Cruising 4K UHD Review

Arrow Video

Blu-ray Release: February 25, 2025

Video: 1.85:1/2160p (HDR10/Dolby Vision)/Color

Audio: English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo, 5.1, and recreated 1.0 mono

Subtitles: English SDH

Run Time: 101:53

Director: William Friedkin

New York is caught in the grip of a sadistic serial killer who is preying on the patrons of the city's underground gay scene. Young rookie cop Steve Burns (Pacino) is tasked with infiltrating the S&M subculture to try and lure the killer out of the shadows... but as he immerses himself deeper and deeper into the underworld, Steve risks losing his own identity in the process. (From Arrow’s official synopsis)

William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) is a film rich in production history, controversy, and revisionism. It brought together the director of the greatest revisionist cop movie of the ‘70s, The French Connection (1971), and the star of the second greatest revisionist cop movie of the ‘70s, Serpico (1973). It applied that former era’s rough ‘n tumble intensity to a hybrid genre that combined police procedural with the newly-minted slasher fad, anticipating the serious, award-contending serial killer movie movement, highlighted by Thomas Harris adaptations Manhunter (1986) and Silence of the Lambs (1991). The film opened to modest box office and enormous controversy, most of it coming from gay activist groups, however, like so many patently offensive films, once the controversy wore off and cultural perception shifted, Cruising became a favorite within subgroups of the LGBTQ movie community, sometimes genuinely, often ironically.

For this review, I could further explore the film’s lasting impact and critical revisionism or even the fact that a real life murderer implicated (but not convicted) in the serial killings that inspired the film coincidentally appears as a radiologist in Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). But those subjects have been heavily researched and thoroughly covered by people wiser than myself – see this video by Matt Baume for more about the LGBTQ controversies (and ongoing cases of violence against queer people) and, for more on killer, Paul Bateson, see this Esquire article by Matt Miller – so I’m going to wrap this up with my perspective on the somewhat prevalent cult film fan question: does Cruising count as an American giallo?

Despite the steady decline of gialli in Italy at the time, their influence in American was at its height in the early ‘80s dawn of the slasher boom, due to films, like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), that paid homage Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Carpenter dug more into the specific narrative functions of giallo with Eyes of Laura Mars (1978, written by Carpenter, directed by Irvin Kershner) and Someone’s Watching Me! (1978), but Brian De Palma was the genre’s real Hollywood champion, whether he admitted it or not. All of his early thrillers match the criteria, especially Dressed to Kill (1980), and Blow Out (1981), which was a reworking of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966), a film that itself is sometimes considered an official entry in the Italian giallo canon.

Cruising was released at the beginning of this short, but lively period, ahead of Friday the 13th, both De Palma films, and very gialli-esque slashers, including Ken Hughes’ Night School (1981), Ken Wiederhorn’s Eyes of a Stranger (1981), and Ed Bianchi’s The Fan (1981). I don’t know if Friedkin himself as spoken on the subject, but he was a fan and friend of Argento and that he was very excited for Arrow’s 4K restoration of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970). It seems likely that, even if he wasn’t recreating any specific giallo imagery, he was at least subconsciously inspired by the movement.

The film features plenty of indicative genre trademarks – a mysterious figure stalking victims from the shadows, brutal stabbing deaths, detailed forensic discussions, and so on – but it doesn’t meet several typical giallo narrative and thematic devices. Generally speaking, gialli are murder mysteries that build to reveal connections between the killer and his victims or some kind of wider conspiracy. Barring that, a number of early gialli are nasty little bottle dramas with low bodycounts and high lewdity quotients. 

If Cruising is a giallo, it’s probably a bodycount-type. Like the serial killer movies of the following decade, the killer’s actual identity is largely inconsequential, because we see his face almost immediately. Still, the why of his crimes is important and what little mystery the film has revolves around Pacino figuring that out. The twist that the killer has been (sort of) communicating with his dead father is very giallo-like, as is the ambiguously implied transference of guilt and violence that ends the film. However, the focus on Pacino’s character over the killer and his victims aligns Cruising more with conventional undercover cop movies. Plenty of gialli have police detectives as protagonists, but the filmmakers are usually only interested in the ways the crimes affect their amateur detectives, not the professionals (I admit that I’m splitting hairs for the sake of argument). 

