News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Monday, July 16, 2012

Four Flies on Grey Velvet: Shameless vs. Koch Media

5:42 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

Once the most elusive of all Dario Argento's gialli, it now seems as if every man and his dog has a version of FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET either on store shelves or in the pipeline. While the likes of OPERA, SLEEPLESS and THE CARD PLAYER have yet to make their high definition debut, FOUR FLIES now has now been released twice on BD, first in the UK by Shameless Screen Entertainment back in January of this year, and now by German label Koch Media, who have treated the film to a deluxe 3-disc digibook (the film on both BD and DVD, plus a DVD for the extras), similar to their recent release of INFERNO.

FOUR FLIES has, to say the least, a troubled history. Originally, it was available only on horrendous-looking bootleg tapes and DVDs, owing to complicated rights issues. Then in 2007, German distributor Retrofilm somehow got their hands on a beat-up old print, scanned it and put it out on a DVD that was of questionable legality and both looked and sounded like a dog's dinner, but was by anyone's standards measurably better than any previous version. This was suplanted a year later by another DVD release, this time by US distributor Mya Communication. Although its English language audio track was botched beyond belief and it was missing around 40 seconds of footage at the start and end of reels due to damage to the source materials, it was a revelation: transferred in HD from the original camera negative, for the first time outside of a movie theatre FOUR FLIES actually looked half-way respectable.

I mentioned the January 2012 BD release by Shameless briefly, but didn't get a chance to do a fully in-depth review of it. In brief, Shameless used the same HD transfer as Mya, but filled in the gaps where footage was missing by dropping back to the grotty old standard definition source used by Retrofilm, offering viewers the option to watch this less than seamless presentation of the film or skip the damaged section in the same manner as the Mya DVD. It also featured a vastly better English audio track than any previous release, with significantly improved clarity and none of the excessively low pitch afflicting the Mya disc. It was a release with problems, however. Most egregiously, the English language track suffered from moments of severe distortion in the last 10 minutes of the film, and an attempt to remove a visual defect during the extreme slow motion shots at the climax (a black horizontal line running across the screen) simply made matters worse. There was also an issue with the gamma being slightly elevated throughout, resulting in some very noticeable posterisation in some of the darker scenes.

The Koch Media release again uses the same incomplete HD transfer, but takes a slightly different approach so solving the issue of the missing footage. Commendably, Koch have gone back to a print source and actually retransferred much of this footage in high definition. The source isn't ideal, with a fair amount of print damage and an overly dark, contrasty appearance, but it's worlds better than the SD gunk used on the Shameless release (Shameless, Koch). Unfortunately, there are two instances in which Koch either haven't bothered to or haven't been able to replace the SD footage with the new, improved HD material: these are a few seconds of Roberto (Michael Brandon) walking past the river at 00:21:38 (Shameless, Koch) and, more problematically, 35 seconds of Roberto talking to Dalia (Francine Racette) starting at 00:52:19. The latter was less of an issue on the Shameless BD because the material in SD amounted to only a few seconds at the start of the scene, after which Shameless simply switched back to the HD version mid-shot. With the exception of the aforementioned river shot, however, Koch's approach has been not to jump between two different sources mid-shot. As a result, the Koch version remains in grubby, heavily cropped SD until the shot ends (Shameless, Koch). This approach is used throughout the disc, in all other instances, the switch is between two different HD sources rather than an SD and an HD one (Shameless, Koch). What it means is that, despite Koch's efforts to source a print and scan it in HD, their version actually ends up having MORE "compromised" footage than the Shameless version. I'm not really sure how I feel about that... or about the fact that, unlike Shameless, Koch haven't provided any means of watching the film with the compromised footage simply skipped over.

