"At 19, they gave him the streets. Tonight, they're going to take them back," in Fun City Editions' Blu-ray of the stylish and gritty ALPHABET CITY.

Johnny (Vincent Spano, OSCAR) aka "Chunga" is the king of Alphabet City, collecting protection fees from local establishments and drug money from his dealers – among them Lippy (POLICE ACADEMY's Michael Winslow) – on behalf of Don Corleone-complex mobster Gino (Ray Serra, SPLITZ). Tonight, however, Gino has commanded that Johnny burn down a building for the insurance; the problem is that it's the apartment building where his mother (Zohra Lampert, LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH) and sister Sophia (Jami Gertz, THE LOST BOYS) are currently living. His proud mother refuses to be intimidated, and his hooker sister ridicules his tough guy image when he begs her to take their mother and run (that is until he gives her a stack of cash). His artist girlfriend Angela (Kate Vernon, PRETTY IN PINK) is tired of his promises to change for the sake of their infant daughter and is not willing to uproot her life even in the face of danger. Johnny stalls on torching the building under the guise of doing regular business, but Gino has eyes everywhere and tells him that there is only one way out of the family and "no one is indespersible (sic)!"

Shot through with rain-slick streets, smoke, color gel lighting, and New Wave music that projects an air of MTV cool, ALPHABET CITY with its macho hero on an episodic journey is like a non-sexual version of Paul Schrader's AMERICAN GIGOLO. The storytelling is elliptical and drags a little in the middle, but that is entirely suited to the thematic question of "When are you finally going to change, Johnny?" We get a look at his life as he stalls trying to decide between "it's going to get burned down anyway" and getting out not because he can no longer hack it but because he no longer wants to do it. ALPHABET CITY is not really an action film and it is in some ways barely a character drama; that is, pretty much all of the film's dramatic exchanges could have been a trite backdrop to Poe's visual style if not for Spano's anchoring performance in the face of various acting and delivery styles ranging from over-the-top to "character actor" takes. While one wonders if Johnny has really impressed upon his family and girlfriend the danger of working for the mob with their dramatic "I won't be pushed around" responses, most moving is his scene with stoned drug dealer Lippy which at first seems like a dressing down but gradually conveys a real concern for the path the latter is going down in light of Johnny's own personal realizations. The last fifteen minutes almost feels like a concession to genre conventions but one cannot help but root for Johnny even if he remains only slightly more sketched out a character than the rest. Director Amos Poe had previously helmed the punk documentary THE BLANK GENERATION and was influenced by the "other New Wave" with his subsequent features UNMADE BEDS, THE FOREIGNER, and SUBWAY RIDERS. He followed up ALPHABET CITY with a series of music videos including Animotion's "Obsession". Presumably Poe met the film's co-writer Gregory Heller while he was living in Paris since Heller's only other credit is scripting the English dialogue of the American characters for Jean Rollin's THE LIVING DEAD GIRL.

Released theatrically by Atlantic Releasing (NOMADS, STORMY MONDAY), ALPHABET CITY was released on videotape by CBS/Fox and on anamorphic widescreen DVD by MGM. Fun City Editions' inaugural Blu-ray is derived from a new 2K scan of the original 35mm interpositive and it is a stunner if one takes into account the visual style and the limitations of the production. In addition to the night location shooting, saturated color gels, and backlighting, it appears as if the flare of the light sources was not through the use of star filters but shooting with the lens aperture wide open leading to some extremely shallow depth-of-field and some lagging focus in scenes with movement. Close-ups reveal strong detail in facial features, eighties hair, costumes, and the grit of the streets and abandoned buildings while saturated color really pop throughout. There are plenty of other shots that are soft due to the aforementioned depth-of-field in low light and the heavy use of diffusing smoke. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track conveys dialogue clearly along with effects and the great soundtrack, and optional English SDH subtitles are included.

The film is accompanied by an optional introduction by actor Spano (0:33) as well as an audio commentary by director Poe and writer friend Luc Sante in which the director recalls that he and producer Andrew Braunsberg (MACBETH) had been trying for a few years to find a project together, vetoing each other's ideas until associate producer Roberta Friedman showed them an outline for a film titled ALPHABET CITY (a term only recently coined at the time). Of the film's visual style, he reveals that he did not want rain-slicked streets because that meant every location would have to be watered down since it was set on one night, but it happened to be raining when they filmed the opening credits sequence. He also notes that a number of scenes were lost due to the budget being cut and had to be worked around in the editing (one early scene he notes missing actually leads to more effective storytelling), and he also reveals that the shooting was done only a few months ahead of the large scale gentrification of the area when buildings were being bought up and flipped and East Village galleries were pretty much Ponzi schemes in the making. He also notes that music producer/composer Nile Rogers ("Le Freak") had been hired before himself, and that cinematographer Oliver Wood had not shot a film since THE HONEYMOON KILLERS but would get hired for the TV show MIAMI VICE based on his work here.