In the realms of Italian exploitation films, these narrative/thematic splits tend to delineate the differences between giallo and the poliziottescho fad that replaced it. That said, there were plenty of movies that combined the genres, including Sergio Martino’s The Suspicious Death of a Minor (Italian: Morte Sospetta di una Minorenne, 1975) and Massimo Dallamano’s What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (Italian: La Polizia Chiede Aiuto; aka: The Police Ask for Assistance, 1974). One later title that does this is Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper (Italian: Lo squartatore di New York, 1982), which I had always considered a grotty answer to De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, but now realize may have also been inspired by Cruising’s Gothic tour of the New York sexual underground, albeit from a heterosexual woman’s point-of-view.

I find two things particularly compelling about comparing Cruising to the gialli, however tentative the connections may be. The first is that, like slasher movies, gialli tended to thrive on the lurid murders of attractive women. Just as many, if not more men die in these films, but their deaths are rarely as baroque and don’t tend to be the focus of ad campaigns. If Cruising is a giallo, that makes it one of the few to not only feature zero female deaths, but to code male victims men as other films code their female victims. This is often down to some pretty outdated and uncomfortable stereotypes about gay men, female impersonators, and trans women, but it’s still a unique trait not shared by many other gialli, slashers, or serial killer movies.

Secondly, The French Connection and Serpico were, along with Don Seigel’s Dirty Harry (1971), directly responsible for the rise of poliziotteschi in Italy. If we are to consider movies like Cruising and Blow Out – movies released after gialli had run their course to be largely replaced by poliziotteschi – American gialli, it means that Hollywood and Italy ended up in some sort of coincidental cultural exchange and that is, frankly, pretty fascinating. 

Video

I’ve probably only seen Cruising one other time and am not up to date on the restoration controversies that have dogged the film since Arrow’s original Blu-ray release. Everything I know I’ve gleaned from a few message boards and this MovieCensorship.com comparison post by user Muck47. 

Friedkin became (in)famous for altering his films for re-release, beginning with The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen in 2000 and including the first Blu-ray release of The French Connection. Cruising was altered for its initial 2007 DVD, including a new digital grading, additional digital effects, and minor edits. It was then altered again under Friedkin’s supervision for its 2019 Arrow Blu-ray release, including some major differences in color timing. According to specs, this 4K UHD is not a 2160p version of that earlier release, but a completely new transfer, restored using the previously unavailable original 35mm camera negative and various optical dupe materials. There's a very long description of the restoration in the included limited edition booklet.

Arrow didn’t include a Blu-ray copy of the new remaster, so the images on this page are taken from the special features disc and aren’t really representative of the differences between releases, at least as I understand them. I need to stress that I don’t have the knowledge base to develop a strong opinion on the ‘correct’ color timing (I’ll have a stronger opinion on the color timing of Arrow’s Don’t Torture a Duckling 4K later this month, I promise). There are some brief comparisons in the extras and, besides that, colors seem mostly natural to my eyes. Flesh tones aren’t overly cooled, night sequences aren’t so blue as to look like they were mastered in the early 2000s, and shadows, though dark, aren’t too crushed, as they are in a number of these Blu-ray screencaps. Details and film grain texture is very impressive without oversharpening effects or other obvious compression artifacts.

Audio

Cruising was initially released in mono sound, but that track was replaced by Friedking-supervised 5.1 and 2.0 stereo remixes, which were also the only options on the 2019 Blu-ray. In order to present the most authentic version of the theatrical cut, Arrow has attempted to recreate the mono mix using original DME (dialogue, music, effects) tracks, which is about the best we can expect, given the situation. The track is clean with a sound floor that is low, but not so low as to press out basic environmental ambience. There are some notable inconsistencies in dialogue that are likely related to the extensive ADR required to complete the film, not a problem with Arrow pasting together old audio elements.

The music, which is largely made up of diegetic and pseudo-diegetic rock, pop, and funk tunes, gets a slight, largely unneeded boost from the stereo and 5.1 remixes. What original score is utilized (mostly jazzy interludes) comes from Jack Nitzsche and an uncredited Egberto Gismonti. This disc includes an alternate musical score by the group Pentagram Home Video, entitled “Heavy Leather,” presented (in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo.

Extras

Disc One (4K UHD)

• Commentary with William Friedkin – This is the 2007 DVD track and it fits the tone and content of the director’s other solo tracks around this time in that it is initially very informative, but sort of devolves into Friedkin narrating on-screen action.