These discrepancies aside, the two releases are actually reasonably comparable in terms of picture quality. The Koch release improves on the Shameless version in most respects, but it would be a mistake to describe this as anything of a revelation because the Shameless disc already looked pretty good to begin with. It was certainly miles away from noise-riddled monstrosities like THE CAT O' NINE TAILS and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and... well, to be honest, the vast majority of all Italian cult titles released thus far on BD. The Koch release has the correct gamma, meaning that the image appears darker and the posterisation issues noted in the Shameless version are gone (Shameless, Koch). Colours are also slightly richer across the board, though to what extent that's a result of the gamma change isn't clear (Shameless, Koch). Neither release appears to have had any additional dirt and scratch removal or grain reduction applied, and both suffer from the exact same occasional DVNR errors (Shameless, Koch). Compression is slightly improved on the Koch release too, though the differences aren't significant enough to be a deal-breaker (Shameless, Koch). Bizarrely enough, for some reason there are two copies of the film on the Koch disc. The only one actually accessible from the disc menu is a 25.6 GB file of the entire film; the other is 13.6 GB, has no audio and cuts out just after the one-hour mark. I'm not even going to attempt to theorise as to why this is sitting on the disc taking up space - apart from the lack of audio and the fact that it cuts out part-way through the film (minor quibbles, I'm sure you'll agree), I can't see any difference in content between this and the 25.6 GB file.

Audio-wise, both versions have English and Italian language options, although only the Shameless release offers English subtitles of any kind. They're not perfect and suffer from some noticeable errors (the more blatant of which is that the film's title is subtitled as "Four Flies OF Grey Velvet"), but they're perfectly serviceable if you want to watch the film in Italian. With only German subtitles provided on the Koch release (they are enabled by default if you select English or Italian audio from the menu, but you can disable them with your remote), the Italian track is going to be out of bounds for those who don't speak the language. This also creates a slight issue when it comes to the killer's confession during the climax, some of which wasn't recorded in English, meaning that the English track dips in and out of Italian during this scene, much like DEEP RED. On the Shameless disc, the requisite lines are subtitled in English; on the Koch release, they predictably aren't. On the plus side, the extreme (and potentially speaker-damaging) distortion that was intermittently present during the final 10 minutes of the English track on the Shameless disc (primarily affecting the Italian dialogue segments but also a large explosion just before the end credits) is mercifully absent from the Koch version.

These glitches aside, however, the English track on the Shameless disc actually sounds significantly better than its Koch counterpart in terms of clarity. I was struck by how crisp and clear the Shameless disc sounded when I first got it, not just in comparison to the notoriously botched Mya DVD but also compared to just about every other Italian cult title of this vintage. The Koch disc sounds, dare I say it, far closer to how I would have EXPECTED the film to sound. The Koch version also suffers from what I can only describe as a heck of a lot of "warbling" (not an audiophile, sorry) during the music that plays before and after the car crash that closes the film. (The Italian track is also affected on both discs, suggesting the music came from the same compromised stem.) Neither version sounds bad per se, but were it not for the almost crippling glitches in the final ten minutes, I suspect I'd be recommending the Shameless version unconditionally.

...So yeah, which version to recommend? They both have their ups and downs. The nature of the available materials being what they are, any presentation of FOUR FLIES seemed destined to be compromised. Myself, I suspect I'd be more inclined to overlook the more minor flaws of the Shameless release were it not for the crippling nature of the audio glitches in the film's final moments (and the situation has certainly not been helped by Shameless' jaw-droppingly ignorant response to viewer complaints, which among other inanities saw them try to claim that different BD players rendered lossless audio differently). It's a shame, because in every other respect the Shameless disc sounds much better. On balance, I'm going to have to lean towards the Koch release, both for the overall better image quality (though I'm still not happy about the increase in sub-optimal footage thanks to Koch's "no jumping between sources mid-shot" rule) and because their audio track won't potentially wreck your speakers, but it's not an ideal situation whichever way you cut it.

---

Shameless
country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.35:1

---

Koch Media
country: Germany; region code: ABC (incorrectly labelled as B); codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.35:1

10 Comments

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.