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Wednesday, 22 April 2026 13:23

We’re back… (Almost)! Plus, we’ve seen the new Speed Racer 4K restoration and it’s glorious!

by
Speed Racer in IMAX

Greetings Bits readers!

So you may have noticed some funkiness going on over the last week or so here at The Digital Bits website.

Back on March 27 (see our post here), I told you that we were fighting the scourge of AI companies relentlessly sending bots to crawl our site to scrape for content to train their LLMs. It got so bad that we essentially have had to move the site and use Cloudflare to block them.

That was frustrating enough, but the process of moving hasn’t been smooth. And we’ve had several other disruptions over the last week, including (currently) to our email. So if you’re trying to reach us and your messages are getting bounced back or not delivered properly, rest assure we’re aware of it and are working to get it sorted.

Thanks for your patience!

All part of the frustrations of trying to run a website in the 21st century… especially in a world of AI, which is probably only going to make things on the Internet worse. [Read on here...]

Anyway, we’ve been posting new reviews all week here at the site, including…

Stephen’s reviews of City on Fire (4K) and Peking Opera Blues (4K) from Imprint, Remo Williams (4K) from KLSC, Trancers (4K) from Full Moon, and the Full Moon Fright Box: Vol III (Blu-ray) from Umbrella.

Tim’s reviews of Day of the Woman: I Spit on Your Grave (4K) from Umbrella, The House with Laughing Windows (4K) and Evil Dead Rise (4K) from Arrow Video, The Devil’s Rain (4K) from Severin Films, Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har: The Complete Series (Blu-ray) and Wally Gator: The Complete Series (Blu-ray) from Warner Archive, Cecil B. Demented (Blu-ray) from Umbrella, and Avenging Eagle (Blu-ray) from Arrow’s Shawscope: Volume Three box set.

Dennis’ reviews of Three Into Two Won’t Go (Blu-ray) and Wrong Is Right (Blu-ray) from Imprint.

And finally, Stuart’s review of Blood of Revenge (Blu-ray) from Radiance Films.

And as always, more reviews are forthcoming! Including (hopefully soon), some from me as well, as soon as I’m able to get the website functionality sorted.

Now then… I’ve also had the chance, with my longtime friend Robert Meyer Burnett (of Robservations and Free Enterprise fame), to see Warner’s new 4K restoration of the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer (2008). We caught a great packed-house IMAX screening at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood yesterday afternoon, at which no less that Speed himself, Emile Hirsch, and Rex Racer actor Scott Porter showed up!

I’ll tell you: If you’ve only ever seen this film on highly compressed Blu-ray (a BD-25 disc) or streaming, you have NEVER seen this film looking the way it was meant to. Nor have you heard the way it was meant to sound.

Speed Racer on the IMAX screen is a glorious experience—Warner should run it once a year. Every detail popped, none of it was lost in a blizzard of compression artifacting during the fast-motion racing scenes. The new Atmos sound mix is thunderous and completely immersive. It was a massive treat.

Best of all, the crowd was laughing and cheering the whole way through. There were even a couple of big rounds of applause for the race finishes and at the end. I’ll tell you—as someone who’s long championed this film as an overlooked masterpiece—one that, in its way, is every bit as groundbreaking as The Matrix, it’s so damn great to see this film finally being given the respect and love it deserves.

The 4K disc streets on May 19th. You can bet we’ll be reviewing it as soon as we can.

All right, I’ve got to go deal with this email issue. If you really need to reach us in the meantime, you can find me on social media on X, Facebook, and Bluesky (you’ll find the links below).

Back with more soon!

- Bill Hunt

(You can follow Bill on social media on Twitter/X, BlueSky, and Facebook, and also here on Patreon)

 

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