Halloween II (1981) 4K Dolby Vision review, US Shout Factory UHD disc. HDR metadata: Mastering display colour primaries: DCI-P3. Mastering display luminance levels: 1000/0.0001 max/min nits. Maximum Content Light Level: 9072 nits. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: 623 nits. Disc type: UHD100.
Decided to give this another shot after being thoroughly dismissive of the movie, though I still couldn't remember a thing about it when watching EXCEPT for the way that Donald Pleasance pointedly keeps fussing with the lighter throughout the film. I was like "gee, I wonder why that is?". Gotta say that I really enjoyed the movie this time around! I won't be rushing out to buy the other 'classic' sequels just yet - though Halloween III might be one - but yeah, I dug the creepy vibe and the gorier kills were fun too. It's a far more haphazard film than the first as characters just seem to drift in and out of the story or have no resolution at all, but with that roving Steadicam it still feels like it belongs in such exalted company. The music's good, though at times it reminded me more of The Fog than it did the first Halloween.
Not much officially-reported technobollox to start with for the UHD review except that the movie was shot 35mm anamorphic on 5247, the standard 100-speed (fast-ish but not crazy grainy) motion picture negative of the period. I'm not gonna insult anyone's intelligence by pretending that I know what HII looked like back in the day, but I do at least have the older Universal HD transfer to refer to from the Spain official bootleg Blu-ray. And in broad photographic terms the fact that it was shot anamorphic in nothing but dark exteriors and artificially-lit interiors will always mean that the movie is struggling for sharpness at the source level; there is still detail to be sure, but not an aggressive "pop" (ugh) to it and that's just how it is when using slow anamorphic lenses which you can't drench with light because of your setting. You can open up your aperture to let in more light but that then diminishes your depth of field and increases softness in its own way, making focus pulling progressively trickier, though the DOF varies throughout. There's a tickle of in-camera filtration at certain points too. At least the OG Halloween still had some scenes set in daylight, this has nada except for the final scene of the film...which is bathed in thick fog anyway! They could've pushed the HII negative (developed it for longer) to cheat some more speed from it but I'd expect pushed 5247 to look much grainier than this. Alien is an example of squeezing as much juice from 40-year-old anamorphic 35mm as possible but as the camera doesn't move nearly as much as it does here then they could light it with surety and precision.
Anyhoo, this newest transfer of HII from OG negative adheres to that generally soft appearance but it shows about as much high frequency detail as you're gonna get from this source material. It gives the image a terrific sense of 'solidity' if not outright sharpness, and it means that the deep depth of field in certain shots is able to keep resolving information right into the recesses of the screen. You do still get more fine detail on UHD than the old HD transfer in any case, the old one looks WAY sharper at first glance because of the typical boosting tricks applied by Universal (though I'm amazed they didn't also DNR it to death!) but once you see past that superficiality the UHD looks far more organic and film-like with no dodgy edge halos. The grain also appears to be far less prevalent on this newest transfer but again, the sharpening on the old Uni one is doing its thang. But just because there isn't loads of coarse grain on the UHD doesn't mean it's not there at all, instead there's a layer of finely filmic stuff extending into the image and giving it an authentically organic texture. From looking at capsaholic's comparisons between the UHD and Shout's previous 4K transfer from the interpositive you can see that the grain is more concentrated, for lack of a better term, on the UHD, with less blotchy dye clouds on OG negative (which is fairly typical of an interpositive and dupes in general, the colour noise gets slightly rougher). The new transfer is much more stable than the old one too, those 'haddonfield' titles wibble about from side to side on the old one but only have the gentlest bit of weave on the new one.
As regards colour I've got no kind of reference for what it should or shouldn't be so can only report on what is, and the UHD's palette tends towards something of a greenier hue in exteriors, likely a result of the mercury vapour street lighting that reads as greeny/cyan on film, but with pleasantly warm and rosy skin tones on interiors. Primaries get a nice boost though, reds are verr punchy and blues and greens look purer. The orange hues on the various pumpkin paraphernalia comes across good and strong, though the credit text in the title sequence seem to 'burn out' from orange into a kind of dark yellow colour once they fade in. The fiery finale looks fantastic though, with a deep orange glow that's much improved over its paler, yellower counterparts. I wouldn't say that there was any kind of overriding tint to proceedings, they're more interested in maintaining consistency of colour within the various environments.
