- Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
- Video Codec: AVC/MPEG-4
- Resolution: 1080p/24 (23.976Hz)
- Audio Codec: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz/16-bit)
- Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish
- Region: A (Region-Locked)
- Rating: R
- Discs: 1 (1 x Blu-ray)
- Run time: 96 Mins.
- Studio: Image Entertainment
- Blu-ray Release Date: February 28, 2012
- List Price: $29.97
[amazon-product]B0064SVNFS[/amazon-product]
BestBuy.com:
Purchase Beneath the Darkness on Blu-ray at CD Universe
Shop for more Blu-ray titles at Amazon.com
Overall
[Rating:2.5/5]
The Film
[Rating:2/5]
Video Quality
[Rating:3.5/5]
Audio Quality
[Rating:3.5/5]
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:0.5/5]
Click thumbnails for high-resolution 1920X1080p screen captures
(All TheaterByte screen captures are lightly compressed with lossy JPEG at 100% quality setting and are meant as a general representation of the content. They do not fully reveal the capabilities of the Blu-ray format)
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The Film
[Rating:2/5]
Dennis Quaid does a respectable job surrounded by these fresh young faces in a way below average horror/thriller, but Beneath the Darkness should have remained below the radar of the executives who gave it a green light. A teen thriller about a group of high school kids preoccupied with ghosts – one of them, Travis (Tony Oller), supposedly witnessed his sister’s abduction at the hands of some sort of entity – try to prove there are ghosts in their small town mortician’s (Quaid) home. The mortician, Ely, is not a man to be fooled with, however, having already been established in the film’s opening scene as having a murderous past. When he catches the teens breaking into his home at night, Ely kills one right in front of Travis, but the well respected member of the township manages to pull it off as an accident and get the teens in trouble with the law for trespassing. From then on, it is up to the three remaining teens to prove their friend was murdered – without becoming victims themselves.
This film never gets off the ground, and, frankly, doesn’t make much sense. At every turn, when Ely should be obviously exposed by the teens or busted by the police, it just never happens, which stretches believability beyond all reason. It’s not scary, it’s not thrilling, and the characters, especially the group of teens, are all cookie cutter, right out of the CW handbook.
Video Quality
[Rating:3.5/5]
The AVC/MPEG-4 encodement of the Super 35mm source just looks average here, I hate to say. Grain is a bit heavy at times, which isn’t really the biggest problem. The issue at hand is that detail is somewhat soft, overall gamma seems a bit too high and contrast too narrow. The end result is that shadow detail is pretty wide, but the image just looks strange, without the real depth and inky blacks you want to see in a film like this.
Audio Quality
[Rating:3.5/5]
Audio is provided in a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz/16-bit) soundtrack that is relatively straightforward for a film like this. Atmospherics are subdued as is low frequency extension, ut dialogue is clean and intelligible at all times.
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:0.5/5]
There’s little to talk about here as you can see in the list below.
The supplements:
- Behind the Scenes (1.78:1; 1080p/24; 00:02:38) – These “behind the scenes” are really just a couple of minutes of b-roll
- Trailer (2.35:1;1080p/24) – The original theatrical trailer.
The Definitive Word
Overall:
[Rating:2.5/5]
Skip Beneath the Darkness and find a better thriller to watch – just about anyone will do, honestly.
Additional Screen Captures
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[amazon-product]B0064SVNFS[/amazon-product]
BestBuy.com:
Purchase Beneath the Darkness on Blu-ray at CD Universe
Shop for more Blu-ray titles at Amazon.com
Overall
[Rating:2.5/5]
The Film
[Rating:2/5]
Video Quality
[Rating:3.5/5]
Audio Quality
[Rating:3.5/5]
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:0.5/5]
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