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

ADDITION: Fun City Editions 4K UHD (September 2026): Fun City have transferred Paul Morrissey's Spike of Bensonhurst to Blu-ray and 4K UHD. Both are sourced from a new restoration of the original 35mm camera negative - which, for a film that has never had a legitimate digital release of any kind, means the jump here isn't from a soft older disc but from a 1989 videocassette. A comparison isn't worth making. Steven Fierberg's (How to Make It in America) photography is naturalistic and location-bound, shot fast on Brooklyn streets, and a negative scan flatters exactly the qualities that a tape master destroyed: the grain is moderate and cleanly resolved, skin tones sit unforced, and the clutter of the neighborhood - awnings, siding, parked cars, shop signage - finally has the depth of field information that gives the film its documentary texture. HDR10 is applied, conservatively, as it should be for a picture with no engineered lighting to speak of; the gains are in the specular detail on chrome and glass and in the density of the night exteriors rather than in any showy expansion of the palette. This looks like film, and after almost four decades of nothing at all, that is a considerable thing.

While we are in possession of the 4K UHD disc, we cannot resolve the encode yet, and therefore, cannot obtain screen captures. We hope to add to this review at some point in the future. So, the below captures are from Fun City's 2026 1080P Blu-ray transfer.

This 4K UHD upgrade delivers delivers a noticeable improvement. It, appropriately, crisper. Fierberg, early in a career that would run through Secretary and a long run of prestige television, and the photography is anti-picturesque by design. Morrissey had no interest in the burnished nostalgia that period Italian-American pictures were already trading in; there's no golden-hour Brooklyn here, no smoke in the boxing gym. The camera sits at conversational distance, favors the mid-shot, and lets the neighborhood - vinyl siding, aluminum awnings, cars parked nose-to-tail down streets too narrow for them - do the work that a designed set would do in a studio film. Stephen McCabe's (My Dinner with Andre) production design is essentially curatorial: the Cacetti house is furnished to be believed rather than admired, and the contrast between it and the Red Hook apartments Spike lands in is drawn in flooring and light fixtures rather than in any pointed visual rhetoric. The one place the film reaches for style is the costuming and hair, where the pompadours and the retro silhouettes carry a distinct whiff of Bruce Weber - unsurprising given where Morrissey found his leading man. It's a knowing anachronism dropped into an otherwise documentary surface, and it gives Mitchell a slightly hallucinatory quality, a boy from 1958 wandering through 1988 without noticing.

NOTE: We have added 66 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray and 4K UHD, Fun City use a DTS-HD Master dual-mono track (24-bit) in the original English language. The soundtrack is the film's secret weapon and its most dated pleasure at the same time. Coati Mundi - Andy Hernandez of Kid Creole and the Coconuts - supplies a score of chirpy, synthetic Italo-pop that seems to be leaking from a car stereo somewhere off-screen, and the effect is quietly subversive: the neighbourhood's own idea of glamour, cheap and pumping and entirely sincere. Dialogue was recorded on location and it sounds like it, with the overlapping, half-shouted delivery Morrissey has always preferred to the clean studio line reading. Fight scenes and the crowd sequences are where a late-'80s independent's sound mix typically shows its limits, and where a new master has the most to prove. The transfer is an honest representation of a modest 1988 independent rather than a remix trying to be something grander. Dialogue was captured on location with a lot of overlapping, half-shouted delivery, and it stays centered, with the inevitable variance in room tone from setup to setup left intact. The real beneficiary is Coati Mundi's (pieces used in Girlfight, 54, Maniac,) synth-pop score, which has more separation and low-end presence than the material has ever had - the tinny Italo-disco cues that keep leaking in from off-screen now sound like they're coming from a specific car on a specific block. The fight and crowd sequences are where the limits of the original mix show briefly congested/thin, and no amount of lossless bandwidth will fix that. Fun City also include an isolated music track, which is the correct call for a film whose score does this much narrative work. Fun City offer optional English subtitles on their Region 'A' Blu-ray and Region FREE 4K UHD.

The 4K UHD supplement package is generous and, more to the point, built around people who were actually there. A newly recorded commentary by William Morris (a film programmer with Music Box Theatre) carries the feature - pointed and interesting. Three new video interviews follow: "A Very Sophisticated Film" runs over 1/4 hour with cinematographer Steven Fierberg, who is candid about the speed and improvisation of the shoot; "A Personal Milestone" 18-minutes with casting director Leonard Finger, valuable on how a Bruce Weber model with no acting experience ended up carrying the picture; and "Something to See" over 5-minutes with executive producer Sam Grogg (The Trip to Bountiful,) brief but useful on the FilmDallas end of things and how the film ended up barely released. Best of all is a 25-minute archival interview with Morrissey himself, recorded at home - indispensable now that he's gone, and a reminder of how bracingly unfashionable his opinions remained to the end. The headline curio is a complete 35mm workprint rough cut (1:46:57), presented in SD from an archival videocassette (see comparison below) - six minutes longer than the release version, with alternate takes and unfinished sound. It's an artifact rather than a viewing option, and Fun City are upfront about that; for anyone interested in how Morrissey and editor Stan Salfas (Let Me In) arrived at the film's abrupt rhythms, it's the most illuminating thing on the disc. Rounding things out: an isolated music track, a 6 minute image gallery of stills and marketing material, and a trailer reel pairing Spike of Bensonhurst with Mixed Blood and Trash - a smart bit of curation that sketches Morrissey's arc in five minutes. The package includes a double-sided wrap with legacy and newly commissioned artwork by Colin Murdoch for the slipcover art, and first pressings add a 12-page booklet with a new essay by Margaret Barton-Fumo.

Spike of Bensonhurst, directed by Paul Morrissey, has spent close to forty years as a rumor - barely distributed in 1988 by a distributor that didn't survive the decade, skipped entirely by the DVD era, kept alive on tape and late-night cable. That it now turns up on 4K UHD, restored from the camera negative and surrounded by an hour of interviews with the people who made it, is the kind of thing boutique labels exist to do. Everything about the setup - the club fighter, the mobbed-up sponsor, the girl above his station, the fixed fight - promises Rocky by way of Saturday Night Fever, and Morrissey builds the machinery only to let it idle. He isn't interested in whether Spike wins; he's interested in the intricate bookkeeping of loyalty, debt and sexual property that governs three square blocks of Bensonhurst, and in what happens when a character who has never questioned any of it is exiled twenty minutes away to Red Hook and discovers the same system running under different management. Sasha Mitchell, a Bruce Weber model in his first film role, is perfectly cast precisely because he plays Spike without a flicker of irony or self-knowledge: the swagger is real, the stupidity is real, and the charm survives both. The film itself remains an argument: uneven, deliberately unbeautiful, politically ornery in ways that will put some viewers off entirely, and - as Morrissey's last narrative feature - the clearest surviving statement of a filmmaker who spent his career being claimed by a counterculture he didn't believe in. The presentation is strong and the supplements are essential rather than decorative. Easily recommended, and Fun City's effort is a candidate for one of the more meaningful catalogue rescues of the year. 

Gary Tooze