BEYOND GENRES: THE QUIET EARTH (1985) Blu-ray
Director: Geoff Murphy
Umbrella Entertainment

Umbrella Entertainment does post-apocalyptic sci-fi New Zealand-style with their Beyond Genres Blu-ray of THE QUIET EARTH.

Waking up at a seaside hotel, Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence, SMASH PALACE) experiences a disturbing temporal distortion that has him seemingly stuck at 6:12 A.M. for an inordinate amount of time before the minute actually passes. As he drives through the countryside and back to the city, he can find little sign of human life, and what little evidence of human activity he does find suggests that people have fled or been snatched up in the middle of their daily lives (including a crashed airplane with no bodies amidst the fiery debris and safety belts still fastened in their seats). He finds Delenco, the satellite research unit where he works, equally empty and finds no response to attempts by the computer to reach various international linkups. The only other human he does discover is his colleague Perrin, his corpse incinerated at the control board, leading him to believe that something has gone catastrophically wrong with "Project Flashlight" a global energy grid as a nuclear energy alternative. At first intensely lonely, Zac returns to his home and waits by the phone for an answer to looping message he has broadcast over the radio asking for contact from any other survivors. Like most last men on Earth, his scavenging efforts turn from the survivalist to the materialistic and he decides to "move up in the world." Loneliness soon turns to near-madness, but no sooner does he go from declaring himself president to God than he meets the "last woman on Earth": in Joanne (Alison Routledge, OTHER HALVES). In spite of her mockery of his Godhood and his scientific ideals ("An exclusive all-male club playing God with the universe"), she is as relieved to find him as he is of finding her, and it is not long before they fall into bed in the midst of scouring the countryside for other survivors (the bodies they find unfortunately suggest that there were others who were killed or took their own lives after discovering they were alone). Before thoughts of repopulating the Earth as a new Adam and Eve, they find a third survivor in Maori Api (Pete Smith, ONCE WERE WARRIORS) who they both welcome with open arms. As the trio share stories of their last memories, Zac surmises that they may have survived because they were each at the moment of death when "The Effect" occurred, with Zac revealing that he had tried to kill himself when he realized that data had been deliberately withheld of the project's "phenomenal destructive potential." When Joanne makes it apparent that she also likes Api – in spite of her disgust of his own God-like behavior – Zac starts to feel like a third wheel. Each of them experience episodes that seem like vivid flashbacks to the "tunnel of light" they saw during at the moment, but Zac surmises that these are actually tremors signaling that "The Effect" is about to happen again.

"How easy to believe in the common good when that belief is rewarded with status, wealth, and power," cries Zac to an esteemed audience of cardboard cutouts ranging from Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher to Adolf Hitler during his acceptance speech as president of "this quiet earth." A sober eighties post-apocalyptic alternative to the likes of Brian Trenchard-Smith's admittedly entertaining Ozploitationer DEAD-END DRIVE-IN, the New Zealand-lensed THE QUIET EARTH – from the novel by Craig Harrison – was lost amidst the glut of more expensive or cheaper but more exploitative examples of the sub-genre in the eighties. This is regrettable since the film proves to be one of the more thoughtful and humanistic examples of a post-apocalyptic film, eschewing mutants, aliens, and vast destroyed landscapes for the inner devastation of its trio of characters and their meaningful attempts to accept each other for the faults pre-disaster that lead to their inexplicable survival while trying to come to terms with their own. Their "group hug" that is genuinely heartwarming rather than cheesy, and Zac's pain of becoming an outsider again is just as intensely felt by the viewer through to the ambiguous finale. Despite this achievement, director Geoff Murphy's Hollywood career went downhill from YOUNG GUNS II and FREEJACK to the likes of UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY and FORTRESS 2 before returning to New Zealand and directing second unit on the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy.

Released theatrically stateside by indie Skouras Pictures (VAMPIRE AT MIDNIGHT, BLOOD SIMPLE, THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS) and on VHS by CBS/Fox, THE QUIET EARTH's cult reputation earned it a steelbook DVD release from Anchor Bay with an anamorphic transfer and commentary by screenwriter/producer Sam Pillsbury (THE SCARECROW) which was also included on Umbrella's Australian DVD edition and Germany's 2016 1080i50 Blu-ray. Film Movement put out their Blu-ray later that year, but the producer commentary was not included in favor of an intermittently interesting commentary by celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and critic Odie Henderson. The transfer was much improved over the German one, as was Arrow Video's 2017 UK Blu-ray – which also did not include the producer track in favor of a more focused track by critic Travis Crawford along with some other new video featurettes – which used the same master. Press materials for Umbrella's Beyond Genres line edition mention a new 2K master which may be the same as the Film Movement and Arrow discs. Compared to the Film Movement, the Umbrella looks a tad darker with possibly slightly bolder colors, and some more evident grain that may either have been filtered out of the Film Movement version or just better encoded here. Like the Film Movement edition, Umbrella drops the original Dolby Stereo track in favor of a 5.1 upmix in DTS-HD Master Audio that is generally front-oriented apart from a couple of the original surround effects that get a bit more spread along with the score (Arrow's edition features an uncompressed 2.0 option in addition to the 5.1 track). Optional English SDH subtitles are also included.

The sole substantial extra is the aforementioned commentary by producer Pillsbury who discusses the source novel – citing its basis on the joke that foreigners on a Sunday morning might think New Zealand was abandoned due to the practice of closing the shops all weekend – which provides a different explanation for "The Effect" having to do with fruit fly DNA, some more of the scientist's tragic backstory, and concerns about being able to shoot depopulated exteriors, the believability of the ambiguous concept, and the lack of dialogue for roughly the first twenty-minutes. He reveals that they were able to rent a disused manure farm and allowed to demolish any of it provided they took away the debris, allowing them to create a large burnt-out site for the crashed airplane that appeared to be in the middle of the city. He also notes that Murphy had engineered some effects on some of his earlier projects, and that Murphy was the brother-in-law of both Lawrence (with whom he formed a band) and cinematographer James Bartle (DEATH WARMED OVER), and that the film's assistant director was future ONCE WERE WARRIORS' director Lee Tamahori whose chief duty was to look out for distant cars or even passing birds which would necessitate re-shooting scenes to maintain the belief that the planet was completely empty but for the main trio. Also included are a theatrical trailer (2:58) and a restoration trailer (2:54), although the only real difference appears to be the former is fullscreen from an older source while the restoration one is widescreen and possibly recreated from the feature's HD master rather than retransferred. The cover is textless wraparound, double-sided artwork while the slipcover features the synopsis, technical specs, and list of extras. (Eric Cotenas)

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