Arachnophobia (Buenavista)

[Lost hero]

segun esto si salio en USA remasterizada


Review del Video

After several false starts, Arachnophobia completes its trip to home video in a presentation that finally presents the film to good advantage. The 1999 DVD release of Arachnophobia wasn't enhanced for 16:9 and suffered from a weak video transfer. The initial pressing of the Blu-ray, which Disney withdrew prior to the original Sept. 4, 2012 street date, suffered from incorrect black levels that were especially noticeable in the Venezuelan sequences. The remastered 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray that streets on Sept. 25, 2012 corrects the black levels and features a vastly superior image. The details of the countryside, the various styles of clothing, the Jennings' ramshackle barn, the elaborate spider webs, the spiders themselves (the small ones a harmless New Zealand breed, the large one a giant tarantula, plus an animatronic model) are all readily visible. The resolution is so good that in some shots you can even make out the thin wires attached to the spiders by their wranglers to control them. The image is somewhat soft, which is appropriate not only to the subject matter, but also because the film pre-dates the hard-edged digital look that has become standard twenty-two years later. (The cinematographer was Mikael Solomon, who shot The Abyss.) With black levels appropriately set, the visible detail is even better on the remastered version.

Colors generally run to the pastel and delicate, but they are now better saturated without the unnecessary overlay of gray on the original Blu-ray. The Venezuelan sequences are the most obvious beneficiary of this improvement, because there is no longer a distracting milky background or hazy overlay, and the greens of the jungle are truly verdant. In the shot where the expedition sees two colorful macaws fly by against a neutral background, the intense hues of the plumage stand out now, just as they should. The one aspect of the South American scenes that may give viewers pause—and it may even explain why the brightness levels were initially cranked up too high—is that the opening sequence, before the expedition descends into the "sinkhole", now looks unusually dark. Since the rest of the film appears correct, this has to be attributed to the original element; it may well be a result of the optical superimposition of the credit sequence, which ends just before the expedition reaches the bottom of the sinkhole.

There is only one slightly negative side effect of the correct brightness level, which is that video noise is occasionally more visible than it was when the grayish blacks washed it out. It's a small price to pay for the many benefits of an overall more accurate image, and, on the plus side, it's confirmation that the image hasn't been compromised by filtering or other noise reduction techniques.