Warners releases three classics on 4K disc – and an inferior sequel

By Jim Bray
November 26, 2024

Warner Brothers has outdone itself with three great 4K disc releases from their catalogue, and each one of them is well worth owning if you collect or are just a fan of any of this trio: North by Northwest, Blazing Saddles, and James Cameron's original The Terminator.

Then there's the inferior and unnecessary second Beetlejuice movie, which is okay but hardly in the league of Tim Burton's fresh original.

Let's tackle the good news first, and the best of the good news is how great all three of those classic films look (and sound) in their 4K release. My favourite of the three, North by Northwest, also simply bristles with excellent extras, so much so that it's almost like going to film school to study the great Alfred Hitchcock.

But it's Blazing Saddles that looks the best of the three, and who'd have expected that? It also features some fine extras. Terminator looks and sounds great, but the extras (other than a "music and special effects featurette") aren't really much. Still, they got the films themselves right, and that's worth a lot.

North by Northwest, Hitchcock's 1959 masterpiece, tells the tale of advertising man Roger Thornhill, a man who at the beginning of the film seems to have the world on a string. Then, all of a sudden, he finds himself running for his life. And driving for his life, and riding a train for his life, and ducking an airplane for his life – and finally zipping around Mount Rushmore for his life.

You see, some bad guys – led by James Mason, in a wonderful performance – think he's someone else and they're out to prevent him from doing whatever it is they think he's about to do. Meanwhile, Thornhill has no idea what's going on, just that he'd better get the heck out of Dodge before the next attempt on his life succeeds.

It's a terrific story, thrilling and funny at the same time and if you haven't seen it, you really should. I think this is my favourite Hitchcock outing (not that I've seen that many), with excellent performances, a wild script by Ernest Lehman, great score by Bernard Hermann and exquisite production values. It really does check all the boxes.

So does the 4K disc. While Blazing Saddles outshines it a bit as far as picture quality is concerned, it still looks terrific, with fine detail, wonderful colours and black levels, and of course High Dynamic Range.

I was a tad disappointed to find the extras (this applies to all three films here) are stuffed onto the 4K disc, rather than getting their own separate one (or being included on a Blu-ray version of the movie, which none of these films have, either). I've always felt that 4K discs should only have the feature film, which can then use all of the disc's storage space to potentially allow for the best picture quality – but fortunately, none of these features seem to be affected.

You can spend a whole afternoon with the NbN extras, too, which I did. There's a commentary by writer Lehman, an approximately half hour-long feature on the music, editing and scoring of the film, another half hour long look at the overall making of NbN, and a fascinating, hour long The Master's Touch: Hitchcock's Signature Style documentary, which is an excellent look at the films and career of the master director.

There's also North by Northwest: One for the Ages (another interesting take on the movie) and what basically amounts to a trailer: A Guided Tour with Alfred Hitchcock.

This definitely belongs in the collection of every movie buff.

So does Blazing Saddles! I've never been a huge fan of Mel Brooks' movies and this one is one of the main reasons why. I always thought it was very overrated and could have used a bit of subtlety (what? With Mel Brooks?). And I also figured that in today's social climate Warners would be all over the thing with disclaimers, apologies, or whatever.

I was very wrong and I'm very happy about that. I still don't consider Blazing Saddles to be a masterpiece, but after not having seen it for many years I found myself laughing my behind off during the first half of the movie. It kind of peters out in the second half, but it's still a hoot.

And as for apologies and wokeness, here's a quote from the package:

"…this breakthrough parody still breaks the rules, breaks stereotypes and breaks wind, all in one sitting. See it again and be offended like it's the first time!"

Gotta love that! Heck, I would've been offended if they had bowed down to woke, but they didn't!

The audio and video are superb here as well, even better than NbN (which, in the grand scheme of moviedom, is kind of a shame). There's also a decent selection of extras on the 4K disc, including a scene-specific commentary by Brooks as well as some extra scenes.

The Terminator is the movie that put James Cameron on the map, and it's an imaginative and worthy outing, full of sci-fi thrills. It stars the Governator, of course, the role that arguably really put him on the map, too, though it was definitely not his first starring role.

The tale is of a military cyborg from the future who's sent back to 1984 to kill the woman who would eventually give birth to the saviour of humanity and leader of the resistance in the future war against the machines. Linda Hamilton, who's extremely "badass" in T2, is the naïve waitress who's the Terminator's target and who's forced into a life on the run – much as Roger Thornhill is in NbN, though at least he finds a solution before the movie is over and therefore doesn't have to stick around for sequels.

The movie sets up its sequel beautifully, even to originating some lines, shots, etc. that would appear later in the franchise (stuff like "Come with me if you want to live" or the infamous "I'll be back", the Terminator crushing flowers, etc. etc.). It's also really neat to see how Cameron pulled off this "high tech lynching" (with apologies to Clarence Thomas) on a budget that was pretty tiny compared to what came later.

Picture quality is the worst of these three 4K outings, but don't take that to mean that it sucks because it doesn't. It's actually a fine video transfer, with exquisite colour and deep inky blacks that come in really handy in all the darkened and night scenes.

Extras are pretty sparse, but there's a neat feature on the special effects and music, a series of deleted scenes you can watch with or without Cameron's comments (I preferred with, because he explains just why they were excised). There's also a short feature on how the movie helped inspire today's robotic scientists and one in which we see how it inspired future filmmakers.

Lastly, and leastly, is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a sequel that was unnecessary and is inferior to the original. Don't take that to mean it's no good, though, because it's pretty good. The main problem is that the original was fresh and interesting, whereas this one rehashes what the first one did, some 35 years after the fact.

But it does it well! Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara and, of course, Michael Keaton are back in their original roles and Tim Burton, fortunately, is back in the director's chair.

Lydia Deetz (Ryder) is now an estranged mother (are there any unestranged mothers in today's Hollywood?) who hosts some kind of weird, ghostly TV show or podcast or something (doesn't matter). Naturally, weird things start happening and in order to get things back to where they should be, and to rescue the daughter (Jenna Ortega), the protagonists end up summoning (willingly, kind of, thanks to desperation) Beetlejuice, who has his own issues with his own ex-wife (Monica Belluci).

The movie looks great and, as you'll learn in the supplements, Burton chose to do as much of the effects in camera, on the stage – instead of using CG – as he could. And it shows. There's plenty of green screen and an abundance of stop motion animation (for which I'm a sucker at the worst of times), but most of what you see on screen happened on the sound stage rather than a computer monitor.

I loved that aspect of it!

Warners only sent the Blu-ray, for which I'll never forgive them, but it's a fine example of the species. The picture rocks, as does the sound, and the extras (Warners says there's more than two hours of 'em) are plentiful and some are quite interesting.

Not surprisingly, I loved the "making of" stuff, including the featurette on stop motion and the practical effects. I can't believe whatever health and safety bureaucracy they were operating under let them have a bunch of shrunken headed performers run down stairs blind, but apparently they did – and the results are worth seeing on the screen.

So here, just in time for Christmas, we have four interesting and/or classic films worth owning (well, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is well worth seeing; not sure it's worth owning, though I'm glad I saw it) and all of them are excellent examples of the disc-based audio/video media.

So, whether you're a fan of Hitchcock, Brooks, Cameron or Burton – or all of them – there's something worth collecting or giving.