Director Stephen Norrington was kind enough to answer my question regarding the various cuts of DEATH MACHINE and has provided this in-depth breakdown:
ORIGINAL DIRECTOR'S CUT AKA FOREIGN CUT
this is the full length (IMHO horribly overlong) Original Director's Cut that was delivered to the financiers/distributors in 1993 - it was produced by Dominic Anciano, Ray Burdis, Jim Beach, Matthew Justice and me - it was screened for the cast and crew
UK DVD CUT
the Original Director's Cut was deemed too long by the UK financiers/distributors so I personally edited a shorter version that became the UK DVD Cut - the original materials for the UK DVD Cut are lost in time - the only record of that cut is the UK DVD/VHS, neither of which I reviewed when I created the 2024 Director's Cut this year - however the opening scene may be similar because I addressed the re-edit for the 2024 version with the similar goal of moving things along faster
TURBINE GERMAN RELEASE
this is the same cut as the Foreign Cut aka Original Director's Cut - however, the Turbine German Release was a new transfer of an original internegative, nicely done by Turbine (I was not involved) with very nice colour grading - personally I think this is the best-looking transfer
JVC JAPANESE LASERDISC CUT
this is (I think) identical to the Original Director's Cut - however, the colour grading may not be the same as the UK DVD Cut or the Turbine German Release - the Japanese distributor had an internegative so may well have made colour adjustments when encoding for the laserdisc - I don’t know who produced the laserdisc
TRIMARK US THEATRICAL CUT
this is somewhat misnamed because, as far as I know, the movie was never released theatrically in the states - the US Theatrical Cut was created by Trimark in-house, I was not involved, I don’t know who did it and what their aims were - my guess is that it was the work of executives tasked with making the movie more suitable for the US home video market - IMHO it's an overly-truncated mess, made worse be a cheap one-light transfer (in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio) that had horrible colour and weak pan-and-scan, leading to many scenes having people's faces half out of frame - the new transfer for the Kino-Lorber release improves the US Theatrical Cut a lot simply by being a nicely graded 2.39:1 aspect ratio but it's still been edited with a chainsaw, not a scalpel
2024 DIRECTOR'S CUT
this can be considered the definitive cut, director approved, moves along like a missile, nice colour, super-elevated soundtrack, correct aspect ratio, finally in great shape and fun! - I personally produced this new cut and worked with Michael Felsher to re-edit it using the German Turbine prorez master as a source - pretty much every scene was tweaked to some extent - I worked with Paul Rabjohns to completely overhaul the soundtrack - we created a new 7.1 audio mix with tons of new sound effects and 17 minutes of new music - I also created a bunch of new VFX to facilitate the re-edit - in places I used VFX to improve the existing visuals - the aim of the 2024 cut was to hugely speed things up, remove a ton of overwrought bathos and emphasize fun stuff - Paul and I fixed tonal issues with the original music - basically we kept the cues that worked and replaced overwrought cues with new music that is less abrasive, more cinematic
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