Meanwhile 'RARO' the so called Criterion of Italian cult cinema have been dumping 'dubtitles' on their last 4 or 5 releases, hoping nobody will notice that what's being said on screen doesn't actually match the subtitles below screen.
Raro, the Criterion of Italian cult cinema?
I had the displeasure of pre-ordering two of their latest BD releases, and the dubtitles are the least of its problems:
-Hanging for Django (Una Lunga fila di croci), advertised as a new transfer from the original negative, looks extremely underwhelming, lacking in detail (plenty of DNR), and to add insult to injury they gave it an interlaced transfer. The audio tracks were both "lossy", regular DD, with mp3 quality.
-Nightmare City also lacks detail, and appears to have been heavily filtered.
Their releases are becoming lazier and lazier. I usually expected quality coming from Raro, but they have been cutting corners to an extreme. I will certainly wait for reviews for their future titles.
It's funny: I used to heavily criticise Arrow's releases, since the care they'd give to their releases seemed to stop with their cases/covers (in their earlier BD titles, they always managed to screw up their releases by doing something silly to their transfers), while I had a few labels such as Raro in high regard. Now, at least since their Bava releases (post Reazione a catena, when James White started supervising their transfers), Arrow has drastically improved their output, while Raro has started slipping away, from poor transfers, lossy audio tracks, ...
