What Blu-Ray did you watch last night?

[Osi Osgood]

I always liked the first one best, as it was basically an unexpected psycho mommy going, well, psycho, and it did have that wonderful moment when Jason jumps out of the water to attack the nice innocent lass that has escaped the wrath if Jason. The rest? Let's see how many ways Jason can slice and dice his victims ?!

[Lincoln Thorn]

It sure did! He spent most of it in a Speedo! haha.

[Osi Osgood]

Lincoln, didn't the first Friday the 13th, star a young Kevin Bacon as one of the horny teens, soon to be slashed?

[Ken Finch]

Just started watching the first episode of “The River Kings” This was an Australian serial which was also broadcast on U K tv some years ago. Recently managed to find a dvd of it on Amazon. One of my cousins emigrated to Australia and lived at Waikerie on the Murray River, and her son had a small part in it as An “extra” playing football on the bank by the river boat with some other boys.

[Lincoln Thorn]

I’ve been rewatching through the old Friday the 13th movie series as of late for some fun popcorn fun since it’s warming up around here again! Last night was F13 - Part 2, which I think is Jason at his scariest with the sack on his head.

[Brian Fretwell]

The Doctor Who season 15 story "The Invasion of Time" an SD upscale also has updated special effects as an option. It looks much more like the picture quality I saw once on a broadcast monitor of a live camera feed than the DVD did. Good for a 44 year-old programme! Pity one camera had a slight fault which is more obvious on this.

[Ed Gordon]

We just bought the blu-ray release of the complete "Babylon 5", a TV series from the mid 1990's....

Another Bluray set you might enjoy is The Expanse (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/). It takes about 2 episodes to grab your interest, and then you are addicted.

[Osi Osgood]

We just bought the blu-ray release of the complete "Babylon 5", a TV series from the mid 1990's. Until now, we have only been able to see this on fairly worn DVD's, which a very marginal image quality. Now the whole 110 episodes have been restored from they're 35mm masters, and it's like night and day! The story arc was tremendous in this show, (especially compared to Star Trek in the 90's) and we've never tired of watching this, and now, we'll be able to see it better than ever!

[Graham Ritchie]

This was tonight at the movies being Saturday night watching this stunning blu-ray transfer from Arrow, you can't get better than this.

Highly recommend you add this one to your shopping list.

Over the moon watching this movie projected using the Epson tonight, it looked great plus 5:1 sound

[Graham Ritchie]

Returned to another screening of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" from 1973 two nights ago. I first watched it on its cinema release, how quickly time passes.

[Ed Gordon]

George Pal produced The Naked Jungle, and later used some of the footage in his production Atlantis The Lost Continent. I agree with Martin Scorcese who called Naked Jungle a "guilty pleasure":

In 1978, Martin Scorsese listed the film as among his "100 Random Pleasures" in a section of films which "are not good. They're guilty. But there are things in them that make you like them, that make them worthwhile.

You can pair this one with another 50's jungle movie, Elephant Walk, and double your guilty pleasure!

[Graham Ritchie]

Watched this gem from Imprint bought new this week, what a stunning color transfer to blu-ray and who can forget those ants.

Highly recommend getting this one

[Graham Ritchie]

"The Great Escape" 1963 the 50th Anniversary Edition blu-ray, taken from the original camera negative and studio source elements. One of the films I remember watching at the old La Scala cinema during the 60s,

[Brian Fretwell]

Catchimg up (a little ) on previous purchases last night it was "Carry on Jack" a naval comedy that only had two members of the regular "Carry on Team" in it (Charles Hawtree and Kenneth Williams) though had future regular Jim Dale in a small role. Mainly great picture quality, but the high definition really showed up the duped in sailing shots taken from othe films, the bit rate went down by a third during these as well showing the lack of detail. I'll have to watchi it agin with Bernard Cribben's narration.

[Ed Gordon]

Remember when you were a kid, and you could never understand why the adults praised the movies of their time when all you saw were old scratched films on the small black and white TV screen?

As Mark Twain observed:

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

I recently watched a restoration of the 1953 film Beat the Devil.

The 2k restoration was made from a 4k scan of the original camera negative. The original sound track was also restored. As for the film itself, Roger Ebert said:

John Huston's "Beat the Devil" (1953) shows how much Hollywood has lost by devaluing its character actors. In an age when a $20 million star must be on the screen every second, this picture could not be made. Huston has stars, too: Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, but his movie is so funny because he throws them into the pot with a seedy gang of charlatans. "We have to beware of them," the Jones character warns her husband. "They're desperate characters. Not one of them looked at my legs."

"Beat the Devil" went straight from box office flop to cult classic and has been called the first camp movie, although Bogart, who sank his own money into it, said, "Only phonies like it." It's a movie that was made up on the spot; Huston tore up the original screenplay on the first day of filming, flew the young Truman Capote to Ravallo, Italy, to crank out new scenes against a daily deadline and allowed his supporting stars, especially Robert Morley and Peter Lorre, to create dialogue for their own characters. (Capote spoke daily by telephone with his pet raven, and one day when the raven refused to answer he flew to Rome to console it, further delaying the production.)

There are times during the movie when you can sense Capote chuckling to himself as he supplies improbable dialogue for his characters. Lollobrigida, the Italian sex star, was making her first English-language movie, but Capote has her explain, "Emotionally, I am English." She claims to take tea and crumpets every afternoon, and quotes the writer George Moore, who I believe has not been quoted before or since in any movie. Bogart describes his early upbringing: "I was an orphan until I was 20. Then a rich and beautiful lady adopted me." And Lorre of course has his famous dialogue about time, which deserves comparison with Orson Welles' "cuckoo clock" speech in "The Third Man." "Time . . . time," Lorre says. "What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook."

If "Beat the Devil" puzzled audiences on its first release, it has charmed them since. Jones told the critic Charles Champlin that Huston promised her: "Jennifer, they'll remember you longer for `Beat the Devil' than for `Song of Bernadette.' " True, but could Huston have guessed that they would remember him more for "Beat the Devil" than for the picture he made next, "Moby Dick"?

Read Ebert's full review at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/g...the-devil-1954