Hard Rain - DVDfever.co.uk

Hard Rain is what beats down on the town of Huntingburg and the local sheriff (Randy Quaid) has his work cut out in the evacuation process. Problems are abound when an armoured truck driven by Tom (Christian Slater) and his uncle Charlie breaks down in the middle of the flood. As if that wasn’t bad enough, across the way is a gang of thieves headed by Jim (Morgan Freeman).

One or two of the gang are a little gun-happy, letting off a few rounds which results in the death of Uncle Charlie (Ed Asner in a thanklessly small role) which makes Tom even more determined to ensure Jim and co. don’t get their hands on the loot.

With little left of the town to care about, the Sheriff takes more than a passing interest in the money and turns traitor on his career to provide a nest egg for himself, which results in Tom and Jim forming the most unlikely of alliances in revenge of an even greater nutter. What follows is some gunfights, shouting, running around including scenes involving a jet-ski chase in a school and boats crashing through church windows after driving up conveniently-placed ramps and a pointless addition of Minnie Driver as Slater’s love interest.

Opening a door the easy way.

The picture quality looks good from the usual viewing distance, but closer inspection reveals motion artifacts onscreen which happen mostly during dark or darkly-lit scenes. Unless you’re going to be watching the film with your nose pressed against the screen, you don’t have anything to worry about and this was on a 32″ widescreen set.

The average bitrate is a fine 5.40Mb/s, occasionally peaking over 8Mb/s and, unlike the American release, the UK disc benefits from being 16:9-enhanced for widescreen televisions allowing 33% extra resolution. The film is presented in its original widescreen ratio of 2.35:1 and open-matte 4:3.

The sound comes in Dolby Digital 5.1 and comes across superb, with a torrent of rain, gunshots, rain, shouting, rain, the vroom of jet-skis and boats and some more rain.

Extras :

Chapters : There are 18 chapters to the 93 minutes of the film which covers most of the major scenes, but no theatrical trailer is to be found.

Languages & Subtitles : English and Spanish are the order of the day for the language, the sound being in Dolby Digital 5.1. English subtitles give you a “deaf and hard of hearing” option which means that any major sound effects are also included within square brackets and displayed onscreen. Subtitles are also available in Dutch and Spanish.

Booklet : A 20-page booklet is included which contains a chapter listing and very brief biographies for Slater, Freeman and Minnie Driver in all three languages.

Menu : Unlike the American DVD release, we are treated to an animated menu with sound to set the scene of the film. Options are given at first for the language required from the same choice of two as for everything else on this disc and then for the film ratio.

One extra put in an electrifying performance…

Along with The Big Lebowski and A Life Less Ordinary, this is one of the first few DVDs to contain both picture formats on the **same side of the disc**. Usually, releases containing both versions will be on opposite sides of the disc but these break the trend. It’s a more welcome move, but on a technical note, I’d rather the fullscreen version be scrapped altogether if it means the widescreen version remaining can benefit from higher bitrate, resulting in a better picture.

It’s just a shame that there’s so few extras on this disc. The Region 1 DVD only beats this in one aspect by coming complete with the theatrical trailer, but overall, the disc reviewed here scores more points over that with an anamorphic picture and animated menu. One thing I’d like to have seen though is the 25-minute ‘making of’ which was broadcast on ITV around the time of the film’s release, showing how the massive set was built, water-proofed and flooded, the “city” being constantly lowered into the water tank to simulate the rising of the waves.

As a film, Hard Rain, originally titled “The Flood”, is fairly entertaining for an hour-and-a-half. It doesn’t set any precedents in or breakthroughs in filming technology but is a comfortable watch and you may be best renting this DVD first to see whether it’s worth a purchase. FILM : ***½ PICTURE QUALITY : **** SOUND QUALITY: ***** EXTRAS: ½ ——————————- OVERALL: ***

[Up to the top of this page]

Dom Robinson

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.

DVDfever.co.uk

Follow DVDfever.co.uk