Born American/DVD/Finnish DVD Review

From The Grindhouse Cinema Database

< Born American‎ | DVD

DVD Review

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There’s two dvd releases that I know of; the US release and the Finnish region 2 dvd by Finnkino. The R1 is full screen so it should be avoided. The Finnish dvd is anamorphic widescreen and looks very good. The image is sharp with only a very small amount of edge enhancement. I’m not sure if the slightly orange tint is intentional, but the film looks better with it than I’d imagine it looking without it. There’s a good amount of specks and dirt but they’re never distracting and actually fit this sort of film. Progressive and Native PAL of course.

Audio is the original English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192 kbps) and features no problems that I could notice. There’s a few words of Russian spoken in the film but those parts are not translated in the Finnish subtitles either, so I assume they were never intended to be subtitled. The Finnish subtitles did not impress me; I only watched one scene with them and already could spot a mistake.

The dvd cover states ”uncut” but this is in fact not the longest existing version. Reportedly at least the old Spanish VHS ran approx 5 seconds longer (it apparently included a few additional shots in the beginning where the Russians kill the reindeer, plus later one shot of a soldier’s bloody face after he’s been hit by a truck). However, I’m not even sure if we should talk about a cut version or simply an alternate cut here (and it certainly wasn’t cut for the dvd). Either way, I consider these changes unimportant. The Finnish dvd runs 92:24 min in PAL format. The US disc is supposedly the same cut.

Finally, the film is fit on dvd-5. That’s not much of a problem due to the short running time and complete lack of extras. Menus only feature ”play movie”, ”choose subtitles” and ”scene selection” options. It’s a shame not even the original trailer was included.

Reviewed by HungFist

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