Dog Soldiers Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		2.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		4.0
Overall		3.5

Dog Soldiers Blu-ray Movie Review

War and Blu-ray releases are hell.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 22, 2015

Years ago when Wikipedia was still a start up (yes, there was such a time), I got involved with a really nasty “administrator” at the online reference site who had the gall to siphon off a ton of my film history research without attribution, a conflict which got a number of higher ups involved, one of whom stated with a fair degree of accuracy, “He obviously wasn’t quite ready for the 'wild west' aspect of Wikipedia.” With that charming description in mind, let us turn to Dog Soldiers, which in its latest Blu-ray release has incited some ferocious debate across the still very wild west ambience of the internet, a debate that makes Wikipedia skirmishes look like tea socials at a church function. For a recap of elements of the actual film, I recommend you read my colleague Martin Liebman’s write up in his Dog Soldiers Blu-ray review. I’d like to use this review to talk a bit about how this particular brouhaha unfolded.

As Marty mentioned in his original review, the video quality of the First Look Studios’ release left quite a bit (as in a lot) to be desired, and so fans’ appetites were no doubt whetted when Shout! Factory’s imprint Scream Factory announced this new release some time ago. Expectations were probably only raised further by the fact that Dog Soldiers’s director Neil Marshall was reportedly involved with the new release. In a completely unsurprising development, naysayers were out almost immediately, and that naysaying achieved monumental proportions once early review discs started appearing. As online “discussion” turned increasingly rabid, Scream posted a couple of comments from Marshall on their Facebook page. One was relatively brief and was tied to Marshall himself receiving an early disc:

Look what I got this morning!! Woohoo!

At last, the new Blu-ray of Dog Soldiers is here and I’m very proud of it. It’s been quite a struggle to put it all together, but I was adamant that this needed to be a new upgraded transfer of the movie; the best it could possibly be. Little did I realise how tricky that was going to prove. It seems the original negative has long since vanished, but I managed to track down a couple of the last surviving prints from the UK. It’s terrifying to think that without this new HD master all that would remain of Dog Soldiers would be a few dvd’s and the previous lacklustre blu-ray release, and it’s not even that old! Independent movies like this need to be archived and persevered [sic] or they risk being lost forever.

So, many thanks to Cliff McMillan and Aine Lecht and everyone else involved, and bravo to Scream Factory! Until somebody does stumble across the original negative, buried in some dark basement somewhere, this represents the definitive HD version of the movie. So get it while it’s hot!

Some of that post might tempt some curmudgeons to chalk it up at least partially to an enthusiastic push for sales, and so it is understandably suspect as an "objective" opinion (not that any filmmakers' post about his or her project would be "objective"). The second post was quite a bit more detailed and provides a wealth of interesting information:

It seems myself and Scream Factory are experiencing some major flack regarding the Dog Soldiers blu-ray release. So I figure I should fill in a bit of background here. First of all, I wholeheartedly support the Scream Factory release. The previous blu-ray (not available in the UK) was made without any involvement from me, and I remember when it came out the general consensus was that the picture quality was not great. All credit to Scream Factory for wanting to involve the film-maker in this process as much as possible.

When they first announced this blu-ray release last year, the original plan was to work with me to create a whole bunch of original extras based on new interviews with all the key cast and crew, but that the movie itself would essentially be the same version as last time. I asked them to delay the release because I felt that we could do better for the fans and try and track down some original film elements to make a fresh HD transfer. Since the movie never received a theatrical release in the US (although I believe it screened at The Egyptian for a week) I knew we’d have to turn to the UK to find the best possible elements available. What I didn’t know was that after an exhaustive search I’d discover the original negative was nowhere to be found. Neither the UK producer, distributor or film processing lab has any idea where the negative is. Without it we simply could not achieve the kind of high quality HD transfer I would have wished to deliver. Instead we managed to get hold of 2 original cinema prints, and despite being 13 years old and having a few scratches here and there, they represent the most accurate version of the original theatrical release that we could find.

However, as close as they are, they are just cinema prints, and in terms of colour timing for the new blu-ray we were limited to the parameters of the print itself. Which means, in basic terms, if the contrast is high on the print and the blacks are crushed (as indeed they are) then there is no more visual information to be gained from them. You can’t brighten up the image and see what’s hidden in the darkness like you can when you’re working from the negative or from digital. All that will happen is that the black will turn to grey and just give the movie a washed out flat look.

Another issue seems to be that one scene in particular now seems to be a daytime scene when it used to be a nighttime scene. Well, this is wrong on both counts. It’s meant to be a dusk scene, and since it features shots of the sunset then it’s graded accordingly - with a warm sunset glow that then gets cooler and darker as it fades into night. Again, this is all taken directly from the print. It was never intended to have such an extreme dark blue tint over it. We had major continuity issues filming this sequence because the weather kept changing from dull grey and rainy to bright sunlight. This is far from ideal for pulling off convincing day-for-night photography.

