ABBOTT & COSTELLO: THE COMPLETE 80th ANNIVERSARY UNIVERSAL PICTURES COLLECTION - Blu-ray (Universal, 1940-55) Shout! Factory

The squat self-deprecating ‘fat man’ and his ever-cynical straight and skinny sidekick: was there ever a more perfect pairing than Bud Abbott and Lou Costello? For, although the era in which they worked was a hotbed of now iconic lowbrow comedy acts; the Marx Bros., The Three Stooges, and, Laurel and Hardy among them; arguably, no one could pull off the mind-boggling split-second timing in wordy repartee better than Bud and Lou. ‘Who’s on First?’ has become such a zeitgeist in the popular lexicon (voted by Time Magazine as the greatest comedy sketch of the 20th century) that in hindsight one tends to forget the myriad of other contributions ‘the boys’ have made to popular culture. On stage, on the radio, in the movies and finally, on television, Abbott and Costello blazed a trail, the likes of which has never been equaled in the annals of great comedy teams; becoming the inspiration for hundreds of comedians who came afterward. If not for their affinity to remain true to their Burlesque roots, we might have lost an entire era in popular Americana; their riotous sketches, populating 36 movies; 28 made for perennially cash-strapped Universal Studios.
No denying it: Universal was in a very bad way when it chose to gamble on the lavish musical, One Night in the Tropics (1940), casting Abbott and Costello in support of Alan Jones, Nancy Kelly and Robert Cummings. The popularity of the studio’s first cycle in Gothic horror had run out of steam, while the studio’s number one star - soprano, Deanna Durbin was increasingly proving a handful.  Despite Universal’s spectacular investment of time and money, One Night in the Tropics was not a hit. And yet, perhaps in part because of their enduring longevity on the radio, Bud and Lou caught the vapors of public interest; audiences and critics alike, warming to their comedic comfortability. Even in their first movie, they emerged as the seasoned pros. Universal could sense something in the wind, and decided to build a picture around its two costars. The war-themed Buck Privates (1941) was an immediate box office sensation; one of the biggest and brightest money makers in years; its infectious blend of patriotism, uber-silly Burlesque routines and ‘The Andrews Sisters’ – effectively giving Universal a formula they wasted no time in exploiting. In 1941, Bud and Lou appeared in four movies; three of them devoted to their befuddled involvement in various branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. Still, it was the anomaly in this early cycle – a spook-filled whodunit - Hold That Ghost! (1941) that, would foreshadow the latter-day renaissance for this team.
On the surface, Bud and Lou were riding high. However, behind the laughter and congenial public facades, Abbott and Costello were infrequently something less than good humored. Lou, a fiery dynamo, regularly clashed with directors over the material they were being given. And there was more than a hint of animosity about his being chronically typecast as the childlike simpleton. After all, Lou’s earliest ambitions had been as a serious actor rather than a comedian. Fortuitously, this way to fame and fortune was barred. The dates are a little sketchy, but Abbott and Costello likely crossed paths for the first time somewhere around 1935 while doing the Vaudeville circuit; electing, after a brief and successful stint, to go their separate ways before reuniting nine months later. Most of their best routines from their movies were mined first, on the radio and stage, and much later, regurgitated for television: time-honored chestnuts from Burlesque, perennially resurrected for newer audiences, and, in different mediums, stemming from their expert calibration to elicit maximum laughter.  Like the enduring popularity of the great American song books from this same era, the routines of Abbott and Costello have since been canonized as celebrated masterworks in the steamer trunk of America’s vintage shtick. 
