Fanres - THE ORIGINAL Fan Restoration Forum

I don't yet have a thing that would make this a little more comprehensive: the 2013 US Blu-ray. The thing is, that Blu-ray is apparently cropped to 16:9 (despite having been shot and framed for 4:3 TV), so I highly doubt that'll be the version I'll want to watch when I properly sit down to watch it on the projector with decent sound at the right speed etc.

Nonetheless, I've just spent quite a lot of time (too much, really) comparing the three releases of the 1993 TV film BODY BAGS that I have so far:

1. the 1994 US Republic Pictures LaserDisc (NTSC)
2. the 2000 US Artisan DVD (NTSC)
3. the 2012 Italian Medusa DVD (PAL)

NOTE: This is a film in which you see Luke Skywalker with a Hulk Hogan moustache doing three things he never did a whole lot of in STAR WARS: domestic violence, shagging*, and a Southern accent. Strap in.

[Image: Body-Bags126143.png]

* For the Americans, I'm talking about willy business. Special hugs. The two-pump tango. I hope that helps.

Now, as you'll already begin to understand as you look at the above image, the colours are absolutely all over the bloody place here. Depending on which scene you're looking at, you might find the LD looks the best by a mile, or the US DVD, or the Italian DVD. At times one will be heavily pushed toward green and the others are really blue, and then suddenly it will flip completely the other way when the shot changes. It's really inconsistent and annoying. I wonder if that's where I might get some use out of the Blu-ray, but who knows? I'll find out soon enough.

The other major thing here is that until the Blu-ray (allegedly, as I don't have it yet to verify personally) most releases of this film were cut to varying degrees. There have been at least one or two European DVDs that aren't cut, of which the Italian DVD appears to be one, but the old 1994 US LaserDisc is partially censored and the 2000 US Artisan DVD is *extremely* heavily cut. I'm actually thinking that the US DVD may be the original TV broadcast version, because there's a whole bunch of stuff in the uncut version that is absolutely heinous and definitely wouldn't have made it onto TV in the US back in 1993, unless I've absolutely no idea what I'm talking about (which is a very real possibility).

So to start with, I ran through and synced both cut versions to the uncut Italian DVD, partly just out of pure curiosity and partly to try to gauge how viable it might be to resync the LaserDisc audio to the uncut version. I'm kinda feeling like it would be more hassle than it's worth after this, because the DVD audio sounds decent enough as it is and there are moments where the LD audio seems like it has significantly *less* fidelity than the DVD, which isn't good (moments where dialogue is partly obscured/distorted or appears to have a short skip in it, that kinda thing).

Anyway. Here are all the differences I noticed, without actually watching the film from start to finish. There are a lot of them.

WARNING: this is a big detailed list of all the changes in the whole film. It is therefore obviously a bit spoilery, although I'm not going to post screenshots of anything that is in the body of this post (I'll put them in a linked gallery at the end instead). It's also a horror film, and quite a grim one at that (especially here where it's variously either heavily censored, gently censored, and seemingly totally uncensored). Expect violence, nudity, both at the same time, lots of blood and gore, and a generous helping of bad taste humour. More importantly, though...

! TRIGGER WARNING !
Film (and therefore the following text about it) contains a couple of scenes involving domestic and sexual violence. Though I've not really put any visual evidence of that here (there is one screenshot which is not especially realistic or upsetting imo), I do talk about a particularly distressing scene in some amount of detail.

Gallery showing many of the changes I described above (so obviously, again, spoilers): https://postimg.cc/gallery/3RvQHjP

I haven't seen this since VHS. wasn't aware of all the censorship!

(2021-01-20, 11:13 AM)Bigrob Wrote: [ -> ]I haven't seen this since VHS. wasn't aware of all the censorship!

I'm guessing the VHS version was probably identical or very similar to the LaserDisc cut, but I wouldn't know. I was hoping the LD audio would be great and merit resyncing over the top of the lossy DVD audio, but I'm not convinced with what little chance I've given it so far (I ended up just flicking through with the Italian DVD audio slowed down to 24/1.001 fps and all 3 videos running at that speed).

I was wondering why the Italian DVD looked the best / most filmic until I scrolled further down the thread to see it having reel markers. It genuinely baffles me seeing a TV movie having print reel cues though. Did the movie get released theatrically overseas or what?

(2021-01-20, 11:59 AM)LucasGodzilla Wrote: [ -> ]I was wondering why the Italian DVD looked the best / most filmic until I scrolled further down the thread to see it having reel markers. It genuinely baffles me seeing a TV movie having print reel cues though. Did the movie get released theatrically overseas or what?

*shrug* It was supposedly shown at an Italian film fest in '99, but other than that...

