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- Price: £19.99
- Widescreen: 1.85:1
- Sound: Dolby Digital Mono
Faye Dunaway takes the role of the eponymous character, a female fashion photographer whose latest work of sexually-violent pictures would place her next to Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin for the Turner Prize going by the amount of controversy she’s caused. At random moments she begins to have nightmarish visions of murders taking place where people are stabbed in the eye.
Lo and behold, it’s not long before said potential victim is brown bread and the city’s crime statistics have increased by one. Upon an investigation by Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones), you would think Laura’s rantings of admitting to witnessing the murders in her mind, would give her a one-way ticket to the local sanitorium, but not so. What he must check out first is why a portion of her portfolio portrays models in similar poses to those found in unpublished photos of previous unsolved murder cases.
The late Raul Julia plays Laura’s ex-husband Michael, with an intonation in his voice that would make Vincent Price’s devilish tones jealous. His girlfriend is one of the victims and soon, she begins to fear for the safety of her colleagues including her protg Lulu. However, Brad Dourif excels as Laura’s jailbird driver Tommy. Sadly the outcome is entirely predictable, not least for the fact that Dunaway and Jones become a matching pair and have a drippy romance.
Congrats to Columbia for continuing to concentrate on anamorphic widescreen transfers. Even if this one isn’t quite up to scratch, any image defects are in keeping with the 22-year-old age of the film. The 1.85:1 print yields a high average bitrate of 7.40Mb/s, often peaking over 9Mb/s. The Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack confused my amp into thinking it was Dolby Pro Logic when in fact it’s plain mono, the same as any other DVD version of this movie and there are subtitles in twenty languages.
The extras include a photo gallery with the producer’s comments on previous script drafts overlaid, a 7-minute “Visions” making-of featurette, cast filmographies and an audio commentary from director Irvin Kershner who followed this up with The Empire Strikes Back.
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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.