The Movie: This is the review of the original (rather terrible) 1998 DVD release of this film. I'm sure the new "Anniversary Edition" is much better, though I haven't actually seen it.

Scarface is a movie I had never seen before. Yup, that's right, I never saw it before. But some people think it's the greatest "gangster" movie ever made. I'm not so sure it's really a gangster movie since really, there's no gang -- there's just Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino. I mean, of course he's got people helping him out, but the movie really isn't about the "gang", it's really just about him.

Overall, I'd say this movie is pretty good. I was almost dreading watching this movie because it's almost three hours long, but it actually moves a long at a very brisk pace, never leaving you bored, which in a movie of this length is already a monumental accomplishment. It's just the right combination of plot, action, and emotion, it never lingers too long on lame plot points or shallow emotional pieces.

I think Al Pacino put together a wonderful performance here, even if the whole accent thing did get a bit annoying after a while... and the writing (by Oliver Stone who himself was wrapped up in cocaine problems during the writing of this movie) and direction (by Brian De Palma) came together to make one really solid film, however, I am not among the ranks of people who think it's the greatest movie ever.

The one niggling thing that bothered me throughout this movie though (besides the horrible quality of the DVD, but I'll get to that later) was the cheesy music. It is, as one member of the riceboard put it, 80's cokehead music. And it's very cheesy. So cheesy in fact, that many of the songs in this movie appeared in the game Grand Theft Auto 3 on the cheesy 80's music station in the game.

Oh, and in case you don't know what this movie is about, it's set in the early 80's when around 125,000 people were allowed to leave Cuba, a number of which were bad guys who Castro didn't want in Cuba anymore. Tony Montana was one of those guys. He's tough, he's ruthless, but loyal, and he quickly claws his way to the top of the cocaine importing business, where he finally gets all the money, the power and the women that he wants... and I guess maybe he finds out it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

The DVD: This has got to be one of the worst DVD transfers I have ever seen. It's a big steaming pile of smelly donkey poo. The letterboxed non-anamorphic 2.35:1 video transfer is grainy, with poor contrast, poor brightness, and every shot is just ringing with excessive edge "enhancement", which made the entire movie just one giant long compression artifact which I really, sincerely believe, detracted from my experience of this movie. I bet there were some beautifully composed shots in there that I didn't even notice because I couldn't see through all the crap from the video transfer... I'd even go so far to say that at times, it was distracting! I have VHS movies that look better than this!

And that's just the video! The audio was just as murky and dismal as the video. Supposedly it's got a 2.0 surround sound track, but heck, it might as well have been in mono for all I could tell. In all of the "battle" scenes with gunfire and explosions it sounded so bad I thought I was watching an episode of The A-Team... that's how uninspiring the sound is here.

There are a few extras on this disc though, including some theatrical trailers, some outtakes and the original 1983 making-of documentary... and these have even WORSE video quality than the movie! There's also some text-based stuff on there like production notes and cast/crew bios.

But yeah. For such a highly acclaimed movie, you'd think that Universal would be able to come up with a little more than this. I mean, yeah, this is a pretty early release as far as DVD's go, but this is just downright horrid, and there really is no excuse. This definitely takes the cake for the best movie with the worst DVD execution I've seen so far, surpassing the original Criterion release of Silence of the Lambs.