The Relic (1997) (Paramount 1080p BluRay x265 HEVC 10bit AAC 7.1 Commentary) Peter Hyams Penelope Ann Miller Tom Sizemore Linda Hunt James Whitmore Clayton Rohner Chi Muoi Lo Robert Lesser Lewis van Bergen Constance Towers Francis X McCarthy Audra Lindley

The Relic (1997), directed by Peter Hyams, Paramount remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including 7.1 remaster, director's commentary, and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120004/

Video encoded in two-pass 13.0 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image. Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available. Subtitles converted to VobSub and repositioned.

Note : There were many attempts at high-budget monster horror films in the late nineties, most of them not very successful, but at least entertaining (see also Phantoms), and this is a pretty good example, a sci-fi monster movie based on an airport potboiler by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, pretenders to the Michael Crichton throne, and it shows, it's a mishmash of Jurassic Park, Alien, Jaws, and a handful of other films about genetics and big hungry monsters, featuring a climactic, extended emergency gene sequencing race against the clock. The monster is actually kind of terrifying as long as it stays in the shadows and is realized with a mixture of practical effects and moderate CGI, but doesn't work all that well when the filmmakers decide to do a grand finale with a full CGI monster that's ON FIRE. Who'd have thought. The competent cast includes Penelope Ann Miller, Tom Sizemore, Linda Hunt, James Whitmore, Clayton Rohner, and Chi Muoi Lo. If you want a big, dumb 90s monster movie where quite a lot of people are gleefully killed off in gory ways, you can do a lot worse.

An anthropologist is studying a tribe in the Amazon and drinks a seemingly psychedelic infusion at a ritual. Soon after, he unsuccessfully tries to cancel a shipment of crates on a cargo ship to Chicago, and sneaks aboard, but is unable to find what he's looking for. Six weeks later, the ship arrives on Lake Michigan, with no sign of the crew. Chicago PD detective D'Agosta and his partner investigate the ship, and find the remains of the crew, torn to pieces in the bilge. Margo Green, an evolutionary biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, examines the crates from South America along with her mentor, Albert Frock, and find them mostly empty except for bed of leaves and a stone statue of a mythical monster. She notices a fungus on the leaves and sends it for analysis, the rest of the leaves are incinerated. That night, a security guard is decapitated and mutilated in the museum's bathroom, and D'Agosta suspects a connection with the ship, and wants the museum closed, as he thinks the killer is hiding inside. The museum's director, Ann Cuthbert, refuses, as an important exhibit is about to open. Margo finds that the fungus on the leaves contains concentrated hormones usually found in several different animal species, and in the container of leaves she finds a mutated beetle which has both animal and fungal DNA. The dead security guard is found to have had his hypothalamus extracted from his brain, as have the bodies from the ship. The police startle and kill a homeless man in the museum's basement, and although evidence is shaky, the conclude he was the killer, and close the case. D'Agosta isn't convinced, but the mayor and the museum's head of security force him to allow the exibition opening to proceed. This turns out to be a mistake, as the real killer is still very much alive, and hungry for the brain hors d'oeuvres at the opening gala. A group of VIPs are trapped inside the museum when the security system malfunctions, and it's up to Margo and D'Agosta to try to get them out, all while fending off the angry creature, whose actual origin might still come as a shock to them.

This is a very dark film to begin with, and this murky transfer does it no great favors, resulting in a version you'll probably want to turn your brightness up for. It looks ok otherwise, though, with decent enough detail and fine grain, and the 7.1 remaster sounds good. The commentary track with Peter Hyams lends some insight into what worked and what didn't in this apparently somewhat messy production.

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