Blu-Ray Horror Movies

There is a noticeable difference between the puppet version of Godzilla’s head and that of the actual suit, but to it didn’t take away from my enjoyment at all.

You can read my review for the special features on this disc here: [...]

Not the Ultimate Edition of Godzilla – Jose Luis Romeu Miguel – Barcelona, Spain
This review is for the Blu-ray edition, and I am going to focus on the technical aspects of the release, not the movie itself, the movie is a great classic and should be seen in its Japanese original form, whether through this BD or the previous Classic Media DVD, that’s your choice.

First of all, the movie is not 1080p is 1080i, which might be because it’s not comming from a direct filmscan, but through an HDCAM tape, since it’s a film, not TV, the fields show half and half of the frame and when a projector or the TV does the conversion to progressive you have the original frame, if you have your BD and TV/Projector properly set up you won’t see any interlaced images.

The film is not presented in it’s original 1.33 aspect ratio, the width is perfect but there is a slight loss in the upper and lower parts of the image (it is clearly seen in the original GODZILLA title, look at the lower right logo), therefore the aspect ratio might be around 1.45, still and improvement from the previous DVD release, it was 1.33 but because it lost both width and height.

There is also another HUGE problem: the Noise Reduction. Since it’s a pretty old film, film stocks from the original movie are in pretty bad shape, and CM instead of performing a full restoration (a-la Criterion), simply applied an inmense quantity of automatic Noise Reduction, resulting in lots of jittering and screen tearing. To tell you the truth, when checking the DVD versus the BD, I found hard to decide wich was poorer in Image quality, but I guess that MPEG-2 is quite an old codec now, and the Standard Definition makes everything look slightly blury. The sound only includes the original Japanese audio in PCM linear, wich is fine in my book (I hate dubs), and the subs are more than ok.

The extras are the same that on the DVD, nothing new, and they are presented in they original codification, MPEG-2.

I would never recommend this BD to any Godzilla fan if already own the CM DVD, since I truly believe that this movie will eventualy get a proper release. However if you have never seen the original Godzilla, and don’t care about the american version… Hey! It’s a Blu-Ray and IT’S REGION FREE!

Good movie but………. – J. Baratti – tulsa, OK
If you pick this up expecting blu-ray quality like I did, save your money. Whoever transfered this to blu-ray did so without cleaning up the film first. It’s full of scratches. I had the standard DVD release of this and was disappointed when i put on the blu-ray version and saw all the flaws still in it. They didn’t even have the courtesy of English-dubbing it. If you don’t understand Japanese, sitting through 2 hours hearing all the screaming in a language unknown, it grates on your last nerve. Why couldn’t they English-dub it like Criterion did to Salo? In a nutshell, I think the manufacturers of this blu-ray release are in it purely for the money. The bonus features are pretty decent, including the making of the Godzilla suit, which was interesting but other than that, I’d say don’t waste your money. You can get the standard dvd of this at a fraction of the cost with the same quality.

How disapointing – new yorker – NYC
One expects a higher priced Blu-ray Edition to be an improvement over the DVD Release. This release omits the Raymond Burr Godzilla King Of the Monsters version. Now instead of passing thew DVD on to a youngster I’ll HAVE to keep both. I will not get tripled dipped on this one. Classic Media dropped the ball with this release. They’ve tarnished their impressive record of Kaiju releases