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Mel Gibson's cornfield harbours a terrifying secret in another suspenseful movie from M Night Shyamalan that's made almost ridiculously tense thanks to a brilliant DVD presentation.
TECHNICAL FEATURES
Picture Occasionally you almost long for the lack of detail that a poor VHS release provided. For with the superior picture transfer of this DVD, you can see every minute detail, even during those spooky dark scenes in the cornfields when you'd really rather not know what's going on.
Sound You get a choice of either Dolby or DTS 5.1 mixes, and both are startlingly effective. Just as with the sound on "The Others" DVD, the rear speakers are used to build subtle effects that build gnawing tension to near unbearable point. The shock moments, when they come, really do jolt you, thanks to frightening use of the subwoofer.
SPECIAL FEATURES
Looking for Signs The gestation of a film in the mind of M Night Shyamalan is briefly explored in this six-minute featurette. He explains what elements he uses to give his films a global appeal and how they are layered.
Building Signs Shyamalan describes himself as a bit of a control freak, which explains in turn why there's little in the way of deleted material for the DVD releases of his films. As we get to see in this glimpse at a storyboard meeting for "Signs", Shyamalan's planning is tightly detailed.
Making Signs Billed as a commentary, this is in fact a 22-minute documentary on the shoot, which started the day after the 9/11 tragedy. Emotions were understandably high, especially as the first scene to be filmed was a death scene.
There's plenty of behind-the-scenes footage, including Shyamalan personally filming the Brazilian video footage with a hand-held camera.
The Effects of Signs This film was Shyamalan's "first journey with CGI, and it was brutal". He mentions in an earlier featurette his general distaste for CGI, but did need to use some for this movie. Here we see him getting to grips with it, as well as a breakdown of how the process shots were created.
Last Voices: The Music of Signs Just as Shyamalan isn't keen on an overuse of CGI in films, he considers that music is often "used too much as a band aid" to cover-up problems in a movie. As a result, his relationship with composer James Newton Howard is quite interesting, and both discuss their work together, scoring the three major Shyamalan films made to date.
Full Circle It's highly unusual that a director would have much say in the marketing of a film, but in this look at the promotion of "Signs", it's clear that Shyamalan is very much in charge.
Deleted Scenes Out of the five deleted scenes in this section, three are very short, reflecting the minimum waste Shyamalan creates when making his movies.
Storyboards As with the "Unbreakable" DVD, a key scene (the pantry scene) is broken down both in visual and audio layers. You can view either the finished film or animated storyboard, but there's no composite of the two. Sound comes as finished mix, music only or effects only, and all are in 5.1.
Night's First Alien Movie Shyamalan introduces another of the short films he made when he was young, as he has done on his other DVD releases. It's - as he admits - hilariously bad, but the idea is typically intriguing. In this two-minute epic, a boy (Shyamalan) draws a hideous creature, only for it come to life and attack him.
TECHNICAL INFORMATION
Region: 2
Chapters: 21
Ratio: 1.85:1 (anamorphic)
Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1
Audio Tracks: Multiple languages
Subtitles: English and multiple languages
Captions: English
Menus: Animated with music
Special Features Subtitles: None of the special features come with English subtitles (foreign subtitles are available).
This DVD was reviewed on a JVC XV-S57 DVD player.
