the 16x9 option even exists.
Video bitrate is around 15 to 16Mbps on each version. Not a great bitrate for real HD material but I didn't really notice any objectionable macroblocking.
English audio is.. acceptable. Pretty clearly also from an old tape master, it's on par with the prime video streaming version.
Both audio tracks are 256kbps dolby digital... Higher bitrate really wouldn't have mattered with the source material though.
There are no subtitles, but prime video did have English subtitles available.
I guess Fokus Media did the best they could with what they had to work with, and honestly it fares better than most standard definition upscales (I'm looking at you, Slasher Video and your atrocities). I think adding the noise layer to simulate grain actually creates a decent viewing experience - a bit of an optical illusion for your mind to create the look of film, to almost create detail where detail doesn't exist and hide the low resolution source.
All that being said, the disc is still a good watch - but only because there simply isn't anything better available right now - so for that I give the disc a thumbs up, but grudgingly. The movie is cute and worth checking out.
Maybe one day we will get a real HD transfer of this late 80s video store hidden gem.
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