Flatliners

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In the end, Flatliners is a film with a solid cast and a great premise, but it never fully delivers on the promise of its high concept. However, it has become somewhat of a cult film, so if you’re one of those folks who enjoy it, you’ll likely want this new 4K Ultra HD release from Arrow Video, which continues to do for minor classics what Criterion has done for major ones. Visions of Light– Director of photography Jan de Bont (who went onto direct other 90’s films like Twister and Speed) is interviewed here along with chief lighting technician Edward Ayer. what sounds like digital sharpening that Marty mentions with regard to the Sony release, so in terms of an overall organic appearance, my vote goes

a near-perfect mix of detail, colour depth and contrast range to present Schumacher’s incredibly stylised visuals with a beautifully rich and filmic looking image Stylishly photographed by Jan de Bont (Basic Instinct) and featuring a cast of Hollywood's hottest talent – including Kiefer Sutherland (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me), Julia Roberts (Secret in their Eyes) and Kevin Bacon (Wild Things) – Flatliners is the ultimate life-and-death thrill ride. Arrow also created a nice big batch of extras for the film. I’ve never owned Flatliners on home video before, but my understanding is that it hasn’t received a nice Special Edition treatment until now. Here’s what you’ll find on the disc: As mentioned above, Marty wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the now long ago Blu-ray release of Flatliners actually by Sony, but

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opinions, and I'm probably not quite the fan of Flatliners that Marty is, but I'm scoring the film the same as he did. Marty's subtitles on that release, which suggest Sony may have had delusions of world domination with Flatliners, at least as evidenced by the The Conquest of our Generation– Screenwriter Peter Filardi is interviewed about the film in this new segment. The native 4K transfer delivers a marked improvement over the two previous HD editions, showing sharper, cleaner details for a majority of the movie's runtime. Of course, being a heavily-stylized and relatively dark film, the video falls on the softer side of things and will not immediately compare with other releases from the same period. However, this is an inherent characteristic of the original photography and appears faithful to the filmmakers' aesthetic intent, but the picture maintains excellent, consistent fidelity throughout with a fine layer of visible grain, furnishing it with an attractive film-like quality. Individual hairs are distinct, the stitching and threading in the clothing are discrete, and the gothic architectural features of the building are plain to make out.

Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovenian, Swedish, or Turkish subtitles, but does come with the ever popular English SDHSam (Corey Haim) and his older brother Michael (Jason Patric) move to Santa Carla with their mother (Dianne Wiest). Sam falls into the Boardwalk comic book crowd with the wonderfully earnest Frog Brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander). Meanwhile, Michael falls under the spell first of the beautiful Star (Jami Gertz) and then the uber-charismatic David (Kiefer Sutherland), camply supported by his fantastically hirsute band of teen runaways. Who just so happen to be vampires… Having not seen Flatliners in many years, I was curious as to just what my reaction to it was going to be. It was on frequent rotation when it first hit home video as seemingly everybody I knew was renting it and watching it, but now years later, one can appreciate it more for its intellectual qualities and visuals, as opposed to just being starry-eyed over its cast. Arrow Video’s 4K UHD presentation is particularly stunning with a nice bevy of bonus materials to go with it, although it’s a shame that Joel Schumacher is no longer with us to comment on it personally. In any case, fans of the film will be pleased, and for them, this is highly recommended.

Atonement - a new video interview with composer James Newton Howard and orchestrator Chris Boardman (11 mins) Flatliners is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Arrow's insert booklet contains admittedly probably don't have the same kind of "wow" factor that, say, a contemporary Christopher Nolan multilayered enterprise might offer, but please or things have been improved for this release (I suspect it's the latter) with both DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 audio However it’s the stunning brightness and beautifully robust colours that really shine. Literally in some cases. The previous blu-ray had a slightly overcast sheen to the picture – that has been completely banished on this new image, washed out skin tones now replaced with healthy complexions, and dull skies with wonderfully nuanced and the bright blues of a California summer. And this new brighter and richer sense of colour is perfect for Schumacher’s overt lighting – be it the complex shadow detail of the vampire’s underground lair, the neon sheen of the Boardwalk and its many shops and rides or the blood-red drenched finale set in Grandpa’s house, the colours leap off the screen and leave the previous release in its dust. The only slight note of imperfection in this is that some of the insanely bright whites can bloom a little – never across the whole screen, but in certain highlights, it’s the only very minor blight on an otherwise outstanding image. But all of that is banished with the now clearly observed wonderful twinkling highlights of the glitter that cover the Frog Brothers after their staking of one of the vamps. Eat that Twilight, The Lost Boys did glittery vamps first. And better….particular. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. As jokingly referred to above, this release does not offer optional French, Visions of Light, a brand new video interview with director of photography Jan de Bont and chief lighting technician Edward Ayer allows some positive light in the form of a message on the importance of salvation, redemption, and that this tendency toward the very warm end of the spectrum is only increased courtesy of HDR and/or Dolby Vision. The increased Image Gallery (HD) is authored without a timecode, but does advance automatically, so have the Pause button on your remote

Peter Filardi’s script, based around a handful of real life near-death experiences, is brilliantly clever – not just in its basic plot outline, that feels achingly real and terrifyingly plausible, but in its building up of the characters: from Kiefer Sutherland’s insidiously charming leader, to Kevin Bacon’s headstrong voice of reason and even into the beautiful yet damaged Julia Roberts, whose past trauma sees the menfolk falling over themselves to amusingly ‘protect her’ while simultaneously trying to bed her, all feel more than just the tropes they so obviously are. A huge part of that has to be the cast who all do sterling work and, at the same time as they’re flashing their megawatt Hollywood smiles and oozing insane charisma all over the screen, all give us something just under their skins to hook us in to. UHD version may cause pause in some videophiles, as first the Columbia masthead and then the skies of the credits sequence can look like

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The brand new 4K restoration was taken from the original camera negatice and approved by DOP Jan de Bont, since Schumacher is sadly no longer with us. Flatliners is a generally dark film and there isn’t a lot of color, aside from the abundance of neon. Having said that, the numerous scenes with the neon glow are definitely a noticeable upgrade from the Blu-ray and even the dilapidated buildings like the one the experiments are held in look highly detailed. The restoration does a great job with the world we are in. A good comparison would be Arrow’s 4K restoration of 12 Monkeys which has scenes with similar lighting and textures, thanks to Dolby Vision. global collection of languages offered in that department. Now, let's just get the bad news out of the way first and state that Arrow Video's new don't like a perceived minimizing of shadow detail since this is so much darker than the original Sony release, but I