Wild Hogs
October 2007 Reviewed by: Doug Blackburn Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Older guys get Harleys and take a road trip. It happens so often these days that Harley production has gone through the roof, giving stockholders a ride to riches. Real-life road trips are rarely as silly as this movie, but the story of a real-life road trip wouldn’t bring millions of people into theaters. Because of a script with something hilarious every few minutes and a great cast, millions of people did see Wild Hogs in theaters. The more you know about motorcycles, road trips, and the whole motorcycle-loving world, the more this movie will tickle your funny bone. We ride our own Hog, and even after three viewings, we are still busting a gut over the various on- and off-bike mishaps. William H. Macey’s performance is a masterpiece to be savored for how he delivers comedy without having to force it. An all-too-brief supporting role by John C. McGinley. the friendly officer, is a creepy and wonderful invention.

Image quality of this MPEG-4/AVC transfer is very good throughout. The daylight scenes are especially vibrant and clear with excellent color balance. Detail holds up very well in long shots, and in close-ups there’s good detail in fabrics, skin, and surfaces. Colors lean slightly toward rich and saturated, giving the movie an attractive, inviting onscreen presence. This is a very clean transfer with very few dust specks, no visible compression artifacts, and no color contouring/banding. But as good as the images are, they lack the last little bit of real-life sharpness and dimension. In spite of that, I could see people picking this disc to demo their projectors and monitors to friends because of its overall vibrancy.

The uncompressed LPCM soundtrack was transferred at 24 bits and 48kHz, a significant improvement over the more common 16 bits and 48kHz. The extra bits do seem to pay off in terms of bass power and control, detail retrieval, and dynamics. Dialogue is crystal clear, and music sounds even better than CD. The numerous sequences of music and motorcycle sounds are very impressive. There are a few times when the motorcycles sounded suspiciously unlike Harleys, but mostly the filmmakers got that characteristic roar right. A soundtrack this good makes the whole movie-watching experience more enjoyable -- something you don’t often get with road-trip comedies. Let’s hear it for 24-bit soundtracks! Now if we can just get them up to 96kHz sampling rates, we’ll have some amazing movie experiences.

The extras are presented in high-def video and include a funny alternate ending, deleted scenes, outtakes (not as funny as I’d hoped), "How to Get Your Wife to Let You Buy a Motorcycle" (a wasted opportunity), a making-of, and an interesting director/writer commentary. Overall, the extras are a little more hit than miss.

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