Review by Gary Tooze

Production:

Disc:

Video:

Audio:

Bitrate:

 

 

This caper film is set in the world of art forgery. An accomplished art forger and a businessman have for many years been successful in a company which authenticates paintings before they are auctioned. They are discovered by an art dealer and blackmailed into forging paintings which disappeared in the Second World War. Procedural detail around the act of forgery is exploited for high-rolling glamour. The Hot Touch was the final film appearance of veteran Academy Award winning actor Melvyn Douglas.

Excerpt from Wikipedia located HERE

Image :    NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

The single-layered Code Red Blu-ray of Hot Touch has some inconsistencies in 1080P. Generally the image is strong with depth, true colors and reasonable sharpness.  I noticed no noise or digitization. It is in the, bastardized, 1.78:1 aspect ratio. You can see a few large cue-blips (see sample below) and some damage sprinkled throughout. Neither impacted the image too negatively. This imperfect Blu-ray image easily gets a passing grade - looking surprisingly strong at times.

CLICK EACH BLU-RAY CAPTURE TO SEE ALL IMAGES IN FULL 1920X1080 RESOLUTION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Damage

 

 

Large Cue Blip

 

 

 

Code Red use a DTS-HD Master 2.0 channel track at 1582 kbps (246-bit) in the English language. The score is by André Gagnon There are no subtitles offered and my Oppo has identified it as being a region 'A'-locked.

Extras :

Code Red include an interview with producer Robert Klein for 1/4 of an hour. He recalls some details of Hot Touch and is easy and friendly to listen to. There are also 6 trailers of other films.

 

 

BOTTOM LINE:
I like films about art forgery. My favorite is probably John Badham's Incognito with Jason Patric and Irčne Jacob. There was also a, recent, relatively weak one with John Travolta, that I also liked, entitled The Forger. Strongly recommended is the documentary Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery.  Hot Touch is not a great flic and it doesn't investigate the forgery angle to my own personal satisfaction. But it is fun... Wayne Rogers is surprisingly very good. It has some heist con tricks and a bit of early 80's appeal - a little sexy.  Some will get a kick out of it.