[versions] BODY BAGS (1993)

[pipefan413]

As far as I know it has always been uncut here. In fact, the dubbing covers all those scenes too as it can be seen from this mux uploaded on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkaB6cZNYso

Oh, definitely, the Italian dub is on the disc!

It doesn't really surprise me that it was never cut for the Italian market. You lot were used to this stuff. America is a sensitive soul sometimes.

[Evit]

It was featured in "Notte horror" (Horror night) a horror-dedicated timeslot in which, once a week from 10.30 PM and throughout the whole summer, they would air horror films. At that time at night they could show whatever they liked, and yeah, luckly gore and such has never really been censored here in Italy. My basic knowledge of the genre came from those beloved Wednesday nights during summer! Ahah

[pipefan413]

I added the Scream Factory Blu-ray to the comparison and made a fairly comprehensive video showing the editorial differences between all the versions (the unique LaserDisc cut, the heavily censored US DVD cut, and the uncut version seen on the Italian DVD and US Blu-ray Disc).

Here's the 187 Corp spoof of the MGM lion from the beginning, as a quick visual example of how they all differ:



I'm not really sure what to do with the video yet; it'll probably go on Vimeo but to do that I'd have to wait a while and compress it at a higher CRF to fit this one video into the entire 500 MB weekly upload limit (I don't feel like I make enough videos or have enough of an audience to justify spending ~£70 a year on Vimeo Plus). I could finally start putting these things on YouTube in theory but I don't know if I want to do that yet and this particular video is unlikely to be YouTube appropriate anyway because it's got a crapload of gore and a horrible sex scene in it (the whole point of the video is me showing the censorship beside the uncensored versions). Most likely it'll go up later on. I still have another Dracula one to upload as well at some point!


Honestly I can't decide which version I find least awful so far. I think I probably like the colours of the LaserDisc best but it's still a slightly censored version of the film. The only truly uncut ones are the Italian DVD, which is really faded, dark, and green, and the US Blu-ray, which is significantly vertically cropped, smoothed to oblivion through DNR/encoding, and way too pink. Also, although the Italian DVD is definitely *too* dark (shadow detail is but a distant memory), the Blu-ray conversely looks way too bright most of the time. However, I'm pretty convinced that the least crappy audio is actually the Italian DVD, despite being sped up for PAL and compressed to 192 kbps Dolby Digital (incredible, I know). The LaserDisc and Blu-ray both have really extreme sibilance on speech and other similar problems, but the Italian DVD has no such issue for some reason. I'm not sure if Shout Factory didn't bother reaching out to Europe for a better audio source or if they tried but were unsuccessful, but clearly the Italians have a better source than the US here. It's a shame it's compressed and sped up, but them's the breaks.

So anyway, given that I know I want to use the Italian DVD audio, but am not sure which video I prefer, I resynced that audio to both the US Blu-ray at 24/1.001 fps and the Italian DVD itself but slowed to 24 fps (since I was going to be slowing it either way, I didn't see much point in over-slowing it slightly to get to 24/1.001 fps when my projector is perfectly capable of true 24 fps). Both were done with an extremely high quality resampler and the Blu-ray resync was done *before* resampling so that I can resample it again later very easily if any further edits are made (or if I want to experiment with different resampling techniques). The Italian DVD frame rate was adjusted with eac3to (-changeTo24.000).

Some things I *could* maybe consider doing one day:

• Re-grading the Blu-ray to the LaserDisc and possibly adding a grain plate to help partially mask the smoothed-out appearance
  
• Attempting to re-grade the Italian DVD to more closely resemble the LaserDisc, then possibly editing the cut frames from that into the LaserDisc transfer (since the colours are pretty far gone on the DVD, I don't think it'd look good trying to watch the whole film like this)
  

[Evit]

I ended up buying this Italian DVD ahah

[pipefan413]

I ended up buying this Italian DVD ahah

It doesn't look amazing but the sound is probably the best available that I know of. Which is sad, really.

I watched the US Blu-ray with the resynced Italian DVD audio and it wasn't an awful experience, but the cropping was occasionally rather distracting and the picture had a slightly odd "pastel" quality to it that didn't seem quite right either. But the Italian DVD picture is just so damn green, faded, and dark...

[Onti]

I'm actually thinking that the US DVD may be the original TV broadcast version, because there's a whole bunch of stuff in the uncut version that is absolutely heinous and definitely wouldn't have made it onto TV in the US back in 1993, unless I've absolutely no idea what I'm talking about (which is a very real possibility).

5. Scream Factory makes an arse of it by cropping to widescreen even though it was always meant to be seen on a 4:3 screen and is clearly framed for that
/quote]

The Artisan DVD is most definitely based on the network broadcast version since it looks to also have different footage and angles instead of just sloppy cuts and censor fog./quote]

Nice job pipefan413! I don't like the Scream Factory release at all (that horrible 1.78:1!). But, which Artisan DVD are you talking about?

This?:



Or this?:



Finally, are you 100% sure that the Artisan DVD is the original television broadcast? And what about the audio? Does the Artisan DVD have the original audio track from its television broadcast? Imdb just says Dolby.

[Darkmoon]

Hi there, i know this thread is about 5 years old. But i have the scream factory release and notiiced the silibance issue with body bags. I have had it for years tbh. But i always passed it off as maybe something to do with my set up. But after upgrading, new speakers, subs and AVR. It sounds the same if not worse. I watched it the day before yesterday. I made sure my eq was flat and even tried turning down treble. It was still there. I realised wait.. no other disc i have actually does this so why did i ever think it was my set up? I come to the conclusion maybe the disc is damaged so was ready to buy another one off ebay. But thought...i will search on google to see if i find any information about this...i am here. I did not want to buy another and find it has the exact same issue.
Tbh my new set up amplified the sound ussues on this disc. I also noticed distortion too on the garage story that I had never even noticed before.
I am keeping my fingers crossed here for a 4k uhd release for body bags also big trouble in little China. That will complete my john carpenter 4k uhd movie collection and surely fix the silibance issue on body bags. Shame as it is such a fun movie.

Btw i find arrow worse. That mutli channel audio track for psycho 2 was terrible. Whoever did that clearly did not know what they were doing. Also nlI never forgave arrow years ago for releasing a dawn of the dead blu ray set. It was only the theatrical version being on an actual blu ray. The rest of the discs on that were in dvds. Which meant only the theatrical i was getting in hd. My favourite version is the extended cut. So the theatrical was never my go to version of the film. I genuinely felt decieved thinking i was actually buying a full blu ray set. That is worse than scream factory imo to be decieved.
But i would love to actuay see a fan restored version of body bags with 5.1 audio and no silibance issue as well as uncut. Would that Artisan dvd be my best bet? Thank you?

[2FAN321]

Hard to believe it's been 12 years since I bought the SF Blu-ray! Was always annoyed by the sibilence, but I was under the impression that it was the uncut/unrated version and (for some reason) I didn't even think about the aspect ratio. I'm trying to remember if I got it on DVD or not, but all my DVD's are currently boxed up and not easily accessible right now.

I was hoping it might get released by someone else, with the sound cleaned up, but haven't really thought about it until I saw this thread. I see there are a couple of European releases, but I expect they will probably have the same issues.

Hopefully I bought the Artisan release, as I used to import a lot of DVD's from the USA at the time it was released. Being a big Carpenter fan, I'll be pretty angry at myself if I didn't!