Oh, just look at this little beauty- prelim Steeelbook artwork for September’s Blu-ray release of Jaws here in the UK. Available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk. I love Jaws; one of my favourite movies and one of the most intense cinema experiences of my life. I must have been nine years old when my Aunt took me to go see it one Saturday summer afternoon. Terrified me silly. No film ever shook me up like that since. Contemporary viewers may well wonder what all the fuss is about, but whenever I watch the film it throws me back to that darkened cinema of my childhood. Well, I won’t be watching it again now until this HD release in September. What a fantastic year this is for catalogue titles on Blu-ray.
Whilst on the subject of Blu-ray coverart, on the other end of the scale, here’s some truly awful packaging for the recent Blu-ray re-release of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. 
If you read my post last week about watching CE3K again you will have seen the lovely box art that release had, featuring the striking and enigmatic image of the nightime road leading to a mysterious glowing horizon (the original campaign artwork for the films cinema release). This latest edition of the film has a completely revised design and has the ugliest artwork I have yet seen for this movie. Really, you’d be hard pressed to do worse- I know they are trying to tie it in to similar-designed releases of films like Taxi Driver etc over here, but it doesn’t work at all. And it doesn’t work for the other films in this series either, but it looks like they are persisting with it. Far as I’m concerned, its more likely to put punters off rather than galvanise a purchase. Ugly.
the ghost of 82 