HACKERS (1995) (88 Films Blu-ray Review)

HACKERS (1995) 

Label: 88 FilmsRegion Code: B
Rating: Cert. 12
Duration: 105 Minutes
Audio: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, 2.0 DTS-HD MA with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.40:1)
Director: Iain Softley
Cast: Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens, Lorraine Bracco

Synopsis: They can break any code and get inside any system. They are often still in their teens and already under surveillance by authorities. They are the hackers. Zero Cool - real name Dade Murphy - is a legend among his peers. In 1988 he single-handedly crashed 1,507 computers on Wall Street and was forbidden by law to touch another keyboard until his 18th birthday. It’s been seven years without a byte... and he’s hungry. Kate Libby, handle Acid Burns, has a souped up lap-top that can do 0 to 60 on the infobahn in a nanosecond. When the two collide, the battle of the sexes goes into hard drive. But all bets are off when master hacker The Plague frames Dade, Kate and their friends in a diabolical industrial conspiracy. Now they are the only ones who can prevent a catastrophe... unlike any the world has ever seen.

Hackers (1995) opens in 1988 with an 11 year-old hacker kid Dade Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller, Trainspotting) who goes by the name of "Zero Cool" being sentenced to probation and banned from using a computer until his eighteenth birthday. His crime? Crashing over 1500 computer systems and sending the stock market plunging. Forward seven years later and on his eighteenth birthday we find him hacking into a local TV station, changing the programming to run a vintage episode of The Outer Limits, so obviously this kid is cool! However, he's kicked out of the TV stations system by another hacker, a competitor that goes by the handle of "Acid Burn", he himself now going by "Crash Override".

Dade and his now divorced mom have moved into a new area and he enrolls in a new high school where he meets up with fellow hackers, like minded guys with cool hacker handles like "The Phantom Phreak",(Renoly Santiago), "Cereal Killer" (Matthew Lillard, SLC Punk), "Lord Nikon" (Laurence Mason, The Crow) and Joey Pardella, whose apparently not cool enough to have a hacker handle (Jesse Bradford, Cherry Falls), plus girl-hacker (Angelina Jolie, Girl Interrupted) who it turns out to be "Acid Burn". Jolie's character and Dade start pranking each other, with her stranding him on the roof of the school looking for a pool during a downpour, and then he sets off the sprinkler system in revenge, but of course there's some sexual chemistry brewing between the pair, heck they even got married after they filmed the movie, and I do think you can sense that chemistry in the film, the pair are the standouts of the bunch.

In an effort to prove his bones, or in the hacker terminology of the film, to become "elite" newbie Joey hacks into the super computer called at a mineral company, some legendary system known as the "gibson", downloading a partial file labeled "garbage", but it turns out it's anything but trash. This security breach alarms the computer security officer Eugene "The Plague" Belford (Fisher Stevens, The Burning) who uses all his resources to frame the group of hackers for a malicious virus he created to cover-up his own crime, creating a worm that will embezzle millions of dollars from the company by siphoning off fractions of a cent from each transaction, which sounds an awful lot like the premise of Office Space (1999).

The film is certainly dated with tech stuff that was once seemingly so far ahead of itself, in '95 not everyone was computer savvy, and I already had an aversion to techno-thrillers, so I skipped out on the film back in the day. It was kind of fun to watch it now twenty plus years later though. I have never been a huge Angelina Jolie fan but I do know that this was a big film for her career, even if it tanked at the box office. She's got some nice presence here, as does co-star Jonny Lee Miller. Maybe it's my age these days, but I think all the kids in this film are annoying as shit! None more so than Matthew Lillard, this guy was one of the more annoying actors of that 90's era, and his performance here has not aged well, the braided hair, the punk rock aesthetic, it's sort of SLC Punk-ish. Then we have Fisher Stevens as a bad-ass hacker who is the big baddie, he does alright I guess, but he's definitely no big bad, the scene of him on a skateboard during the hand-off of a computer disc had me in stitches.

Be on the lookout for appearances from Penn Jillette as a game-crazed IT guy and Lorraine Brocco (Goodfellas) as The Plague's corporate accomplice. In my opinion the film is a very middle of the road 90's youth culture techno-thriller with very low stakes, I never felt any threat or high stakes here for the characters, but it's got some vintage 90's visual pop culture flavor that will probably appeal to a lot of people who were grunge-era teens at the time, but not for me.

Audio/Video: Hackers (1995) arrives on region B locked Blu-ray from 88 Films  in 1080p HD framed in 2.35:1 widescreen. Grain is present, colors look vivid, blacks are good, but the master looks like an older one, it doesn't look like this is a new 2K scan or anything, there's some bits of print damage you can see from time to time, but it's a solid presentation overall. 

