THE PROGRAM

“Dragon Ball Z: Kai” is a unique simultaneous re-mastering and re-telling of the classic “Dragon Ball Z” anime series. For the uninitiated, “Kai” takes the original 291-episode run and trims the fat, omitting filler episodes in order to present a series that more closely resembles the original storyline of the mangas. The result is 98-episodes of lean, mean and far from childish storytelling. Initially released in two-volume per season installments, for a total of eight-volumes, Funimation is going back and re-releasing “Kai” as standalone, complete seasons, meaning viewers can enjoy the series as it originally aired, as opposed to encountering false breaks while waiting for a second release.

“Dragon Ball Z: Kai” season three is a bit of fresh air, eventually introducing some new foes for our hero Goku and company to face off against, but not before concluding last season’s arc involving Frieza. One of the more frustrating, but likely not surprising early developments in the third season is the false absence of Goku. It lasts a couple episodes at best, teasing viewers with maybe some more time spent with the large cast of colorful supporting characters, but like clockwork, Goku returns to save the day. It’s not all for nothing though, as Goku finds himself sidelined not too much later on as the season’s new villains, the Androids provide a new flavor of villainy for our heroes and anti-heroes alike to combat.

Unfortunately, for as much as the Androids bring to the table, the series quickly falls into a comfortable lull, bombarding viewers with episode after episode of battles that quickly lose their epic feel as they become the status quo. Midway through the season, the series is fast approaching shaky ground, but like the early tease of an absent Goku being premature, the season does manage to recover with a few elementary, but engaging plot twists and the introduction of an even greater foe, Cell. Is any of this really creative or inspired? Probably not, but “Kai” manages to defy the odds and emerge at the end of the day, still entertaining, but not nearly as fresh as it began.

The third season of “Dragon Ball Z: Kai” is definitely the weakest thus far, but its final run of episodes does set up some interesting character developments, in particular the greater emphasis put on Gohan and his ultimate potential as a Super Saiyan. With only 21 episodes left, there’s still a compelling enough reason to see the series to its conclusion. At the very minimum, “Dragon Ball Z: Kai” proves its necessity to exist by showing how at even 98-episodes, “Dragon Ball Z” can be a somewhat bloated series at times, trotting out the same formula, often multiple times in a row.

THE DVD

The Video

The 1.33:1 original aspect ratio transfer is definitely far cleaner and vibrant than the assorted “Dragon Ball Z” material I’ve seen in the past. There’s a very minimal amount of compression in some shots, but considering how this new version of the series was crafted together, some elements still have some slightly faded quality to them. No one will ever mistake this for being a modern piece of animated work nor something from the heyday of classic Disney, but compared to other anime series’ of the timeframe, this is a very good looking transfer.

The Audio

The English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track has considerable more life than the very flat and thin, original language stereo track. While voice work is incredibly well orchestrated, the dub is a bit more dominant than any other element of the sound mix. Effects are strong as forceful, despite the slight overshadowing by dialogue, but the accompanying score can sometimes go unnoticed. The Japanese stereo track, as stated above is far more flat sounding, but the overall mix is much more satisfactory. English subtitles are included that only accompany the Japanese audio.

The Extras

The only extras are textless credits.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re going to buy “Dragon Ball Z: Kai” depends on how well you love the source material as well as the desire in wanting a leaner series. While this third season does conclude developments that took place over season two, the initial promise of something new with the appearance of the Androids, quickly enters familiar territory. The season does recover and once again, manage to hook viewers into giving the fourth and final season a go, but at this point, the series is really only for fans truly wowed by the first half of the entire run. Recommended.

THE MOVIE:

Plenty of action movies promise non-stop thrills but Sleepless Night is one of the few that actually delivers. Director Frédéric Jardin’s film is an unyielding shot of adrenaline that simply can’t be denied. It goes and goes and just when a lesser film would have paused for a breather, it takes off like a rocket.

As the film opens, we hit the ground running with Vincent (Tomer Sisley) and Manuel (Laurent Stocker) who steal a duffel bag filled with cocaine from a couple of thugs. Unfortunately, things get messy in a hurry when Manuel gets trigger happy. In the ensuing commotion, one of the thugs is killed and the other escapes but not before getting a good look at Vincent’s face. This is going to be a problem because Vincent and Manuel are actually cops…dirty ones, but cops nonetheless. The heist comes back to haunt Vincent in a big way when his son (Samy Seghir) gets snatched by José Marciano (Serge Riaboukine), the drug lord whose inventory is now short one duffel bag of cocaine.

