With spectacular audio and video, an amazing
new documentary, and no rip-off moves to keep certain extras exclusive to previous releases, this Jaws Blu-ray is a classy way to acknowledge Uni- versal’s 100th birthday. Dive in. AARON VON LUPTON
But I Regress...
ALTERED STATES (1980) Blu-ray Starring William Hurt, Blair Brown and Bob Balaban
Directed by Ken Russell Written by Paddy Chayefsky Warner Bros.
Nearly 32 years after its theatrical release, Al-
tered States still stands as one of the more accom- plished film adaptations of a challenging book (Naked Lunch, Hellraiser and The Keep are some others). It’s largely due to the fact that the author of the novel, playwright Paddy Chayefsky, also adapted the screenplay, but there’s no denying the source material was perfect for the late Ken Rus- sell and his penchant for religious allegory, which rears its head frequently amidst the jumbled visu- als of the film’s numerous hallucination sequences. Based on the real-life sensory deprivation re-
Chew On This
JAWS (1975) Blu-ray Starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss
Directed by Steven Spielberg Written by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb Universal
On an artistic, academic and purely visceral
level, Jaws holds a place in film history that is well known beyond just horror fans, and well deserved. Now, it finally debuts on Blu-ray as part of thirteen films commemorating Universal’s 100th anniver- sary. Any time the restoration of
an important film is an- nounced, internet debates are bound to spark, but take it from us, Jaws has never looked better. Presented in its theatrical 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and using a 1080p encode lifted from the original nega- tives, the high-def resuscita- tion was supervised by Steven Spielberg himself, and is covered in detail on the bonus feature Jaws: The Restoration. The image is now crystal clear and extremely detailed, which is particularly notewor- thy given the movie’s abundance of practical ef- fects. You can almost feel the water splashing
during the opening attack sequence, and Bruce the shark looks sleeker but with visible nicks and scrapes. Sound-wise the experience is considerably en-
riched too, with the new repurposed lossless DTS- HD Master Audio 7.1 track giving a whole new boost to the panicked crowd scenes and John Williams’ iconic score. There are some enhanced effects as well, including a “dinosaur roar” heard during the shark’s demise, which Spielberg points out in the aforementioned featurette. The key new extra, though, is the long-awaited,
full-length documentary The Shark is Still Working (RM#125), a fan-made project that covers the impact of Jaws on other filmmakers, the movie industry and popular entertain- ment in general. It’s one of the best horror docs ever made, thanks in large part to an in- depth commentary from all of the key players, from Spielberg to the late Roy Scheider to poster artist Roger Kastel. In addition, the Blu-ray also
copies over all of the significant extras from previous releases, including Laurent Bouzereau’s
equally interesting 1995 documentary The Making of Jaws, a few deleted scenes and outtakes, and From the Set, an interview with a very young Spiel- berg at the time of the film’s release.
search of neuroscientist/psychonaut John C. Lilly, Altered States follows the efforts of one Dr. Edward Jessup (William Hurt, in his feature film debut) to explore higher consciousness via a series of iso- lation tank experiments aimed at finding one’s “true self.” Jessup be- lieves he can tap into a genetic memory that exists in all of us – with a little push from a hal- lucinogenic substance he procures from an ancient Mexican tribe at a sacred mushroom ritual – which could flare a spiritual con- nection to early man. His scientific peers, played by Bob Balaban (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and a deliciously fired-up Charles Haid (Nightbreed), try to stop him from doing permanent damage to himself, but when one of Jessup’s trips sees him temporarily regress to a primitive state that manifests itself physically, there’s no stopping the scientist’s crazed race to repeat the results. Like an astral- travelling Jekyll and Hyde, Jessup becomes a di- mension-straddling monster, experiencing full-blown transformations into a murderous simian beast, until the increasingly dangerous ex- periments crescendo into a full-tilt molecular melt- down. Altered States ultimately succeeds on the tour-
de-force performance of Hurt, the believable fric- tion between Jessup and his peers, and Russell’s glorious illustration of Jessup’s psychotronic freak- outs, which easily rival the mind-bending visuals of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s final act in terms of
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