COOL HAND LUKE (1967) (WBHE 4K ultra HD Review)

COOL HAND LUKE (1967)

Label: WBHE

Region Code: Region-Free

Rating: PG-13 

Duration: 126 Minutes 

Audio: English DTS-HD MA 2.0 Dual-Mono (UHD), DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono (BD) with Optional English Subtitles 

Video: (HDR10) 2160p UHD Widescreen (2.35:!) , 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)

Director: Stuart Rosenberg

Cast: Paul Newman, George Kennedy, J.D. Canon, Robert Drivas, Lou Antonio, Strother Martin, Jo Van Fleet

In the prison classic Cool Hand Luke (1967) Paul Newman (Road To Perdition) stars Luke Jackson, a war hero who at the start of the film is arrested for disorderly conduct and destroying public property after the cops nab him walking an empty city street quite drunk and cutting off parking meters at the stem with a pipe cutter. Sentenced to two years of hard labor at a Florida prison run by a warden who goes by Captain (Strother Martin, The Brotherhood of Satan). Luke proves to be not a fan of being told what to do by the prison staff, especially the menacing prison guard Godfrey (Morgan Woodard, Battle Beyond the Stars), who always wears mirrored sunglasses, and sits watch over the work crew with a rifle. 

Inside he earns a reputation among his fellow incarcerated as someone who is cool under pressure, hence his titular nickname, and not one to easily fall into line when told do so. He earns the respect of the towering Dragline (George Kennedy, Creepshow 2) after taking him on in the weekly prison yard  boxing match, and despite being whupped by Dragline hands down he refuses to give up, even when he can barely stand up, he never stops swinging. 

Occasionally his ant-authority antics begin to rub Captain the wrong way, and after various infractions throws him in the sweat box overnight several times, but it never breaks him. However, when his dear momma Arletta (Jo Van Fleet, Satan's School for Girls) passes on it get's under the skin of Luke, and despite the Captain preemptively locking him away in the box so as he is not tempted to escape, he does just that. His escape makes him in instant hero among the convicted, he is re-captured and the Captain lays into pretty hard so as to set an example and discourage he and others from attempting escape again. He makes several more escapes, each time his punishment grows more extreme, and finally it seems to break him. The fellow inmates start to lose faith in their former hero, but Luke has more tricks up his sleeve, and eventually makes a final break-out with his bud Dragline in tow. 

Cool Hand Luke is a classic among prison film, Newman is in top physical form and the camera loves his glistening bare-chested body as he labors away in the son. He's just a cool cat and his character is charming as heck, his indomitable spirit even winning over a few of the prison guards along the way. He's capably supported by Kennedy who gives a terrific Oscar-winning supporting performance as the hulking Dragline, a felon with heart; and Strother Martin just about steals every scene he shows up in with his wicked and slightly effeminate Southern drawl, uttering perhaps the film's most iconic line, "What we have here is a failure to communicate...", made famous to my generation (Gen X if you're keeping track), after it was used on the Guns N' Roses tune "Civil War".  The film also feature turns from a lot of familiar faces including Joe Don Baker (Charley Varrick), Harry Dean Stanton (Repo Man) as a guitar strumming felon, Dennis Hopper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Clifton James (Experiment In Terror), and Anthony Zerbe (Omega Man).

Audio/Video: Cool Hand Luke (1967) gets a region-free 4K Ultra HD from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment in HDR10-enhanced 2160p UHD widescreen (2.35:1), and while there's no specific information about the source of this new scan it looks quite nice. There's an unobtrusive layer of fine film grain that exports pleasing depth, clarity and fine detail throughout, especially in close-ups of characters caked in mud and sweat while working outdoors under the noon day sun. Colors are a bit muted and dingy by design, enhanced slightly by some judicious HDR10 color-grading that subtley  enhances primaries and boosts contrast with deeper more layered blacks during the night scenes. Audio on the UHD comes by way of DTS-HD MA 2.0 Dual-Mono with optional English subtitles. Its a solid track that is clean and offers intelligible dialogue, and the terrific Lalo Schifrin score sounds great. Unfortunately, the accompanying Blu-ray is a recycle of the 2008 release, which has only lossy Dolby Digital 1.0 mono, so the UHD's dual-mono DTS-HD track is actually a nice upgrade 

