The Vagrant Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

The Vagrant Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson June 18, 2017

As originally written and shot, The Vagrant was molded to be an intelligent, dark, and twisted psychological thriller. The screenplay by Richard Jefferies (Bloodtide, Scarecrows), as director Chris Walas has recalled in interviews, contained a terrific balance of comedy and creepiness. The film, with a budget estimated to be between $4-8.5 million, was developed by Mel Brooks through his production company Brooksfilms and distributed by MGM/UA. Walas (The Fly II) was tapped to direct following the marvelous special effects and makeup work he did on such films as Dragonslayer, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Scanners, Gremlins, Enemy Mine, The Fly, and Arachnophobia. Although all the Hollywood majors reportedly rejected Jefferies's script, The Vagrant held promise and potential. But when Brooks's Life Stinks (also a MGM/UA property) bombed at the box office, it sent studio moguls into a tailspin. The movie was altered and morphed into a more commercial-friendly horror thriller. "The finished movie is not the one I set out to make,'' Walas later admitted to John Stanley of The San Francisco Chronicle. "Unfortunately, it turned out to be a mutt. What you see is an amalgamation of principal photography and reshooting, and a lot of re-editing.''

In the theatrical release version, The Vagrant tries too hard to make a satiric and seriocomic statement on suburbia. Its over-reliance on slapstick and only slightly amusing sight gags also prevent it from making any constructive commentary on homelessness and the outsider. Graham Krakowski (Bill Paxton) is a numbers-crunching financial clerk who hopes to settle into a middle-class suburban neighborhood in Phoenix. After noticing a vagrant encroach on his kitchen sink, Graham experiences recurring nightmares and visions of this odious bum invading his home life. The film promptly gets on the wrong foot by ascribing its characters with illogical motives and choices. The female characters in The Vagrant are particularly given stereotypical and cardstock roles. For example, the local realtor Judy Dansig (Colleen Camp) initially seems serious and pleasant around her client Graham but turns lustful rather abruptly and tries to seduce him. The film never shows or explains what prompted this sudden urge. In addition, Edie Roberts (Mitzi Kapture), Graham's attractive brunette girlfriend, turns out to be a dunce when she lets the titular panhandler (Marshall Bell), who is loitering in a vacant lot across the street and had already been trespassing on Graham's property, into the house and prepares him a sandwich. Edie acts like an imbecile and Mitzi Kapture is completely wasted in a role that could have been so much more. Instead of acting as a muse and helper to Graham's plight, Edie quickly gives up on him and boards a taxi to go home. For about a fifteen-minute stretch when Graham becomes a manager in a trailer park, the film goes from laughable to hopelessly cockamamie. A giddy Southern woman, who is obviously patterned off a combination of Peggy Lee and Dolly Parton, presents Graham with a cake and before long, is making her move to get into bed with him too.

The Vagrant in his lair.

The men don't fare much better either. The dark-shaded policemen in the squad car who Graham alerts about the vagrant show little to no concern. Michael Ironside's Lieutenant Ralf Barfuss clearly doesn't like Graham but after multiple incidents in his since renovated home are reported, he employs a S.W.A.T. team to set up an automatic firing system whenever a disturbance occurs. The steely Ironside is as much a byproduct and victim of the visual gags as Paxton is. Richard Jefferies does give Graham's boss, Mr. Feemster (Stuart Pankin), some clever lines about in-office corporate politics but his character isn't given enough screen time. Jefferies also provides Paxton with a great monologue about the beast residing in him but instead of completely focusing on Graham's existential crisis, the movie returns to his war with the vagrant. During the climax, when Graham is inside some kind of underground cave or tunnel, it struck me that the vagrant's facial complexion and physical stature was probably modeled after Mola Ram's giant chief guard (played by Pat Roach) in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A reason for this is the presence of a pickaxe and mine car as the two quarrel. (Indeed, Walas was scenically in Spielberg's territory, albeit temporarily.)

There's a good movie somewhere to be found in the jumbled mess that became The Vagrant. A majority of the blame for the film's failure has to go with MGM/UA. An MGM source informed The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt that the studio tested the film with preview audiences during the spring of 1992 in Rochester and Buffalo, New York as well as in Colorado Springs but results proved unsuccessful. MGM/UA then opened the film Labor Day weekend in Chicago; Nashville, Tennessee; and Des Moines, Iowa but reaction was also negative. Salas acknowledged to Stanley that the studio didn't provide exhibitors with a single poster when The Vagrant played in three theaters on the East Coast. According to Box Office Mojo, the movie only played in a total of eight theaters nationwide and raked in a measly $5,900 of domestic ticket sales. While Brooks was off in Europe promoting Life Stinks, Salas says that the studio tinkered with the film and shot three different endings. If the ending that was ultimately put in the film gave the impression that MGM/UA had a sequel on its minds, that prospect was dashed early on when Variety's Lewis Lazare wrote this epitaph: "As psychological suspense thrillers go, The Vagrant should wind up pretty near the bottom of the barrel."

The Vagrant Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Shout! Factory brings the studio cut of The Vagrant to US Blu-ray on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-25. The 91-minute feature appears in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1. Shout! has given the film a very healthy average bitrate of 30928 kbps. The print is in relatively good shape with only occasional specks cropping up in the frame. The Vagrant was shot in Phoenix and daytime exteriors look appropriately bright and sunny. Shout! has applied some grain removal tools. During close-ups, Paxton's face looks pasty. Still, detail on faces is pretty good. Furthermore, the blue sky appears a bit too clear and clean. (See the tiny pockets of digital noise as well as a little shimmering in Screenshot #6 and in some of the other captures.) A thin tramline also slides into the picture in a few instances (see #19).

Shout! supplies the main feature with twelve chapter breaks.

The Vagrant Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shout! delivers a solid DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo (1772 kbps, 24-bit) of the film's main sound track. Dialogue is clear and intelligible with good overall balance. Certainly one of the best parts of The Vagrant is composer Christopher Young's bouncy score, which sounds like a cross between Jerry Goldsmith's music for The 'burbs and the The Gremlins films (especially the main theme). This is not only stylistically apropos given the ilk of this film but also in an associative sense given that Walas was the creator of Gizmo and his Gremlin adversaries.

Shout! has encoded the movie with optional English SDH.

The Vagrant Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (2:07, 1080p) - a fairly nice-looking anamorphic widescreen trailer of The Vagrant with source-related print flaws.

There was speculation that Shout! might give The Vagrant the "Collector's Edition" treatment with new bells and whistles This is definitely one of their lower-budgeted releases.

The Vagrant Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

One hopes that a label will give Chris Walas the opportunity to present a "Director's Cut" of The Vagrant or at least give interested fans the chance to read Richard Jefferies's shooting script. The commercial cinema version that MGM/UA released was a studio hack job. The sadly departed Bill Paxton was a very versatile actor and I believe he did all he could here to infuse Graham Krakowski with a three-dimensional portrayal. Shout! Factory delivers above average video and sound presentations. Fans of the beloved Paxton may want to add it to their collections but for those with passing curiosity, give it a RENTAL.