Elite Entertainment: Re-Animating the Genre Classics on DVD Part Two

By: SCOTT COLLURA
Date: Friday, May 17, 2002

As head of Elite Entertainment, Vini Bancalari has long been providing fans with great home video versions of classic genre movies. He started with Laserdisc when that format was the collector's medium of choice, and has since moved on to DVD, but one thing has remained constant at Elite: quality. With films like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, and RE-ANIMATOR, Elite have proven their dedication to fans time and again. Today we continue our talk with Bancalari.

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Having recently begun a new line of "Millennium Edition" discs, of which NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and RE-ANIMATOR are the first two entries, Bancalari recalls the original Elite DVD release of the former film. George Romero's original zombie flick has notoriously been released on video and DVD a multitude of times because of its public domain status, and Elite decided to take a jab at the expense of those other versions of the film when they released what was, at that time, the definitive version of the picture.

"We had a little fun with that, poking a little fun at all the other versions," he recalls, referring to the first few seconds of the disc which duplicate the blurry, grainy, atrocious look of NIGHT as seen on the many subpar versions of the film, before cutting to the crisp, THX Elite transfer. "You can't imagine how many people wrote letters and e-mails saying, 'You fooled me. I was just getting up from my couch to throw this thing out the window when the THX logo came on.'"


For fans of the film, that disc was a must-have. But now the new "Millennium Edition" version, while sporting the same transfer as the earlier DVD, features extra features not previously available on DVD. That includes some THX tinkering, so to speak.



"THX, their standards have changed over the years, so there was some tweaking that they wanted us to do to improve upon the transfer," says Bancalari. "Plus, the original DVD was a single layer, a DVD-5. This is a 9, so we have a little more room to give it a real high compression rate. For that alone, it should look a little bit better than the original DVD."

When asked how he decides on which films to acquire and release, Bancalari explains that, as a fan himself, it's just a matter of staying in the know.

"It's really just being a fan of the genre since I was a little kid," he explains. "You get a feel as to what's good, what's classic, what needs to be redone, what the fans are always waiting for [and] talking about. Some of them are controversial, things like Doris Wishman's A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER. But thank God, nine out of 10 critics who reviewed that got it. They understood. The movie is what it is, and some people were saying, 'I can't believe you put this thing out. It looks like they ran it over with a truck.' But that's the whole ideathat's Doris Wishman's filmmaking. We can't go back and reshoot the movie!"

Bancalari has an interesting take on the whole DVD revolution that has taken hold of the country over the past five years, because he was there when it started, when laserdiscs still ruled the roost. As he recalls, it was an abrupt and somewhat troubling change when DVD went mainstream so quickly, especially considering how laserdisc was never embraced by the big companies that could have helped it thrive.

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"The hardware manufacturers immediately got behind the format and promoted the hell out of it," he says of DVD's quick rise. "I've never seen a TV commercial for a laserdisc player. And being in that business for so long, we always knew if these guys would just get behind us and push it and let people know, '[Laser] is like the best kept secret in the video industry.' And even with very few people into it, it was still big business. So the support of the hardware guys and the support of all the major studios jumping in right awayreally, they blitzed the market with [DVD]. It's amazing. I went to sleep on a Monday night, watching laserdiscs [which] were a thriving, living thing. Tuesday morning they were dead, it was gone. I've never seen a format die off so quickly. It was sad."

DVD's arrival spelled the death of laserdisc, that much was certain. But from a business point of view, companies like Elite were going to have to rethink their operations as well.

"There where a lot of people running around saying, 'This is great, it's a great new format, this is wonderful thing,'" laughs Bancalari. "And I was saying, 'Technically, it is great. It's going to look better. It's going to sound better. It's [a] smaller disc. But, you know, we're selling laserdiscs now for $90 retail for a box set. It's going to be $25 retail for a DVD. Is it still a good thing? [But] I guess the whole idea is make it up in volume with the wider market."

"And you know it's starting to really take off when all of a sudden your neighbors are talking about this DVD player they bought. And this is the same guy that when you said 'laserdisc' he looked at you like you were from Mars!"

Be sure to check back soon for the conclusion of our chat with Elite's Vini Bancalari.