Marciano’s not an unreasonable man. He’s willing to make a trade. If Vincent shows up at Marciano’s nightclub The Tarmac with the drugs all accounted for, he can collect his son and be on his merry way. This turns out to be easier said than done as other players enter the frame. There’s Lacombe (Julien Boisselier), a corrupt Internal Affairs officer who is working with Manuel and Vignali (Lizzie Brocheré), Lacombe’s eager underling who doesn’t recognize the monster she’s working for. Let’s also not forget Feydek (Joey Starr) and Yilmaz (Birol Ünel) who are impatiently waiting to purchase the drugs that Marciano is currently missing. The Tarmac is about to get very crowded and that’s before you even account for the hundreds of shiny, happy club goers that are going to descend on the joint.

There’s an obvious genre analogy to be made here so I won’t be coy about it. A determined man of action who goes up against incredible odds to save his kidnapped child could just as easily apply to Taken (a film I love dearly) but the comparison ends right at the surface. The devil, after all, is in the details. The strength of Jardin’s film lies in the character of Vincent who convincingly comes across as the underdog. He isn’t a superhero with a very particular set of skills. He’s just a streetwise cop who’s good at thinking on his feet. Not all of his plans work out (in fact, very few do) but he’s resourceful enough to stay alive long enough to come up with a new one. His unpredictability adds a dose of danger that more conservative action flicks can only dream of.

For a film as fast-paced as this (it really does fly), one may expect that character development would take a major hit. My concerns were put to rest by the intelligent screenplay that extracts tiny glimpses of Vincent’s humanity with every nigh impossible obstacle he tackles. His frustration, his anger and even his sadness are handled with sensitivity and efficiency. This doesn’t prevent Jardin from occasionally reminding us that though Vincent’s mission is virtuous, he still isn’t an angel. His use of excessive force against Vignali is borderline uncomfortable but acts as a reminder that we are watching a man very close to the edge of his sanity. Tomer Sisley absolutely shines in the lead role and manages to keep us on Vincent’s side, even in difficult moments like this.

While all the performers acquit themselves admirably, a pivotal role actually belongs to the club itself. The structure complete with its writhing mass of singing, dancing partiers features so prominently that it quickly becomes a characters in its own right. Watching Vincent navigate its differently themed rooms and battling its crowds to get from place to place is pulse-quickening in itself. One of the most touching moments comes courtesy of a young lady that Vincent saves from a lecherous drunk. Enamored by him, she follows Vincent like a lost puppy until he is forced to cut her loose. Their relationship is brief and practically silent but it offers a shared calm experience in the midst of the chaos surrounding them.

If there are any missteps in the film, they are barely worth pointing out. The jittery, frenetic camera work conveys urgency for the most part but it occasionally feels gratuitous (especially in the quiet moments). The post-climax scenes also stretch the film out to deliver an emotional impact that feels excessive. Thankfully, these are truly minor nitpicks and you’ll be too exhausted from the running / punching / shooting / bleeding to really care. This is visceral, forceful entertainment that demands to be experienced.

THE DVD:

Video:
The anamorphic widescreen image offers up decent contrast and black levels which is important considering how much of the film takes place at night or in dark corners of the nightclub. Tom Stern, the cinematographer, employs a jittery handheld style with his camera always on the move. Given that, some of the visual aspects like occasional heavy grain and softness in certain scenes seem to be intentional and indicative of what the director was going for. Fine detail is certainly not lacking in plentiful close-ups. This is a perfectly suitable presentation for the material at hand.

Audio:
The audio is presented in French 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround and 2.0 Stereo mixes with English subtitles. I chose to view the film with the surround mix and it did not disappoint. The score by Nicolas Errèra is a pulsating twitchy thing of beauty. Thankfully the mix gives it ample support. Since the film is set in a nightclub, it’s nice to have the pounding, electronic music of The Tarmac come through with such oomph. Dialogue is clear and doesn’t get overwhelmed while the action roars to life with great regularity.

