Quote:
Originally Posted by Baguda
Seriously... ouch! Not that I paid too much but I spent way too many hours researching a few dozen movies I'd never heard of to see if they're worth buying. The worst part of KL's site is not seeing any way to sort movies by price, so I had to try to go through every page in their Browse option and try to spot Blurays under $10, and type that into a list. Then I had to search my lists to see if I already had them. There were still too many, so I moved my cutoff price down to $7 leaving me a few dozen to check. Then I read multiple reviews of each movie and KL release over multiple evenings.
I learned a lot about KL Blurays I didn't know. Almost all of them are BD-25, 2.0 DTS HD sound, acceptable but mediocre video transfers (with a few exceptions) provided by the studios, and extras range from nothing to several. I spent a lot of time trying to compare the Mill Creek Blurays I had to the KL equivalents. Most of the time there were only 2-4 detailed KL reviews (typically this site, DVD Talk and sometimes 1-2 other sites). Only on rare occasion did any reviews mention any noticeable video or audio difference mentioned relative to the Mill Creeks I already had, so I didn't rebuy the KL releases on most of those. Some KL Blurays, like Play It to the Bone, have zip zero nada reviews anywhere that I could find. I couldn't find any image of its back cover via Google. TLI (Too Little Info) = no sale.
Decision anxiety set in and I finally placed the order just to get it over with... mostly $4.99 and $5.99 Blurays. I've seen some people wonder why some people procrastinate so long to order. In my case it's because the research takes so many hours it has to be spread over multiple days and sometimes weeks.
Many Blurays are cheaper this sale than ever before, and some in the list are a little more expensive, so I skipped the price increases. Are all of these really going OOP eventually or is this just an inventory thinning sale?
After ordering around 20 Blurays, I was still left with over a dozen potential blind buys I was undecided on after reading the reviews... movies like Boys (1996) with only 1 review, Who Is Harry Kellerman which has several negative reviews, Cemetery Club, Invitation to a Gunfighter, Lovers and Other Strangers, Midas Run, More Dead Than Alive, etc. Too bad none of them are on Netflix or Vudu free with ads to watch first.
For me I usually limit blind buys to $6 for a Bluray (or $3 for a DVD) and only if reviews I read sound good. If I'm paying in the $6-$10 range ($10 is usually my top limit) it has to be a movie I've seen and really like. I could be mistaken, but there seem to be a lot of KL Blurays under $9 so if you bought every KL Bluray <= $9 wouldn't you buy buying at least a hundred titles at a cost in the thousands?
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Transfers on KL Blu-rays can definitely differ in quality, but many of them are great, some even stunning, and even the "worst" ones that I have encountered (i.e. bought with my own money) are
not even close to putting me off of enthusiastically buying from this company and spreading the word about them to every serious film lover whom I can. It is true that some KL releases don't have the most glorious transfers, but for anyone to say that most of their transfers are mediocre just doesn't seem fair to me. At least, that has not been my experience with buying many, many of their Blu-rays (more than any other single company in my collection, including Criterion and Shout/Scream Factory, which is saying something for me).
One of the major reasons that I support KL so very avidly is that they bring a
very large number of movies to Blu-ray, and often,
keep them readily available, for years and years, on the format-- movies that other companies, including very large and rich movie companies, would
never take the time to release on Blu-ray, even when they were responsible for the initial releases of these films to cinemas decades ago! It is truly a crime how so many great films are now being mistreated, by the companies which first brought them to public attention, but which now are content to let them languish, unavailable to film lovers on Blu-ray, or even on DVD, in some cases. KL has truly stepped in and rescued these films. They have been brought, on Blu-ray and/or DVD, to both older, seasoned film fans, who remember and love these movies from years ago, and to younger film aficionados, who can now discover them for the first time. Not all of the transfers are completely sparkling, 4k restoration-level, Blu-ray quality. However, so many of the transfers are still very good, and without KL, I would not have even seen, or have been aware of, many of the films which I am now so happy to have in my collection.
Your personal experience with buying from KL may be different than mine. That's certainly possible. I genuinely hope, for you, that you find enough of what you like from them, and that it looks good enough to your eyes, for you to be a satisfied KL customer for years to come. (No, I don't work for them, nor do any of my friends, hehe!) In my experience, KL employees are great people who really care about movies and about taking very good care of their customers. I do greatly dislike mediocre products and poor customer service, having experienced both too many times. KL is tops in my book!
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I enjoy it for that, and it does have some surprisingly gory scenes, especially for a 1980 movie. It's also a groundbreaking slasher film for actually predating most of the slasher films that most people know, such as the original "Friday the 13th" film and all of its many imitators. "To All A Goodnight," though it is definitely a lesser slasher film, also pioneered many of the aspects that, over time, have become slasher film cliches. For example, it largely created (along with "Halloween," from two years earlier) the "you have sex-- you die!" template of the slasher movies that followed it. 
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