The HDR looks great. A massive amount of highlight detail is recovered versus the old HD transfer which is badly blown out in various spots like light fixtures, headlights, even the light bouncing off of the walls inside the hospital (you can see this in one of the capsaholic shots) but then I'd expect such clipping from a telecine that's prolly a couple decades old. The interesting thing is that the new BD which comes with the UHD has virtually the same amount of highlight information as the UHD, it proves that SDR doesn't shear off highlights automatically but if they wanted to push the SDR version brighter then it may well have lost some of it, it helps that it takes place almost exclusively at night. The actual HDR version does inject some more luminance than the new BD though, thankfully it doesn't overcook it just to sell the format (despite what the metadata might indicate!) and it all integrates so well, it adds layers of shaping and depth to the light that the new BD lacks even though it's showing much the same stuff. The showdown with Michael has some genuine intensity to the flames in HDR. And when combined with that tighter rendition of detail then the depth is really 'sold' by this UHD, a few shots had an almost three-dimensional look to them.
Black levels don't run to a deep deep letterbox dark, generally hovering slightly above black, but lightweight greyblack this is not either. There's lots of detail in the shadows and the perceptual effect of the brighter highlights whenever they pierce the imagery only serves to heighten the sense of contrast. The old HD transfer really seems to choke on the darkest scenes like when the kid is in Laurie's hospital room sweet talking her only to find her comatose, you can barely make out his face amidst all the noise and what even looks like a rolling interference pattern on the old BD, but the new transfer not only renders lowlights to be far more intelligible it also greatly reduces that rolling/flickering. Some of that flickering is still there in the UHD, though it's more of a gentle wavering in density rather than the terrible distraction of the old transfer. You might catch it in some other scenes too but don't be alarmed, it's definitely part of the transfer and isn't an encoding or DV problem as such, though there's no telling how the processing of some displays might react to such delicate fluctuations in near-black content.
Ah yes, what of the encoding? I've been very VERY vocal about how bungled I think Shout's new UHD of Halloween is, and even when watching HII in Dolby Vision - combining a full enhancement layer (FEL) with the HDR10 image to provide more visual data - I was initially very sceptical of how this was going to turn out, and that's before we even get to Boobygate. But lo and behold, in DV the compression is essentially faultless. Excellent chroma containment, no outright blocking that I could perceive in the highlights (which is what brings Halloween down so badly) or indeed in the rest of the image, and no pulsing grain. Perhaps the lack of extremely sharp high frequency details and general softer look helped them out, I dunno, but in any case it just works here whereas even in DV Halloween still struggles. I clicked DV off on my Pannysonic 820 player and watched a few bits in HDR10 (not the whole thing though, sorry Phil!) and even there HII still seemed to hold together fairly well, mostly, which again was a surprise after Halloween's UHD had that dreadful I-frame pulsing on the HDR10 layer.
Alas, what HDR10 can't fix are those moments during Pamela Shoop's disrobing in the hot tub sequence. They're blink and you'll miss it-type glitches, that much is true, it's not like the whole scene drops out, but it pixelates to varying degrees every few seconds as she takes off the towel. That's a clear failure of QC and is simply not good enough, it's weird that the glitching seems to concentrate on the parts of the picture where the background colour is different to the greeny hospital walls. But I said that the DV presentation was more or less faultless and that *includes* this scene, for in the interests of science I went back and watched it several times in DV and with the FEL rebuild I literally could not discern anything wrong with it. There's just no glitching there any more, just beautifully encoded grain along with a couple of other pertinent points.
Here's a quick photo comparison slider thingy of how one badly corrupted HDR10 frame looks compared to its DV equivalent and yes, they are the same frame. It's like comparing the Picasso version to the real thing. OBVIOUSLY this image is verr NSFW so viewer discretion (as well as a wad of Kleenex) is advised:
https://imgsli.com/MTAyNjkw
Whaddaya know? I managed to enjoy both film and disc FAR more than I thought I would. It sports a very competent modern 4K transfer that serves the imagery rather than distracts from it, not getting boosted to ungodly levels of "pop" (ugh) for the sake of it. It's another HDR makeover that has benefits intrinsic to that system but which still fits the film like a glove. The compression side of things is a bit trickier, for if you're watching in Dolby Vision with its reconstituted visuals then nothing will be amiss, but for HDR10 viewers with a discerning eye then it's far more problematic just for the Shoop scene alone.
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