Foul Play Blu-ray Screenshots (Patreon)

Video

Holy frozen grain Batman! This is a mess. Paramount's level of care for bottoms out with Foul Play, a truly dismal, dated, and filtered master that's rates among the studio's weakest catalog discs. Grain is not only messy and sloppily resolved, but it sticks to everything. Mosquito noise surrounds background objects and actors, assuming the grain moves at all. If there's a plus to be found, at least Paramount kept the grain. Sort of. A little.

The result? Middling detail all around. Foul Play's low resolution scan doesn't do the imagery any favors. Fidelity can't rise above DVD in these conditions, made worse by the constant smearing caused by the filtering.

Not helping things, blown out contrast regularly clips all detail when peaked, and that's frequent. Cinematography appreciated the brightness, but overly so, or maybe that's only this transfer. Regardless, black levels listlessly deliver shadows. Black isn't much of a thing, more a drooping gray. A slight boost comes from the color saturation, the only genuine positive in a truly awful transfer.

Audio

The only option is a 5.1 DTS-HD track, although this becomes little more than a mono track with slight extension into the stereos when the music picks up. There's no movement or motion on this track.

Fidelity hits a passable peak, holding dialog to a crisp level as the music's treble smoothly plays. There's even a slight kick in the low-end, albeit an unspectacular one.