6.1 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
In 'The Stud', waiter Tony Blake (Oliver Tobias) becomes manager of a hip discotheque by sleeping with his boss's insatiable wife, Fontaine Khaled (Joan Collins), but the life bores him and he returns to his East End roots.
Starring: Joan Collins, Oliver Tobias, Sue Lloyd, Walter Gotell, Mark Burns (I)Romance | 100% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 2.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Author Jackie Collins has never been accused of having good taste, but her scorching tales of sex, scheming, and the pains of the elite have filled dozens of books, making millions off readers who enjoy private time with amoral characters engaged in nasty personal and public business. “The Stud” originated as a 1969 U.K. novel that shocked the public with its description of bedroom hopping and nasty behaviors, but it took the movie industry time to figure out a way to bring such salacious details to the big screen. Nearly a decade later, “The Stud” was finally ready for cinema sampling, and director Quentin Masters (working from a script by Collins, who also makes a photographic cameo) worked diligently to transfer the dramatic fire and ice that bewitched its original audience, delivering a film that retains much of Collins’s tart antagonism, but also tries to clarify a modernized disco era, which is perhaps an even more appropriate setting for its Machiavellian antics.
"The Stud" comes to Blu-ray with some concerns. The AVC encoded image (1.78:1 aspect ratio) presentation is a bit iffy on black levels, which tend to look either milky or impenetrable, making delineation a challenge, especially during scenes of intimacy, where it's periodically difficult to discern what's going on. Evening wear also dips into solidification. The viewing experience is more interesting when blasted with light, offering adequate detail for the feature's extreme close-ups, and club encounters retain depth, permitting the study of dancers. It's a softly shot effort to begin with, sacrificing sharpness, but clarity has its moments. Colors show some age, but primaries are adequate, giving some life to club lighting and costuming. Source isn't ideal, with scratches and speckling common, and some jumpy frames.
The 2.0 DTS-HD MA sound mix is hectic one, but never precise. Dealing with an active soundtrack and club environments, music generally leads the listening event, and while the hits keep on coming, it's a cacophonous track with slightly fuzzy highs and muddy beats. Loudness is more important than sharpness, and the music occasionally steamrolls over dialogue exchanges, requiring the use of subtitles to understand what's being said. In more tranquil locations, dramatics are easier to follow, making performances simpler to track. Atmospherics are blunt, capturing group and urban activity.
Hearts aren't broken in "The Stud," as the characters are too cold to really care about the lives they're ruining. It's a Jackie Collins specialty, and such flippant behavior is engrossing for the first half, which details Tony's calculating ways and Fontaine's one-upmanship as disco music blasts away on the soundtrack. Once predatory advances emerge for teenaged Alex, "The Stud" tends to lose its bite, slowly swallowed by melodrama and some weird corner-cutting with characterization that loads the climax with more questions than answers. Still, sexuality is vivid in the feature, which is really the ultimate destination for the production.
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