Were, that their private lives could have been as rosy. But hardship, self-doubt, gambling debts, health concerns and family tragedy only added to the mounting friction between Bud and Lou. In reality, Lou’s on-stage innocence obscured what was, behind closed doors, a fairly aggressive personality. Harboring a grudge against Abbott ever since the proceeds from their professional union were divided 60/40 in Bud’s favor, Lou demanded all future earnings be split 60/40 in his favor.  He also renewed an objection to billing. Universal’s management stood their ground on this one. They had hired ‘Abbott and Costello’, not the other way around. But as negotiations progressed, Universal agreed to up Lou’s salary. Although not the split he had hoped for, Costello decidedly made more than Abbott from their movie partnership, stirring additional acrimony between them. Lou’s frequent cracks about ‘straight men’ being a dime a dozen while genuine comedians were a rarefied breed, also did not sit well with Bud; particularly, as he knew what Lou’s career had been without him. Alas, and despite this indignation, as the years passed, Bud and Lou became devoted to each other on and off the screen.  Hence, when Lou’s infant son drowned in a backyard pool in 1943, just shy of his first birthday, Bud – who was godfather to the boy – arrived first on the scene to comfort a devastated Lou. Director, Charles Barton has recalled how, in their later films, Bud drank rather heavily to conceal the effects of his chronic epilepsy; relying on Lou to ‘snap him out of it’ when the tremors became so awful, nothing short of a sock pump in the ribs would reset his system.
By 1954, Universal had tired of Bud and Lou…or perhaps it was the other way around. For some time, Lou was increasingly irritated by the material being offered them. In fact, he all but refusing to shoot 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (renown today as one of their all-time great comedies); telling co-screenwriter, Robert Lees, “My daughter can write better stuff than that!” To some extent, one can sympathize with Lou’s detachment and frustrations. Here they were, the studio’s number one box office draw – a record remarkably held for nearly an entire decade – despite Universal’s executive logic, and yet, never allowed a respite from the screen, thereby never whetting the public’s appetite for more. Every time a new Bud and Lou picture was dumped onto the market, Universal circled the wagons with several elaborate double bill reissues from their back catalog. The few loan outs, mostly to MGM and Warner Bros.; MGM responsible for one shiny musical extravaganza (1942’s Rio Rita) and two rather turgidly scripted programmers (Lost in the Harem 1944, and, Abbott and Costello in Hollywood 1945); after 1955’s Abbott and Costello meet The Mummy, Universal officially let Bud and Lou go. They were hardly big news and not nearly as light on their feet. In hindsight, Lou’s fragile heart was slowly getting the better of him, as was Bud’s epilepsy.
Nevertheless, the boys trudged onward; appearing in a half-hour TV series for 52 episodes; most drawing on situations reworked from their Burlesque routines. In 1957, Lou dissolved their partnership for good to pursue a solo stand-up career in Vegas. It was short-lived. On March 3, 1959, Lou Costello died of a heart attack at the age of 53. His widow would barely outlast him, dying in December that same year – presumably of a broken heart – at the age of 47.  “There are only two times my dad cried,” Bud’s daughter, Vickie Abbott Wheeler would later recall, “When his brother, Harry died and when he heard about Lou.”  Bud Abbott would outlive his partner by nearly 15 years; in the interim, attempting a comeback with Candy Candido and later, committing his own voice to a Hanna-Barbera animated series in which Stan Irwin’s brilliant vocalizations subbed in for Lou. A series of epilepsy-related strokes did much to slow Bud down. In 1972, he broke his hip. Two years later, he died of cancer at the age of 78. Asked by a reporter to quantify the loss, fellow comedian and contemporary, Groucho Marx gave the most fitting epitaph, calling Bud Abbott, “the greatest straight man who ever lived.”
Life and art are rarely reconciled. Much less, do they run a parallel course.  Mercifully, the films of Abbott and Costello evoke a vibrant heritage. Without Bud and Lou, we would have no record of these time-honored sketches. Bud and Lou may not have invented these routines, repeatedly mined for laughs in their Universal Pictures. But they nevertheless, sold each as slickly packaged slapstick with precision-based timing that has made a good deal of their legacy endure as among the most cherished movie-land memories from our collective consciousness.  Moreover, the team’s razor-sharp delivery is unmistakable; quick and snappy with an elegantly refined play on words, most memorably displayed in their iconic ‘Who’s on First?’ performed in two separate movies for Universal; the aforementioned One Night in The Tropics and The Naughty Nineties (1945). In all, Bud and Lou were partnered together for a record 21 years, 460 radio broadcasts and 36 motion pictures; to say nothing of their numerous television and Broadway performances. They continue to hold a hallowed place in our hearts, and remain the only comedy team in history to have 5 stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame: each, their own; one for their combined work in radio, another for their mega-contribution to motion pictures, and yet another for their body of work on TV, to say nothing of their 3 Hall of Fame inductions in baseball, radio and, in New Jersey.
