The Camp on Blood Island Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

The Camp on Blood Island Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman December 22, 2020

The Camp on Blood Island is currently available in the twenty film Hammer Ultimate Collection.

Western P.O.W.s populate a Japanese prison camp where they are treated harshly and frequently murdered in cold blood. The war has just ended, but news has not yet reached the Japanese overseers. The prisoners are aware that the war is over, and their task, beyond survival, is to prevent a massacre which has been promised should news arrive that Japan has lost the war. Complicating matters is a nearby camp that houses women and children, many of them family to the segregated men. The men make plans to sabotage radio equipment and get word out to the outside world before it's too late.

The film is surprisingly rich in story and hauntingly effective in its depiction of wartime violence and cruelty. While it cannot match the best of the Japanese P.O.W. camp films -- The Bridge on the River Kwai and Empire of the Sun amongst them -- there's a tangible feel for the deplorable conditions, the poor treatment, and the genuine fear that permeates the camp even as the men often stand tall in the face of adversity or stare down the barrel of a gun. The picture does not shy away from displaying the horrors of prisoner life with stark brutality, unafraid of depicting various atrocities with unforgiving realism. The acting is terrific, particularly from the prisoners who look and behave as if long deprived from food and family, never mind hope.

The Camp on Blood Island Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The 1080p picture quality is generally very good. Grain retention is a key visual component; it's light, even, and natural. It's a critical aid in delivering a handsome, filmic presentation that additionally reveals sharp details throughout the frame, with sweaty, dirty prisoner skin amongst the visual highlights. There's a nice contrast to the worn and frayed prisoner attire and the sharper, cleaner, more fabric-dense Japanese military uniforms as well. The main location is the prisoner camp, and exterior locations primarily. The image shows enough core definition to huts, crude wooden structures, and the dirt terrain to offer a decent feel for location specifics, but there's not so much depth or detail to intimately draw the viewer into the place. The black and white photography is well served here. Whites are creamy but blacks are pleasantly deep. The grayscale is varied and well nuanced through the range. There is some flickering that lends some light deviations from standard. A handful of speckles are in evidence throughout and there are light compression issues as well. On the whole, though, the picture is pleasantly organic; there's not a lot of room for complaint.

The Camp on Blood Island Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Camp on Blood Island's DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless soundtrack suffers from the same fate as so many of its peers in the Hammer Ultimate Collection. The presentation is cramped in the middle with little sense of space beyond. Music over the opening titles struggles to escape a crunchy delivery, failing to find elegance or much of anything beyond crude definition. The track opens ever so slightly in the following scene when score seems to drift a bit further to the edges, though the harsh-edged definition remains. Many elements beyond music fare a little better. Clarity is marginally improved when it comes to general atmospherics, a plane in the air, and little odds and ends like footfalls and creaks around camp. Dialogue is clear and images to the center with most of the rest of the content.

The Camp on Blood Island Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplemental content has been included with this release.

The Camp on Blood Island Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The film is not so elegant as its similarly styled counterparts, but what it lacks in polish it makes up for with grit and gusto. Mill Creek's Blu-ray is disappointingly featureless but does deliver solid video and decent audio. Recommended.