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Hey Folks,
There is a film I’m really interested about. I’ve been a Highlander fan for quite a while and while I acknowledge that it is only the original movie that’s worth something (actually - quite a lot. Queen scored their most recognizable music ever for this film). Stunning story, great atmosphere, beautiful photography on the Scottish Highlands.
All the subsequent films were terrible (except the third, but that was practically a remake of the first one), but the TV series was pretty good IMHO. Hence I was really anticipating the fourth movie - Endgame, especially because they put Christopher Lambert and Adrian Paul in a head-to-head (literally) situation, an actual showdown between the main protagonist of the movies and the TV show.
Fortunately, it was shown in my town when it came out in cinemas, because at the time there was a rerun of the series on TV, raising some interest in the topic. So I watched the movie in the cinema, and thank God I did!
Well, not really for the quality of the film. It was apparently quite low-budget, looked actually like as a feature-length episode of the series. The dialogues were quite dumb, the narrative was quite shaky, but I did like a story quite a lot and the bittersweet, downbeat ending to it.
Fast forward a few months and one of my friends who saw the movie in the theatre as well told me that the home version had a different ending I might want to check out. I rented the movie on tape at once and was genuinely stunned to learn that there was a completely different ending on the video that would make George Lucas himself blush (one of the main characters isn’t actually dead as the theatrical release suggested, but quite alive and well - inexplicably left alive by the main antagonist).
Fast forward about ten years, I came across one of the old movie magazines that dealt with the film at the time, then I realized the theatrical version was actually much shorter - almost by 13 minutes (!) - than the version I own on DVD and the one shown on TV. I didn’t notice at the time for some reason but in retrospect it made perfect sense why certain scenes felt quite odd. Not just because they weren’t shown in the cinema, but many of the scenes included alternative takes to make up the sequences.
More importantly, virtually ALL of these changes made the movie even worse than it already was. (Does that ring any bells?)
So I started browsing the web whether the theatrical versions were available somewhere. To my greatest disappointment they weren’t. But, apparently one of the special edition DVDs contains an actual workprint version of the movie, which is virtually the same as the theatrical edition (and some more) only with incomplete SFX, and the whole nine yards that’s part of workprints.
Moreover I found this great website where they attempt to track the changes b/w the theatrical and the home edition using this workprint: http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=820504
Unfortunately my hardware is quite old-school to do such a project, so I’m asking whether there are Highlander fans here who have the will and the time and would find it interesting to recreate the original theatrical version.
