Something for Everyone!

The fun thing about catalogue titles is you never really know what’s coming next. You get the obvious big-deal anniversary releases, sure, but then something else turns up out of nowhere and lights up the room.

Take Robert Benton’s The Late Show, which was released in 1977 and thus a year away from a big-deal 50^th anniversary release. But someone at the Warner Archive Collection loves this movie, and figured people wouldn’t want to wait, so here it is now.

Have you seen The Late Show? You should see The Late Show. Benton’s second feature, made five years after his revisionist Western Bad Company, is a much smaller affair, a detective movie starring Art Carney as Ira Wells, an over-the-hill PI hired by New Age stoner Margo Sperling (Lily Tomlin) to find her missing cat. The case is much bigger than that, of course, so before long they’re being chased around every corner of Los Angeles by a collection of swindlers, hustlers and sadists determined to shut them up for good.

The Late Show is a detective movie in the same way Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye was a detective movie, which is to say its plot is just an excuse to capture a culture at a specific place and time. Altman produced the film, and connected Benton with his editors, Lou Lombardo and Peter Appleton, so there is a similar looseness to the pacing. But this is its own thing, with Benton taking great pleasure in the anti-chemistry between his leads as they talk over, around and through each other.

The best joke in the picture is that Ira is just as locked into his own hard-boiled patois as Margo is to her own raised-consciousness nonsense, so they haven’t got a chance of understanding one another – but they do know the score, and eventually they find a rhythm that works. Benton was always good at the human stuff.

Warner Archive’s Blu-ray of The Late Show was mastered from a 4K scan of the camera negative, so the film looks better than it has in decades. (How much better? Just watch the trailer afterward, which was not restored for this edition.) It’s not an especially pretty film, but DP Charles Rosher Jr. did the best he could with the browns, beiges and fluorescent blues of the era. The mono soundtrack was never especially distinguished, but it comes through loud and clear. Other than the trailer, the only extra is a clip of Tomlin promoting the film on Dinah Shore’s talk show. That feels like the ’70s.

Chuck Russell’s Eraser is similarly rooted in its historical moment: The mid-’90s, somewhere between Cliffhanger and Rush Hour, when Sylvester Stallone was aging out of action blockbusters and Arnold Schwarzenegger was briefly the only go-to guy for action blockbusters. He’d stumbled with Last Action Hero but righted himself with True Lies, and Eraser was supposed to be the uncomplicated shoot-em-up that let Schwarzenegger prove he had as much to do with his recent hits as James Cameron.

Technically this is true: Eraser was indeed a hit, grossing nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in a summer dominated by Mission: Impossible, Twister, Independence Day and The Rock – which all made considerably more. Those films all had novelty on their side, while Eraser has a certain squareness to it; despite its lush production values and vaguely technothriller presence, at its heart it’s a very simple story about a good guy saving an innocent girl from a small army of bad guys. And even then, it’s more Raw Deal than Commando.

It’s basic, is what I’m saying, but thirty years later the lack of novelty feels less important; Eraser lines up nicely with Schwarzenegger’s other mid-tier pictures, and given what was to come – the supernaturally silly End of Days, the pre-9/11 clunker Collateral Damage – it goes down pretty smooth thirty years later. There’s a pleasure in watching Arnold do his thing as generic hero John Kruger, Vanessa Williams is a lively screen partner as the young whistleblower he’s charged with protecting, James Caan’s default position of mild annoyance is an interesting color for the bad guy, and director Chuck Russell stages a couple of decent shootouts with those CG railguns … though that alligator has not dated nearly as well. But mostly, yeah, it’s a good time.

Warner’s 4K upgrade is a massive improvement on its Blu-ray, which was produced in the early days of the format and very much looks it. That VC-1 transfer looked like oversharpened digital video in a number of scenes, but this new master makes Eraser look like film again. Faces look like flesh rather than wax, there’s grain, there’s shadow, there’s texture. A new Atmos soundtrack turns your screening space into a battlefield, and gives Alan Silvestri’s score some scale. (The theatrical mix is also included.)

There were no supplements on the earlier DVD or BD to port over, but Warner has tapped Williams, Russell and executive producer Michael Tadross to sit down for two new retrospective featurettes. “Revisiting the Modern Action Hero: The Evolution of Arnold” lets the trio reminisce about working with Schwarzenegger and the ways Eraser tried to expand his persona, while “’90s Action Thriller Reimagined” finds them recapping the project’s production and release. The two pieces amount to less than 15 minutes of material, so don’t expect any shocking revelations or insights, but the glimpses of stunt footage are nifty.

And now we can jump forward to 2006, and James Gunn’s Slither – which may have looked generic on paper, but came out as gloriously distinct in execution. Juicing up a small-town monster movie with the possession-slug element of Fred Dekker’s ’80s gem Night of the Creeps, Gunn’s directorial debut practically throbs with his love of goopy monster makeup and silly character comedy.

