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Stallone’s underdog franchise packs a punch on 4K-UHD

Coming in the wake of Creed III’s big box-office take, we finally see Sylvester Stallone’s long-running franchise make its first foray into the 4K platform. After six films (and three more on top with the Creed series) Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is kicking things off with this Knockout Collection, bringing together on 4K-UHD, ROCKY, ROCKY II, ROCKY III and ROCKY IV, and the recently recut/rereleased ROCKY IV Ultimate Director’s Cut, ROCKY VS. DRAGO.

Rocky (1976)

Where it all began. Kickstarting not just the franchise but Stallone’s career. A low-budget film that won the Oscar for Best Picture, and is now part of the United States National Film Registry The underdog tale of a man (Stallone) rising from the Philadelphia streets, chasing a once in a lifetime shot at glory. Beyond it’s boxing angle, we also get the human element. A common man, punching above his station, who while in search of his dream, also meets the love of his life. It’s a perfect setup, centering the film around this humble, driven man, and enabling us to root for his success, in both ventures. Rocky himself is the anchor of the series, an endearing, deeply authentic man, devoted to his work, his family, and his turtles. Beyond the emotional, Rocky is a damn good sports movie, with impactful boxing sequences, the emotion behind then drawing you even further into the spectacle. A legendary score from Bill Conti, moving dialogue, and memorable characters, including franchise mainstays Adrian (Talia Shire), Mickey (Burgess Meredith), Paulie (Burt Young), Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Ingredients that ensured not only the success of Rocky, but the 5 sequels that followed.

The 4K-UHD transfer for Rocky is a marked improvement on the last round of Blu-ray releases. There is no wholesale change to the look/color tone of the film, rather an increase in detail and definition. Brighter scenes in particular benefit from increased image stability. Natural grain preserved, and no artifacts were evident. Looking at the 5 movies included in this set, this one is the clear winner.

ROCKY II (1979)

A direct sequel, and one that puts Rocky into a position he will wrestle with the rest of his life, his health, or his career. Taking retirement due to his injuries, Rocky is enticed back into the ring when given a shot at rewriting history and finally securing the world heavyweight championship in a rematch with Apollo Creed. There are plenty of parallels to the first film, if it aint broke, why fix it? Revisiting the underdog story, dipping into relationship development (now as a married man), only everything is just ramped up a bit more, as you’d expect in a sequel. It also marks a larger embrace within the series of that conflict between athlete and celebrity, between competitor and commercialization. Familiar in formula, but there’s enough freshness here to carry Rocky II along, and who can fine fault with spending more time with the Balboa’s and their expanded family.

The transfer here is of similar quality to the first film. A step-up from Blu-ray, with a sharper and more healthy image, good color representation, and no real sign of changes to the color palette or artificiality creeping in.

ROCKY III (1982)

Rocky III poses that interesting question about athletes and sport in general, once you reach the top, what keeps you going? Finally, Rocky has it all. The title, sponsorships, a nice home, a family. Then he endures a crushing defeat to an young, aggressive, and hungry boxer. What does Rocky do about it? Montage. Yep, he becomes the underdog again and doesn’t just have to get in shape, but rediscover his thirst for winning. The film narratively harkens back to the first, but the fact that Rocky faces off against “Thunderlips” (Hulk Hogan) and Clubber Lang (Mr. T,) here kind of tells you a lot about where the franchise was going. A tilt into more entertainment and bigger in scale. The result is something that is at times uneven, and lacks the raw emotional stakes of the first two. Where the film shines though is in its focus on the bromance between Rocky and former adversary Apollo Creed, and the feel-good factor that comes with it.

While again a step-up from the Blu-ray editions, there are some compression artifacts that creep in here, especially during brighter scenes. The natural grain covers up much of this though, and overall the improved detail and depth of image feel a worthy tradeoff. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn good.

