Highlander - Special Edition [Blu-ray] [1986]

Ignore the nay-sayers, Highlander has never looked this good! Having owned VHS and DVD copies previously, I can guarantee that Highlander will never look more polished than this without serious money being spent by the studio (like Bladerunner or Star Wars), and it'll never happen! This is a "warts & all" release, with even the Director of Photography in the "Making Of..." documentary (transferred from a German DVD release) pointing out such things as the Skycam visible in the wrestling scene, or the shadow of the camera crane passing across the Kurgen's face. HD quality has been both a blessing and a curse to this film, making it look stunning in parts, but also highlighting its flaws. Some of the visual effects have clearly not dated well, and the quality of the film stock varies between scenes. However, those who say their DVD quality is better are talking rubbish; the outdoor highland scenes look gorgeous on blu-ray! As for the 1-star reviewer saying how poor the film is...this release is unlikely to win over legions of new fans, but for those of us who've loved it since 1986 this is an essential purchase! However I only give it 4/5 because it is missing the three Queen music videos present on the original Region 1 Immortal Edition DVD, and also the "Deleted Scenes" are nothing of the sort. They are extended/alternate scenes which are also missing the audio track, so a temp music track has been put in place, and not very interesting at all. For years I'd heard rumours of scenes such as the Kurgan slitting a sheep open and tossing it aside when first bursting in upon Ramirez and Heather, and a scene involving Mcleod, Kastagir and a coke dealer on a New York subway...If they ever existed they are not on this disc!

I am of an age to have seen Highlander when it first came out on VHS (I wasnt quite old enough for the cinema haha) and it was a film, along with The Terminator, which I watched again and again at the time. Something about this 80s' slice of swashbuckling cheese just really appealed to the 11 year old me.

Its basically just the age old story of good versus bad but.......its got Christopher Lambert channeling his best Scottish accent, Clancy Brown doing a superb baddie in the Kurgan, Sean Connery as......um Sean Connery, its set, partly, in an amazingly sunny SCOTLAND :D (Ive been past the castle used for filming many times and never seen such an amazingly blue sky seen here!!) and its got possibly the best soundtrack for a movie EVER!

I havent owned a copy of Highlander since my video copy burned out and faded away long ago so its nice to have it now on blu. The picture quality is nice, though obviously nothing spectacular. I dont know if a remaster would help with some of the issues but seeing the film warts and all, or should that be strings, is just part of the magic for me. The commentary is low key, with only the director Mulcahy participating, so there are occasional silences but its still an enjoyable listen. Would be nice to have a cast commentary. The documentaries and featurettes are perfectly perfunctory and its nice to see some of the people involved talking some years later about the films eventual success.

All in all, a great blu ray of a cheesy classic movie. And cheap as chips.

Beware any film that begins with a wrestling match. Despite its cult success and Lazarus-like comeback on video after flopping big on the big screen, Highlander is a classic example of how to turn a great idea into a terrible film. Just hire Russell Mulcahy. Christophe Lambert as a Scotsman? I can live with that. Sean Connery as an Egyptian from the Spanish court? Sure, why not? An immortal race of swordsmen decapitating each other through the centuries from the Scottish Highlands of the 16th Century to New York in the 1980s in search of the ultimate prize when only one survives? Sounds fun to me. But Russell Mulcahy in the director's chair? Wasn't Michael Winner available that week?

Mulcahy's directorial style seems almost perversely determined to make the wrong choice in almost every scene, whether it's his obsessive use of inappropriate long lenses or his determination to make every shot so distinctive that he never notices that not only do the pictures often play against the intent of the scene but half the time the shots don't even match. It's so in-your-face you can practically see his tonsils, his visual overkill both irritating and distracting. The trouble is that, yes, they're pretty pictures, but they're just there because they look good: cut together they become increasingly clumsy and they stand in the way of telling the story. This is one of those embarrassing cases of a director constantly drawing attention to himself at the expense of the film he's making, suffering especially badly from the rock video mentality and its attendant inability to convey a cohesive narrative, let alone develop character. He's so afraid of losing your attention if he doesn't throw another great set-up at you every three seconds that you have nothing to latch on to and too often you just switch off.

