I haven't seen this in a long ass time, I had fond memories of it from when I was a tyke, and it was just released in HD. I fagged out and bought it, fully aware in hindsight that it wasn't particularly a great movie. But hey, nostalgia, in HD! Nintendo only delivers on one side of that equation, lol!
Anyway, I popped in the blu-ray tonight to check it out, intending to skip out of the two shitty sequences (Heads a-poppin' Vic Morrow's segment and the shitty nursing home suckfest), watch the good bits (Joe Dante's EVIL FUCKIN LITTLE KID and Lithgow doing Shatner. . .in the butt), take like a half dozen sleeping pills, and return to the land of nod.
So, the movie starts, and I leave the first 10 minutes go to get a taste of the transfer. All the segments look rather different, so it is something of a little feast. Anyway, sometime over the past decade since I had seen this movie, I forgot (or didn't recognize) what appears to be its most significant flaw; something that if corrected could have made this movie more favorably remembered, and even made those two shitty segments seem at least tolerable: the four segments that comprise the movie are totally in the absolutely wrong order.
Skipping the bookends, the first sequence is the Vic Morrow one. Now, two things are wrong with this. One, it wasn't properly completed, and two, it's kind of in poor taste to have an incomplete, kinda bad, segment be the last testament to Vic Morrow. I mean, he died making this thing, and it blows. They could have like shelved it with some BS excuse that the segment was too grim or something, but no, let's have the fucking movie open with it, an incomplete segment that the main character and two children got fucking decapitated while making. Now, I am a fan of decapitations and all, but I'm surprised a production associated with Spielberg had the cojones to go through with this. Er, poor taste aside, this segment just sucks. Without getting into it, let's just say it's clearly incomplete and haphazardly tossed together via editing.
Segment number two is the worst thing Spielberg has done in his career next to Hook. Actually, it is thematically in the same family as Hook. We all know Hook is terrible. This segment is terrible.
Segments three and four, Dante's segment and the Lithgow segment are both pretty great. After watching the episodes they are based on religiously, they don't really add a whole lot, but they are good alternate takes on classics. Lithgow turns in a pretty great performance, too.
So you see, the problem is clear: the movie opens with its two worst segments, and they are both really bad. I argue that the movie could have been saved if they did it bad good bad good, good bad good bad, or ideally good bad good (cutting the Morrow segment completely). I guess the philosophy in the final cut was "save the best for last," but that really ahsn't done the movie's reputation any big favors.
EDIT: As far as the transfer goes. . .pretty good for something non-high profile. The Morrow segment appears to use film stock that is of significantly lesser quality than the other three segments. Anthology movie, so it is a safe assumption that each segment used its own crew and equipment. It's also possibly, due to the nature of the Morrow segment, that dulled colors and a"worn" look were somewhat intentional. Fidelity and resolution are still great in that segment, but it doesn't pop like the others. Joe Dante's segment looks the best. The colors are especially warm in that one, and they look especially real. For all I know, the same might be said about the Lithgow segment, but airplanes don't have a lot of color in em to judge.