ROCKY IV (1985)

With the Cold War tension between America and the Soviet Union reaching it’s peak, who better to extoll ‘Mericuh’s values and take down the Iron Curtain than the Italian Stallion? Rocky, having reached the upper echelons of fame and wealth, and holding the world heavyweight boxing championship , faces the emergence of a behemoth out of the Soviet Union. Ivan Drago, a mountain of a main, seemingly bred and trained to pummel those he faces in the ring. First refusing to meet him, he later agrees after Drago’s boxing tour results in tragedy for Balboa. Stepping up, and montaging hard, he has to avenge his lost friend, and fight for national pride. Yep it’s capitalism vs communism in this patriot-fest which continues the tilt into cartoonish entertainment. It doesn’t reach to human heights of the first, but there’s an macho, emotional swell that’s undeniable. It’s one of the more maligned entries to the franchise, but the pulpy tone and stonking soundtrack ensure good, dumb, fun.

The 4K-UHD treatment here does look to tilt towards a cooler palette, with elements being a tad desaturated. This does seem to result in inkier blacks, and generally shows off the increased detail and definition well. It’s a good 4K, just not at the same level as the first film in this release.

Rocky vs. Drago: The Ultimate Director’s Cut (2021)

With a few decades of experience under his belt, and some reflection on the journey of Rocky himself, Stallone took it upon himself to recut IV. The result if a film that is a more sombre affair, one that tones down the patriotic fare, and ramps up the emotional heft behind things. It’s an interesting experiment on Stallone’s part, and many of the cuts, edits, additions, and alternate takes, do help the film in certain respects. Less bombastic, perhaps better aligned to the trajectory of Rocky coming out of III. Sadly we get less of Paulie’s robot, but it is a fascinating insight into Stallone’s journey as a filmmaker, and how he views this character. It’s great to have both included in the release.

The director’s cut is aesthetically is in the same ballpark, but some creative decisions strip select scenes of color. The black and white flashbacks hold up well in 4K, but there is some inconsistency in image quality in other scenes due to digital zoom and alternate stock sources. Nothing overly egregious, but it’s there if you’re looking.

Extra Features

Disc1

• Rocky Audio Commentary 1: A group track with director John Avildsen; producers Irvin Winkler and Robert Chartoff; actors Talia Shire, Carl Weathers and Burt Young; and Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown: A rather crowded commentary, but it has some interesting content, largely about technical aspects of the production, and from cast members discussion the experiences under Stallone as director
• Rocky Audio Commentary 2: Featuring boxing trainer Lou Duva and sports historian Bert Sugar, who convey their affection for the film, and also add some sporting context to the boxing matches
• Rocky Audio Commentary 3: The best of the bunch, handled with aplomb by Stallone himself, who as writer/director/star, has a rather unique perspective on the film

Disc 5

• 8MM Home Movies of “Rocky”: A stock compilation of clips from the franchise
• 3 Rounds with Lou Duva: An interview with the renowned boxing trainer, manager and promoter
• Steadicam: Then and Now with Garrett Brown: A technical take on one of the most legendary scenes featured in the film
• Make-Up! The Art and Form with Michael Westmore: A great featurette on some of the work done to mimic the real damage from stepping in the boxing ring. Westmore is perhaps better know for his work on the Star Trek franchise!
• Staccato: A Composer’s Notebook with Bill Conti: The music/score of Rocky is one of its most memorable features, so great to see a little content showcasing the work behind it
• The Ring of Truth (9:37) — Rocky set designer James Spencer talks about his production work.
• A Tribute to Burgess Meredith: An salute to the man and his career
• Stallone Meets Rocky: A comedic split-screen affair
• The Making of “Rocky vs. Drago”: Keep Punching: A solid documentary that gives a run down of the making of this reimagining of the film, large;y centered around Stallone working at his craft. PSA, there is a longer version of this doc. available on Youtube
• Trailers: For all the included films

Note: There are no Blu-ray copies included in the release, just 4K-UHD discs, and digital copies

The Bottom Line

While there’s something grating about the release strategy here, something also seen with Paramount’s recent splitting up of the 4K Star Trek movies, the Knockout Collection is still a welcome release, especially with the inclusion of the alt-Rocky IV edition. Detailed, pristine transfers give the films a visual upgrade that complement the vitality and enduring spirit of the Rocky franchise.

