FUNNY GAMES

Director: Michael Hanake

Starring: Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Muhe, Frank Geiring

A family on holiday are terrorised by a pair of initially-charming psychopaths.

Michael Hanake’s intriguing thriller plays with audience expectations and genre conventions, and cleverly challenges the viewer to question their motives for continuing to watch the entertainment on offer.

Tartan’s disc, presented in non-anamorphic 1.85:1 ratio, with German 2.0 stereo sound (at 224kbps) is apparently taken from a subtitled theatrical print, is generally satisfactory, but there are a few signs annoying of digital artefacts. A trailer and a brace of text supplements, including an interview with the director, are offered to sweeten the pill.

Tartan's 2006 Special Edition

The new re-mastered version improves over the old in several respects: it's a new anamorphic transfer - this time without burnt-in subtitles - and it's on a DVD-9, rather than a DVD-5. The average bit-rate is a lot more adaptive, and, at 6.4Mb/s, has more data allocated to it than the old version, which had an average bit-rate of 5.58Mb. Contrary to the press release, though, it does not have 5.1 audio - it's a 2.0 track. Note, too, that the disc is coded for Region 2 only (the sleeve says Region 0).

The new disc has a new eighteen-minute video interview with the director (the old version's Director Interview was a text article). The Special Edition also contains a trailer for the film (1m), and trailers for Guy X, Primer, The Proposition and Battle in Heaven.

Menu screens from this release can be seen here.