Extras:
The only extra is An Interview with the Cast of Sleepless Night (4:47). This extremely brief featurette is loaded with footage from the film and just a few sound bites from Tomer Sisley, Samy Seghir and Joey Starr on what their characters bring to the film.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Director Frédéric Jardin has created something special here. This is a pulse-pounding thriller that absolutely delivers on its promise (and then some). Tomer Sisley makes his ass-kicking lead utterly believable by underscoring the heroics with vulnerability and intelligence. Sleepless Night is a relentless wonder worth seeking out. Highly Recommended.

THE MOVIE:

I’ll just come clean at the start: I’ve always had mixed feelings about LCD Soundsystem. The band’s miasma of New Order riffs, Suicide drumbeats, and 1980s vocal eclecticism is appealing in short doses, but I often find the songs go on too long, working one idea to death, and outstaying their welcome.

With this in mind, it maybe shouldn’t really be a surprise that I have similar misgivings about Shut Up and Play the Hits, the documentary about the band’s last performance, a massive three-hour-plus event at Madison Square Garden in April 2011. James Murphy, the frontman and principal songwriter, had decided to end the group after three albums, to go out while he was still proud of all he had accomplished, and punctuate the whole affair with a big party at a legendary venue. It’s a movie that is at times exhilarating, especially when the live footage takes over, and at other times perplexing and dull, maybe lingering too long on the moment in an effort to force a heavier meaning on the whole thing.

Shut Up and Play the Hits is directed by Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, who previously directed the Blur documentary No Distance Left to Run. To provide context for the LCD show, they film Murphy in the days leading up to the concert and the day after, tracking the nervousness and minutia that consumes him in preparation of the massive event, and then letting the boredom sink in as he comes down from the high. All these timelines are chopped up and shuffled, the cinematic journal jumping between the different days, live tracks, and a sitdown interview with Murphy and writer Chuck Klosterman. The stuff about the business of shutting down a band ends up being pretty good; the long takes of Murphy staring pensively into space as he presumably contemplates what he has done–though he could just as easily be merely contemplating going back to bed–drag on and on and on and, at times, some of this wandering around even feels staged. You kind of wonder where the camera was, how they managed to be ahead of him while he walked his dog, or underneath him as he shaves his beard–all stuff you shouldn’t be wondering while watching a documentary. As Klosterman accurately points out, James Murphy is a man who finds it impossible to not be self-conscious; yet, here he is ignoring the fact that he’s being filmed.

These complaints are easy to forget once the music gets going. I never saw LCD Soundsystem live myself, but had I done so, it might have removed my doubts about their recorded output. (It’s been known to happen; a transcendent TV on the Radio concert completely changed how I heard their records.) Lovelace and Southern stick to the title’s maxim and mainly cull the hits from the sprawling performance–“Dance Yrslef Clean,” “Losing My Edge,” “North American Scum” (with guest backing vocals by members of the Arcade Fire), “All My Friends,” “Us v Them,” a cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Jump into the Fire,” and more. Reggie Watts also makes a guest appearance, and there is a horn section and a men’s vocal choir. The band is energetic and the camera swings from the stage to the audience to capture the experience of being there from both angles (and finding comedians Aziz Ansari and Donald Glover in the process). It’s scintillating and intense, and the show culminates in an emotional finale of “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.”

Murphy’s dialogue with Klosterman attempts to wrestle with the meaning of this ending. What is its cultural significance? How does it fit with the mythology of rock ‘n’ roll? Murphy even wrestles with whether or not it’s a big mistake, or something he is doing for the right reasons. There are, of course, no definitive answers, because there is no distance. If I am reading it right, I believe the intention of Shut Up and Play the Hits is to get that assessment rolling, to create the document by which future rock journalists can argue the case. This may be some of what sucks the feeling of immediacy out of the effort, and it’s the kind of thing that Murphy says he never wanted to do with the band, and maybe this whole thing would have been better served had there actually been more shutting up, and just let the music speak for itself.

Which it does on the bonus discs, but more on those in a second…

THE DVD

Video:
Oscilloscope has brought Shut Up and Play the Hits to DVD as a 1.85:1 widescreen transfer. Resolution here is superb, with sharp lines and gorgeous color timing. The photography in the film is exquisite, capturing reality with an artistic eye, working with natural light to create a remarkable image of the band’s offstage activities, and going full-title disco for the onstage activities. Both look awesome, with only some slight blocking in some of the darker concert scenes–though that appears to be just a problem of capturing the complicated set-ups, not with the DVD authoring.