Rocky the Knockout Collection 4K-UHD is available via Warner Bros. Home Entertainment now

Synapse Films present all three versions Phenomena in 4K-UHD

Dario Argento, the maestro of Italian horror. His creative peak was in the 70s and 80s with cinematic landmarks such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Deep Red, Tenebrae, and most famously Suspiria. One of his more offbeat ventures was Phenomena, releases in some markets as the heavily edited Creepers. Like Suspiria, this is a tale of a young American girl, who travels overseas and finds herself in nightmarish surrounds, only instead of witches we have murders, monkeys, telekinesis, and talking to insects.

The girl in question is Jennifer (Jennifer Connelly). Suffering from bouts of sleepwalking, she also contends with her mysterious emerging powers. Sent to a Swiss boarding school by her actor father, she finds herself in the middle of a spate of murders. Falling in with local entomologist, Dr. McGregor (Donald Pleasence) and his chimpanzee Inga, they look to unravel the mystery behind the brutal killings, before the killer strikes again.

A relatively simple plot, but one accompanied by absurdist, weird fare. We get not just a chimpanzee assistant, but Jennifer’s burgeoning telekinetic powers, and another ability to not only commune with insects, but control them too. A wacky device, handled with a grim weight, that is leverages into the murder mystery at hand, as well as fostering the bond between this young girl and the friendly neighborhood entomologist.

The screenplay by Argento and Franco Ferrini, is equal parts murder mystery (giallo-adjacent), horror, and psychological thriller. At times it feels like a rigg on Argento’s greatest hits, with him throwing many of his ideas into the mix. They manages to pull all these disparate elements together into something weird but cohesive, unless you watch the Creepers cut of course, largely by leaning into the investigative arc as a way to anchor the film. Argento’s mastery of mood is ever-present, with cuts, perspectives, and camera positions that build an unsettling tone, particularly in several set-pieces, notably those revolving around a killing or a dungeon location in the film’s finale. Connelly shows of that beguiling innocence her early performances are laced with, while Pleasance is always an absorbing presence on screen, even if he is confined to a wheelchair. The cherry on top is the killer heavy-metal soundtrack. A hypnotically entertaining feature.

The Package

A round of applause to Synapse films who offer up not just one, but all three editions of the film in 4K. Disc one houses the original Italian, clocking in at 116 minutes, the international cut (110 min), and the U.S. Creepers-cut (83 min) are on the second disc. The differences, notably the hacking up of the film for the Creepers release, is pretty well known amongst Argento fans. One of the extra features included on the release (below) does a very good job of explaining the various differences in the versions.’

These 4K restorations are notable step ups in quality from previous home video releases, and look akin to a rather pristine 35mm print I saw a few years ago. Blacks are inky and deep, colors have a natural palette but healthy representation. Details is where the 4K stands out, especially those shots zooming in on insects or facial features, of showcasing the foliage of the surrounding forests. Quality is consistent across the three versions, although the grain consistency looks a tad more natural and refined on the Italian cut. Extra features also impress:

