Vinegar Syndrome restores the first gay film to address the AIDS epidemic with their Blu-ray/DVD combo of BUDDIES.

Shy graduate student/typesetter David Bennett (David Schachter) volunteers at the Gay Center to be a "Buddy" to a hospitalized AIDS patient. The experience is not what he expected when he is paired with Robert Willow (Geoff Edholm) who is in the isolation ward at St. Matthew's hospital. However sick and weak Robert is physically, he makes David uncomfortable by his probing questions about his own life as a gay man and his committed relationship with boyfriend Steve (David Rose). While typesetting a publication about AIDS, David also puts his own thoughts to paper to try to figure out why he feels so negatively about Robert and starts to realize that he himself needs to do more listening rather than asking questions easily turned back upon him. Day to day, David visits Robert and learns of the differences between them that lead to Robert's rootless existence and the importance of being gay to his identity in comparison to David's desire for domesticity and not wanting to be defined by his sexuality. As Robert becomes physically weaker, he instills in David a sense of community as well as the conviction that not enough is being done to combat the virus while their increasingly all-consuming friendship starts to intrude on David's private life.

Touted as the first film to address the AIDS crisis in the gay community in the eighties – from the stigmatization of gay sexuality and the belief that the virus was only a gay disease (and the prejudices that came with that) – BUDDIES almost plays like a response to the well-intentioned "very special" episodes of eighties television shows that addressed AIDS (usually through a character infected through a blood transfusion). Described by director Arthur Bressan Jr. – whose career encompassed hardcore porn and gay-positive documentaries before his early death in 1987 at age forty-four – as his "Bergman film", BUDDIES is a two-person character study set largely within the confines of a hospital room, with the contrasts between the leads laid out through a series of dialogues as they find common ground. Their personalities do not much merge in a Bergmanesque fashion. Instead, Bressan risks the audience stereotyping that all gay male interactions are reduced to sex through David's imagined reveries with a healthy Robert in which he takes the place of the other man's lookalike although more self-confident lover; however, David's boyfriend Steve – an offscreen voice apart from a beefcake shower scene – functions not as an enabler for the relationship but reveals an understanding about the nature of separate fantasies in relationships and the emotional and psychological impact the more sheltered David's friendship with Robert is having on him. In studying the contrasts between the two principles, the film also suggests the importance of community and the dangers of ignorance and naiveté in gay people who want to just blend in (David regards the Gay Week parades as a "freak show"). The ending is not so much predictable as inevitable, but it is no less affecting, and probably more so than subsequent films and television shows that use characters with AIDS to milk audience emotions.

Released theatrically by the more daring New Line Cinema of the 1980s and subsequently only available for viewing in academic settings, BUDDIES comes to Blu-ray from a 2K scan of the original 16mm camera negatives which are largely free of damage apart from one noticeable repaired tear. It is a very "early eighties" film with its white-walled, natural light settings and primary-hued clothing, and the Blu-ray encode is up to the task. The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track boasts clear dialogue and nice presence when it comes to the scoring while English SDH subtitles are also provided.