GREAT FILM! Banned & locked up for 30 years, the print is nothing to write home about (see the examples that follow), but it's the film itself that matters here. Not sure its "message" will be apparent to everybody though. The "tension" - as one of the interviewees says - has gone, and the whole thing seems to be amusingly harmless after all those years. "So why was it banned?" you may ask. Well, it showed the truth...

Still, there's one more issue I'd like to point out - it seems an encoding problem appears between frames 18537 - 18558 (the following is a JavaScript animation):

Similarly to Dark Sky Films' "The Cremator" DVD (and for all I know Second Run's too), this seems to have been "reformatted" to 16:9 from the same master Bonton used years ago for their non-anamorphic release (identical print damage, etc.). Fortunately, the end result here is at least no worse than the original (unlike the aforementioned "The Cremator"). [In the gallery below, Second Run screencaps are at their native 576i (to use the "modern" terminology) resolution, while Bonton's were "upscaled" (x 1.368) to match the horizontal size of the former.] I won't dig into the heavy cropping complained about by some on the Internet, as the film's director and cinematographer, Jiří Menzel and Jaromír Šofr, were involved in all this, and who am I to question their decisions? (c: Speaking of Mr Menzel, his self-made featurette commissioned specifically for this release is very entertaining, and might be THE reason for double-dipping on this title for those who already own the older Czech edition. (That and the booklet, which I found quite an interesting read.) The choice is yours...