How to Marry a Billionaire (Rental)

Does anybody remember the TV series Full House? What about John Stamos' character Jesse, the cool one? You know, who married Lori Loughlin’s character? And they had twins? And no, not the Olsen twins! Well, he lives.

Now, name just about anything, and it's certain to be more entertaining than this telemovie. Sad, isn’t it?

Being a telemovie, the lovely black fade outs are still there, just like in The Rats. These heavily disrupt the flow of the film, and wouldn’t take much to remove. Don’t forget the great little suspenseful music cue that leads up to the fade out. Instead of releasing these corny American telemovies onto DVD, why don’t DVD companies spend time on mastering new titles or previously unreleased yet popular titles for the Australian market, and leave these telemovies for television? No one in their right mind should have to pay for these – that is the reason they went straight to television in the States.

The humour is crude, predictable and not at all funny. For “A sexy, hip, up-to-date twist� on any film, go for 10 Things I Hate About You or William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet rather than this pile of rubbish. This is not terribly sexy, hip nor up-to-date and really leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

Anyway, this film is based on the classic How To Marry A Millionaire, which starred Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall. This time though, three guys are wanting to marry rich girls so they can have all the money they need. Kinda chauvinistic point of view, right? But that’s as simple as the story goes – just shows it was written by and directed by men.

The video is presented in a widescreen aspect of 1.85:1, and is 16x9 enhanced. The slick for this title states 4x3 full frame, when it is actually widescreen.

Overall the video is quite disappointing, especially when compared to Fox’s usual standards. The colours look quite unhealthily sick, due to the fact that it is an NTSC transfer simply changed to PAL without fixing colours at all. The reds are over-saturated and the skin tones pinkish, but blues and greens are bright and colourful. Blacks are solid and deep, yet shadow detail is severely lacking and makes the already soft image look messy.

The opening credits are simply awful, and show many problems that reoccur throughout the film. These include large amounts of aliasing, namely at 0:52 on the car insignia and 3:05 on floorboards, just to name two. Simply shocking-looking pixelation MPEG artefacts can be seen at 0:59 over the whole image, as well as in numerous other locations throughout the film, contributing to the soft look of the transfer.

The entire film is very soft, at times too soft, and it lacks any clarity whatsoever. This just gets quite annoying by the first 15 minutes of the film.

English subtitles are provided, and come on automatically at the start of the film, needing to be turned off during the film. Being a single layered disc, there is no layer change to talk about.

There is one audio track provided on this disc – in Dolby Digital English stereo.

The front left and right speakers each got a heavy workout, with a great stereo soundstage being created. The music is a collection of pop and alternative rock songs that just accompany songs. The music shows the rich bass of the soundtrack without requiring a subwoofer.

Dialogue is crisp, clear and audible throughout the film, with each word being understood.

The surround and subwoofer channels are not used for this film.

The 'extra features' comprise of a trailer reel for other Fox titles. These titles are Behind Enemy Lines, Soul Survivors, Kung Pow: Enter The Fist, Super Troopers, Bandits, Black Knight and Ice Age. From the menu you can choose to watch these again if you want to, and each of them are in separate chapters. The reel runs for 16 minutes.

This film is terribly made with a poor script, unfunny jokes and B-grade TV actors who should have stayed with their original shows. The video transfer shows some really bad problems during the opening, but it does improve slightly later in the film. The audio is sufficient, but nothing special and being a rental disc the extras are just propaganda for Fox. It's hard to recommend this film even for a quick rent, perhaps that is why it is called a TV movie?