Uncle Tom's Cabin Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.0
Video		1.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.0

Uncle Tom's Cabin Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 20, 2020

Note: This film is available as part of Al Adamson: The Masterpiece Collection.

Disc Eleven of The Masterpiece Collection offers two films that I guess might be termed as Blaxploitation fare, at least if you can consider a film based on what its marketing campaign proudly touts was "the book Abraham Lincoln started the Civil War" real Blaxploitation. Both films on this disc do share the frequent incidence of Adamson co-opting someone else's film for his own purposes.

Of course that book was Harriet Beecher Stowe's immortal Uncle Tom's Cabin, though offered here from the probably unavoidably skewed perspective of Al Adamson, the tale becomes a salacious saga that is obviously meant to evoke films like Mandingo, which would have been relatively recent at the time of this film's release. Still, this seems like an almost willfully provocative choice on the part of Adamson, perhaps a stab at respectability in some way that is almost hilariously ill conceived. Herbert Lom is on hand only less slightly less scarred than he was in The Phantom of the Opera as the cruel and conniving Simon Lagree. Olive Moorefield as Cassy and John Kitzmiller as Uncle Tom do what they can with the material. The bulk of this feature was actually co-opted in typical Adamson and Samuel M. Sherman style from a previously released German version of the Stowe novel, with Adamson adding his patented sex scenes to spice up the proceedings, in what is probably a disastrously misguided step.

Uncle Tom's Cabin Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Uncle Tom's Cabin is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.38:1. This is probably the worst looking transfer in the set in terms of palette, as the element utilized here is so badly faded that large swaths of this film can almost pass for black and white. When there is discernable color, it's often very heavily skewed toward browns. That said, there are occasional pops here that somehow have managed to survive, including repeated uses of yellows and purples. There's typical damage on display, but detail levels divorced from the desaturated palette can often be quite good, all things considered.

Uncle Tom's Cabin Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Uncle Tom's Cabin features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono track. The film's dubbing leads to some clearly obvious mismatches between lip movements and the words being spoken. That element side, fidelity here is decent if on the whole hampered by pretty noticeable boxiness, as well as some slight background hiss and occasional pop.

Uncle Tom's Cabin Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• TV Spots (1080p; 00:46)


• Radio Spots (1:02)

Uncle Tom's Cabin Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Adamson and Sherman always had an eye out for foreign properties they could buy and then recut to suit their own whims, but their decision to co-opt Uncle Tom's Cabin seems like an uncharacteristically boneheaded choice on the part of the pair. This presentation also suffers from seriously subpar video and pretty boxy sounding audio.