After almost a year of anticipation, the trumpeted "ultimate director's cut" of the beloved 1979 camp classic arrived - and it made George Lucas's belated Star Wars reeditions, with their already proverbially inane "Greedo shooting first" and "Hayden Christensen's head inserted over Sebastian Shaw" changes look like genuine improvements.
Walter Hill just managed to do what medicine previously thought unimaginable - he raped himself. He took a film loved by no less than four generations and murdered it, spat on it and desecrated its corpse.
The "ultimate cut" was turned into an imbecilic quasi-comic book film. Hill destroyed numerous legendary scenes by inserting awkward zooms, awkward cuts at pivotal moments, and - oh, heaven have mercy - freezes and transitions into "stylized" pseudo-comic book panels (actually seemingly made with the emboss filter of Photoshop), often complete with inane "thought bubble" comments.
Case in point - the scene in which the Warriors encounter the Furies. A powerful scene in which tension grows with every second, conveyed only through the actors' eyes and Barry de Vorzon's slowly creeping-up score. At least that is how it looked originally... because in the new version, at the second when the tension just began growing, the "new" film freezes and transforms into an idiotic comic book panel complete with - oh, God, why?!? - an imbecilic bubble comment stating "Holy sh..., the Baseball Furies!". That's how bad the new version is - and this isn't even the worst example.
He shattered the mystery of the ambient "Wonder Wheel" opening by inserting an absolutely unnecessary animate reference to Anabasis before it. And, worst of all, he obliterated the wonderful ending scene. You know it - it is the symbolic take showing the survivors as they walk away from the memory of the night of horror towards the - perhaps hopeful - fresh dawn. I called this scene "the walk to nowhere - somewhere - everywhere".
In the new version, the walk is frozen after a few seconds and spliced into four idiotic comic book panels which then remain on screen. That single change is so wretchedly disgraceful that it defies belief. It is akin to taking, say, the closing scene of "The Godfather" and cutting it at the moment when Michael Corleone sits and thinks, rolling end credits at that moment rather than following it to show the legendary "new don" conclusion.
As the final insult, the DVD does not offer any worthy extras. There are some standard featurettes, but not much beyond that. Hill "does not believe in commentaries", apparently, so this is absent, but doesn't he believe in viewers' rights to watch deleted scenes, either?
It's true that most deleted scenes, in any films, on any DVD, are usually worthless and epitomize drivel - yet even truly bad ones are often included, since any viewer devoted to any film is always interested in seeing extra footage from it. I understand that Walter Hill may feel ashamed of those scenes and does not want them to be viewed even as a curiosity. I would not be surprised if some of them had not even been shot by him (particularly the infamous, awful day opening) - that would make his objection against their inclusion perfectly justified. However, considering that deleted scenes that do make it to existing DVDs as extra features very rarely represent all material that was cut from the film, and taking into account the typical running time of most rough cuts and workprints from late 70s, I would suspect that there was well over half an hour of alternate or additional footage shot - and that would be enough to choose some interesting snippets for the disc. And, Mister Hill... however bad even the worst deleted scene was, it would be practically impossible for it to be worse than the comic book insertions in the Ultimately Disgraceful Cut.
If there is anything worth having in this disc, it's the new cover. It restores the original 1979 poster - the famous gang conclave in the park, with the tagline "They are the armies of the night". (The UK version has this cover, anyway. The US release apparently features an idiotic, oversaturated "Photochop" of a random scene from the film instead - identical to the previously available DVD's cover, but tinted in "angry" MTV red now...)
If that travesty is indeed representative of the concept that Walter Hill originally had in his mind in 1979, then I praise the studio board that changed it into the version that the audience knows and loves.