Perhaps, as Frank Morgan astutely points out to Jack Haley’s Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939), “…a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” In the intervening decades, Bud and Lou have been beloved by comics, audiences and critics alike. And like the preamble to Oz, “time has been powerless to set (their) kindly philosophies out of fashion.” They endure, partly because we could all use a good clean laugh these days; moreover, because to bask in the afterglow of their magnificent genius is to be royally entertained as few actors – much less, comedians – have been able to do, so consistently, and, for as many years. While profitability ought never be considered the barometer by which greatness is measured, it behooves the reader to reconsider that in 1941 alone, Bud and Lou’s 4 movies were responsible for 25% of Universal’s gross, and this, spread over 56 other features made in that same year! Not everything they did was golden.  Due to their frequent feuding, 1946’s Little Giant, based on a Broadway smash hit, proved a clumsy flop, keeping the duo separated for much of its run time. That same year saw the release of The Time of Their Lives, a lavishly appointed picture about ghostly intervention, but in which Bud and Lou were again separated by nearly a century of progress. The Time of Their Lives is, today, regarded as one of their greatest movies. But in 1946, it failed to find its audience. Near the end of their Universal tenure, quality decidedly fell off; 1950’s In the Foreign Legion, 1952’s Lost in Alaska, and, 1955’s Meet the Keystone Cops, among their weakest efforts.  However, in the pantheon of great comedy acts, Abbott and Costello unequivocally proved that even at their worst, they were considerably ahead of the pack, if not up to their own usually high standards.
Shout! Factory has unfurled the same Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection, previously available only on DVD; now, on Blu-ray. It is a worthy upgrade, if still cribbing from unevenly preserved elements.  As with its standard-def predecessor, this hi-def set includes all 28 movies made at Universal, beginning with One Night in The Tropics (1940) and ending with 1955’s Meet the Mummy.  Any thorough analysis of the films is fairly futile in a review format. Suffice it to say, what’s here is pure gold. One Night in the Tropics: in retrospect, tests the waters with a wacky musical claptrap in which Bud and Lou play second fiddle to crooner, Alan Jones, cast as a ‘love insurance’ salesman, while dodging would-be thugs sent to apprehend a wayward friend - millionaire, Steve Harper (Robert Cummings). Infused with some memorable routines and also a stellar score by Jerome Kern, including the spectacular set piece, the Farandola, One Night in the Tropics may not be first-tier A&C, but it does not miss the mark by much; a highly enjoyable excursion.
The boys’ early cinematic tenure is a rapid succession of mega-hits; 1941 alone, launches Buck Privates, In the Navy, Hold That Ghost and Keep ‘Em Flying. In Buck Privates, Bud and Lou are accidentally drafted into the Army, with similar circumstances befalling them in the U.S. Navy and Air Force in the aforementioned other movies. The one exception to these patriotic flag-wavers is Hold That Ghost, a riotous spook-fest in which A&C inherit a rundown tavern from a deceased bootlegger. Virtually all of these excursions feature musical performances by The Andrews Sisters – Patti, Maxim and Laverne; a hot swing and jitterbug trio that, for a while, became an inseparable part of the A&C Universal formula; the studio, cranking out A&C movies like link sausage. Hold That Ghost is also notable for superb foil, Joan Davis, cast as a pseudo-love interest for Lou, or as Lou explains it, “We had a runaway marriage…she bought the license and I ran away!” Lou was not particularly fond of Davis, perhaps realizing she was not merely an appendage in their routines but a formidable comedienne in her own right who, in several of the movie’s key comic vignettes, all but steals the show. In hindsight, Hold That Ghost has held up remarkably well; its deft blend of comedy and scares foreshadowing Bud and Lou’s later outings, facing down virtually all of the studio’s classic monsters.
