Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Ruby

Collapse
X
Collapse
  •  
    Ian Jane
    Administrator

  • Ruby



    Released by: VCI Entertainment
    Released on: September 12th, 2017.
    Director: Curtis Harrington
    Cast: Piper Laurie, Stuart Whitman, Roger Davis, Janit Baldwin, Fred Kohler Jr.
    Year: 1977
    Purchase From Amazon

    The Movie:

    Made a year after the success of Brian De Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie and four years after William Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, Curtis Harrington's 1977 film Ruby mixes up elements from both of those movies and turns them into… something.

    The film begins with a prologue wherein sultry albeit pregnant chanteuse Ruby Claire witnesses the mob land execution of her man, Nicky Rocco (Sal Vecchio) in the swamps of Dade County, Florida. Years later, Ruby, no longer a singer, runs a drive-in with the help of her pal Vince Kemper (the ever reliable Stuart Whitman). In the years that have passed since the murder, Ruby has given birth to the baby she was carrying at the time, Leslie (Janit Baldwin), who is about to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. For reasons never explained to any sort of logical point, Ruby has given jobs to each of the hitmen who killed her beloved Nicky, so her drive-in is basically staffed by hoods.

    As the movie plays out, some of those same hoods start turning up dead, the victims of some strange and gruesome murders… the best of which is the drunken projectionist getting strangled and hanged by a reel of 35mm film in the projection booth! Clearly something is amiss, but Ruby isn't sure what. Leslie, who is mute, starts acting strange as more hoods turn up dead, leading Vince to bring in a parapsychologist named Doctor Paul Keller (Roger Davis) to try and sort all of this out. Meanwhile, Ruby keeps trying to relive past glories by singing in what's left of the bar that she used to run with a wheelchair bound man named Jake (Fred Kohler Jr.) who doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with the central plot of the movie.

    Ruby has plot holes the size of the Lincoln Tunnel and it doesn't always make sense but you know what? It's watchable and entertaining in its own sort of goofy way. Harrington is savvy enough behind the camera to make sure that we get a murder or two every so often to hold our attention, and in the stretches where we don't? We get Piper Laurie being weird and Janit Baldwin being weirder. Laurie struts about her house, her old bar and her drive-in dressed to the nines, a red boa around her neck, her ample bosom about to pop out of her dress, ordering people around and swilling cocktails like they're going out of style. She's a blast to watch, chewing the scenery a little bit here and there but doing her thing and doing it well. Janit Baldwin's performance is, for ninety-five percent of the film at least, completely silent but she's interesting to watch, her eyes seemingly ready to pop out of their sockets at a moment's notice. Fred Kohler Jr. doesn't do anything except sit silently in a wheelchair and move his fingers now and then but Roger Davis is okay is unremarkable as the doctor. Stuart Whitman more or less plays himself here, which is a good thing, because Stuart Whitman is awesome.

    Despite the fact that it doesn't always make a whole lot of sense, the movie is fun. It does take a little while to really hit its stride but the last half hour of the picture, where Harrington seems to not only allow the film to go off its rails so much as he does completely shove it off, is bonkers enough to make this one worth checking out for fans of seventies era possession and supernatural horror pictures.

    Video/Audio/Extras:

    VCI present Ruby on Blu-ray on a 50GB disc in a transfer taken from a new 2k scan of the original 35mm negative framed in its proper 1.85.1 aspect ratio. That's the good news. The bad news? Pretty much everything else. First off, there's that strange vertical combing effect that makes otherwise smooth lines look jagged (this same issue plagued their recent One Million B.C. disc reviewed here). This is apparent in most of the screen caps below. And then there's the compression. The feature takes up 26GBs of space on the disc, there shouldn't be obvious macroblocking and compression artifacts, but there are. Colors are murky more often than not, there's black crush all over the place and the whole thing looks soft and muddy. There's also some fairly aggressive noise reduction on display throughout, essentially removing the film's grain structure and giving an already soft, problematic image a waxy sheen. On top of that, at the 21:30 mark, there's a stretch of about seven seconds where the picture just goes completely black (though the audio continues over top of it). VCI has acknowledged that there are problems here and are working on a solution. Once that happens, we'll be glad to update - but until then, yuck! This does not look good at all.

    The film gets an LPCM 2.0 Mono mix that is thankfully free of any major problems. There are a few spots that sound a bit flat and the occasional line of dialogue sounds a bit muffled but by and large things sound fine. The optional English subtitles are a nice touch as well.

    Extras start off with a new audio commentary featuring film historian David Del Valle and Curtis Harrington expert Nathaniel Bell. Lots of insight here into the production, comments on Harrington's career up to and including this feature, thoughts on the performances, influences that clearly worked their way into the film and more. Also here is an archival commentary from the old DVD release featuring actress Piper Laurie and Harrington himself. They reminisce about working together on the film, share some stories from the set, discuss Laurie's co-stars like Whitman and Baldwin and more.

    From there, we get two episodes of Del Valle's television series The Sinister Image in which Harrington is interviewed fairly extensively. The first part runs twenty eight minutes and the second twenty nine. Originally recorded in 1988, these episodes suffer from some obvious audio synch problems but if you can get past that they're pretty interesting. This doesn't focus on Ruby so much as it is a career overview with Del Valle talking to Harrington about his younger years, how he got into filmmaking and then some of the specific projects that he's worked on over the years. It's pretty interesting and a nice addition to the disc. Del Valle pops up again in a separate sixty-minute interview with Harrington. Again, it goes quite in depth into the director's career and lets him talk at length about his career making horror pictures (and again, it has some audio synch problems).