No new extras are afforded the Oscar nominated film, we get the archival Audio Commentary by Eric Lax on the UHD, which is duplicated alongside all the other archival extras on the Blu-ray, again a recycle of the 2008  disc, which are a bit light for a classic film in my opinion, a real shame The 2-disc release arrives in a black dual-hubbed keepcase with a single sided sleeve of artwork. Inside there's a redemption code for a 4K digital copy of the film. The slipcover is adorned with the WB 100 anniversary logo in the upper right hand corner, the wrap does not. 

Special Features:

- Audio Commentary by Eric Lax

- “A Natural-Born World-Shaker: Making Cool Hand Luke” (featurette) (29 min) 

- Trailer (3 min) 

- Slipcover

- Digital Copy 

NIGHTWING (1979) & SHADOW OF THE HAWK (1976) DOUBLE FEATURE

NIGHTWING (1979) & SHADOW OF THE HAWK ( 1976)

Label: Mill Creek Entertainment
Region Code: A
Rating: PG
Duration: 105 Minutes 
Audio: English LPCM 2.0 Stereo 
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.85:1) 
Director: Arthur Hiller
Cast: Nick Mancuso, David Warner, Kathryn Harrold, Stephen Macht, Strother Martin

Nightwing (1979) is clearly a post-Jaws exploitation film, combining indigenous culture with a swarm of plague carrying vampire bats in the New Mexico desert. Our Chief Brodie here is Maskai Indian Deputy Duran (Nick Manscuso, TV's Stingray) who finds himself at odds with the Tribal Council Chairman Walker Chee (Stephen Macht, The Monste Squad), a stand-in for Mayor Vaughn, who wants to exploit the tribes sacred lands for oil-money. While investigating the bizarre death of a horse on a local ranch that's been drained of blood Duran is confounded by what could have done it, while Walker wants to keep it hush hush so as not to spoil a profitable deal with the oil company.

Enter British scientist Philip Payne (David Warner, Waxwork) who suggests that the horses death is the handy work of vampire bats, declaring himself a vampire bat hunter, sort of the Quint of the film, a man completely obsessed with exterminating the vile winged vermin! He definitely brings some flavor to the film, he's the quint but he also brings a fun Peter Cushing-type vampire (bat) hunter flavor, it's a fun character in a film that certainly needed something to spice things up. 

Also figuring into the plot is Duran's shaman uncle, a medicine man feared by the tribe who has cast a spell meant to end the world, the old man having grown tired of the white man's disregard for the environment. Deputy Duran is a man of both worlds, he believes in the modern world but he also has can appreciate the mysticism of his heritage, attempting to tie the two world's together when he eats hallucinogenic plants intended to open his mind to the ancients -  looking for answers to help end the vampire bat invasion that threatens his people. 

Nightwing is way overlong at one hour and forty-five minutes, there's some interesting ideas floating around here with plenty of tribal and personal melodrama, but it did wear on me a bit. The special effects are decent, lots of furry vampire bats flying around on strings, with the decent swarming effect reminding me a bit of the fish-on-sticks from Piranha (1978), the special effects having been done by Carlo Rambaldi (King Kong). They don't look awful but they can look silly in a few places, there's a nod to jaws with our heroes hanging out in a bat-proof cage, no shit!  

Nightwing has some long stretched but I really dig the ancient native American mysticism of it, the mingling of science and ancient beliefs is cool, but some of the mumbo jumbo from Warner's vampire-bat hunter's mouth is straight-up ridiculous, but entertaining. He gets loads of monologues to espouse his "scientific" beliefs, but when he gets biblical about the origins of vampire bats it stretches credulity.