1942’s roster of A&C classics begins in earnest with Ride ‘Em Cowboy; another musical, casting Bud and Lou as an unlikely pair of dude ranch hands. The picture also features a very young Ella Fitzgerald in a classic performance of ‘A Tisket, A Tasket’; and the Pied Pipers warbling a few ditties along the dusty trail. The laughs continue with Pardon My Sarong as Bud and Lou become stranded on a tropical island and find themselves at the mercy of native savages. The year’s piece de resistance, however, is Who Done It?: a radio-land murder mystery gone awry when Bud and Lou set themselves up to solve a real crime taken place within the confines of a broadcast of the popular ‘Murder at Midnight’ series; eventually unearthing a coded message by a Nazi sympathizer.  The film is also notable for Mary Wickes’ strong performance as smart-talking script doctor, Juliet Collins, whom Lou attempts to woo, merely to land a spot on the radio. “…and the moral of the story is ‘crime doesn’t pay’…and neither did she!”
By 1943, Bud and Lou’s Teflon-coated reputations with audiences were secured: Universal poured all of its resources into a Damon Runyon-esque musical; It Ain’t Hay – long delayed in its home video release due to an embattled rights’ issue. Bud and Lou are befuddled taxi drivers who help a young girl fulfill her dreams of entering her pony in the Grand National. In Hit the Ice, Bud and Lou find work as a pair of waiters at a Sun Valley Resort, forced to dodge the mob after becoming embroiled in a scheme to defraud the retreat. By the end of 1943, Bud and Lou needed a break; both from work and each other. Although the aforementioned movies made 1943’s releases all box office winners, the returns were bolstered significantly by Universal’s reissues of Hold That Ghost and Who Done It? And Lou had suffered the loss of his only son, leaving a scar Maxim Andrews would later recollect, “…changed him forever.”  Indeed, tempers had flared on the set of both movies. While Universal regrouped with plans to relaunch their most lucrative franchise, Lou would see to it, the team made only three movies the following year; the first, In Society (1944) a rather tepid distraction with Bud and Lou mistaken for members of the social elite invading a country club, and later, crashing an estate auction in which a world-famous painting is stolen. The second outing, Here Come the Co-Eds (1944) – yet another musical, minus The Andrews Sisters – was set at Bixby; a fictional all-girl’s college where, as janitors, the boys attempt to save the school from foreclosure. Finally, there was The Naughty Nineties – a careworn rehash of the team’s Vaudeville performances, notable only for preserving the complete ‘Who’s on First?’ routine on celluloid; all of it, set aboard a river boat circa 1890.
By 1946, Bud and Lou were at each other’s throats. Not only were they dissatisfied with Universal’s marketing of their movies, they were increasingly aware the material in their last few movies had been substandard, strictly – and rather cruelly – devised by Universal to capitalize on their box office appeal. At times like this, Lou had a remarkably simple plan to counterbalance this studio greed. He simply would not show up to work – holding up production for days, feigning illness. Hence, in 1946, Universal compensated the team with two of its most unusual properties; the first – Little Giant, proved a minor disaster. For the first time, Bud and Lou played characters unknown to one another. Based on a stage hit (another departure for the team), the film version of Little Giant did not gel with the public. It lost money, and deservedly so, as it quite simply lacked the old A&C chemistry audiences were expecting.  Not having learned their lesson, Universal’s second attempt to keep Bud and Lou apart in The Time of Their Lives, equally failed to find its audience. However, unlike Little Giant, The Time of Their Lives was a superbly scripted ‘ghost fantasy’ with a preamble set during America’s revolutionary war; Lou and costar, Marjorie Reynolds (pregnant at the time), mistaken for traitors, shot to death, and, seemingly condemned to haunt the estate at Danbury Acres forever. For his part, Bud played a modern-day descendant of Lou’s old arch nemesis, determined to rectify the no good of his ancestors and help set the ghosts free.
