With Halloween on the horizon, we’ve noticed a flood of horror-related titles being announced for Blu-ray, and while we can appreciate demand for the genre exists, do we really need some of the touted B-movie dross in high definition? Case in point: American distributor MPI is set to release their debut Blu-ray, the 1978 mock snuff compilation ‘Face Of Death’, which really is a tacky oddity that deserves it’s spiritual home on fuzzy VHS. With the current craze for torture flicks such as ‘Hostel’ and ‘Saw’ currently hawking their dubious franchises on Blu-ray, it seems there is no end in sight for schlock coming to the format. While we’d all like the best films to be given the best possible presentation on Blu-ray, we HD enthusiasts and film fanatics will have to get used to more rubbish filtering through to appeal to all demographics, but there is a silver lining to the Blu-ray horror-revival. The Spielberg-produced ‘Poltergeist’ is on it’s way, as is Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Interview With A Vampire, and Bryan De Palma’s ‘Carrie’. Film fans will be expecting big things from these classics on Blu-ray, while teenage newcomers to the format will no doubt have their interest piqued by ‘Zombie Strippers’ starring ex-adult movie star Jenna Jameson – at least Blu-ray is starting to offer something for everyone.

We all like a good comedy here at HD Review. We laughed at Knocked Up, Superbad and The 40-Year-Old Virgin as much as anyone, and as well as raising the profiles of Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen, Michael Cera and Jonah Hill, and Steve Carell respectively, this trio of films also combine smart, genuinely funny scripts with a real story at their core. Unfortunately, the Hollywood movie machine has become so obsessed with the success of new comedy mogul Judd Apatow and his collective of actors, writers, producers and directors, that movies loosely associated with him, which would normally have the appeal of stale bread, are getting past the quality controllers. Furthermore, the word ‘overexposed’ means nothing to the dream factory; the majority of comedies hitting our screens over the last six months have been marketed, “From the guys that brought you Knocked Up and Superbad.”Judd Apatow directed The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, and the rest of his days are filled in the relatively hands-off roles of writing or producing. During its recent theatrical release, Forgetting Sarah Marshall was billed as “From the guys…”, except the director was Nicholas Stoller (making his feature debut), and first-time scribe Jason Segel also starred. Chuck in the UK’s Russell Brand and you have a distinctly dissimilar film to Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But Apatow produces, and cohorts Jonah Hill and Paul Rudd show their faces, so the billing sticks. Unfortunately, FSM doesn’t compare to these earlier films, so for the sake of a quick buck the marketing machine dupes a cinemagoer, unlikely to return to Apatow, Rogen et al when they produce their own features because of the dreaded tag: “From the guys that brought you Knocked Up and Superbad.”

After my eulogy to all that is worldly and indie in cinema, a spanking Blu-ray copy of Gus Van Sant’s skater drama, Paranoid Park, arrived. Without giving too much away (our forthcoming issue will feature the review), the film did come as somewhat of a double-edged sword. With said review mapping out the film’s glories, I see it as being a slight issue when, despite best efforts from both sides – Tartan has given the film a dutiful transfer spec while, to encapsulate, the film itself rocks! – the relationship doesn’t gel when cast in HD.Shot on less than DV quality, 35mm and merged with the kitsch images of Super 8 filming, Van Sant’s indie feel never ceases to shine through. But where the boot doesn’t fit is with Paranoid Park’s HD treatment, although in this case nobody is actually to blame. The distributors and those involved in production have dutifully seen that their product/baby reaches the public, but the aesthetics so vital in creating this left-field piece cannot marry with the future format.Saying this, Paranoid Park needs to be seen to be believed, with its shining qualities hardly dealing a death knell to left-field cinema and its future on Blu-ray.

I started to watch Cloverfield the other day, but after 30 minutes my girlfriend asked me to switch it off. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the opening third of the post-modern monster movie, more that the handheld Blair Witch-style camera work was so jarring that she was suffering from motion sickness. As a gamer I’m used to the first-person perspective of many a shooter, but I have to admit I was rather relieved when we stopped the DVD – my eyes felt like they had been through the wringer just making sense of the constantly moving images. It got me thinking, would I have coped in the cinema? Camcorder footage on a 20-foot-high screen is not a good combination, and even the film’s producer, JJ Abrams, was quoted recently saying that he thought Cloverfield was a rarity in that he think it actually works better on the small screen.There may be some connotations for the future of HD. Will the effects of eyestrain and motion sickness be amplified in HD when Cloverfield hits Blu-ray? With the emergence of stereoscopic (3D) filming, will we find it harder to make sense of images that fool our brains to represent reality more accurately? Maybe it’s down to filming techniques, although static cameras are rare in this age of action blockbusters and CGI. The biggest indicator that our eyes may need to adapt to catch up with technology is the Ultra Definition system currently being developed in Japan – it’s in the experimental stage, but the 450-inch screen can cover a wall and induce motion sickness whatever you’re watching. With any luck, when we’re all watching our home-cinema walls in 20 years’ time, Cloverfield 7 will be less jerky…

First Pan’s Labyrinth and now The Orphanage; creeping onto HD with superb Blu-ray releases, are these contemporary world-cinema gems setting a precedent? One would hope.With Bergman’s The Seventh Seal receiving a faithful transfer in a recent Blu-ray outing, seasoned film aficionados out there (myself included) are suffering from a distinct lack of HD culture. Italian neorealism powerhouses such as Rome, Open City, the French New Wave chic of Breathless and the sword-waving classicism of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo – will all these feature on a Blu Disc in the near future? Possibly. With world and left-field cinema distributor Tartan sporting a new Blu release slate – headed by Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park – expect to see us going all Mark Kermode in the not-so-distant future with highbrow reviews of some of cinema’s finest.Catch our reviews of both Paranoid Park and The Orphanage in Issue 7 of HD Review, set to hit shelves 5 June.