• Audio commentary by Troy Howarth, author of Murder by Design: The Unsane Cinema of Dario Argento (on Italian Version): A comprehensive commentary that not only gets into detail on the various cuts of the film, but Argento’s career in general. He’s pretty critical over certain aspects of the film, sometimes surprisingly so
• Audio commentary on the international version by Argento scholar and author Derek Botelho and film historian, journalist and radio/television commentator David Del Valle: A more positive commentary, one that largely focuses on Argento’s overall career, and the recurring themes and aesthetic in his films
• Of Flies and Maggots, a feature-length 2017 documentary produced by Arrow Films, including interviews with co-writer/producer/director Dario Argento, actors Fiore Argento, Davide Marotta, Daria Nicolodi and others…: A superb documentary that assembles a whole host of materials (including behind the scenes footage) and interviews from cast and crew, to sketch out the genesis of the film, on set issues, production problems, and the films release and legacy
• The Three Sarcophagi, a visual essay by Arrow Films producer Michael Mackenzie comparing the different cuts of Phenomena: The featurette the breaks down not only the specific differences between the different cuts of the film, reasons behind it, and their personal preferences
• “Jennifer” music video, directed by Dario Argento: An ‘original’ musical tale, using some of the talent from the movie. Looks to be upscaled
• U.S. theatrical trailer and radio spots for ‘Creepers’:
• Original Italian and international theatrical trailers:
• Slipcover with new artwork from artist Nick Charge
• Reversible cover featuring the new artwork, or the original Italian Phenomena art

The Bottom Line

Synapse films offer up a welcome 4K restoration of Phenomena, in all its forms. Visually resplendent, the extras are solid, although some included in previous release are absent. Even with that, it’s the best way to watch Arento’s absurd but enthralling blend of supernatural horror and giallo-esque murder mystery.

Phenomena is available from Synapse Films on 4K-UHD, via MVD, from March 14th

Last Year’s Biggest Surprise Swaggers onto Home Media

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was perhaps the most improbably great movie in all of 2022. I mean, think about it: Over the course of a decade, the Shrek franchise managed to exhaust every last scrap of goodwill engendered by the first and second film by the time Shrek Forever After limped onto screens in 2010. Then, just when the culture at large seemed utterly exhausted by this brand of riff on Happy Ever After, a year later comes a spinoff movie, Puss in Boots. And, surprisingly, it was a totally enjoyable adventure movie, fresher and bolder and funnier than it would seem to have any right to be.

Cut to ELEVEN years later. Shrek is a relic, the emerald embodiment of a style of animation and humor that has been left behind. The fact that there was a Puss in Boots spinoff movie is a largely forgotten trivia fact. Dredging that world and these characters back for another round of fairy tale lampooning shenanigans wasn’t so much scraping the bottom of the barrel, it was dumping acid into the barrel and watching the acid melt into the very ether of the earth.

So what to do with the fact that, yes, eleven years after the original Puss in Boots movie and twenty-two years after the original Shrek movie, Puss in Boots: The Last Samurai arrived and isn’t just good, it’s actually great? It’s funny and moving and exciting and scary and boasts some of the most striking animation we’ve seen from any studio in a post-Spider-Verse world.

Man, even knowing how they did that…how did they actually do that?

Directed by Joel Crawford, Puss in Boots: The Last Dragon opens with the titular swashbuckling feline (voiced once again by Banderas) living his life to the fullest. Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, battling people-eating giants, having a dang good time doing, what more could an anthropomorphic outlaw cat ask for? But when his duel with the giant results in Puss’s sudden demise, he awakens to the discovery that he may indeed have lived life a little too fully: Cats, as we all know, have nine lives. Scientific fact. And our Puss has used up eight, leaving him with only one final go-round before he is shuffled off the mortal coil for good.

(The explanation of what happened to the previous eight lives is an extremely funny early joke that also tips the movie’s hand towards the vein of genuine darkness that will be mined for the remainder of the film.)

Puss initially tries to continue swaggering through his remaining life, only for an encounter with a truly terrifying bounty hunter, Lobo (Wagner Moura) to leave him reeling, grappling with mortality for the first time in any of his lives. Puss initially tries to go to ground and remove himself from any and all danger, but it’s not long before he’s drawn into a quest for a legendary fallen star, said to grant whoever finds it one wish.

The chase quickly expands to include Puss’s rival/love interest Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek-Pinault, returning from the first Puss movie), a fledgling crime family fronted by Golidlocks and the three bears (voiced by Florence Pugh, Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, and Samson Kayo), and “Big” Jack Horner (John Mulaney), who has been collecting magical weaponry for years to overcompensate for the fact that he’s a character from a nursery rhyme rather than a fairy tale. And a lame as hell nursery rhyme at that.

