Image Entertainment has officially announced that it will release on Blu-ray director Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright (1971), starring Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond and Chips Rafferty. The release will be available for purchase on January 15th, 2013.
Restored and presented by director Martin Scorsese at the Classics section of the Cannes Film Festival, where it won Autour de la Sélection, Heritage Film Award, Wake in Fright, together with Nic Roeg's Walkabout and George Miller's Mad Max, is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal films in the development of modern Australian cinema.
This film was considered "lost" for many years until the original, and only, surviving copy was found in an attic. Lovingly restored by the Australian Film and Sound Archive, it has been available on Blu ray in Australia for about 1 year. Classic Oz genre and VERY confronting, I would recommend this film to anyone willing to take a chance.
I hope that this edition isn't DVNRed to within an inch of it's life, as the Australian edition appears to have been. This film needed a frame by frame restoration but seems to have been just sandblasted blasted by by noise reduction with terrible results. Such a great and important film needed better care taken by the archivists...
What Oz-Steve said! Unfortunately, I don't have much hope that the Americans will have had access to the original materials to do their own transfer without the excessive DNR that plagues the Aussie disc.