The Time of Their Lives is a particularly endearing movie; chiefly, because it does not play to the old Burlesque routines; also, in part, owed its superb casting: Binnie Barnes as the street savvy, Mrs. Dean and Gale Sondergaard as an extremely unsettling and strangely morbid housekeeper, Emily, who, in the movie’s pivotal séance, channels the spirit of Lady Melody’s long dead lover, Thomas Danbury and helps guide the ghosts to discovering a clue that will set them free from the curse upon their souls.  After the box office failure of The Time of Their Lives the studio attempted to turn back the clock with a sequel to one of their brightest money makers of 1942: 1947’s Buck Privates Come Home; the boys, returning to a post-war milieu and patriotism, this time as vets adopting a war refugee. Their second outing from this same year; The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap proved one of the most dissatisfying and problematic movies in their cannon. For starters, its premise had everyone ganging up on Lou, more elfin and child-like than ever. Even Bud gets his licks in, making it strangely vindictive and distasteful. Second, the picture was responsible for taking a genuine toll on Lou’s health. After several months of recuperation, Bud and Lou came back with one of their best movies ever: 1947’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: an instant classic, co-starring Bela Lugosi (as Count Dracula), Lon Chaney Jr. (as the 'Wolf Man') and Lenore Aubert as the sultry Dr. Sandra Mornay in a plot centering on the good doctor attempting to transplant Lou's brain into the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange). The movie has since been voted by the AFI as one of the 100 greatest comedies of all time.
In hindsight, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein relaunched the A&C franchise and elevated the team’s sagging popularity back into the top ten box office draws. Apart from 1948’s Mexican Hayride, a rather turgidly scripted ‘south of the border’ romp, in which Lou must masquerade as a famous bullfighter, and later, a Spanish senorita to escape desperadoes, the remainder of A&C’s Universal outings would be spent combating ...The Killer: Boris Karloff (1949), ...The Invisible Man (1951), ...Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1953) and finally, ...The Mummy (1955). In between these classic comedy/horror movies, Universal allowed the team to make some featherweight comedies; each, valiantly trying to recapture the magic of their earlier flights into screwball; Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950), Lost In Alaska (1952), …Go To Mars (1953) and …Meet The Keystone Cops (1955). The singular highlight from these latter pictures remains Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. Interestingly, Boris Karloff, who had turned down the plum offer to reprise his Frankenstein monster in the most lucrative of A&C’s monster mashups, claiming “Abbott and Costello ruined the monsters”, would trade on his popularity to co-star with the boys in two of their more forgettable monster movies. But ‘…Meet the Mummy’ is a delicious nod to the old A&C magic; Bud and Lou, bumbling into the murder of a famed archaeologist and forced to submit to a devious viper (played with impeccable venom by Marie Windsor), who is out to discover the mummy of Clarice; unaware the two-hundred-year-old relic is still very much alive and ready to exact its revenge on all who dare relocate its sarcophagus.
While Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy was a big hit for Universal, the studio was no longer interested in maintaining the team that, for so many lean years during the war, had meant the difference between operating in the black and teetering on the brink of foreclosure. In hindsight, it’s probably just as well. This movie capped off Bud and Lou’s Universal movie career on a very high note. Apart from one other, Dance, With Me Henry (1956), made for United Artists, A&C confined the body of their later work to television, before officially marking an end to one of the most successful comedy acts in U.S. history. In 1965, Universal paid homage to the boys with The World of Abbott and Costello – a very loose assembly of some of their funniest bits into a retrospective, narrated by Jack E. Leonard. Throughout the mid-60's, as the old guard and studio system continued to crumble, it became fashionable for studios to mine the legacy of their ‘old’ stars for nostalgia and profit. Alas, The World of Abbott and Costello was not a moneymaker for Universal. Nevertheless, the movies would find renewed interest with fans on TV in the early 1970’s; edited for time constraints, interrupted by commercials and shown early on Sunday mornings.
In the mid-1990’s Universal began producing Laserdisc sets of A&C’s more popular movies: a ‘monster’ themed set in 1994, with a specially produced ‘Abbott and Costello meet The Monsters’ featurette; and later, another compendium of their earliest comedies; this time with a preamble from noted TV comedian, Jerry Seinfeld. With the advent of DVD, Universal inaugurated a more comprehensive four part ‘franchise’ collection, each set containing six A&C movies in chronological order; alas, released on the inferior DVD-18 flipper disc format and not remastered.  Then, in 2003, Universal reissued the A&C catalog yet again, this time as Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection. Much to the relief of fans, the fallible DVD-18’s were gone, replaced by the more reliable DVD-9’s. Better still, Universal had elected to go back and remaster virtually all of the titles for this deluxe reissue; albeit, some with more care and attention paid than others. Now, we get Shout! Factory’s stab at the same collection, with a few added goodies. There are six very comprehensive audio commentaries from noted historians and authors on Buck Privates, Hold that Ghost, Who Done It?, The Time of Their Lives, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and, curiously, Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; I say, ‘curiously’ because the latter was never considered among the duo’s stellar accomplishments.
