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F.E.A.R.: Forget Everything and Run
R2 - United Kingdom - Signature Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Rick Curzon (5th April 2021). |
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The Film
 The Walking Dead meets The Revenant. When a virus ravages a mountain community the survivors must flee from the monsters it created into the barren wilderness. Scavenging, freezing and dying, one family will fight for their lives against marauders hellbent on revenge.As humanity clings to hope, their only chance for survival forming an alliance with the monsters that came calling.
Video
Let's see, we'll take the zombie epidemic backdrop of TV's The Walking Dead (2010 - ) and we'll graft onto a situation ala The Revenant (2015). We get a portentous opening text scrawl with a portentous female narrator which made me giggle. Frankly, I'm tired of zombie films; far, far ... far too many are made these days. F.E.A.R. lost me in the first few moments in which two people fail to completely nullify an attacking zombie because they keep shooting it in the torso and not the head. The makers of programmers like this need to understand that viewers these days are very savvy and have seen a hundred zombie epics and having characters do dumb things in the opening moments of the film isn't how you pull an audience in; my response of "oh, come ON!" isn't what the makers wanted two minutes in. Visually this is a more interesting film. It uses the now relatively rare flat ratio of 1.85:1 so it's always a pleasant surprise when I see this format because everything these days is usually wider; Netflix and BBC stuff is 2:1 and most films (theatrical and straight to video / streaming) are 2.39:1. It used to be the reverse with scope films being in the minority. It's digitally lensed so very little true grain but the image has been given a hazy slightly pastel patina; perhaps to look like old, faded photos. Being modern, and a horror epic, it favours the usual largely desaturated blue-gray look that filmmakers seem so much in love with but the haze is either part of the cinematography or it's been done in post. I'd say the former although the colour grade is definitely artificially tweaked in post. Why can't we just have the colours as they were in real life? Black levels are generally strong although because the contrast can be rather flat there are some bits where they're more dark gray. This seems to have been a stylistic choice and contrast is stronger in exteriors, flatter in interiors with very little really bright highlights. I could see no unintended crush or blown out highlights. The encode is strong handling a problematic source generally well. The image is hazy and so at times there is potentially some noise in the darker areas of the screen. I could see no compression artefacts. A decent standard def transfer of a difficult source. MPEG-2 / DVD5 / 1.85:1 / 97:22 PAL
Audio
English Dolby Digital 5.1 English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo Subtitles: None This is a pretty active track but also typical of lower budget productions. It's nowhere near the league of the latest Bond or Marvel film but the rear channels are very active generally with plenty of ambiance (it's set outdoors) and lots of use of score. Dialogue is clear and the subwoofer activity is present albeit not pervasive despite there being plenty of opportunities. The 2.0 is basic stereo, not surround. Play it via ProLogic II or similar to get the best out of it. Sadly, no hard of hearing subtitles. Companies are excluding quite a few potential viewers by not including them.
Extras
Startup Trailers: - Wrong Turn (1:01) - Willy's Wonderland (0:57) The standard promos for other releases.
Packaging
The standard black DVD Keepcase.
Overall
High concept melding of zombie and survivalist epics is pretty run of the mill and heavy on the melodrama and characterisation. Image and sound are decent but the source is difficult and would be much better suited to BD or UHD BD. No extras to speak of. As usual for Signature Entertainment this is a cheap disc from day one so casual viewers who have no need of hard of hearing subtitles buy with confidence; those who do need them and hardcore collectors go for the internationally available BD releases.
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