Sound:
Two sound options are offered, a 5.1 surround mix and a stereo mix, both in Dolby. The multi-channel choice is the way to go. The quiet scenes have excellent aural ambiance, while the concert goes big and goes loud. The use of front and back speakers means the music is all around you, and the crowd noise is mixed purposefully to make it sound like you’re standing in the audience listening.

What I will say about the 2.0, though, is that it has a more direct impact. Literally. The centered mix means you can really feel the heavy drumbeats in your chest.

Extras:
The usual multi-piece Oscilloscope packaging is very classy, with a foldable book coming inside a smartly designed slipcase. The multi-panel interior section has room for all three DVDs, as well as printed liner notes by Nick Sylvester, who led the men’s choir at the MSG show.

DVD 1 has the movie alongside several on-disc extras:
* Around 20 minutes more of the conversation between James Murphy and Chuck Klosterman.
* A short look at the men’s choir warming up.
* An even shorter reel of Murphy’s manager, Keith Wood, swearing.
* “Catching Up with Keith,” a 10-minute featurette showing Murphy going on a trip to see how that same manager is faring now that LCD Soundsystem is kaput.
* The theatrical trailer.

DVDs 2 and 3 have the full concert, a 3-and-a-half hour event, spread across both discs. All the songs are here, and in truth, this is the real selling point of the Shut Up and Play the Hits DVD release. This is essential material, and a must for any fans of good concert films. You really get to see the band do what they do, and experience the full breadth of their material, while also seeing how large an event this really was. The edit here largely matches the excerpts in Shut Up and Play the Hits, but without any interruptions or insertions. Sound options are also the same. Added backstage material fills in the breaks during the concert. Plus, the extra special Shit Robot cameo!

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Highly Recommended. More for the two bonus discs of the concert than the documentary itself. Shut Up and Play the Hits is a decent music documentary, especially when it stops with the self-important pondering and cuts to the live footage of LCD Soundsystem rocking Madison Square Garden. The event the band put together for their last show is huge, as evinced by the full three-and-a-half-hour uncut version. The performance is remarkable, and the presentation is bright and loud. The backstage stuff in the main documentary ranges from interesting to completely boring, but such is life, I suppose. Shut Up and Play the Hits indeed.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joëlle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich’s blog at Confessions123.com.

When low-rent hitman Walter (Jürgen Rißmann) accidentally kills the wrong person, his boss tells him he’s gotta take a break. Against his better judgment, Walter takes a tip from a friend about a job up in the mountains some 2,000 miles away, on the promise that it will be “like a paid vacation.” Upon arrival, his car gets stuck in the snow, his obnoxious partner Micky (Thomas Wodianka) gets on his nerves, and Berger (Reiner Schöne), the man with the assignment, isn’t there, only his wife Sibylle (Eva-Katrin Hermann). Walter and Micky are left to twiddle their thumbs waiting for Berger while Sibylle causes trouble, and events quickly spiral out of control.

Writing out the summary of Snowman’s Land makes it sound sort of like In Bruges, and for a twenty or so minutes, the film has a nice understated absurdity to it. After realizing he’s shot the wrong guy, Walter gets the right target in his sights, but holds up the picture next to the guy’s face, just to make sure. His meditating boss tells him about a sort of lightbulb therapy and how to pretend you’re on a distant, warm beach while staring into them for a few hours every day. The chilly mountains make for a nice backdrop for something goofy but violent to happen.

Sadly, when something violent finally does happen, director/writer Tomasz Thomson doesn’t seem to know how to escalate. The film sets up a tricky situation for Walter and Micky, but it struggles to wring an exciting or funny scene from it. The film plods along at a glacial pace as the two men lounge in Berger’s hotel-like mansion, watching fuzzy TV and sneaking into the areas Sibylle tells them are off-limits. True to the role, Micky is indeed fairly obnoxious, and probably not as funny as Thomson or Wodianka think he is, and the viewer will probably relate to Walter in the worst way in under twenty minutes.