Let's not forget that the neither Mancuso or Macht are Native America actors, playing the prominent Indiana roles here, they're Jewish and Italian respectively, but if you can put that aside and get down with Duran's Datura-fueled vision quests there's some fun to be had here. The movie goes well beyond the length it needed to tell this story in my opinion though, it's not so much a slow-burns as it is a long slog with some decent moments of bat-terror and mysticism. Also be on the look out for the always awesome Strother Martin (The Brotherhood of Evil) as a man-of-God turned trading post entrepreneur, a colorful performance from Martin decked out in sterling silver and turquoise. 

SHADOW OF THE HAWK (1976)

Label: Mill Creek Entertainment
Region Code: A
Rating: PG
Duration: 92 Minutes 
Audio: English LPCM 2.0 Stereo 
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.85:1) 
Director: George McCowan
Cast: Jan-Michael Vincent, Marilyn Hassett, Chief Dan George 

The second half of this mystical Native American double-bill is Shadow of the Hawk (1976),  a made-for-TV slice of PG-rated horror, wherein elderly shaman Old Man Hawk (Chief Dan George, The Outlaw Josey Wales) who reaches out to his half-blood grandson Michael (Jan-Michael Vincent, The Return) to help him battle an evil that has fallen upon his village. Michael has long left behind his Native American heritage, and has become a business man in the city, but he reluctantly joins forces with his grandfather who indoctrinates him into the mystical ways of his ancestral shaman lineage.

The witch sends Michael visions of a a ghostly masked spirit to haunt him, in addition to sending animals and snakes to attack them, hoping to stop them from returning the village. This one offers up some good, creepy visuals, it's the better lensed of the two films in my opinion. The white-masked spirit was fairly cool looking, and Michael even has to wrestles a bear, there's a bit where they mix in a man-in-a-suit with footage of him actually wrestling the bear, it's sort of goofy looking but it works for the most part, it certainly looks better than the burning snake that shows up later! The stuff that really worked for me were some ominous looking dudes following them around in a creepy black car, it kind of reminded me of The Hearse or The Car, all black and vintage, not sure what black cars have to do with Indian mysticism but there you go. Also cool is a scene of Old Man Hawk using his magic to stop that creepy car dead in it's tracks, looking like it's hit an invisible wall in the middle of the road, by far the coolest part of the whole film in my opinion. 

There's a series of scenes in a cave when the ancestral shamans appear to Michael during a ritual, there's some cool hard atmospheric colored-gel lighting and wafts of colored smoke, I dug it. This is one of those film where you have to be able to look past the white-washing of the indigenous character, Jan-Micheal Vincent as a half-blooded Native American is a bit of a stretch to say the least, well-tanned though he may be, lol.  That he has all the charisma of wet napkin doesn't help either,  but I love these Native American tales of mysticism, even of the story is not particularly well fleshed out. I was never really sure why the witch was wanting to kill Old Man Hawk and his grandson, and the way she's taken out happens way too fast, as the credits were rolling I thought I'd missed something the first time around, but I didn't, the way it just comes to an end made it seem like everyone wanted to go home early on the last day of shooting.

Audio/Video: Nightwing (1979) and Shadow of the Hawk (1976) are presented on a dual-layer Blu-ray disc from Mill Creek Entertainment in 1080p HD framed in 1.85:1 widescreen. These were both previously available on burn-on-demand DVD. This Blu-ray is probably struck with the same existing masters provided by Sony for those burn on demand releases. The widescreen image looks good on both movies, grain looks natural and unscrubbed, detail is fair to moderate, and the colors looks accurate, with good looking black levels. The uncompressed LPCM 2.0 stereo audio is clean and well managed,  notably Nightwing features a score from Henry Mancini (The {Pink Panther), plus songs from Kenny Rogers and Crystal Gale, there are no subtitles for either film. 

This is a solid double-feature of 70's Native American horror, I'm always into the mysticism of these sort of films, even if they're a bit over-long and padded for run time, these are both worth a watch for fans of slow-burning 70's horror with a mystic bent. Kudos to Mill Creek Entertainment for debuting both of these on Blu-ray with good looking transfers, I hope they keep coming forward with these cult films, love it. 

MORE NIGHTWING BLU-RAY SCREENSHOTS

MORE SHADOW OF THE HAWK BLU-RAY SCREENSHOTS