Review of UK / DK: A Film About Punks And Skinheads

Introduction

As the unofficial DVD Reviewer music genre reviewer, I get a wide range of discs sent to me to review every week. I`ve have plenty of good discs but inevitably along with them goes a great deal of dross.

One of the primary purveyors of said dross is Cherry Red Records, who`s releases are without question the lowest quality DVDs that I have come across - the last disc from them that I reviewed - "Demented are Go" was a step in the right direction, so would the improvement continue with "UK/DK"?

Video

The video is presented in 4:3 full-frame and is, somewhat unsurprisingly of particularly poor quality, with what can only be described as a poor quality VHS cassette transferred to DVD with no attempt whatsoever made to clean up the dreadful image.

The picture falls short of VideoCD and is very low resolution with plenty of grain, and even has the horizontal lines across the image caused by worn VHS tape. Colours are over saturated and the image is over exposed at times, overall this is dreadful.

Audio

Luckily, the sound isn`t as bad as the picture, the Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack is not particularly wonderful, but adequately reproduces the music and dialogue on offer. The sound itself is quite flat, but has limited compression at the top end. There is not much in the way of bass, but the music sounds OK.

During the interview footage, the dialogue is clear and understandable with not too much hiss.

Features

There are no extras on offer, the static menu lets you choose between playing the two features in their entirety, selecting a chapter from either of looking at a list of Cherry Red`s other DVD releases should you wish to buy any of them.

Conclusion

Overall, a relatively interesting look at punk music spoiled by absolutely dreadful picture quality that falls well short of an acceptable standard. Cherry Red Records obviously doesn`t have a quality threshold for it`s material because the vast majority of it is of extremely poor quality and unfortunately this disc is no exception.

There seems little point in releasing DVDs with worse picture quality than most home movies, but for some reason they continue to do it. Please please please find some decent quality footage in the future or just don`t bother.