Bad Blood (1981/NTSC DVD version) + The Girl-Getters (aka The System/1964) + High Tide (Armchair Thriller series/1980) + The Only Way (1970) + Trouble In The Sky (1960/VCI DVDs)

 

Picture: C/C+/C/C/C     Sound: C/C/C+/C/C     Extras: D/D/D/C-/D     Films/Episodes:

 

 

Bad Blood  C+

The Girl-Getters  B-

High Tide  B-

The Only Way  C

Trouble In The Sky  B-

 

 

VCI has issued a series of unrelated but distinctive DVD dramas that some will want to catch out of curiosity interest or because the material is distinctive.  To my surprise, I had already seen one of them, an early Mike Newell feature film entitled Bad Blood from 1980.  We covered a PAL import DVD edition with the same picture and sound quality from Umbrella Entertainment a few years ago.  You can read all about it at this link:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6994/Bad+Blood+(Umbrella+Entertainment

 

 

The TV director moved on to an awkward and not always satisfying theatrical film career after this and The Awakening (1980), but this is one of his more watchable efforts.  The discs are almost dead similar, except this one has no extras and the other had barely any.

 

A very different directing career came out of The Girl-Getters (1964) with Michael Winner helming more of the kind of film he was used to in Britain at the time.  Later known for hared-hitting, controversial Hollywood releases like Death Wish, The Mechanic, Scorpio and The Sentinel, this is more on par with early work like The Cool Mikado.  This is a somewhat realistic portrait of young teen men doing anything to meet women and has an exceptional cast that includes Oliver Reed, Jane Merrow, Harry Andrews, Guy Doleman, John Porter-Davison, David Hemmings, Jeremy Burnham, Derek Newark, John Alderton, Barbara Ferris and Julia Foster in a film from the same period as The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night and it works well.

 

High Tide is a four-part story from the Armchair Thriller series we have covered a few times on the site (along with a few of its sister shows) and stars Ian McShane in an intentionally Hitchcockian-type thriller (down to imitating Bernard Herrmann music) about a man named Peter Curtis (McShane) who is so angry a man has hit and killed his dog that he accidentally kills the man!

 

However, he has said something before he died and Curtis does not give it a thought until a man following him asks if he heard the man say anything before he died.  At first, he cannot remember, then he starts to.  Based on P.M. Hubbard’s novel, I was surprised how watchable this really was, how it was one of the better installments of the series I have seen and how much star power even then McShane had.  This is a fun one worth your time.

 

The Only Way is another tale of Jewish people escaping Nazi genocide and has the advantage of an early appearance of Jane Seymour before her international breakthrough role in the 1973 James Bond film Live & Let Die (reviewed elsewhere on this site) as the daughter of a family that must escape Denmark before they are all killed.  They don’t believe it at first, but it then becomes quickly apparent that the rumors are true.  The film is uneven and does not always hold up, but it has its moments and was a UMC release.  Better than most of Seymour’s TV work too.

 

Trouble In The Sky is the oldest of the releases and also has a strong cast in this story of the world’s first commercial jet airliner, called the Comet here.  Bernard Lee (later the first ‘M’ in all the Bond films of the 1960s and 1970s) plays a captain who has invented and developed the vehicle, but it is not working and investigations follow that question if he was pushing a bad failure and may be guilty of criminal negligence.  Peter Cushing, Michael Craig, George Sanders, Gordon Jackson, Charles Tingwell, Jack Hedley, Marne Maitland, Simon Lack and André Morell also star in this decent, interesting drama that may have inspired the British TV series The Plane Makers, reviewed elsewhere on this site.

 

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on Blood, Getters and Way should be the best here, but Blood and Way underperform leaving Getters as the best, but its fine black and white cinematography by Nicolas Roeg (with Alex Thompson no less as camera operator) still has detail issues, some aliasing and may come from a fine print, but DVD just can’t cut the great camerawork.  This is supposedly due on Blu-ray in the U.K. and VCI should consider a similar release.  Tide was shot all in 1.33 X 1 16mm film and these are older analog transfers of that material.  We have seen better from the Acorn DVD sets of the series and we’ll see if any future sets have these shows on them.  Sky was a 35mm scope film and while the opening and closing are here in letterboxed 2.35 X 1, the rest is in an oddly letterboxed 1.5 X 1 frame that ruins compositions throughout, which include constant softness, aliasing errors and haloing.  Why did they do this?  Director of Photography Arthur Grant deserves better than this.

 

The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on all five DVDs show their age, with Tide having the best sound, despite being a TV production and the second newest work here.  Extras only exist on Way, and that is only a couple of trailers.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo