The Fog (1980) 4K UHD

[Matt89]

So mine showed up yesterday, wow these are really nice sets. Had to check out the climax of The Fog that everyone's been talking about and wow yeah, the compression in that shot is shockingly bad. YouTube-level bad. There is also a bit of weird grain on the first daytime shot with Andy on the beach. It looks sort of frozen, so I popped the blu-ray in to compare and it seems to be better resolved on the blu-ray but I feel like the issue is more to do with the shot itself. Overall though, honestly it's a gorgeous transfer. The blu-ray is really nice too (it definitely has better compression in those select scenes and it's a big step above the SF transfer) but the film grain on the UHD is glorious.

I didn't get home till late last night and both The Fog and They Live had been delivered, as well as the UHD of 2001, so I won't be able to check these out till tonight. But I thought The Fog looked really really good for the most part.

Couple minor gripes about the packaging. It really is rather difficult to get the contents back into the box, they probably could've made the sets a tiny bit thicker so it wasn't such a struggle to get the contents in and out. However, there was no damage to either of my sets. Secondly, I feel like they really overused the artwork. I actually prefer it to the original theatrical poster with Jamie Lee, but did they need to use it on not only the cover, but the cover of the booklet, the poster, the UHD and both blu-rays? It's overkill. I feel like they could've changed it up a bit, used the original poster for the cover of the booklet or something or change up the disc art. Anyway, it's still a beautiful set and I prefer them over the look of the SF editions.

Just a shame about the compression in those few scenes. Otherwise I actually think The Fog looks gorgeous in 4K. The colours, the wide shots of the California coast, the shots on the ocean. This is one beautiful-looking restoration.

~Matt