Audio comes by way of English DTS-HD MA 5.1 and 2.0 with optional English subtitles, dialogue is crisp and clean, and the score from Simon Boswell (Dust Devil) sounds fine, but I find the techno bump and thump annoying, not by bag at all. Of note, this looks to essentially be the same release of the film we saw from Shout! Factory a few years back, but this release includes the original 5.1 theatrical mix, which was absent on the Shout! Factory release.

Extras include a brand new and exclusive audio commentary by Director Iain Softley and Film Critic Mark Kermode, plus an over hour-long retrospective doc that should please fans of the film, there's also a trailer for the film. The Limited Edition first print run of this release from 88 Films includes a Gloss O-Card slipcase and a 150gsm fold-out poster.

Special Features: 
- Limited Edition Gloss O-Card slipcase [First Print Run Only]
- Limited Edition 150gsm Fold-out poster [First Print Run Only]
- Audio Commentary by Director Iain Softley and Film Critic Mark Kermode
- The Keyboard Cowboys: A Look Back At Hackers - Brand-New Interviews With Director Iain Softley, Cast Members Fisher Stevens, Matthew Lillard And Penn Jillette, Costume Designer Roger Burton, Visual Effects Artist Peter Chiang, And More! (64 min) 
- Original Trailer (2 min)

As 90's techno-thrillers aimed at the youth culture go this was entertaining stuff I guess, if vintage 90's computer effects, bad techno, rollerblading, and hacker hangouts sound like your idea of a fun time have at it, but I probably won't be watching it again anytime soon. That said, if you're a fan of it this is a good looking edition with cool extras and packaging. 

RATS: NIGHTS OF TERROR (1984) (88 Films Blu-ray Review/Comparison)

RATS: NIGHTS OF TERROR (1984) 

Label: 88 Films

Region Code: B
Duration: 96 Minutes

Audio: English, Italian LPCM Stereo with Optional English Subtitles

Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.85:1)

Director: Bruno Mattei
Cast: Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, Geretta Geretta, Massimo Vanni

In Bruno Mattei's Rats: Night of Terror (1984) Earth is a post-nuke wasteland, the year s 225 A.B. (you know, After the Bomb!), the world lays in ruins hundreds of years after the bombs have fallen, and we take-up with a motorbike gang of Mad Max styled bad asses rolling in the a burned out town. They find refuge is a strange building that looks to be a saloon up on top and a research facility down below, which is where good fotune seems to be smiling down upon them, discovering crates of stockpiled food rations. The food is a bizarre combination of what looks to be canned sour kraut, grains, sugar and flour, it's a pretty shit pantry selection but even this seems like quite a find in the A.B.-life. Filling themselves on their new spoils they settle in for the night, but find that the place is crawling with fierce four-legged vermin, besieged by a horde of red-eyed rats with a taste for human flesh.

Co-written and directed by Claudio Fragasso (Troll 2) and Bruno Mattei (Violence in a Women's Prison) this is a post-apocalyptic slice of Italian exploitation in the vein of Eliminators of the Year 3000 (1983), by way of a killer-rat movie Deadly Eyes (1982). The band of surface dwelling scavengers is lead by the cheesily rugged Kurt (Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, Zombie 3), but for me the real star is American born Euro-cult star Garetta Garetta (Demons) who is a serious bad ass black biker babe, named "Chocolate", 'natch. Along those lines there's a scene of someone dumping a bag of flour over Chocolate's head, and she starts doing a jig, while singing/saying "look, I'm just as white as all of you!", it's an odd bit of reverse-black face, but not all that strange for an Italian production from this era, all these Italian films were loaded with oddities, if it wasn't the all too-real animal carnage in the cannibal films (and this one too), it was atrocious dialogue, which this has as well,  and these insensitive racial characterizations. 

The rats we see onscreen are not the ravenous looking sewer rats they are implied to be, instead we get some docile looking white lab rats with bright pink eyes, that look to have been thrown into an oil can or something to make them look dark and scary, with occasional tufts of white fur showing through, but in a world where I can watch Deadly Eyes and be just fine with dachshunds in rat pelts I'm O.K. with what this film has to offer. Some of it is less forgivable though, like a brief scene of what is supposed to be a horde of rats on the move, but looks to be some sort of carousel wheel or treadmill with plastic toy rats glued onto it being turned around to give a poor man's illusion of said horde, it's probably the most laughable effect in the film, but trust me, it's not as laughable as most of the stilted Italian to English dubbed dialogue. 