Several of these 1080p transfers received significant upgrades over the old Universal ‘franchise’ releases at the time they were being prepped for DVD – not Blu-ray - with Meet the Keystone Cops at long last being appropriately framed in 1.85:1. Virtually every home video presentation has maintained a cropped 1.33:1 aspect ratio. It should be noted, only the aforementioned title and Meet the Mummy are presented in widescreen – as they should be. The rest were originally shot for 1.33:1 and remain in this aspect ratio. On the whole, and, on Blu-ray, the B&W images are impressive; the movies, housed two per disc for a total of 15 discs. While compression is never an issue, I find it rather skinflint of Shout! and Uni to have never given us separate discs (1) per movie to maximize the bit rate. Perhaps Uni is running true to form. Maxim Andrews always claimed working at Universal was ‘just awful’ – “They never spent a dime more than they had to on any of our pictures and squeezed every last red cent from the reissues. We didn’t even get a ‘thank you’.”  As I pointed out earlier, certain movies fare better in image quality. The best of the lot exhibit razor-sharp clarity, likely to have been sourced from properly managed archival materials. Here, we get a very nicely contrasted gray scale with a solid smattering of indigenous film grain reproduced without age-related artifacts. But a few of these features have obviously been sourced from dupes rather than original camera negatives – and look it too; In The Navy, in particular is soft, muddy and grainy. All feature a DTS 1.0 mono soundtrack; consistency, again, uneven. While there are generally no complaints, it’s worth noting that One Night in the Tropics audio is strident; ditto, for Meet the Killer.  
In addition to the already amassed extras that were available on the Uni discs, Shout! has shelled out for new audio commentaries on In The Navy, Keep ‘Em Flying, The Naughty Nineties, Little Giant, Meet the Killer, It Ain’t Hay, Hit the Ice, Ride ‘Em Cowboy (which actually gets two separate commentaries), Mexican Hayride, and, Meet The Mummy. On a separate disc, we the 1965 compendium feature, The World of Abbott and Costello, plus the two superfluous featurettes that accompanied Uni’s Laserdisc releases: Abbott and Costello meet Jerry Seinfeld, and Abbott and Costello meet the Monsters. Perhaps the best news of all is that Shout! has again put their money into some far more comprehensive extras to augment this viewing experience: Abbott and Costello: Their Lives and Legacy, is a wonderful featurette in which Lou’s daughter, Chris, and author, Ron Palumbo dish about the boys’ longevity and close working relationship. Palumbo also returns for a Behind the Scenes – discussion about the various unseen collaborators on these pictures. Historian, James L. Neibaur is featured in Abbott and Costello: Film Stories – an intensive reflection with some good back stories to share.  Behind the Scenes – Ron Palumbo talks about the various writers and directors. Finally, there are several fascinating anomalies to be had: eight, 8mm and 16mm shorts A&C made for Castle Films, plus, some intriguing, and newly unearthed outtakes from Pardon My Sarong, It Ain't Hay, Hit the Ice, Little Giant and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Last, but not least, we get a trailer reel.
Bottom line: despite the varying quality of all this material, overall, this is a superb representation of A&C’s Universal tenure and should be considered the definitive Abbott and Costello movie experience. The movies made apart from Universal are understandably – if regrettably – absent from this set. Now, if we could only get Warner and MGM/Fox to give us the remaining titles, still MIA in hi-def: chiefly the MGM pictures: Rio Rita, In Hollywood, and, Lost in the Harem, and, for completionists, Jack and the Beanstalk, Africa Screams, Meet Captain Kidd, and, Dance With Me Henry. Okay, wishing doesn’t make it so and I sincerely will not be holding my breath for these remaining MIA catalog titles any time soon. But Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection from Shout! is a superb offering not to be missed. Currently retailing for a scant $120 U.S., or basically less than $4 a title, the value cannot be beat. This one belongs on everyone’s top shelves this Christmas. Very highly recommended!
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
Overall Entertainment Value 5+ (priceless)
VIDEO/AUDIO
Overall 3.5
EXTRAS
5+

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