Hangfire- Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Hangfire



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:

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Movie
Moving on to the last two films in the set, we’ve already run the gamut of crazy DTV stuff from the late 80s and early 90s. We’ve had Dolph hunting cops. A robot Terminator/Robocop type character, David Hasselhoff hamming it up while running around with a pet cougar, and now we move on to Hangfire, a movie so straightforward and so that you WANT to like it. Despite the fact that it had no budget, most of the leads were phoning it in, and Jan-Michael Vincent played one of the most hilariously insane military colonels I’ve ever seen. But hey, this is the 90s baby. Anything goes, and anything certainly did go.

Criminals escaping from custody in 90s action movies was nothing new. Dolph’s own Joshua Tree (in this set) did it as my first review for this box set; Con Air was most famous for it, but there’s a genuine bewilderment here as the audience is left wondering, “What the heck are these guys gonna do?” when it comes to the prison break premise of Hangfire. Our film starts out with small-town New Mexico Sheriff Ike Slayton (Brad Davis) getting married to his fiancée Maria (Kim Delaney), only for their honeymoon to get interrupted by a gang of escaped prisoners following orders from maniac killer Kuttner (Lee de Broux). Shooting the guards and taking some prisoners, Kuttner and his ragtag group of prisoners take refuge in a small town (of course, Sheriff Slayton’s town) where they hole up and try to figure out a way out of this mess.

Reality is, there is no way out of this mess. They’re surrounded in the middle of the desert with some small arms, and an entire police force surrounding them. But to make matters even more fun, the Governor calls in the National Guard, with Colonel Johnson (Jan-Michael Vincent) pulling off one of the most bizarrely insane roles of his lifetime. Barking orders and nearly getting his men killed, Johnson botches the mission, forcing Sheriff Slayton and his best man/war buddy Billy (Ken Foree) to pull off a two-man rescue mission. I mean, what could go wrong? An insane military commander with what looks like 15 men on one side, criminals with no way out on the other, and more overacting than Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man.

Hangfire is trash, but it's earnest trash. The script is flawed and silly, made for less than nothing, and with mostlyno-name, or aging actors playing their respective roles. But whatever the reality of the situation, Brad Davis is giving the film his all, and with the help of Ken Foree as Billy, they make some general sense out of the mishmash of film ideas. Some of them work, some of them don’t, but the bad action, bad acting and general hammy nature of the film kept me rolling in the aisles till the credit roles. The powers that be gratefully made this just a hair under 90 minutes long, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome too much, but that’s being generous, as this was something everybody knew would never see the inside of a theater.

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Rating: R for violence and Language




Video:
As is the case with the previous films, it looks like Hangfire was scanned at 2K using the 35mm interpositive via Fotokem, and then graded in 2K resolution at R3Store Studios. The result is similar to the rest. Good for what it is, but nothing that will blow your noodle. The 35mm shoot looks nice and grainy, with that dusty brown “dirty” look that so many 90s films shot out in the New Mexico desert looked like back in the day. Detail levels are generally good, with solid facial details, but surrounding backgrounds can look a bit crushed in the dark, and grain spikes tend to happen in said low-light situations. Some of the wide shots look a bit hazy (possibly due to the dusty environment?), but when the film gets dark for the second half of the film, details take a dip.


Audio:
Hangfire’s 2.0 LPCM track is about on par with the video score, and feels distinctly a “product of the time” with a synth-laden score that just blasts you in the face with aggression from the get-go. Dialog is solid, but sound effects bounce all over the place, and sometimes you can actually detect missing effects (a shotgun blast is missing when firing in one scene, and a can kicked over doesn’t make a noise in another). The dialog can sometimes bounce up and down in volume, but overall the track is solid enough.


Extras:
• Commentary by the Edinburgh Zombie Club
• Brothers in Arms
• Crash and Burn
• Re-Release Trailer
• Stills Gallery

Final Score: ​

I’m not sure what went through anyone’s head when they were making Hangfire, as it copies a dozen different movies with the same plot line, just with a shoestring budget and weak editing. Brad Davis is all in as the lead, and it was fun to see Lou Ferrigno show up as a bit part bad guy, but overall Hangfire is the very definition of a movie that really has no reason to exist. It doesn’t do anything especially spectacular in either direction, and isn’t so bad that it ends up being fun either. Just a middle-of-the-road DTV flick from the budget wild, wild west that was the 90s. The Blu-ray looks and sounds solid, and actually has some pretty reasonable extras, though, so fans of the movie should be very pleased to see it finally get an HD release.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Brad Davis, Kim Delaney, Ken Foree, Lee de Broux, James Tolkan, Jan-Michael Vincent
Directed by: Peter Maris
Written by: Brian D. Jeffries
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 AVC
Audio: English: LPCM 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Arrow
Rated: R
Runtime: 90 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: October 27th, 2026

Recommendation: DTV Drunk Watch