There are some clever links from one time period to another and some moments work when he just stands back and lets the story happen, but ultimately the film is never as much fun as it should be and repeatedly defies all my attempts to like it more. If only it had been made by someone who knew how to direct, or even, with every scene played at fever pitch to growing indifference, had just the most rudimentary grasp of the importance of pacing. He's not much good with actors either, constantly spinning off into clumsy broad comedy that undermines any threat or momentum, with Clancy Brown's evil Kurgan the main casualty as he is reduced to a tiresomely comical punk rocker, alternating reckless driving and gratuitous priest-licking with terrible one-liners that wouldn't have passed muster in the Adam West Batman series.

Not that the direction is the only problem. Lambert is at times more sheepish than lionly in the lead and too often the film feels like it didn't know what to do with its idea, at times camping it up or descending into deliberate comedy, going especially awry in the 20th Century as the Kurgan goes ever more OTT once he discovers leather and MTV. It's also, like so many films from the decade of big hair and shoulder pads, surprisingly dated for a film that spends so much of its running time in the past, with many of the worst visual failings of 80s schlock in the modern-day scenes. Still, there are some good in things there: an engaging double-act from Connery and Lambert, a couple of half-decent sword fights despite Connery obviously not putting in the rehearsal time, Michael Kamen's score and Queen's songs, some of the period scenes look good and... well, that's pretty much it. It may be the best of the series, but it's a long way from being even nearly as good as it could and should have been.

Optimum's UK BluRay of the original European theatrical version is a very disappointing widescreen transfer: at times it is something of a minor improvement over previous versions (it has to be said the film didn't look that great on the big screen to begin with), but the quality veers wildly from shot to shot in some sections. The first 20 minutes or so suffer especially badly from excessive grain in the Madison Square garden scenes, improving sporadically in the Scottish flashbacks, but never impressing - it's more a case of getting used to it than radically improving. It doesn't have many of the features of the various US DVD releases of the title over the years - producers' commentary, music videos, stills galleries - but it's a decent package that improves on Lionsgate's all-region US disc. The few minutes of extended scenes are missing original sound or even subtitles, which is a bit of a problem when one of them is a dialogue scene, while the 85-minute making of documentary is missing most of the key players - no Lambert, Connery, Mulcahy or producers - but makes up for it by focussing on the interviewees it does snare at considerable length and detail. Particularly revealing is original writer Gregory Widen on the script's origins: touring the Tower of London armoury he wondered what it would have been like to not only own all the armour and weapons but to have used them all, adding a villain inspired by Harvey Keitel's persistent duellist in Ridley Scott's first film following the hero through history to pursue a never-ending duel that becomes the sole focus of his existence. Also on hand is co-writer Peter Bellwood to explain how the idea was expanded into an epic without delving too deep into why the rewrites went so wrong. Cinematographer Gerry Fisher and production designer Allan Cameron discuss the look of the film - the modern scenes now being its most dated aspect - while leading lady Roxanne Hart discusses her take on the role.

Unfortunately the 30-minute interview with the producer from the German DVD that concluded the documentary is missing, which is a pity because the film's financial history deserves more discussion than it gets here. It was instrumental in the downfall of EMI as a film company, with the studio fronting the lion's share of the huge budget to its canny independent producers and not even getting the potentially lucrative US rights - which went for a pittance to Fox, who heavily re-edited the film - in one of the most outrageously kamikaze deals of the eighties that ensured the company could never make a profit on it no matter how much it took. (Similar bad deals ensured that by the time the film came out, EMI had sold out to Cannon, who gutted the company before running it into the ground.) It would be the film's surprising profitability in the gold rush days of home video that would drive the series of increasingly poor sequels and syndicated TV series.

While it may not be definitive, it is surprisingly interesting, with gaps filled in by Mulcahy's dryly informative audio commentary and a brief French interview with Lambert, the package rounded off by the full UK trailer (though not the effective teaser). It's a more than decent package for one of those films that I'd love to like more but which never lives up to its central idea. Still, there's always the impending remake - and this is one film that's practically crying out for a remake with a decent director.