Blade

New Line seems to be THE company that will be doing alot of comic-to-film adaptations of the not so well known comics such as Blade whereas Village Roadshow will be doing the distributing in region 4 for them. Sure, we all know about Batman, Superman, Spiderman and Wonder woman from the Justice League cartoons but characters like Spawn and Blade are only known by the true comic fans.

So what do you expect when viewing a movie such as this? Not alot, as never knowing who blade was, there wasn't much to expect and hence I wasn't disappointed. Comic fans probably knew more and as my cousins 'are' indeed true fans, they weren't disappointed at all either.

Wesley Snipes stars as Blade, a half human, half vampire hero whose cause is to protect life from the verocious feeding frenzies of some of the new young blood-sucking night walkers. Blade's mother was bitten by a vampire when she was almost due with her baby and hence he acquired all of the vampire strengths but only one weakness - the thirst for blood. To overcome this thirst, his friend, mentor and guardian named "Whistler" (Kris Ktistopherson) has devised a syrum that subdues the hunger for blood.

The Vampires on the other hand are led by Frost (Steven Dorf). He has studied the ancient vampire scribes and has translated the ritual that needs to be performed to release La Magra, the blood god, so that they can dominate the earth.

What ensures is a dark movie with some great martial art fight scenes and a perfectly casted performance from Wesliy Snipes. I must admit I'm not a big fan of his but in Blade he is perfect.

3 cheers to Village Roadshow, this is the kind of disc we'd like to see more of. I've long been a big fan of the MPEG compression quality used by New Line in their US dvd releases and I've always felt that if you're using the same master, the same quality should be capable for an Australian release and here it is.

The style of film that Blade is can really show up any mistakes in the compression process. The blacks, the fast pace, the strobing effects can all make it a nightmare but this disc really shines.

Right from the opening night club scene, the audio makes its presence felt. You get English 5.1 and 2.0 tracks aswell as a hidden MPEG 2.0 track. Interesting as the cover doesn't mention it at all. I guess Roadshow didn't want to shoot themselves in the foot by promoting MPEG audio but with more reviews revealing this it may be a bad omen for them.

Is this a case of two steps forward, one step back? Oh well, atleast it's a forward step overall.

I must admit, any movie with swords in it has a small bias in the audio department but ONLY if it sounds realistic and not a repetitive sample as some movies are known to demonstrate. The sword fighting in here is visually and aurally great.

Here is where Village both excells and fails in their dvd efforts. I've forgiven them because they can only reproduce what has been given to them and they've done a great job in this respect.

You get a great percentage of extras from the region 1 disc but there are still some features still missing, most importantly, the audio commentary, the isolated musical score and the dvd-rom content. These extras would be the ones used the most (me personally, not sure about the general consensus) so it's another minus. Once again, they are restricted by what they are given.

One thing that they really do have to get rid of is the window-boxed formatting they use. They use it for the theatrical trailer and for those of you that don't like black bars on top and below the image, then add them to the left and right of the image and you've got your window-boxing. tsk tsk, minus marks here.

This disc is a great demo for the region 4 market. For those of us with region 1 stock and players we may not think so but we must consider that supporting the local market will only produce a better product and this disc is a great addition for those who are doing so.