Nightmare City

[domino harvey]

NOW THEY ARE EVERYWHERE! THERE IS NO ESCAPE!

Long before zombies took up jogging in 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, they were brandishing axes and other sharp implements in Umberto Lenzi’s utterly insane radiation-sickness opus Nightmare City.

In true Zombie Flesh Eaters form, our story begins with the arrival of an ominous, seemingly unmanned craft – in this instance, a military plane making an unscheduled landing at a European airport. Upon forcing the aircraft doors open, the waiting soldiers get a nasty shock when out bursts a horde of flesh-hungry, pizza-faced radioactive ghouls. The walking dead are here, and they’re hungry!

Counting amongst its fans the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth, Nightmare City (aka City of the Walking Dead) is a bonkers slice of Italian zombie carnage from the man who shocked the world with the notorious Cannibal Ferox.

CONTENTS

• Brand new 2K restoration of the film from the original camera negative
• Alternative High Definition transfer from the 35mm reversal dupe negative
• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
• Original Italian and English soundtracks in mono audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray)
• Newly translated subtitles for the Italian soundtrack
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the English soundtrack
• Brand new audio commentary by filmmaker, Fangoria editor and Nightmare City fan Chris Alexander
• Radiation Sickness – a brand new interview with director Umberto Lenzi
• Sheila of the Dead – a brand new interview with star Maria Rosaria Omaggio
• Zombies Gone Wild! – director, producer and actor Eli Roth on Nightmare City and the wild cinema of Umberto Lenzi
• Nightmare City and The Limits of Restoration – featurette looking at the differences between the two transfers included on this release
• Alternate Opening Titles
• Original Trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys

[MichaelB]

Arrow will be including two different transfers of Nightmare City on their release - one sourced from the badly damaged original camera negative, and the other sourced from a much cleaner but significantly softer interneg, the only pre-print elements believed to survive.

James White explains the situation here.

[EddieLarkin]

Damage doesn't bother me half as much as it does most (unlike soft grain and lack of detail and sharpness), so I'm confident I'll be going with the OCN transfer.

[tenia]

it’s been interesting to note that when another label releases the film using the same studio-supplied master but doesn’t bother to do any additional clean-up themselves, reviewers often don’t pick up on the differences. When they compare our two releases, they describe our presentations as being “essentially the same”. This can be a bit discouraging, as it doesn’t acknowledge the additional care and expense that we went to in our efforts to release the film in the highest quality presentation possible.

The data that 2 releases share the same master are very often public knowledge, while stating in a review that the additional clean up needs proper full-length comparison to be 100% sure of what and how much has been cleaned. To be simplistic, you'd have to count the specks and scratches on all the concerned releases, while cleanliness usually is more a subconscious element than anything.

[Banasa]

I look at this digital clean-up jobs in the same was as I look at digital effects in films. As long as I'm not noticing it or if it's not distracting from my viewing experience and taking me out of the film, than I really have no problem. I've been to enough revival and arthouse theaters using prints which have gone pink to really stress out about film related deterioration. This is especially true of films like this one by Lenzi that I never expected to look like pristine.

In short,
I'd rather have a print that has pops and speckles than something that has been digitally modified into hell. But if you fix things without me noticing, what's the harm?

[tenia]

Absolutely.
On the other end, I've watched half of Arrow's BD of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and while I was happy to see that it looks like a recent MGM master instead of one of their old IP-based masters, the amount of specks ended up bothering me and limiting how good I felt the PQ was.