Umbrella Entertainment's Beyond Genres line returns with a Blu-ray of the Australian cult classic BAD BOY BUBBY.

Having lived all of his life in a bunker-like one room apartment under the thumb of his religious fanatic mother (Claire Benito, STRUCK BY LIGHTNING) who has told him that the air outside is unbreathable and that God sees everything he is doing, socially-stunted thirty-five year old manchild Bubby (Nicholas Hope, LITTLE WHITE LIES) can only see his mother's brutal punishments and her molestation of him as signs of her love. All this starts to change when Pop (Ralph Cotterill, HOWLING III) – a supposed vicar who claims to also be Bubby's father – appears in their lives and monopolizes his mother's affections. Pop is ignorant of how Bubby has been raised, believing Bubby first to be queer and then some kind of idiot, and mother in Pop's presence dismisses the weird beliefs Bubby has that she has drilled into him as eccentricities. As mother's own behavior slips under the influence of Pop's attention (and a lot of alcohol), Bubby starts to question everything he has come to understand about the world through his mother. After Bubby's accidentally suffocates his parents while testing their apparent ability to go outside without needing to breath, Bubby ventures outside on his own into a brutal world where he is beaten up, exploited, molested, questions his faith, falls in love, and becomes a punk rock star.

Opening with an extended chamber play-like sequence depicting Bubby's grim existence with his mother, the rest of the film is a breath of fresh air but the beginning is crucial to the audience's identification with a barely verbal man who projects his mother's rage at him onto a caged cat and inadvertently suffocates it when his mother tells him the creature can come and go without a gas mask because it does not need to breathe unlike humans. We do not see the outside world of contemporary Australia from Bubby's perspective, but that is the point; we understand what kind of misunderstandings and social "faux pas" of which he is capable and we dread what might happen both to him and to other people (especially once he points out the bodies of his parents in a newspaper story that identifies their assailant as "The Clingfilm Killer".

Hope gives an incredible performance, mimicking people he comes into contact with and evolving his appearance until he really does look as "handsome" as an overweight woman calls him when she believes he is teasing her by showing sexual interest in her because she reminds him of his mother. The final third of the film is quite moving as Bubby discovers that he can communicate with a group of cerebral palsy patients and develops a meaningful relationship with overweight nurse Angel (Carmel Johnson, THE BABADOOK) which we feel has nothing to do with his mother (especially with his reaction to her parents berating her appearance and feelings at a family dinner). Bubby's screaming of mimicked obscenities and phrases he has picked up and as he gropes a blowup doll shift from a display of mental illness mocked by the concert audience into a piece of punk performance art in which he knows how to get a reaction. It is entirely fitting that the film ends happily, with Bubby and Angel existing in an idyll in the midst of an urban wasteland in spite of all that has come before.

Following the minor cult classic ENCOUNTER AT RAVEN'S GATE and the more mainstream DINGO, Australian Dutch-expat director Rolf de Heer mounted this Australian/Italian co-production in an experimental fashion, with jack-of-all-trades Australian camera operator Ian Jones (DEAD CALM) handling the opening sequence and thirty-two "contributing cinematographers" shooting individual scenes. In spite of this, the film has a consistent visual tone, and even some affectations of style like canted angles and gel lighting stand out without actually distracting, possible because Bubby's perception of the world is constantly evolving with each encounter. The audio was also recorded to emphasize Bubby's perspective using binaural microphones, most noticeable in close-ups where the sounds of the outside world can either bombard the ears or recede (as when the band put a bag over his head to discuss whether or not to turn him in for a reward after he has revealed that he is the "Clingfilm Killer"). Although the film won several awards and was widely distributed abroad on the festival circuit and theatrically, director de Heer did not make the leap to American budget features and episodic TV, remaining in Australia apart from the European international co-production THE OLD MAN WHO READ LOVE STORIES. His nineties science fiction film EPSILON was picked up by Miramax and Dimension Pictures for a straight to video release as ALIEN VISITOR but it did not make much of a blip on the radar.

Largely unseen in the United States outside of festivals and bootlegs, BAD BOY BUBBY got it first wide release when Blue Underground put out a DVD in 2005 that ported over most of the extras from Umbrella Entertainment's two-disc set released the same year apart from the commentary which would appear on Blue Underground's 2009 Blu-ray edition (which was also preceded by Umbrella's HD edition as well as a UK Blu-ray from Eureka). Umbrella's "Beyond Genres" Blu-ray edition presumably utilizes the same HD master as all of the others. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray transfer does not look sterling, and it should not since it was shot with Technovision anamorphic lenses on the quick (sometimes resulting in that lens flare that was unintentional in the eighties but all the rage these days) on expired film. Blacks vary from scene to scene and reel change marks have not been painted out, but saturated colors pop and detail and texture are quite effective her in conveying Bubby's relationship with the world around him, seeming coarser than some of the people around him and at other times seeming very much a part of them. Ported over from the earlier release is an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track – this edition adds a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo dowmix option as well – while the original binaural recording headphone mix is included in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo. The 5.1 and 2.0 mixes are fairly faithful to the binaural recording going by the lossy track with a bit more spread it seems, particularly with the concert scenes. Optional English HoH subtitles are included.

The audio commentary by director de Heer and actor Hope has also been ported over. De Heer discusses his inspirations for the project and discovering Hope via a short film titled "Confessor Caressor" while Hope recalls having more difficulty with scenes involving religion as a Catholic than those with nudity (learning to shut out everything else happening on the set in a similar manner to Bubby tuning out while his mother bathes and grooms him). They discuss the technical aspects of the film's audio and photography – de Heer originally intended all of the scenes in Bubby's home to be matted to 1.33:1 before opening it up to scope for the outside scenes but found the viewing experience unbearable and ended up liking the wide look to these early scenes in which he points out that the sets are actually subtly enlarged as soon as Pop appears on the scene and Bubby's work starts to expand. They also provide information some of the cast including Rachael Huddy who plays one of the cerebral palsy patients and had actually spent the first eighteen years of her life in a bed ignored by her family because the doctors believed that she perceived nothing.