Family Plot Blu-ray features awful video and great audio in this mediocre Blu-ray release
When a wealthy woman unwittingly hires a con man and a phoney psychic to find her missing heir, the results are diabolically funny in Alfred Hitchcock's tongue-in-cheek mystery thriller.
A man confronts his accuser atop the Statue of Liberty, where one false move will spell death. A wolf in sheep's clothing allows the beast lurking within to bear its teeth. A housemaster slowly, oh so slowly, pieces together the heinous crime perpetrated by two former students. A woman searches for clues in a suspected murderer's apartment just as the man returns home. Four people work to keep the demise of a fellow smalltown resident a secret from a local deputy. An assassin's gun slides out from behind a curtain as an ordinary man races to thwart his plot. An airplane buzzes then roars past as a man dives for cover. The hiss of a shower masks the approach of a madman with a knife in his hand. Countless birds gather on a jungle gym as a woman smokes a cigarette nearby. A husband barges into his new wife's bedroom and has his way with her as she retreats into a near-catatonic state. A physicist discovers killing a man isn't as easy as it might seem, wrestling with his victim right up until the violent end. A purple dress billows out beneath a dying woman like spilled blood. A serial killer retrieves his pin from a woman's grasp, one dead finger at a time. A fake psychic tries to squirm out of a thief's vice-like grip as he pushes a syringe closer and closer. Be it drama, horror or comedy, psychological stunner, monster movie or international spy thriller, is it any mystery that filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was known as the Master of Suspense? Is it any wonder his movies still hold hypnotic sway over filmfans all these years later?
Chaos ensues when a phony psychic and her none-too-bright boyfriend take on a pair of criminals...
Hitchcock's final film feels like anything but. Without the good fortune of choosing which project would be his last, the director simply continued to work until his failing health no longer allowed it. Family Plot is by no means a failure, though. It just doesn't leave much of a lasting mark, making Frenzy Hitchcock's last great film and The Birds, released thirteen years earlier, his last classic. It's also lighter fare than most might expect from a film involving con artists, kidnapping and murders most foul. Family Plot is pure dark comedy, with plenty of screwball antics and silly suspense to boot. But, I have to say, it isn't all that well-crafted, nor does it amount to much more than a rather inconsequential whim. Oh, it's fun. It's still laugh-out-loud funny too. It just isn't as tight as Hitchcock's more refined comedies, as razor sharp as his best murder thrillers, or as carefully scripted as, well, anything the director ever shot. An ailing filmmaker, largely improvisational performances, a stilted car chase, an ending that comes much too easily... Family Plot limps along, relying on laughs, pratfalls and criminal shenanigans to pull itself together. Against all odds, it works and even serves as a semi-fitting farewell to the director. Barbara Harris' parting wink at the audience is as much of a Hitchcock cameo as the silhouette that appears behind the door of the Registrar of Births and Deaths, and begs the question: did the ever-clever Hitchcock know this would somehow be the last shot of his last film? Considering the filmmaker's wry sense of humor, I'm inclined to say yes.
Family Plot's god-awful 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation has to be seen to be believed, it's that incredibly bad. It's more difficult, in fact, to find something positive to say about the transfer than to simply point to everything, one scene at a time, and ask questions along the lines of "what happened? What is that? Is this a DVD? A shoddy YouTube upload? What am I looking at? What did Universal use to remaster the film?" Colors are all over the place, contrast is erratic, detail is soupy and indistinct on the whole, edges are framed by severe halos, egregious noise reduction wipes away the vast majority of fine textures, debilitating crush lurks around every dark corner, and just about every anomaly you could name pops up and pops up more than once. It's as if the studio repurposed a first-generation DVD master, and it's in shockingly poor condition. The unequivocal low point of the Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection, Family Plot is dead on arrival.
Fortunately, Family Plot's two-channel DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix doesn't suffer the same fate. Dialogue is intelligible and neatly prioritized, effects are crisp and clear, John Williams' score is unexpectedly full and lively (especially considering its born of a front-only presentation), and there aren't any major mishaps to speak of. Universal's audio tracks are the highlight of the Masterpiece Collection, just as Family Plot's lossless mix is the highlight of its Blu-ray release.
Plotting Family Plot (SD, 48 minutes): Pat Hitchcock O'Donnell, assistant director Howard G. Kazanjian (who doggedly pursued the director before landing the job), Universal head of production Hilton Green, set designer Henry Bumstead, composer John Williams and actors Bruce Dern, Karen Black and William Devane discuss Hitchcock's final film, its dialogue and innuendo, comedy, casting and on-set anecdotes, as well as Hitch and his wife's failing health, his realization that Family Plot would be his last film and his retirement.
Storyboards: The Chase Scene (SD, 9 minutes): A series of storyboards.
Production Photographs (SD, 15 minutes): Movie posters, vintage ads and production photos.
Family Plot is silly, screwy and even a little suspenseful, and marks the off-kilter end of a legendary filmmaker's career. The comedy and performances keep Hitchcock's final film barreling ahead, clumsy left foot over clumsy right foot, and it's honestly a lot of fun, flaws and all. Its Blu-ray debut, though, is a bloody mess no thanks to one of the worst video transfers I've ever had the displeasure of reviewing. I'm not even sure how it made it out of the door, much less onto shelves. This one is in dire need of a recall.