Of all the characters, Sibylle is the most interesting, but the role is pretty minor; the character hops in her car and drives away for a good 15 minutes of the movie, and she’s only given so much to do when she comes back. It seems, for a minute, that the film is going to perk up with her presence, but it doesn’t last. Instead, the movie moves onto Berger, who is not a particularly interesting character; he’s sadistic and highly suspicious of his two new hires, but he’s also pretty bland. Another actor might’ve been able to infuse some comic energy into the role, but Schöne only perks up for a few seconds at a time.

As the movie twists and turns through the story, it becomes clear that Thomson doesn’t really know where he’s going. Power shifts from Berger to others, back to Berger. Walter and Micky are okay one minute, and not okay the next. Walter tries to leave, but the film artificially stops him. At the center of all of the chaos is Walter, who doesn’t seem to know why he’s been stuck in this hell, nor how to change and escape from it. Like every other plot development, the film’s finale feels arbitrary, with all the affectation of having conveyed something satisfying and meaningful, but none of the substance.

The DVD
I guess when working on a foreign film with no stars, there’s nothing stopping a designer from taking the arty route with DVD cover design. I don’t know how well it conveys the story of the film, but it’s certainly memorable and neat-looking. The disc comes in an eco-friendly Amaray case, and there is an insert promoting other Music Box releases.

The Video and Audio
When the action isn’t out in the bright, snowy hillsides, Snowman’s Land spends most of its time in dingy, underlit rooms with a heavy blue palette and lots of shadow. Many scenes are shot at night. This could spell disaster for a DVD transfer, but this 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation handles contrast and color just right — I watched very closely, but I didn’t find a single instance of banding, which is pretty remarkable. A hint of compression or resolution-related haloing is visible, as well as maybe a touch of crush, and the image is sometimes on the soft side, but that’s it — a fine transfer.

Sound-wise, Snowman’s Land is a sparse experience. The film’s atmosphere is all about the eerie emptiness of an empty mountain far from civilization, so there aren’t a lot of opportunities for this German Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track to show off. The unique squeaky pop-crunch of someone walking through snow, the distant call of birds and twigs snapping, echoing voices in a spacious, empty house, the distant sound of a thumping boombox, and the occasional gunshot are all rendered nicely, with the occasional hint of directionality. English subtitle translation seems fine. A German Dolby Digital 2.0 track is also included.

The Extras
The one extra is “The Making of Snowman’s Land“ (19:33), a pretty standard behind-the-scenes featurette. Points for being heavy on interviews rather than clips from the film, and the footage of the trailer the filmmakers shot to sell the film is interesting, but it’s not too heavy on information otherwise. A shame the promo trailer isn’t included all on its own.

Trailers for Henning Mankell’s Wallander, The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch, Viva Riva!, and Mesrine play before the main menu. An original trailer for Snowman’s Land is also included.

Conclusion
Snowman’s Land gets off on the right foot and has an interesting look in a striking setting, not to mention a handful of laughs, but it’s aimless overall. If Thomson had spent a little more time punching up the comedy and refining the story, there might’ve been a minor masterpiece in the story and characters, but as it is, it’s a rental at best.

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Light-footed little spy flick, with just a suggestion of supernatural overtones, from director Budd Boetticher, Jr. producer Wallace MacDonald and Columbia Pictures’ “B” unit. Sony Pictures’ own M.O.D. (manufactured on demand) unit, the Sony Pictures Choice Collection, which caters to movie and TV fans looking for those hard-to-find cult and library titles, has released Escape in the Fog, the 1945 WWII espionage programmer from Columbia, starring Nina Foch, Otto Kruger, William Wright, Konstantin Shayne, Ivan Triesault, and Ernie Adams (and look quick for a cameo by Shelley Winters). Enthusiasts of “B” programmers, rather than Boetticher cultists, will find Escape in the Fog to their liking; it’s clean but anonymous. No extras for this okay-looking full-screen transfer.

