Vampire Ecstasy (Joseph W. Sarno, 1973) UK DVD ADDED

[Darrel_Griffin]

Title: Vampire Ecstasy
Country: UK
Region: 0 (claimed on case - my player is multi-region and does not report the region code so I cannot confirm this)
Releasing Studio: Mediumrare Entertainment Ltd. / Freemantle Media Enterprises
Case Type: Amaray Keep Case
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Anamorphic?: Yes
PAL or NTSC?: PAL
Soundtracks: English Dolby Digital 2.0 mono, German Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
Subtitles (are they optional?): No
Cuts: (and if you know it, precise run time) none according to BBFC website, and a quick check suggests it is the same shot-for-shot as Retro Seduction release (which I also own). run time = 98:46 (PAL - roughly equivalent to 102:53 without speed-up)
Commentaries: none
Extras: 'A Touch of Horror: Interview With Director Joe Sarno' featurette (6:47)
Notes: (please see below)
Easter Eggs: none
Amazon ASIN (UK, French, German, USA releases only): B009M3OL38
Source: I own a copy (I also own a copy of Retro Seduction Cinema 'Vampire Ecstasy' release)



additional notes for this and other releases:


1. For the Mediumrare release above - the case incorrectly states a run time of 103 minutes (it is 98:46, although this is roughly equivalent to 103 minutes when factoring in PAL speed-up), and also incorrectly states that the aspect ratio is 4:3 (it is 1.78:1).


2. A comparison between:

(a) the Retro Seduction Cinema release (Vampire Ecstasy version) (4:3, currently reported as more or less open matte)
and
(b) the Mediumrare release (1.78:1)

suggests that there is complicated cropping going on. It seems that on most shots, (a) has more picture top and bottom while (b) has more at the sides. But it is not as simple as this - for example sometimes (b) also has more picture at the bottom than (a) and far less at the top. Anyway, neither can be said to contain the whole of the original frame as it appeared on the negative. This also means that (a) is NOT a true open matte version. (N.B. IMDb states that the OAR is 1.66:1.)

Generally, the picture quality of (b) is much better than (a). In addition, some shots in (a) are much darker than in (b), including some outdoor shots. It is not clear whether these were meant to be day-for-night shots - if so then they are perhaps overly bright in (b), but in any case, in (a) they are so dark that it is sometimes hard to see what is going on.


3. most of the existing PAL entries have runtimes about the same as the original movie, which strongly suggests they are NTSC -> PAL conversions.


4. For the Retro Seduction Cinema release (Vampire Ecstasy version), playing it on my Blu-ray player (Panasonic DMP-BDT110, converted to multi-region for DVD) it does appear to be non-progressive as previously reported - for example pausing sometimes shows 2 fields from different frames. However, when I engage 24p mode, it seems to play smoothly. I don't fully understand how 24p works on my machine - my understanding is that some NTSC movies are stored on DVD at 24fps, which 24p mode should always cope with, while others are stored at 30fps. It seems that with 30fps movies on my machine, in some cases engaging 24p mode manages to reverse engineer them back to the original 24fps, while in other cases it fails. In this case, it seems to work.


P.S. I am not suggesting that you put ALL of these notes on the web page, but hopefully they will help you to update and improve the page as you see fit.


Darrel.

[James-Masaki_Ryan]

Added. Thanks!

As with the 24fps mode, yes it can disguise a correction to interlaced transfers, but that is something progressive transfers would do automatically.

[Eric_Cotenas]

my understanding is that some NTSC movies are stored on DVD at 24fps, which 24p mode should always cope with, while others are stored at 30fps

The DVD-compliant framerate is 29.97 frames per second (or 59.94 fields per second). Interlaced NTSC DVDs have pulldown from 23.976 hard-encoded into them while progressive NTSC DVDs of films shot at 23.976 fps remain at that framerate but are digitally-flagged to tell the DVD to apply pulldown if the player and/or monitor cannot support the framerate.