Gremlins 30th Anniversary

[Geoff D]

Just watched this again ('tis the season), and I'm still not understanding why the video quality gets such a bad rep. The blacks are a bit thin and it's clearly not some razor-sharp new scan off of the neg, but the colour's really nice and there's still plenty of fine detail, I never noticed the wires on the decomposing Stripe puppet until now. It's Warners, so as always it could do with more bits to help out the grain, but overall I liked what I saw. The sound's pretty active too.

[edit]From the age of the movie and from the looks of it I guessed that Gremlins was shot on 5293 (confirmed with a glance at IMDB) which was never the prettiest looking high-speed stock and didn't deliver especially contrasty images. Even anamorphic with its bigger negative area struggled with it (see Tootsie), never mind something shot in Academy and matted down to 1.85 which Gremlins was. So the movie will always look a bit rough around the edges and Warners current Blu-ray encode does about as good a job as could be expected IMO.

The film itself is as brilliant as ever, it's laden with scares and laughs and more easter eggs than a genre fan could count. I love the little montage in Dorry's tavern the most, with the flasher, the Stevie Wonder gag, the dude at the table drowning his sorrows cheered up with a hand puppet, the one dressed like a gangster's moll during the poker game, I'm laughing even as I'm typing this. Wonderful film.