Night on the foggy San Francisco Bay Bridge, 1945. Eileen Carr (lovely Nina Foch) is stopped by a beat cop (Dick Jensen) who advises her to go home (“You never can tell what will come out of the fog,” he gravely intones). Sure enough, he’s right; a taxi pulls up, and out spill three men, two of whom are about to spike the third. Eileen screams…and awakes in her room at the Ye Rustic Dell Inn in Northern California, where fellow guest, Barry Malcolm (William Wright), standing anxiously at the foot of her bed. Eileen dreamed the murder, but what’s truly unsettling is that Barry was the victim in the dream―a man she has never before met. Enjoying breakfast together later that morning, the two find out about each other: Barry has been doing “a little psychological warfare” work he can’t talk about, and Eileen, an honorably discharged Navy nurse, is recently out of the hospital after “cracking up a little” when her medico ship was sunk underneath her. A casual invitation from Barry to travel with him to San Francisco is met with an equally agreeable “yes” from Eileen, and they’re off…however, sinister forces are aware of Barry’s true vocation―espionage agent―and head Nazi operator in Frisco, clock repairman Schiller (Konstantin Shayne), is made aware of Barry’s imminent arrival. Once Schiller learns Barry’s mission, courtesy of a bug planted at Barry’s control agent Paul Devon’s (Otto Kruger) home, the race is on to retrieve Barry’s vital papers…and for Eileen to stop her dream from becoming a terrifying reality.

There’s not much you can write about Escape in the Fog…precisely because it’s such a successful, mainstream example of its genre: the quick-flash 40s “B” programmer. No fat. No flourishes. Just clean, anonymous A-B-C storytelling, shot in as fast and as efficient a manner as possible, with little or no time spent of fleshing out characters or filling in plot holes. Escape in the Fog‘s director, Oscar Boetticher, Jr., is of course “Budd” Boetticher, Jr., who would soon make a name for himself in Hollywood directing Randolph Scott Westerns, several of which would later be recognized as important milestones in the genre. However, at this earliest point in his directing career (according to Boetticher himself), these “B” efforts were without personal distinction for the director, serving as little more than training exercises for the novice helmer. Certainly that’s the way the studio “B” units were set up, anyway, regardless of whether or not Boetticher may have wanted to aesthetically express himself. Within the factory-like production methods of the studios, the programmers were even more rigidly controlled in terms of budget and shooting methods; even if the producers had wanted to let the contract directors have some artistic license, there wouldn’t have been time or money for complicated set-ups or experiments.

And the same goes for Escape in the Fog. Written by Aubrey Wisberg (The Horn Blows at Midnight, The Man From Planet X), Escape in the Fog‘s biggest drawback stems from its “B” second-bill DNA: lack of adequate run-time to more fully develop the story and characters. While all of the spy shenanigans in the movie are thoroughly ordinary (with some admittedly nice touches, such as Wright’s amusing danger signal when they’re locked up in the clock shop: he writes “Hail Japan” on a magnifying lupe and reflects it off his lighter onto the shop window), what could have been potentially fascinating about Escape in the Fog―Foch’s mental instability and her supernatural premonitions―is completely ignored. A character admitting to “cracking up” in the military, especially a woman, wasn’t exactly a clichéd stereotype in these WWII-era movies, but Escape in the Fog only has Foch simply state her condition once…before it’s dropped completely. Same thing with her ESP powers. I think Wright says something like, “Remarkable,” when her premonition is proven correct, but that’s the only comment Escape in the Fog makes on this intriguing element of the storyline, a facet of the plot that proves utterly superfluous since nothing is made of it (no one says anything about the potentially scandalous nature of unmarried Foch and Wright going to Frisco together for a week, either…). That’s too bad, too, because without those oddball elements, Escape in the Fog plays like any other number of “B” programmers from those days: speedy, mildly entertaining, but wholly undistinguished.

The DVD:

The Video: I thought the full-screen, 1.33:1 black and white transfer for Escape in the Fog looked a bit grainy, with digital noise particularly during the fog sequences. Overall, though, the image was sharpish, with an adequate gray scale.

The Audio:
The Dolby Digital English mono audio track was adequate, with a bit of fuzz and hiss, but acceptable for viewers used to these older titles. No subtitles or closed-captions available, however.

The Extras:
No extras, not even a menu: it just starts up, and loops.

Final Thoughts:
Boetticher completists may look in vain for signs of their favorite director’s touches in this anonymous little spy thriller. It’s too bad enough time wasn’t available to explore the ESP aspects of the story, as well as developing more thoroughly Foch’s psychologically damaged character. A rental is best for Escape in the Fog.

Paul Mavis is an internationally published movie and television historian, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and the author of The Espionage Filmography.