It also gives Nathan Fillion a surprisingly complex role as the lovelorn police chief Bill Pardy, who’s carrying a torch for his high-school flame Starla (Elizabeth Banks), even though she’s married to local magnate Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) and therefore smack in the middle of the alien infestation … because Grant is fully infected with a parasitic creature that’s out to eat the world. These things happen, right? No one said marriage was easy.

Shout’s 20^th anniversary steelbook sports a brand-new 4K scan of the 35mm interpositive, approved by Gunn and DP Gregory Middleton, that looks just a little less than pristine in the best possible way. It’s not worn or scratched or anything, but the image has a kind of depth and warmth that feels like we’re seeing it just after its opening weekend. (I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, and I’d love to talk to Middleton about it sometime.)

The soundtrack has been remixed into Dolby Atmos – the original theatrical audio is also included – and we get nearly an hour of new interviews with Middleton (“We’ve Got Worms”), editor John Axelrod (“Feed the Fear”), special makeup effects designer Todd Masters (“Just a Bee Sting”) and composer Tyler Bates (“What’s Gotten Into You”). The considerable extras produced for the 2017 Scream Factory collector’s edition Blu-ray are all here, too, along with the extras produced for Universal’s HD-DVD release a decade prior. Gorge away, fans.

One more disc of note arrives this week, though it’s not an anniversary edition: Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore’s reunion project 50 First Dates first hit theaters in 2004. But Sony’s bringing it to 4K alongside another of the studio’s Sandler projects, Click … which does turn 20 this week. The thing is, I do not like Click; it’s a mawkish and dopey high-concept comedy that doesn’t seem to understand the ramifications of its premise. I didn’t bother requesting a copy. But I did reach out about 50 First Dates.

Peter Sagal’s Hawaiian romcom could similarly be read as mawkish and dopey, I suppose, with its gimmicky comic conceit of “guy falls for the perfect girl, but she forgets him every morning and he has to woo her all over again.” It’s the Mr. Short Term Memory bit from Saturday Night Live, right? Endless hijinx and misunderstandings as lovestruck veterinarian Henry tries to remind the bubbly Lucy of their connection over and over again!

Maybe that’s how it started, but somehow George Wing’s screenplay zeroes in on the genuine horror at the core of the story: Barrymore’s Lucy is forever remembering the last good day of her life, before the horrific car crash that left her with irreparable brain damage and memory loss. And while the path is rocky, and occasionally obstructed by walrus vomit (and a signature Wacky Guy appearance from Rob Schneider), Henry’s struggle to love her as she is lets Sandler explore the flaws in his default comic persona.

Rather than let Henry solve Lucy’s problems with an elaborate gesture, 50 First Dates shows us how a can-do attitude can’t fix anything, forcing both characters to take their situation seriously. Sandler and Barrymore had a fun puppy-love chemistry in The Wedding Singer six years earlier, but this movie found them in a different place – Sandler had made Punch-Drunk Love, Barrymore had launched her production company – and they’re clearly up for something more substantial. Almost every element of this movie is better than it needed to be.

Speaking of which: Did you know that 50 First Dates was shot by Jack N. Green, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer of Unforgiven? Green was Eastwood’s go-to DP from Heartbreak Ridge to Space Cowboys, during which he also shot stuff like Twister and Speed 2 and Girl, Interrupted. Somehow he ended up working in comedy – he’d shoot The 40-Year-Old Virgin the year after this – but he never condescended to the genre. 50 First Dates is darker and moodier than most of Sandler’s comedies, and Green shot it with the scope and care it deserved. The resulting 4K upgrade looks just great, with a new Dolby Atmos mix that expands the soundstage appropriately rather than obnoxiously; the original theatrical audio is also offered in DTS-HD 5.1.

All the supplements from the original disc are here, too: production featurettes, deleted scenes, music videos, commentary from Barrymore and director Peter Sagal. No new retrospective, though, and it's too bad Sony doesn’t share Warner’s unofficial policy of producing retrospectives for its catalogue releases. It'd be nice to see Sandler and Barrymore together again, again, after all this time.

The Late Show is now available on Blu-ray in the Warner Archive Collection; Eraser is now available in 4K from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment, and 50 First Dates is now available in 4K from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. And Slither is now available in a 4K/BD steelbook from Shout! Studios. Phew.

Up next: It Was Just an Accident, The Mastermind, Crime 101, They Will Kill You and EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert lead the new-release roundup, along with a couple of revelatory French-language collections. And don’t forget, my weekly What’s Worth Watching recommendations go out tomorrow morning to paid subscribers – so bump up that subscription today and you won’t miss a thing!