• Commentary with William Friedkin – This track was recorded for Arrow’s Blu-ray and is moderated by critic Mark Kermode, who helps keep the discussion moving. Like the older track, the subject matter delves into the real crimes that inspired the film, Friedkin’s connections to those crimes, entering the alien world of the gay leather scenes, and the ins & outs of making the film. The original track is good, but this one is better.

• Commentary with original musicians – Subtitled "There were cops, a dark bar… and Al Pacino,” this brand new track features a collection of musicians that worked on the original soundtrack discussing their work.

The Backroom Cut – Alternate/deleted Scenes:

• Deleted scenes:

  • "Why Take the Job?" (0:56, HD)

  • "Night Stick” (illustrated, audio-only)" (3:35, illustrated, original audio, HD)

  • "Phone Booth” (2:40, HD)

• Raw on-set audio:

  • A Piece of Work (10:38, HD) – 2018 interview with on-set sound mixer Kim Ornitz 

  • Protesters (1:48, HD)

  • Club scenes (0:33, HD)

  • Killer's voice (0:21, HD)

  • Apartment audio (1:29, HD)

• Alternate film/video elements:

  • French disclaimer card (0:59, HD)

  • French credit roll (4:02, HD)

  • Spanish disclaimer card (0:37, HD)

  • Alternate English end credits (1:09, HD)

  • Alternate introduction comparison – Teatrical, 2006 Restoration (1:09, HD), and 2018 Restoration (1:11, HD)

• Censored material:

  • Censored scenes reel 2a side-by-side comparison (1:38, HD)

  • Censored scene reel 2a complete (1:42, HD)

  • Censored scene reel 3 side-by-side comparison (1:55, HD)

  • Censored scene reel 3 complete (2:11, HD)

Archival Extras:

• The History of Cruising (21:05, SD) – An original 2007 DVD featurette about the film's origins and production. It’s on the shorter side, but it tidily covers the basics.

• Exorcising Cruising (22:31, SD) – A second 2007 featurette looking at the photography, the controversy surrounding the film and related book, securing community support, steps taken by protesters, and Cruising’s legacy up to that point.

• Teaser and theatrical trailer

• Four TV spots and five ‘test’ TV spots

• TV spot optical tests

• Image galleries – Promotional items, key art, musical releases, Jane Wechsler on-set sketch gallery, set items

Disc 2 (Blu-ray)

• I Want to Be the Curator (38:29, HD) – The newly-produced video extras begin with this interview with actress Karen Allen chats about being cast, never being allowed to read the entire script, working with Friedkin and Pacino, the controversy, Friedkin hiding copies of The Exorcist novel on set, and seeing the film for the first time with fellow actor Jay Acovone.

• Walking the Line (71:13, HD) – Actor, consultant, and former NYPD police detective Randy Jurgensen looks back at his work undercover in the NYC gay community (initially, he was looking into other cops, not a serial killer), the logistics of his daily duties, connections between him and Pacino’s character (the Don Scardino character is based on a real neighbor and friend), and making the movie with Friedkin. It’s a very long interview, but it is full of fascinating anecdotes.

• Cut Offs (55:00, HD) – A 2017 interview with editor Bud S. Smith, who discusses editing multiple Friedkin films with focus on Cruising, the existence of rumored X-rated footage, censorship, and the implication of the final shots.

• Who's That Guy? (13:42, HD) – A 2017 interview with actor Jay Acovone, who talks about his training, previous work, being cast, and time on Cruising.

• Pounding the Beat (46:57, HD) – A 2017 interview with actor Mike Starr, who tells stories about scene partner Joe Spinell, being a relative amateur at the time, auditioning, and dealing with protests, among other anecdotes. 

• Boy on the Bus (37:30, HD) – One more 2017 interview with actor Mark Zecca looking back on his life as a gay man in NYC during the ‘70s, the state of the city, and attending S&M bars and other gay spaces (some of which appear in the movie).

• Mineshaft Memories (33:41, HD/SD) – A raw 1990 archival interview with Wally Wallace, former manager of the Mineshaft club depicted in the movie, filmed by activist and historian Jack Fritscher.

• William Friedkin's BeyondFest 2022 Q&A at the American Cinematheque (41:10, HD)

• Breaking the Codes (13:02, HD) – A new visual essay with actor/writer David McGillivray about the history of gay hanky-codes.

• Stop the Movie (11:51, HD) – 1980 short film capturing the Cruising protests that includes optional commentary by director Jim Hubbard.

• Production stills

The images on this page are taken from Arrow's Blu-ray extras disc – NOT the 4K UHD – and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.