The fade-to-black doesn't actually fade to black on VLC for me. It just crosscuts with a green haze or skips some frames altogether. That's the unstable video I guess. But any other point where the frame is mostly black, such as the end of the title crawl, the image suddenly lightens to white. Why would that be?

Just playing around with some frames in Photoshop got the picture looking a lot better. Of course it's not accurate but it kind of shows what seems to be off about the transfer. There's too much blue in the red which makes skin tones turn pink as well as the excess green:

If you have black frames on your end it may be worth searching for accurate color, I'd say.