Written out like that, it’s easy to mistake Puss in Boots: The Last Starfighter for just another installment of smug, celebrity-voiced, pop culture self-devouring pastiche. I mean come on, a bunch of colorful rogues chasing after various magical MacGuffins, colliding for a set-piece roughly every twenty or so minutes? This thing is one sky-beam short of hitting every cliché in the book, and this is a franchise that literally OPENED with its titular protagonist wiping his ass with that exact book.

SomeBODY once told me, indeed.

But execution makes all the difference. For starters, there is that animation, about which enough good cannot be said. While not completely abandoning the established look and visual language of the previous movies, Puss in Boots: The Last Unicorn is elastic where they were plastic, lush where they were flat, bursting at the seams with energy and invention in all the places where the previous Shrek films, and most previous CG films period, were mired in dull limitations. The Spider-Verse influence is pronounced throughout, especially in the various fight and action sequences where frame-skipping and cell-shading make the characters appear to vibrate off the screen. But the movie also incorporates the aesthetics of anime, video games, and traditional hand-drawn animation to arrive at a look that feels wholly unique even at a moment when Spider-Verse’s breakthroughs are breaking out all across the field.

Regardless of what is happening on screen, it is always a pleasure to be watching it.

Thankfully, Puss in Boots: The Last of Us isn’t just a sequence of pretty pictures. The script (credited to Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow) is genuinely clever and funny, with a strain of dark humor that may have parents gasping even as jokes fly over the heads of the younger viewers.

(I haven’t discussed him much, but one of the major additions to this sequel is a happy-go-lucky mutt voiced by What We Do In the Shadows standout, Harvey Guillén. The backstory of this adorably ugly little sidekick is such an unbelievably dark joke that even on repeated viewings I still cannot believe it was included.)

And tying the whole room together is a sincere theme of dealing with mortality, coping with anxiety, and figuring out how to get the most out of life. Banderas has always, Always, ALWAYS over-delivered in this role, effortlessly flexing his ability to slide from goofy/giddy silliness to powerhouse gravitas at a moment’s notice. Here, he brings the full weight of his talents to portray Puss at the twin extremes of Bruce Campbell-ian blowhard and emotional trainwreck, and all the stages in-between. He and Hayek-Pirault have demonstrated their chemistry for decades now, and their give and take is better written and played than the romantic banter in 90% of live action American mainstream films. I don’t know if that speaks to how good Puss in Boots: The Last Tycoon is, or to how much live action cinema has dropped that particular ball, but either way, these cats remain a joy to watch.

The newcomers all get plenty of opportunities to shine, particularly Guillén, who proves to be every bit as endearing and funny as a voice actor as he is in live action. Pugh, Colman, Winstone, and Kayo are a whole lot of fun as warped versions of Goldilocks and the bears, and Mulaney is just…weird. Jack Horner is a genuinely disturbing creation, and Mulaney seems palpably delighted to sink his teeth into every new freakish dimension of his villain.

And special shout-out must be paid to Wagner Moura as Lobo, one of the best villains in an animated film in…years? Decades, even? Everything about Lobo is captivating, from his design to his movements to his silhouette, and Moura’s performance brings the whole creation together for an antagonist who is never anything short of riveting to watch.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish really is the proverbial That Good. Like the other recent triumphs in the animated space, it serves as not only an excellent film in its own right, but as a gauntlet thrown to any other studio in the game. If the second Puss in Boots movie (and the SIXTH Shrek movie) can be this excellent, this inventive, this gorgeous, if it can contain this much artistry and heart and innovation, then what the hell excuse does anyone else have?

It becomes, then, the best kind of great movie. The kind that actively dares you to do even better.

I can’t wait to see how that challenge is answered by animated films down the line. But while we wait, we can always just watch Puss in Boots: The Last Wish a few more times.