88 Films Releasing Absurd, Beyond The Darkness, Aenigma & Massacre In Dinosaur Valley

[agent999 Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close agent999]

I need to get Anthropophaugs and Absured now. I have seen Anthropophagus, but never Absurd, I liked Anthropophagus, I hear people put it down, but I liked it. It's as good as any other Italian horror film from that time period.

The current 88 disc of Anthro doesn't look good, but they are doing a new transfer so I'd wait for that. I agree, I think it is a much better film than people say. I fucking love Absurd, and the score is great too. I remember a mid nineties review with D'Amato where he said he really wanted to make more horror films but the finances weren't there so he was only able to do porno.

[John Bernhard Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close John Bernhard]

All 4 of these kickstart releases were done @ the same lab, all are a nasty greenish yellow, and given no color correction.

I had to turn BEYOND THE DARKNESS off it looked so sickly.

Ya just gotta love 88....free money and they still botch the releases.

[Paul L Scholar of Sleaze Find all posts View Profile Close Paul L]

All 4 of these kickstart releases were done @ the same lab, all are a nasty greenish yellow, and given no color correction.

I had to turn BEYOND THE DARKNESS off it looked so sickly.

Ya just gotta love 88....free money and they still botch the releases.

I thought ABSURD and NUDO E SELVAGGIO looked fine (EDIT: the possible issue with the framing of ABSURD notwithstanding); BUIO OMEGA looks noticeably soft and lacks the definition and texture of a picture shot on 16mm, but I wonder if some of the film was shot with a gauze over the lens, which might explain the former. I've not done any sort of scientific comparison (or even compared it with a white balance card or anything of the sort), but the whites certainly don't hit empirical white and lean towards the yellow/green cast which speaks of deterioration; then again, my eyes adjusted to it after a while and I found it watchable, and I always felt that the Shriek Show/Media Blasters DVD and Blu-ray were pushed too far the other way. I think YMMV with that one. The texture and lack of 16mm 'structure' bothers me more than the colour cast, to be honest.

The most egregious error amongst the releases, imo, is the lack of day-for-night filtering in all the nighttime scenes within AENIGMA; but nobody seems to have noticed that (perhaps because the film's not a huge favourite of most people)