Mark's fears increase when an incident on an ice rink almost results in Henry's
younger sister Connie (Quinn Culkin, adding to the acting family)
drowning under the ice, yet every adult around thinks Mark's exaggerating and
it all starts to rebound back on him.
What does have a genuinely interesting premise, though, gets rather tiresome
as you realise the 83-minute film, despite being short, seems very dragged out
and could easily have been told in around 50 minutes.
Henry - his bite is worse than his bark.
The film is presented in the original 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen ratio and
has some artifacts that only really show up in dark scenes, mainly indoors.
Also, the transfer is a little skewed in that everyone's head (which is the
most prevalent thing in a case like this) looks a bit on the 'fat' side
when using the correct widescreen mode on your TV. This can be compensated
with an alternative mode like "Just" (for Panasonic TVs) or "Super Zoom"
(for Philips TVs), while other models may have an alternative. Quite why
this happens though is unforgiveable.
The soundtrack is nice and pleasing but it's not a film that relies on special
FX and is only in Dolby Pro Logic so don't expect anything major.
The only extra is a 2-minute trailer in 4:3 fullscreen.
There are 15 chapters to the film which isn't enough and the subtitles come in
12 flavours: English for the hard of hearing as well as Czech, Danish, Finnish,
Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and
Turkish. The menus are all static and silent. Back-catalogue titles deserve
better treatment than this.
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
