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I must admit, while I like Class of Nuke'Em High, I still don't love it 
Rotund character actor Pat Ryan, who had a great run in '80s indie trash, is a highlight as the pushy nuclear plant operator. As do the honor society turned eye-lined, bone-nosed freak punks, The Cretins, especially leader Spike (Robert Prichard) and Pete (Gary Schneider) being Avenger vets. The gang also have one inspired sequence when the Cretins are expelled and in an act of defiance proclaim they're "the youth of today", "God bless America, limpdick!", and then break out into the The Star-Spangled Banner. The idiotic plant worker sent into the high school's basement only to be killed by the fantastic looking mutant child of Chrissy's biohazardous joint smoking is also hilarious. I guess I'll have to watch it more as I don't have any nostalgic memories of this one, but actually USA's Up All Night airings of its second 1991 sequel.

The real problem is the standard Dolby 2.0 audio at a bottom-of-the-barrel bitrate of 224kbps. Dialogue is frequently very harsh, the omnipresent rock music background sounds like it's coming from an AM radio with a blown speaker, and the volume is extremely low. While I can appreciate Blu-ray's lossless, "tranparent-to-the-master" audio types; I'm not one to complain about sound quality as long as it's relatively clear. Not here, the sound really sucks, and even Media Home Entertainment's old VHS seemed better in my memory. Troma should either remaster their soundtracks somewhat or at least provide PCM versions of the shitty tracks so as to be a little better than Dolby. The Blu-ray retains all the extras found in Troma's trilogy DVD box set (w/ the Kaufman commentary), but lacks the Kaufman with cast commentary of the standalone DVD. Still, this Blu-ray is probably worth the $15 if you're a fan and yes, this is Troma's usual 85 minute "unrated director's cut" and not the fabled 96 minute Japanese DVD cut.
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1 comment:
I watched this over the weekend and thought it looked really good compared to the DVD. Many of the scenes looked extra sharp and many finer details such as writing on walls were legible. Certainly it's not on the same visual scale of newer movies, but this one actually has a upgrade in the video department. It's definitely not just an upscale of the DVD.
I'm glad to have all the dust, dirt, and damage as it adds to the cinematic feel and shows Troma didn't try to run a slew of DNR filters to plastify the image. As for the sound, sure it's not an upgrade but again this is Troma and we may not see Lossless Master Audio tracks in the future, because they may not exist.
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