Like it or not, when the movie was originally released in the UK in 2002, the blacks were crushed, the contrast was high, the colours were rich and the image was grainy as f***, because let’s not forget, this movie was shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm. So under no circumstances was a blu-ray of this movie ever going to look as smooth and pristine as a movie shot on 35mm or any of the hi-res digital formats we use today. In fact, transferring it to HD actually highlights the grain just as it does any other detail, so this version inherently looks more grainy than before. It’s unavoidable unless you have the money to do a full restoration and clean-up, but again, you need the negative for that.

So, is this version of Dog Soldiers the best it could ever be? No. Of course not. If we had the negative and a s***-load of cash we could have done a lot better. Is it the best it could be under the circumstances? Yes. Will it appeal to everybody? No. But that's movies for you!

At the end of the day everybody involved, myself included, put in a lot of work to give the fans a blu-ray worth forking out their hard-earned cash for. And nobody involved, myself included, got paid anything for doing it. There are no royalties, ancillaries or anything else. This is not an attempt to exploit the fans. It was, on my part, an attempt to give the fans something new and unique, and not simply a repackaged version of what’s already out there.

NEIL MARSHALL

I think Mr. Marshall’s second post speaks for itself and details with a fair amount of specificity the complex hurdles that need to be overcome to release some of these niche titles on Blu-ray. Some of the vehemence of the response to this release has even suggested Mr. Marshall is acting as a "shill" for Shout! Factory, but I think any honest assessment of that second post has to agree that Marshall makes several salient points about how much can properly be expected from problematic elements. Does he want this release to succeed? Most probably, as anyone proud of their work would. Does that mean his comments are without validity? I personally don't think so, and those with an interest in how transfers are achieved should perhaps at least take a deep breath when considering all the elements (no pun intended) which play into any given release. Many have already expressed their displeasure over the look of this release, and there's no denying that this new version looks different. Whether it's actually "worse" than the previous Blu-ray (or even DVD) is at least debatable and of course (like everything else) subject to individual preferences. It seems obvious (to me, anyway) that Marshall and the Scream Factory team at least attempted to do the right thing here. They admittedly may not have succeeded, at least in part, but I personally sense only good intentions with this release. Of course, you know what destination a pavement of good intentions leads to.

Dog Soldiers Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Dog Soldiers is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. As detailed above, Marshall and the Scream Factory team utilized two (problematic) prints as source elements for this transfer, and the new 2K scan of these elements has not been able to overcome a lot of inherent issues. Not only are there still quite a few nicks and scratches (including one big scratch that recurs in the center of the frame), there is prevalent black crush as well as an incredibly swarthy grain field which is only exacerbated by what looks like overly pushed contrast (despite Marshall's contention that release prints were also this "contrasty"). I personally kind of liked the grittier grain appearance of this release when compared to the First Look Blu-ray, but perhaps the biggest issue confronting fans of this release is the radically altered color temperature and brightness. This is a brighter offering, something that's immediately apparent even in sun dappled moments, but which becomes unmistakable once the ostensible gloom and doom set in. There's also less blue in this presentation. Perhaps in a bit of welcome news, there's very little in the way of actual compression problems with grain resolution, something that has tended to be a problem with Shout! releases. There are also no signs of the artificial sharpening which were sometimes on display in the First Look release. While obviously far from a perfect presentation, when taken on its own (questionable?) merits, the look of this transfer is interesting and arguably reasonably organic, at least if one accepts the desaturated color grading as authentic.

Dog Soldiers Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Dog Soldiers is presented with both a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix. Neither of these mixes is overly bombastic, at least not in the way contemporary horror-action fare soundtracks tend to be, and some of the sound effects are a bit underwhelming. The 5.1 track doesn't offer a ton of placement in the rear channel, though things pick up decidedly in several of the action sequences, which are reasonably immersive sounding. Slight anemia attends the lower range in both of these tracks, but is never overly problematic. Dialogue, score and effects are rendered without any problems and with very good prioritization.

Dog Soldiers Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Werewolves vs. Soldiers (1080p; 1:01:50) is a wonderfully in depth and informative background piece which includes a ton of great interviews. Some curmudgeons may get a bit of an ironic kick out of Marshall talking about watching an "old grainy print" of Frankenstein when he was a little boy, something that fostered his interest in cinematic horror.


• A Cottage in the Woods (1080p; 13:26) looks at some aspects of the production design.


• Trailers (1080p; 5:02)


• Dog Soldiers Photo Gallery (1080i; 4:57)


• Behind the Scenes Photo Gallery (1080p; 4:30)


• Combat - A Short Film by Director Neil Marshall (1080p; 7:37)


• Audio Commentary with Neil Marshall is anecdotal and informative in equal measure, but does not really get into any of the issues confronting this attempt at revisiting the property and "upgrading" it.

Dog Soldiers Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm not quite as enamored of the overall film as Marty was in his review, but there's no denying Dog Soldiers' lo-fi "charms". (I have to give props to the production team, many of whom hail from hardscrabble Newcastle, my father's birthplace.) The fierce debate this release has engendered probably only goes to show how passionate some fans are about these cult titles. Is this release the latest harbinger of the apocalypse? Hardly. It's problematic, as both Marshall and Scream have discussed. If and when the negative is discovered, fans may have a bit more "ammunition" in being able to ask for a more definitive release. For me personally, the care taken in the supplemental package helps to ameliorate any qualms about the video quality. Recommended.