Arrow Video Flatliners UHD [Blu-ray] [Region Free]

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The round trip to the great beyond is intriguing, but I'm surprised the majority of the characters are so shallow in their reasons for experimenting. Flatliners remains a fun experience that works as both a medical thriller and, with its Gothic imagery, a genre film. I’m glad Arrow is putting this out because I haven’t seen it since it’s release when I was an impressionable teenager and I look forward to seeing if the effects and the “science” of the film holds up because we know the haircuts won’t. There were also a few sequences early on in which the dialogue was briefly out of sync with the action. They reveal tricks used for creating projections during the subway sequence and the multiple scenes of rippling light.

Nelson is repeatedly assaulted by a young boy in a red hood, David (Bacon) sees visions of a young girl that he bullied as a child, Rachel (Roberts) sees her dead father who committed suicide, and Joe (Baldwin) is haunted by women that he secretly videotaped while having sex with them. The cast comes off as a twisted horror genre variation of The Brat Pack, but fortunately they deliver solid performances across the board and sell the whole med student angle surprisingly well.

They consistently discuss the film while watching it together, with Reesman primarily providing real-life factoids about filming locations and the cast and crew, while Evry focuses a little more on the cinematography and the content of the film. Here he throws his entire bag of tricks at the screen, including a gorgeous cast dressed in trendy fashions, surrounded by giant wind machines and placed inside stunningly colorful (occasionally black-lit) environments. Strangely, it was only dialogue that was impacted, not any other ambient noise and I was not able to replicate it, implying a technical issue on the player side and not on the disc itself. It's easy to see how the others would be coaxed into going along with him on what is, in all reality, a pretty reckless endeavor.

Nelson sees a key memory from his childhood in which he and his friends mistakenly killed a young boy, Billy Mahoney (Joshua Rudoy). Assistant director John Kretchmer (14-minutes) explains what an assistant director does (the ship’s first mate to the ship’s captain) before getting into some of the technical challenges around the film’s photography. The disc then closes off with a small 12-image gallery featuring only production photos and then the film’s original trailer that looks to have been lifted from a VHS. As someone who loves clever practical effects, “Visions of Light” with de Bont and chief lighting technician Edward Ayer ( Die Hard) is particularly fascinating as they discuss little things, like how they achieved the shadow affect when Nelson is sitting alone in his apartment holding his screwdriver defensively or the use of a projector to get the splintered light just so on David’s face before being confronted by younger Winnie.All those neons now have real depth and it really does add to the look and sound of the film giving greater clarity and depth to the many night time scenes. Schumacher puts his mark on the film, giving an edge that we look back at and admire in the films of the 90s. Other topics include the striking cinematography and production design as well as how the film was shot like an action movie and the use of its Chicago locations.