Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (DVD)

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Video:
This combined color/b&w version replaces the previous release. While the liner notes says it was "remastered in High Definition," I can't tell the difference in level of detail between this release and the previous one. If anything, the print looks slightly darker this time around. I thought it looked better colorized than in black & white, and once again Legend Films gives us a solid, natural-looking color version. Nice job, guys. The film is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen.

Audio:
The soundtrack comes with 2.0 Mono in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French, along with a beefed-up English Dolby Digital 5.1 which almost seems a little over-processed, given the whole B-movie nature of the beast. But the sound is clear with little distortion, and subtitles in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Extras:
There's some overlapping here with "20 Million Miles to Earth" and "It Came from Beneath the Sea," which are also newly released in two-disc color/b&w sets. It's always a treat listening to Harryhausen talk about his work, and he takes center stage on the full-length commentary track that he shares with visual effects artists Jeffrey Okun, Ken Ralston, and Arnold Kunert. "Remembering 'Earth vs. the Flying Saucers'" shows Harryhausen on-camera with his model, explaining how he did the stop-motion (the highlight of this otherwise routine look back). "The Hollywood Blacklist and Bernard Gordon" is a mini lecture by a member of the writer's guild about the blacklist-where it came from, what happened, etc. For those who don't know anything about the blacklist it will be a useful primer; for the rest, it's a snooze. But the feature is here because Gordon's credit was restored on this version for the first time. So what took so long???

The original screenplay credits are included, along with art galleries, original artwork, and a short feature on the colorization process. "David Schecter on Film Music's Unsung Heroes" is an okay feature on the way that music supports the dramatic tension, while an interview with Joan Taylor underscores how "B" these movies really were. The best feature is the interview that Tim Burton conducts with Harryhausen, which is also available on the other releases. And surprisingly, a second-best short feature is one that has absolutely nothing to do with the film and "stars" an NYU student. Kyle Anderson shows us clay and foam models he's made of characters that he's using for an animated feature, and explains how animators approach stop-motion today. Though the most famous stop-motion is Nick Park's "Wallace & Gromit" team, it's fascinating to hear from a student and get some sense of how and why this medium has endured.

Bottom Line:
Just as there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, there's good and bad camp. "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" isn't campy because everything is so bad it's funny. It's campy because the attitudes and Ray Harryhausen special effects now seem so charmingly quaint. It may be unintentionally funny now, but this B-movie is better than most of those low-budget affairs. In that context, and since it's as good as B-movies get, it certainly merits a 7. If you removed the B-movie factor and considered it as-is, well, then it would be closer to a 6.

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