Let's have a look at the good news first. For starters, the film is presented in its original 2.35:1 cinematic aspect ratio using a 1080p/24 transfer, so there's nothing to moan about concerning its basic 'spec'. For the most part it's also crisper and more detailed than any DVD version, especially where bright, studio shots are concerned.

Without doubt its greatest strength, though is the depth and naturalism of its black levels. Most of the film takes place at night in dark and dingy rooms and streets, which have tended to be plagued on the DVD versions by greyness and MPEG-style noise. But while the near-perpetual darkness of the film is certainly not rendered perfect here, it's easily better than it's ever looked before outside of a proper cinema, combining extreme black level depth - provided your projector or TV is up to the job of showing this - with an almost complete absence of dotting, blocking or colour noise.

Shame, then, that the rest of the picture isn't nearly so free of video noise. Numerous scenes are plagued by constant, sometimes really quite aggressive dot crawl, while many skin tones and background walls are also beset by colour noise that finds dots of the wrong colour tone information popping up all over the place.

A particularly nasty example of the sort of noise issues we're talking about can be seen in the Chock Full O' Nuts store, where Plissken meets a girl who is promptly pulled through the floor by a bunch of scavenging mentalists. The video noise here is so overt that we pretty much had to force ourselves to concentrate on the dialogue rather than looking at the mess.

It may be possible to put some of this noise to the problems of filming on a tight budget in dark areas. But we have no doubt that the poor quality of the transfer is playing a big part too.

The sometimes extreme noise is by any means the disc's only problem, either. Some motion-packed scenes suffer with blurring too, making our excellent JVC HD1 projector suddenly look like it's turned into an average LCD TV. And some of the edges in the film are ridiculously overstressed, looking as if someone has taken a white pencil and drawn a slightly pixellated light line around everything.

We also found some of the colour tones rather odd, particularly the slightly green caste to sin tones that pervades much of the film, and regularly found ourselves distracted by the image dropping out of focus at its top and bottom edges.

We've seen this latter phenomenon before with 2.35:1 transfers - Blood Diamond immediately springs to mind - and have seen suggestions that it's an inevitable side effect of shooting with very wide anamorphic (in this case Panamorphic) lenses. But we're pretty sure we've never seen such edge softness when watching a 2.35:1 film at the cinema, and also have seen plenty of other 2.35:1 Blu-rays and DVDs where such edge focus problems are nowhere to be seen, so we're not sure it's quite as simple as saying that Blu-ray's HD nature is merely highlighting an issue with the original film.

One final issue we have with this Blu-ray is that there are moments where the transfer picks up some pretty obvious scoring marks in the master print. They're not really horribly distracting, but they are enough to confirm the feeling raised by most other aspects of the transfer that it hasn't been remastered for its Blu-ray jaunt in any significant way.

This is probably a sensible time to point out that we are fully aware that Escape From New York was made with a pretty low budget (considering what it had to achieve), in tricky lighting conditions, 27 years ago. So we know it's not realistic to expect miracles from the Blu-ray transfer. But while the occasional studio-based scene looks absolutely great, some things about the transfer definitely smack of laziness on Warners' part. So rather than feeling all cuddly and grateful that Warners has managed to deliver a version of Escape From New York that's superior to the DVD one, we're more inclined to feel a tad annoyed that we haven't got something nearer to the sort of supreme standards - even with old films - that we know Blu-ray is capable of delivering.

Before you get too excited by the DTS-HD Master Audio track, though, we should say that the relatively low quality of the source material's original audio track means that there really isn't much - if any - significant difference between the quality of the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix and the DTS-HD Master Audio mix. But hey, it's the thought that counts, right?

Where the new 5.1-channel mix really comes into its own is with John Carpenter's self-penned classic 1980's synth soundtrack. This drifts around the soundstage quite expertly - almost as if it was written for five channels rather than two.

There are one or two moments of surprisingly well realised geographical effects too; for instance, as the helicopters patrol the waters around Manhattan there engines enjoy some effective front to back and side to side transitions.

For all Warners' efforts, though, the brittleness of the original audio inevitably shines through from time to time. During the scene where Snake fights the big fat dude with the dodgy 'tache, for instance, the crowd noise sounds at times (especially in the rear channel) like it was made by just rustling a few newspapers together. And the sound of the combatants clubs as they hit each other is more like a half-hearted tap than a gut-wrenching thud.

There's also no disguising the way voices can sound rather thin and sometimes even a little unclear, especially when they appear together with the much cleaner, more successfully remixed musical score.

But while Escape From New York on Blu-ray is hardly speaker demo material, we're inclined to cut it some decent slack on account of the source film's age. With the rider that while we do genuinely appreciate the digital surround sound remix efforts, we would also have appreciated the disc carrying at least the option of listening to the original Dolby Stereo mix.

To be fair, none of these missing features is particularly exciting. But that doesn't alter the fact that they should definitely have found their way onto the Blu-ray release.

The features we are granted are dominated in grandstanding fashion by a fact-packed but also often humorous commentary track by Carpenter and Russell. Solid support then comes from a decent retrospective documentary, and an interesting extended opening scene Carpenter eventually decided to cut from the finished film.

Here's the full list of goodies:
1. Feature-length commentary track by Kurt Russell and John Carpenter
2. Return to New York retrospective documentary
3. Three trailers
4. Exclusive interview with John Carpenter.
5. Extended deleted scene showing the crime Plissken is sent to prison for.

For a review of every feature on the disc, click here.

The pop up menus are rather less inspiring, though; you just get straightforward text options except for the scene selection menu, which provides small stills to illustrate the paltry set of 'leap points' the disc provides.

Overall, then, we guess the Escape From New York Blu-ray does enough to justify its existence. But it's hard not to feel a little frustrated that the disc's producers haven't really lavished the mastering attention on the film that its cult status surely merits.