Director Jack Sholder does a great job staging the film s action sequences, or should I say playing traffic cop. The cast does a good job with the material, Nouri is ideal as the overworked police detective and MacLachlan s quirky performance suits his character quite well. For some reason, the older transfer was harsh looking and the colors tended to look as if the film were shot under fluorescent lighting. New Line s transfer rectifies these problems, providing smoother contrast and more natural colors. As I stated earlier, colors are improved over the Laserdisc issue, but they are not perfect.
Flesh tones appear correct, as do most of the other hues.
Reds tend to be more intensely saturated the majority of the colors in the film, although in some cases, they do bleed beyond their boundaries. Blacks are well rendered, but the level of shadow detail is somewhat limited. Digital compression artifacts are held in check throughout the presentation. The 5.1 channel sound mix is an improvement over monaural, but the original sound recordings still seem to suggest the low budget nature of the production. Sound fidelity is limited, giving the track a flat, uninspired quality.