When “Nightmare On Elm Street” star Robert Englund is in front of the camera for a “Halloween” director, only one slasher can come around – and a very special one at that. Now new in home cinema: “Phantom Of The Opera”.
But it was about time: It’s now ten years since “Phantom Of The Opera” aka “The Phantom of the Opera” celebrated its Blu-ray premiere here – and it feels like the legendary slasher interpretation of the world-famous novel Gaston Leroux’s classics have all but disappeared from the market. Now the somewhat different version of the material is celebrating its long overdue comeback in home cinema.
“The Phantom of the Opera” will finally be released on May 6, 2022, as a new edition on DVD and Blu-ray – of course completely unabridged with FSK 18 approval. Capelight Pictures is releasing the film as a standard DVD and as a Limited Collector’s Edition in the Mediabook, which also contains the film on Blu-ray – and for the first time including new HD scanning and German stereo sound!
You can get both the inexpensive DVD version and the strictly limited Blu-ray version from Amazon or directly from Capelight. By the way, anyone who orders the Mediabook in the rental company’s in-house shop before the start of sales not only receives 35 bonus points in the Capelight shop but also a 10 percent discount.
In the end, however, it doesn’t matter where you get which edition. In any case, a unique genre mix awaits you: Director Dwight H. Little (“Halloween IV”) and leading actor Robert Englund (Freddy from “Nightmare On Elm Street”) gives the well-known classic “The Phantom of the Opera” a wacky, chillingly atmospheric slasher paint job!
This is Phantom Of The Opera
Robert Englund slips into the role of the eponymous phantom – following in the footsteps of Lon Chaney (1925), Julian Sands (1998), and Gerard Butler (2004), among others. As a mysterious entity, he is up to mischief in the opera house of Victorian London until one day he meets Christine (Jill Schoelen), who has been catapulted back in time.
He falls madly in love with the up-and-coming opera singer, who soon rises to become the star of the institution recognized on the global music scene. What the young woman doesn’t know, however, is that she owes her success to a series of horrific murders…
“The Phantom of the Opera” was created in 1989 – between “Nightmare On Elm Street 4”, “Nightmare On Elm Street 5” and “Nightmare On Elm Street 6” – and thus in the middle of a time in which Robert Englund was just one of the ultimate Established greats of horror cinema.
However, the trade press had mixed feelings about the slasher interpretation, so the film ultimately went bad at the 1989 box office and it never made it to the originally planned sequel “Phantom Of The Opera 2: Terror In Manhattan” (probably not coincidentally based on “Friday the 13th VIII – Manhattan Death Trap”), also published in 1989. However, there is no question today that the film has long since achieved cult status in genre circles.
And so is the home cinema remake the Opportunity to catch up on an extraordinary piece of genre film – both for all those who like to see cult mime Robert Englund assassinated away from his nightmare hauntings and for those who want to experience “The Phantom of the Opera” from a slightly different side.
