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There are some movies that you get to know from their omnipres­ence in the bar­gain bins.  In fact, a lot of impor­tant cult movies often end up there due to copy­right mis­man­age­ment issues: Night Of The Living Dead is per­haps the most famous vic­tim of this curse.  However, there are brave DVD labels that will take on the res­cue and remas­ter­ing of these bargain-bin orphans.  Severin recently under­took this task for BMX Bandits and the result is the best ver­sion of a title that has often been dis­re­spected on home video.

The key here is the trans­fer: after years of crummy look­ing pan-and-scan edi­tions and close-but-not-quite ver­sions that crop the film for 1.78:1, BMX Bandits is finally pre­sented in all its cin­e­mas­cope glory.  The 2.35:1 trans­fer here comes from a British print source (it has a Film Censors notice and a Rank Organization title card at the begin­ning) and it ben­e­fits from a hand­some remas­ter­ing job.  The pri­mary color scheme — lots of reds, yel­lows and blues — pops off the screen and the fre­quent “big vista” shots come through with a gor­geous amount of detail.  The sound­track is pre­sented in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo form, which uti­lizes the synth-heavy musi­cal score to nice effect.

There are also a few worth­while extras that have been ported over from Umbrella Entertainment’s Australian DVD release.  The first is an unex­pect­edly sub­stan­tial fea­turette enti­tled BMX Buddies.  It runs 40 min­utes and incor­po­rates input from direc­tor Brian Trenchard-Smith, pro­ducer Tom Broadbridge, writ­ers Russell Hagg and Patrick Edgeworth and star James Lugton.  Their com­ments are edited together into a seam­less overview of the film, cov­er­ing it from con­cep­tion through to its post-release cult popularity.

Trenchard-Smith scores the best com­ments as he describes the meth­ods he used to expand the scope and style of the film beyond its kid-flick ori­gins.  However, other par­tic­i­pants occa­sion­ally chip in with inter­est­ing tid­bits: Lugton in par­tic­u­lar tells a fun story about how he ended up sup­ply­ing some in-character greet­ings in a wed­ding video for one of the film’s most ardent fans.

There is also a com­men­tary track from Trenchard-Smith.  It’s a very scene-specific track that gets into the par­tic­u­lars of his visual and story choices, plus a lot about the film’s fre­quent stunts.  He’s good natured, thor­ough and refresh­ingly can­did about what ele­ments he would change if he had the chance to re-shoot the film.  It’s also worth not­ing that his son (who makes a cameo in the film) pops in around the one-hour mark to add a few com­ments of his own.  The extras are rounded out by a brief trailer for the film (taken from a video source), trail­ers for three other Severin releases and a three-minute clip of teenage Nicole Kidman appear­ing on an Aussie kids’ show to pro­mote the film.

All in all, this is worth­while upgrade of a film whose visu­als deserve the ben­e­fit of an anamor­phic trans­fer.  BMX Bandits is prob­a­bly the froth­iest entry in the Brian Trenchard-Smith fil­mog­ra­phy but his fans will no doubt wel­come the chance to pick up a nice ver­sion of this film, espe­cially since he is so promi­nent in the disc’s extras.