I'm now wondering if perhaps it went down like this:

1. Shown on Showtime in the US (US DVD cut)
2. Released on home video in a significantly more grim cut (US LaserDisc, VHS)
3. For some reason, somehow, an uncut version is discovered and screened at Italian film festival in 1999
4. Italian version is then released by a handful of low-rent European distributors since nobody else would give a damn about doing it
5. Scream Factory makes an arse of it by cropping to widescreen even though it was always meant to be seen on a 4:3 screen and is clearly framed for that

Apparently the original plan was for it to basically be "John Carpenter's Tales from the Crypt" but then Showtime shat it and pulled the rug out at the last minute so to salvage what had already been filmed they just made it into an anthology film instead. Could be for the best but I do wonder what else we might've gotten if it had been made.

Body Bags was originally planned as a Tales from the Crypt-like series pilot with provisions (and widescreen framing) to create a theatrical version for overseas markets. It was created by John Carpenter's one off company 187 Productions with finical backing by overseas entities. One of the production companies that were funding the bulk of it had finical troubles and backed out during filming. This meant John Carpenters crew couldn't film more material without financial backing and only had enough footage to assemble an episode or two. 187 made a deal with Showtime to turn what footage they had into an R-Rated exclusive movie premiere, and was also sold to various distributors for international theatrical exhibition.

Showtime also leased the US video and network television broadcast rights to Republic Pictures, who created a "sanitized" TV-14 version to meet broadcast standards. I imagine Republic used the same edited master for the LD and Artisan DVDs (under licence from Republic/Spelling/Paramount), which explains why they're noticeably cut compared to the Shout BDs and Italian DVD. The 1.78 AR on the current HD master is not far off from the overseas theatrical release ratio, but some sections do look really tight and I imagine Showtime had things like credits framed and finished in 4:3 anyway. The bigger problem on the current HD master is the audio. It has that "syllable" issue due to being sourced from an optical audio track and not the Dolby Stereo master element (which may no longer exist if no one in the US has it).

(2021-01-21, 01:47 AM)SpaceBlackKnight Wrote: [ -> ]Body Bags was originally planned as a Tales from the Crypt-like series pilot with provisions (and widescreen framing) to create a theatrical version for overseas markets. It was created by John Carpenter's one off company 187 Productions with finical backing by overseas entities. One of the production companies that were funding the bulk of it had finical troubles and backed out during filming. This meant John Carpenters crew couldn't film more material without financial backing and only had enough footage to assemble an episode or two. 187 made a deal with Showtime to turn what footage they had into an R-Rated exclusive movie premiere, and was also sold to various distributors for international theatrical exhibition.

Showtime also leased the US video and network television broadcast rights to Republic Pictures, who created a "sanitized" TV-14 version to meet broadcast standards. I imagine Republic used the same edited master for the LD and Artisan DVDs (under licence from Republic/Spelling/Paramount), which explains why they're noticeably cut compared to the Shout BDs and Italian DVD. The 1.78 AR on the current HD master is not far off from the overseas theatrical release ratio, but some sections do look really tight and I imagine Showtime had things like credits framed and finished in 4:3 anyway. The bigger problem on the current HD master is the audio. It has that "syllable" issue due to being sourced from an optical audio track and not the Dolby Stereo master element (which may no longer exist if no one in the US has it).

That's a shame because I was mostly hoping the audio would be the thing I'd be able to glean from the Scream Factory release. Bugger.

The audio on the Italian DVD is actually surprisingly decent, so perhaps it's just a case of "slow down the Italian DVD and call it a day". I've already done that, and encoded two different .dtshd files to experiment a little: one as L+R (since it's a TV film and all the home video releases claim it's ordinary stere) and one as Lt+Rt (because it was nonetheless shot on film and IMDb claims "Dolby"). After testing first by matrix decoding it back to L+C+R+S, the surrounds and sides have a lot of leaking dialogue etc. that clearly should be in the centre, so I think I'm sticking with it being plain stereo (at least in the form that it appears on the Italian DVD). There's none of the sibilance you mention w.r.t. the Scream Factory one so I don't believe this has been sourced from optical. I'm guessing the master must be L+R as opposed to L+C+R+S because they knew it was destined for TV, although if they ever had plans to release on 35 mm theatrically I'm a little surprised by that because you'd think it'd make more sense to mix 4ch so it's Dolby MP Matrix ready. But it seems probably not, at least if the DVD is anything to go by.

The LaserDisc audio, as I mentioned, isn't as impressive as I'd hoped, and I'm leaning toward the DVD.

The Republic logo only appears on the LD, not any of the DVDs, and the US DVD is significantly more cut than the Republic LD. Like, the LD is comparatively almost uncut, it only trims the most obviously OTT scenes (which is mostly just a gigantic spurting blood geyser and some pretty gratuitous violent sex, both of which it still shows, just less explicitly).

I'm guessing if it was shown "overseas" you mean what I meant as well (European countries, primarily, or perhaps exclusively) in which case I take it that would have probably meant 1.66:1 or thereabouts. That's at least a little closer to the essentially "open matte" 4:3 TV presentation and I wouldn't have minded that so much since it'd likely look just a little less cramped. But even from picking just about any random screenshot, the 1.78:1 looks really, really tight.

