New World Pictures' post-apocalyptic Canadian pick-up DEF-CON 4 comes to Blu-ray from Scorpion Releasing.

High above the planet on a classified American space station holding several atomic warheads, pilots Walker (John Walsch) and Howe (Tim Choate, THE FIRST TIME) and medic Jordan (Kate Lynch, MEATBALLS) witness a devastating nuclear exchange between the America and the U.S.S.R. Having lost all communication with Earth, they are conflicted over whether they should launch their missiles without the go-ahead from their superiors, only going ahead when their radars pick up an imminent threat. After two months drifting in space, the ship's system reprograms itself to return to Earth, crash-landing in Nova Scotia. When they hear knocking on the outside of the ship, they believe they have encountered survivors only for Walker to be ripped apart as soon as he exits the ship. Howe must leave an unconscious Kate behind when he ventures out in search of help, only to discover that the devastated landscape is overrun by "terminals" (mutated and cannibalistic survivors), being rescued – that is, captured – by ruthless survivalist Vinny (Maury Chakin, THE ADJUSTER) who wants only food and women. Howe makes a deal with Vinny for the food supplies from the ship in exchange for his freedom in order to get to Oregon to see if he can find his infected wife and his sister who was blinded by the blast. He double deals with Vinny's other prisoner schoolgirl J.J. (Lenore Zann, VISITING HOURS) who knows the whereabouts of a boat Howe thinks he can use to get to an area remote enough to have likely been unaffected by the nuclear fallout; however, the three of them are captured by the terminals who are being controlled by J.J.'s ex-boyfriend: charismatic schoolboy Gideon Hayes (Kevin King, IRON EAGLE) – aided by his dead father's psychotic second-in-command Lacey (Jeff Pustil, KILLER PARTY) – a military brat responsible for taking Howe's ship off-course in the hopes of using its computer systems to discover the location of a still-active survival station. When Howe and Jordan refuse to help him and J.J. rejects him, Hayes decides to put them on trial and schedule a public execution unless Howe can rally Hayes' soon-to-be-abandoned flock against him. Little do they all know that one malfunctioning warhead was not jettisoned from the ship and is counting down from sixty hours to detonation.

Arguably the lesser of a string of lower-tier New World Pictures post-apocalyptic pictures – closer in budget to HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN than STAR CRYSTAL but closer in tone to IN THE AFTERMATH (an American barebones live-action film built around footage from the Japanese anime ANGEL'S EGG) – DEF-CON 4 starts off well during the space scenes with good production values and some moving drama as the three deal with the destruction of everything familiar only for Howe to then learn via recorded message that his newborn baby was infected and disposed of, his wife is dying, and his sister has been blinded (probably the closest the film comes to more sober nuclear war films like THREADS). Once they reach Earth, it is an entirely different film: a cheap Canadian knock-off of the post-apocalyptic genre coming after so many Italian and American variations with respected character actor Chakin out-acting Choate, Zann, and Lynch in a flat role, and King effective as the sort of spindly despot that any sane person would dropkick (J.J.'s ambiguous explanation of Hayes' charismatic influence does not quite cut it). Much of the action takes place in a cliché junkyard of clapboard and corrugated metal dwellings overrun by so-called terminals whose mutations are hidden under masks. The middle of the film drags too much to make the action of the climax worth waiting for, so the film does not even really qualify as a timewaster. Nova Scotia area writer/director Paul Donovan had previously helmed the 1983 vigilante flick SELF DEFENSE which New Line did not bring to the screen until 1985 and followed up this film with the Shapiro-Glickenhaus BILL & TED knockoff NORMAN'S AWESOME EXPERIENCE, the children's film GEORGE'S ISLAND, and the more entertaining BURIED ON SUNDAY – in which a Canadian fishing village uses a nuclear warhead to declare its independence – the erotic thriller/sci-fi hybrid concoction TOMCAT: DANGEROUS DESIRES (in which Richard Grieco goes psycho after getting genetic material from a stray cat), and later moved into the country's lucrative American-looking TV shows shot in Canada industry with the sci-fi series LEXX.

Released theatrically and on home video by New World in the eighties – and briefly on laserdisc in the nineties from Image Entertainment – DEF-CON 4 continued to gather dust on the shelves even when Anchor Bay put out a barebones anamorphic DVD in 2001 and Image Entertainment slapped it onto a DVD double bill with HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN in 2011 when they had the Lakeshore catalogue. The film seemed to go unwanted during the more recent plundering of the Lakeshore catalogue by various labels for Blu-ray until last year's Region B edition from Arrow Video. No information is provided on whether it is a new scan, but it presumably is at least of recent vintage given the Arrow edition last year – and the likelihood that Image's earlier DVD utilized the same SD master as the Anchor Bay – Scorpion Releasing's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray does what it can with the source material. The opening credits – designed by GODZILLA 1985's Ernest D. Farino as part of New World's embellishments to the Canadian pickup – and the space scenes look quite clean and crisp while the Nova Scotia scenes evince some heavy grain in the darker areas of the frame and detail is sufficient to convey the gritty textures of the locations and make-up. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track sounds perfectly fine, although it is too bad New World did not remix the film in Dolby Stereo when they replaced the score. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided.