Skip to content
Dom Robinson reviews
Entertainment in Video
- Cat.no: EDV 9047
- Cert: 12
- Running time: 99 minutes
- Year: 1999
- Pressing: 2000
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Chapters: 24 plus extras
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Languages: English
- Subtitles: English
- Widescreen: 2.35:1
- 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: DVD 9
- Price: £19.99
- Extras : Scene index, International theatrical trailer, Domestic trailer, Cast and Crew Bios, Interviews, Deleted Scenes, B-Roll
Director:
- Hugh Wilson
(Blast From The Past, Burglar, The First Wives Club, Guarding Tess, Police Academy, TV: WKRP in Cincinatti)
Producers:
- Renny Harlin and Hugh Wilson
Screenplay:
- Bill Kelly and Hugh Wilson
Music:
- Steve Dorff
Cast:
- Adam Webber: Brendan Fraser (Airheads, Blast From the Past, California Man, Dudley Do-Right, George of the Jungle, Gods and Monsters, In the Army Now, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, Monkeybone, Now and Then,The Passion of Darkly Noon, School Ties, Son in Law, With Honors)
Eve Rustikoff: Alicia Silverstone (The Babysitter, Batman and Robin, Blast From The Past, Clueless, The Crush, Hideaway, Le Nouveau Monde, Love’s Labours Lost, True Crime (1995))
Calvin Webber: Christopher Walken (The Addiction, The Anderson Tapes, Annie Hall, Antz, Basquiat, Batman Returns, Blast From The Past, Brainstorm, A Business Affair, The Dead Zone, The Deer Hunter, Excess Baggage, The Funeral,Heaven’s Gate, Inside Job, Last Man Standing, Mouse Hunt, Nick of Time, Pennies From Heaven, The Prophecy 1 & 2, Pulp Fiction, Sleepy Hollow, Suicide Kings, Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead, Touch, True Romance, A View To A Kill, Wayne’s World 2)
Helen Webber: Sissy Spacek (Affliction, Badlands, Blast From The Past, Carrie, JFK, The Man With Two Brains)
Blast From The Pastbegins in 1962 as Calvin Webber (Christopher Walken) and his wifeHelen (Sissy Spacek) mistake a plane crashing on their house and theensuing explosion for a nuclear attack from Cuba, following JFK’s announcementon the TV moments beforehand.
And so they spend the next 35 years in Calvin’s extensive nuclear shelterwaiting for the supposed half-life radiation to die down. While under there,they give birth to Adam (Brendan Fraser), sowing the seeds for afish-out-of-water comedy as he sets out into the brand new world full of hopefor the future.
In order to finance the need for more food and supplies, he sells his collectionof rare baseball cards that his father gave him and it’s in the first shop hetries where he meets Eve (Alicia Silverstone). He intends to employher for two weeks to help him on his shopping spree and to find a wife,preferably one from Pasadena, for reasons that will become clear when you watchthe film.
She finds all these requests bizarre but then neither of them have ever metanyone quite like each other before. You know where this is all leading ofcourse and the films goes about its business drawing the humour out of eacharea possible including the fact that Adam’s house was scrapped with shopsbuilt over the land, including a 1960’s cafe that progressed through theages ending in a shrine to the God-like creatures that live underground, suchis the perception of the owner in relation to the Webber family’s home.
Anamorphic picture, original 2.35:1 ratio, no artifacts and no complaints.In scenes that demand it, colours are bright and strong. The average bitrateis a fine 6.4Mb/s, often changing wildly.
The sound is also of top quality too, although the speakers are neverstretched, only getting a blast from standard teen pop songs or old tunes fromthe film’s first era.
Extras : Chapters :There are 24 chapters covering the 99-minute film, the same as the Region 1 DVD. Languages and Subtitles :There’s just one language on this disc – English, but it is available in DolbyDigital 5.1 and there are also English subtitles for the hard of hearing. And there’s more… :The Cast and Crew Bios contains biogs and filmogs for the four peoplelisted atop, plus Dave Foley, director Hugh Wilson and co-screenwriterBill Kelly. There’s also brief Interviews from Alicia, Fraser,Walken and Wilson, but they only really amount to a minute or three of stop-startpre-scripted PR blurb about the film and Alicia’s cuts her off in mid-sentence (!)Meanwhile, Walken comments on it being one of the best scripts he’s ever read…So The Deer Hunter and True Romance werejust drops in the ocean then?!
There are seven Deleted Scenes covering five minutes and presentedin anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen. One of them (Walken going up the elevator intothe shop) was in the film too, but the rest could easily be left out.The B-Roll is five minutes of work in progress footage – 16 brief bitsof it altogether including multiple takes of some scenes.
Finally, the package is rounded off with two Trailers, an Internationalone and a Domestic one. However, once you’ve seen these extras you won’t reallywant to go back to them.
Note that the back cover states the inclusion of a Love Meter in theextras, but it’s not there at all. However, I’ve seen it on the American DVDand it’s just a random-event game. Press START and a ‘love meter’ attempts tocheck your passion rating – or some such nonsense – but it’s just random asto what rating you get, so quite pointless.
Menu :The main menu is nicely animated and scored, with a sixties style,with options to start the film, watch the extras, choose the language options(variations on English?) and select a scene.
Overall, when I first saw clips of this film on TV I dismissed it out ofhand by being the worst kind of teen-romance style of film I’ve ever seen.Then I saw the trailer and it was literally laugh-a-second, making me reallywant to see the film. Then I watched it and… while it does have its goodparts, they don’t come often enough with more misses than hits.
None of the laughs come until 25 minutes into the film anyway once all thenecessary preamble, charting the first 35 years, has gone by. They could alsohave done with losing the stereotypical gay friend of Eve, Troy (DaveFoley) who has nothing original to do here, as well as the brief occurencein the present day when Christopher Walken’s character has a heart attackbecause things get on top of him. After that, he takes a nap and spends mostof the rest of the film offscreen. Same goes for Sissy Spacek – we have twotop-class actors on show here but once Brendan climbs out of the bunker forthe first time, their lives take a back-seat.
Definitely one for the rental market here. If you like it, it may be wortha purchase. However, I wish Entertainment in Video would get the infoon the back correct, since the ratio is often quoted as “16:9” but that’smeaningless. For those who’ve looked at many of their discs as I have, itusually means an anamorphic print in its original ratio (sometimes wider than16:9), but at other times it’s been used for a non-anamorphic film.
Similarly, as described above, there’s no Love Meter game to be found,but it’s no great loss anyway if you’re choosing between region-encoded DVDsand the Region 1’s only other extra is a fullscreen version of the film.
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS
OVERALL
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.