For a Mattei film there's not a lot of bloodletting and gore, but the film is reasonably well shot, being a fairly entertaining genre mash-up with some much appreciated nudity and a loads of scenes of wet rats clearly being thrown and dumped onto the actors, which I am sure was not pleasant for actor nor rat. There is a small smattering of minor gore though, with the group discovering the gnawed-on remains of the scientists who once inhabited the facility, plus a cheap gag involving a rat emerging from the mouth of a corpse after having eaten it's way up from her naughty bits, presumably.

The film is cheap and silly for sure but I dig the apocalyptic punker aesthetic and deadly rats shtick, if you're a fan of post-nuke and/or killer rat movies this is a fun trashy b-movie, not a great film, but certainly an entertaining red-eyed rat flick. 

The film has a shocker of an end that involves the arrival of contamination suited survivors who emerge from the underground, revealing themselves to be rat-faced subterranean humanoid underground dwellers, which always brings a smile to my face, love it.

Audio/Video: Rats: Nights of Terror (1984) arrives on region B locked Blu-ray from 88 Films as part of their Italian Collection line-up, presented in 1080p HD and framed in 1.85:1 widescreen. 88 Films do not offer an lineage for their HD master but it looks good, the grain looks decent, blacks are good and the colors are well saturated, though there is what looks to be a little bit of scanner noise present throughout. I've included a few screenshots comparing it to the 2014 region-free Blu-ray from Blue Underground, the color grading and framing looks identical to my eyes, I am thinking this is the same HD master, but a tad brighter.  

Audio comes by way of both English and Italian LPCM 2.0 Stereo with optional English subtitles, both tracks are clean and free of distortion, they're in good shape, but I think the English audio is more robust, the electronic synth score from Luigi Ceccarelli has a nice life in the mix.

Onto the extras we get a few good ones, beginning with a new interview with Stuntmen and leads Massimo Vanni and Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, they discuss having known Mattei since childhood, he was a friend of their cousin, joining Mattei for a series of films he shot in the Philippines, working with Fulci on Demons 3, how the effects of a rats coming out of a victim's mouth was ac hived, and singing the praises of "b-movie" directors like Enzo Castellari, Lucio Fulci, Lamberto Bava and, of course, Bruno Mattei.

Composer Luigi Ceccarelli shows up for a 19-min interview, opening with his early love of music, and of composing music specifically, beginning his career in film scoring on a Claudio Fragasso super 8mm film, then going on to score Metamorphosis, Blue Angel Cafe, Women's Prison Massacre and over forty others, including co-scoring Nosferatu with Vangelis, saying he rarely passed up a film score opportunity, regardless of budget. He also speaks of visiting the set of Rats, which was not something he would usually do, and seeing scenes of the rats being let loose, describing Mattei as being very in control, while Fraggasso was more impulsive, describing their rapport together as playful.

88 Films go all-out for this release, the single-disc Blu-ray release comes housed in an oversized clear Blu-ray keepcase with a 2-sided sleeve of artwork, both artworks are basically the same with slight alterations, one side featuring the Italian title and the other the English title, with the English option featuring the numbered spine, while the Italian option does not. The limited edition includes an attractive slipcover with the same English title artwork, inside there's a 4-page booklet containing an interview with star Garetta Garetta by

Calum Waddell, in it she discusses her career, working with Argento and Lamberto Bava, the convention circuit, and a writing a script for a Demons homage, which would in effect be Demons 3! There's also a fold-out mini poster of the film with the Italian title!

Blu-ray Comparison: 

Top: Blue Underground Blu-ray (2014)

Bottom: 88 Films Blu-ray (2018) 

Special Features:  

- Limited Edition Gloss O-Card slipcase [First Print Run Only] 

- Limited Edition Interview with Geretta Geretta booklet by Dr Calum Waddell [First Print Run Only] 

- Limited Edition 150gsm Fold-out poster [First Print Run Only] 

- Uncompressed Original English Audio 

- Uncompressed Alternative Italian Audio 

- Newly translated English Subtitles fort he Italian Audio - NEW Interview with Stuntmen and leads Massimo Vanni and Ottaviano Dell'Acqua (25 min) HD 

- NEW Interview with composer Luigi Ceccarelli (19 min) 

- Theatrical Trailer  (2 min) 

- Reversible Sleeve with Italian Title 

Rats: Nights of Terror (1984) is a fun slice of post-nuke rat horror from the Italians, it's not too gory but all sorts of fun, and just a little bit mental, good stuff. 88 Films do good work bringing this one Blu-ray for the UK, and for you region-free lovers of exploitation.

More 88 Films Blu-ray Screenshots