VIBES (1988)
Retro VHS Blu-ray
Label: Mill Creek Entertainment
Region Code: A
Rating: PG
Duration: 99 Minutes
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 2.0 Stereo with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.85:1)
Director: Ken Kwapis
Cast: Cyndi Lauper, Jeff Goldblum, Julian Sands, Peter Falk, Steve Buscemi, Michael Lerner
Late 80's adventure-comedy Vibes (1988) stars Jeff Goldblum (The Fly) and 80's pop-star Cyndi Lauper as gifted-psychics Sylvia Pickel and Nick Deezy, who meet at the Department of Para-Normal Studies, an institute that studies psychic abilities, a project lead by Dr. Harrison Steele (Julian Sands, Warlock). They find themselves recruited by a mysterious con-man named Harry Buscafusco (Peter Falk, TV's Columbo) to travel to South America to find his partner who disappeared while looking for a legendary lost city of gold. Along the way they find danger, love, and possibly the secret alien-origins of all psychic powers on Earth!
What Vibes really boils down to is a comedy adventure film with oddball romantic leanings that comes off as a pastiche of ideas borrowed wholesale from way better films like Romancing the Stone and Ghostbusters, without having the spark of either. It's not awful but it's the sort of light-substance fluff that you forget about only a few minutes after you've just watched it. Goldblum's character is a psychometrist who can tell you all about an object by simply touching it, while Lauper is a spirit-medium with an invisible ghost-friend and the gift of astral projection, with their gifts being both a blessing and a curse. My favorite stuff is Deezy finding out that his longtime girlfriend has been cheating on him with a hockey player after touching her underwear while their in bed together, and then a co-worker forcing his hand on a plate of cooked fish to find out if it's fresh. It's all corny stuff played for laughs but not all that funny, but Goldblum and Lauper do their best the the uninspired material.
We do get a cool cast of supporting characters at least, we have Julian Sands as a duplicitous professor, Michael Lerner (Barton Fink) as a doomed adventurer, and Steve Buscemi (The Big Lebowski) briefly appears as Lauper's degenerate gambler boyfriend, plus we have the lazy-eyed charms of Peter Falk slumming it here but seemingly having fun. The pairing of Goldblum and Lauper is only alright, he's typical early-era Goldblum in that he's quirky, and Lauper is appropriately loud and brash, but the pair have little physical chemistry on-screen, though I did like when they would verbally insult each other. When the film culminates in a long building smooch between the two there's absolutely no spark between them at all, zero chemistry in that regard.
Vibes is a threadbare film built on the back of better movies, but if you're into light-weight late-80's comedies with a supernatural tinge it's worth a watch, it has some entertainment value, particularly if you're an 80's film junkie.
Audio/Video: Vibes (1988) arrives on Blu-ray from Mill Creek Entertainment in 1080p HD framed in 1.85:1 widescreen. Generally the image looks pleasing with some modest depth and clarity, but the encode struggles to properly resolve darker scenes containing heavy layers of fog wafting through them, looking a bit noisy in comparison to other scenes, but colors saturation is strong and the blacks are solid.
Audio comes by way of English DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo with optional English subtitles, dialogue is crisp and clean with some good use of the surrounds during atmospheric and more action-packed moments of zaniness, the score, from late composer James Horner (Krull) sounds great, as does the Cyndi Lauper tune "Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China)".
As with many of the retro VHS-style Blu-ray releases from MCE there are no extras on this one, we get only a static menu with the option to watch the feature with or without English subtitles. The single-disc release comes housed in a single-sided sleeve of artwork featuring original movie poster artwork. The retro VHS-style slipcover features a different original movie poster artwork, with the back of the slipcover featuring another cooler, original movie poster artwork, which is the option they should have used on the front, it's the better option. That artwork is also featured on the disc.
