7 | / 10 |
Users | 3.7 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
This war drama follows the lives of five young Marine inductees from their training in boot camp in 1967 through a tour in Vietnam in 1968 that quickly devolves into a hellish nightmare. Disheartened by futile combat, appalled by the corruption of their South Vietnamese ally, and constantly endangered by the incompetence of their own company commander, the young men find a possible way out of the war. They are told that if they can defeat a rival soccer team, they can spend the rest of their tour playing exhibition games behind the lines. But as they might have predicted, nothing in Vietnam is as simple as it seems.
Starring: Stan Shaw, Andrew Stevens, Michael Lembeck, Craig Wasson, Noble WillinghamWar | 100% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 2.0 | |
Audio | 2.5 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
The Boys in Company C feels like a practice run for Full Metal Jacket, albeit a practice run from an entirely different filmmaker. Director Sidney J. Furie's 1978 film tells the story of the lives of a handful of young men on their way to Vietnam, spending the first half of the film following their transformation from civilians to soldiers at boot camp, followed by their experiences "in country" and fighting a war halfway around the world. Director Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film tells the story of the lives of a handful of young men on their way to Vietnam, spending the first half of the film following their transformation from civilians to soldiers at boot camp, followed by their experiences "in country" and fighting a war halfway around the world. Indeed, the plots are identical. It's not uncommon for films to share plots -- in fact one could argue that there are not many original plots out there anyway -- but one cannot ignore the similarities to cadence, look, structure, setting, and purpose. Whether Kubrick "ripped off" The Boys in Company C is a debate for another space, but this film does hold serve on its own. Unfortunately, the Blu-ray release is rather unimpressive, with Hen's Tooth delivering shoddy picture and sound qualities and a poor showing of extras, all paling in comparison to the clearly superior Australian Imprint release.
Hen's Tooth releases The Boys in Company C to Blu-ray with a "D" grade picture quality. The picture is hardly ideal and clearly not sourced from any kind of remaster, restoration, or even an image with just a little touch-up performed on it here and there. The picture is fairly weak and middling, with some flickering and some spots and speckles (heaviest during the opening titles, but remaining persistently bothersome for the duration) causing the most damage throughout. The picture looks flat and faded, too, with detail that hardly captures the would-be splendor of film that its resolution should allow and which audiences are accustomed to seeing even at 1080p. Granted, this is not a classic film, and granted it comes from a smaller studio, and granted the source lacks the pristine polish of a higher budget effort, but there is clearly room for improvement, and even a slight bump to "decent" would have done wonders for the picture. With bland and inconsistent detail at every turn, and not much sense of a natural or tangible grain structure, there's just not much here to commend. On the color side of the ledger, things are not much better. There's a decent sense of fullness to core colors, like natural greens, military fatigues, and the like, but forget the sort of robust hues and rich expressions the best Blu-ray releases bring. Again, some level of expectation is key, but it seems like there is room for at least a mild gain in color depth and accuracy to be had. Black levels struggle to hold true black, whites are creamy, and skin tones look, at best, passable. Sadly, "passable" would be a modest upgrade for this Blu-ray which can teeter there on occasion, but at least it never falls to "abysmal."
Hen's Tooth releases The Boys in Company C to Blu-ray with a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono soundtrack. As with the video, there are not really any high points of which to speak. The presentation is satisfactory at the basest level, as in it "gets the job done" to convey dialogue and basic sound effects, but listeners will have to set expectations to "low" and be prepared to be content with the bare minimum. At best, the track is intelligible and adequately clear, allowing dialogue to present with able detail and a decent sense of front-center imaging. It is also decently prioritized. Not much more can be said of it. Music is a little wider, but it never stretches the listening area beyond a basic sense of space. There's no real sense of stage dominating width; the track is content to huddle closer to the middle ground between center and speaker location. Again, basic clarity, allowing the music to scrape by with just enough definition, represents just about the zenith of its capabilities. Action elements, like gunfire, present no real sense of depth or volume, but the core sound effects enjoy basic clarity and recognizeability. Ambience if very basic and very minor with no real sense of place at work.
Unlike the Australian Imprint release, which was packed to the gills with supplements, Hen's Tooth's Blu-ray release of The Boys in Company C
is much more sparsely populated, containing only a single commentary track (the Imprint release was home to two tracks), a trailer, and a few lobby
card images. Fans who will buy, or who have bought, this issue would be wise to add the Imprint release as well.
Kubrick's film is the masterpiece and Furie's is the forgotten template. Yet even absent Kubrick's masterful technical presentation, The Boys in Company C holds up as a quality outing that proves to be an effective storyteller, offering better-than-solid performances and often compelling narrative flows that keep it solidly in the mid-tier of the sprawling Vietnam War arena, and genre fans might even rank it higher apart from the existence of Kubrick's later take on the same story. Hen's Tooth's Blu-ray is rather poor in quality, sad to say, with substandard video and audio leading the charge. the disc lacks almost all of the extras from the much fuller Australian imprint release. Wait and hope for a superior edition down the line.
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