Walking Tall Trilogy
Rhino
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With ’Walking Tall, ’ Rhino Home Video is releasing a 3-dsic box set, containing all three parts of the motion picture franchise about an unstoppable Tennessee sheriff who takes the law into his own hands in order to clean out his community. The film may not be politically correct, especially in today’s climate, but it is gripping, energetic and powerful. A strong following has given these movies continuous life, and even a remake is currently in the works with The Rock in the lead.
Rhino Home Video is presenting the films in their original fullscreen aspect ratio on these DVDs. The image looks very dated I am sad to say and the transfer has an overall soft and washed-out quality. Colors are faded and never achieve the luminescence you would hope for and blacks are washed out without much shadow definition. The compression of the films is also a bit problematic with some noticeable artifacting and visible loss of detail. Since the DVD’s storage space is not used up entirely and no extras have been added to the release at all, I wonder why Rhino did not increase the bitrate a bit to improve image detail somewhat.
’Walking Tall’ comes with its original mono audio track in Dolby Digital and does not contain subtitles. The audio is equally dated with a narrow frequency response that give dialogues a harsh quality. Sibilance is audible on occasion and the music appears overly compressed without any notable dynamic range.
Fans of the film will undoubtedly be glad to see these films available on DVD but unfortunately the quality leaves somewhat to be desired. Some restorative efforts could have made this a great release but as it stands, it really just caters to the hard-core fans of the films.