6.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
An American painter has an affair with a bar owner in a French village and agrees to help her murderer husband escape from a prison for the criminally insane.
Starring: Kerwin Mathews, Nadia Gray (I), Donald Houston, Liliane Brousse, George PastellMystery | 100% |
Thriller | 15% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.35:1
English: LPCM 2.0 (48kHz, 16-bit)
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Mill Creek has released 'Maniac' on Blu-ray as part of a double feature with 'Die! Die! My Darling!' and is currently the only way to own the film from Mill Creek. Sony released the film in November 2018 as a standalone disc. This featureless disc offers solid video and audio presentations, neither of which are a dramatic departure from the Sony offering.
Maniac's 1080p transfer appears to be, for all intents and purposes, identical to that which Sony released in November 2018. For a full video review, please click here.
Mill Creek's LPCM 2.0 uncompressed soundtrack for Maniac of course does not dramatically alter or rework the track compared to the Sony release, which was also of a two-channel configuration. Anyone would be hard-pressed to notice any dramatic differences between the two tracks. The Sony disc does play with a steadily higher audio bitrate (around 2.0 Mbps for the Sony disc, 1.5 for the Mill Creek disc). The Mill Creek disc maintains a similar front-center focus for most all effects, never quite reaching out as far as it could. Essential clarity to sound effects, music, and dialogue are fine but nothing noteworthy. The track carries the listener through the film but accomplishes little more.
No supplemental content is included, nor are DVD or digital copies. The Sony disc was nearly as bare-bones, offering only the film's trailer.
Maniac does not rise to the level of distinguished cinema, but audiences should find it an agreeably paced and suitably mysterious time waster in the spirit of so many otherwise campy films that aim to play it straight down the middle. Little about the movie proves the least bit memorable beyond Houston's work in the third act, yet it's strangely alluring thanks to a legitimate shroud of mystery, a few good performances, tight pacing, and nicely composed framing and photography courtesy of DP Wilkie Cooper. Mill Creek's Blu-ray release of Maniac contains essentially the same video transfer as the Sony disc, a two-channel soundtrack that is not a radical departure from Sony's, and no extras. Worth a look, and anyone looking to add this film to their collection would be wise to choose this release; it's cheaper by a bunch than Sony's disc, comes with another movie in the double pack, and offers basically the same A/V quality.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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