    Aside from that we get the film's original theatrical trailer, animated menus and chapter selection. As this is a combo pack release there's also a DVD version of the movie include and on the reverse side of the cover sleeve there is an essay on the film written by Bell.

    The Final Word:

    Ruby has its problems but so too does it have its own set of quirky, screwy charms. VCI's Blu-ray release sounds fine and has a pretty solid array of extras, but that transfer… here's hoping they can get replacement discs out sooner rather than later.

    Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!









































    • John Bernhard
      #1
      John Bernhard
      Senior Member
      John Bernhard commented
      Editing a comment
      I wonder why there is audio sync problems on the Sinister Image material? Will VCI ever releases a problem free Blu? ( that's a rhetorical question, obviously ).

    • C.D. Workman
      #2
      C.D. Workman
      Senior Member
      C.D. Workman commented
      Editing a comment
      Jesus Christ. Yet another title for me to avoid...

    • Maureen Champ
      #3
      Maureen Champ
      Member
      Maureen Champ commented
      Editing a comment
      I thought Ruby is sweet sixteen which was christened in blood and raised in sin but hell no! Also this transfer sucks monkey's balls, Scream Factory or Arrow Video should fix it.
    Posting comments is disabled.

Latest Articles

Collapse

  • Roommates (Quality X) Blu-ray Review
    Ian Jane
    Administrator
    by Ian Jane


    Released by: Quality X
    Released on: February 28th, 2024.
    Director: Chuck Vincent
    Cast: Samantha Fox, Vernoica Hart, Kelly Nichols, Jerry Butler, Jamie Gillis
    Year: 1982
    Purchase From Amazon

    Roommates – Movie Review:

    Directed by Chuck Vincent and released in 1982, Roommates opens with a scene where a young woman named Joan Harmon (Veronica Hart) gets a hotel room with an older man named Ken (Don Peterson, credited as Phil Smith),
    ...
    03-15-2024, 01:10 PM
  • The Bounty Hunter Trilogy (Radiance Films) Blu-ray Review
    Ian Jane
    Administrator
    by Ian Jane


    Released by: Radiance Films
    Released on: March 26th, 2024.
    Director: Shigehiro Ozawa, Eiichi Kudo
    Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Minoru Ôki, Arashi Kanjuro, Bin Amatsu, Chiezo Kataoka
    Year: 1969-1972
    Purchase From Amazon

    The Bounty Hunter Trilogy – Movie Review:

    Radiance Films gathers together the three films in Toie Studios’ Bounty Hunter Trilogy, starring the inimitable Tomisaburo Wakayama. Here’s how the three movies in this
    ...
    03-13-2024, 11:30 AM
  • Nemesis (MVD Rewind Collection) Blu-ray Review
    Ian Jane
    Administrator
    by Ian Jane


    Released by: MVD Rewind Collection
    Released on: January 8th, 2019.
    Director: Albert Pyun
    Cast: Olivier Gruner, Jennifer Gatti, Tim Thomerson
    Year: 1992
    Purchase From Amazon

    Nemesis – Movie Review:

    Albert Pyun's 1992 film Nemesis takes place in the future of 2027. Here it's common for criminals and cops alike to ‘upgrade' themselves using cybernetic bits and pieces in an effort to make themselves more than human. In this world
    ...
    03-13-2024, 11:22 AM
  • Bloodmoon (Severin Films) Blu-ray Review
    Ian Jane
    Administrator
    by Ian Jane


    Released by: Severin Films
    Released on: February 1st, 2024.
    Director: Alec Mills
    Cast: Leon Lissek, Christine Amor, Helen Thomson, Ian Williams
    Year: 1990
    Purchase From Amazon

    Bloodmoon – Movie Review:

    The directorial debut of Alec Mills, the cinematographer on such films as Polanski’s MacBeth and Return Of The Jedi, 1990’s Bloodmoon, a later period slasher film, is set around St. Elizabeth’s, an all-girls Catholic School
    ...
    03-07-2024, 03:55 PM
  • The Shining (Scream Factory) Blu-ray Review
    Ian Jane
    Administrator
    by Ian Jane


    Released by: Scream Factory
    Released on: March 12th, 2024.
    Director: Mick Garris
    Cast: Steven Weber, Rebecca De Mornay, Melvin Van Peebles, Courtland Mead
    Year: 1997
    Purchase From Amazon

    The Shining – Movie Review:

    Stephen King somewhat famously didn’t like Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel, The Shining, so he signed on to work with Director Mick Garris on this three-part TV mini-series take which hit the airwaves
    ...
    03-07-2024, 03:50 PM
  • Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny (Shout! Factory) Blu-ray Review
    Ian Jane
    Administrator
    by Ian Jane


    Released by: Shout! Factory
    Released on: February 13th, 2024.
    Director: Liam Lynch
    Cast: Jack Black, Kyle Gass
    Year: 2006
    Purchase From Amazon

    Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny – Movie Review:

    Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny opens with a prologue where we meet a young man named Jables (JB, played by Jack Black) who, despite his strict religious upbringing, only wants to rock n roll. When his father tears down all of his posters
    ...
    02-29-2024, 06:17 PM
Working...
X