So you say the LD is more in line with the IT DVD/SF Blu but with certain scenes cut? The Artisan DVD is most definitely based on the network broadcast version since it looks to also have different footage and angles instead of just sloppy cuts and censor fog.

Interesting that you say the SF audio doesn't have the sibilance issue. Have you checked the 2.0 and/or 5.1 tracks? Some BD.com users said it was the 5.1 that had this issue while some said the 2.0, and now I'm not even sure if it's their mishearing like with Black Christmas or used weak soundbars.

(2021-01-21, 02:10 AM)SpaceBlackKnight Wrote: [ -> ]So you say the LD is more in line with the IT DVD/SF Blu but with certain scenes cut?

Well, content-wise, definitely, yes. See the spoiler in the top post for a comprehensive breakdown if interested (scan through if you like, don't necessarily have to read the entire thing hahah). But not in terms of picture characteristics... I think they're from different sources, for a number of reasons, e.g.

1. Totally different colour (could have just been regraded that way but I don't think so personally)
2. IT DVD has reel change markers, LD doesn't
3. Different dust/damage/warping etc.
4. It isn't only that there are cuts, there's also a fair few brief alternate shots (as there are on the US DVD)

(2021-01-21, 02:10 AM)SpaceBlackKnight Wrote: [ -> ]The Artisan DVD is most definitely based on the network broadcast version since it looks to also have different footage and angles instead of just sloppy cuts and censor fog.

I agree that this seems incredibly likely, yes, I'm sure I said as much though didn't state it as fact because I have no way to be absolutely 100% certain. But yeah, I'm pretty sure that it will be.

(2021-01-21, 02:10 AM)SpaceBlackKnight Wrote: [ -> ]Interesting that you say the SF audio doesn't have the sibilance issue. Have you checked the 2.0 and/or 5.1 tracks? Some BD.com users said it was the 5.1 that had this issue while some said the 2.0, and now I'm not even sure if it's their mishearing like with Black Christmas or used weak soundbars.

I didn't say that, I said the Italian DVD doesn't. I haven't heard the SF audio because as I explained above, I don't have it yet; I only bought a copy because I was hoping I could make use of the audio, but if you're right about it, I guess not. Cry

EDIT: Ah, I think I might know why you've thought I was saying the SF audio didn't have sibilance, you might have read one sentence toward the end of a paragraph as an isolated statement (and without the context of the text right before it, it probably would sound like I was talking about the SF release)...

(2021-01-21, 01:58 AM)pipefan413 Wrote: [ -> ]The audio on the Italian DVD is actually surprisingly decent, so perhaps it's just a case of "slow down the Italian DVD and call it a day". I've already done that, and encoded two different .dtshd files to experiment a little: one as L+R (since it's a TV film and all the home video releases claim it's ordinary stere) and one as Lt+Rt (because it was nonetheless shot on film and IMDb claims "Dolby"). After testing first by matrix decoding it back to L+C+R+S, the surrounds and sides have a lot of leaking dialogue etc. that clearly should be in the centre, so I think I'm sticking with it being plain stereo (at least in the form that it appears on the Italian DVD). There's none of the sibilance you mention w.r.t. the Scream Factory one so I don't believe this has been sourced from optical. I'm guessing the master must be L+R as opposed to L+C+R+S because they knew it was destined for TV, although if they ever had plans to release on 35 mm theatrically I'm a little surprised by that because you'd think it'd make more sense to mix 4ch so it's Dolby MP Matrix ready. But it seems probably not, at least if the DVD is anything to go by.

That entire paragraph is about the Italian DVD audio: ergo, I wasn't saying the SF had no sibilance, I was saying that the IT DVD doesn't have the sibilance that you say the SF audio has, hahah.

(2021-01-20, 11:59 AM)LucasGodzilla Wrote: [ -> ]I was wondering why the Italian DVD looked the best / most filmic until I scrolled further down the thread to see it having reel markers. It genuinely baffles me seeing a TV movie having print reel cues though. Did the movie get released theatrically overseas or what?

The film arrived on TV in Italy in 1995, no theatrical release although originally there might have been plans to release it that way but we have no way of knowing. It wouldn't surprise me and it wouldn't be the first time! The Torino Film Festival showing in 1999 was part of a tribute to Carpenter.
I don't have the Italian VHS anymore, othwerise I could have checked the presence of reel cues there too. I assume they have always been there, and I remember seeing all these scenes from the first airing on Italian TV. As far as I know it has always been uncut here. In fact, the dubbing covers all those scenes too as it can be heard from this mux that was uploaded on YouTube (check Wes Craven's appearance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkaB6cZNYso

Thanks for all the efforts to compare it, pipefan413. I love this film, I didn't know there were different cuts elsewhere