Movie Night Custom is an odd DVD, one that seems to have set foot on a fairly untrodden path for DVD features. It's not a movie: it's a... well, it's a "flavor" package for home theater, for lack of a better way to put it. Movie Night Custom attempts to provide the little frills that traditionally go with the movie theater experience (like concession stand ads and movie trivia) for the DVD home theater.

It's tough to give a general idea of what Movie Night Custom is about, so let's go ahead and see the details. When you pop it in the player, it starts up automatically with a ten-minute introduction: a virtual walkthrough a computer-generated movie theater (with very clunky graphics), animated suggestions to buy popcorn and cold drinks, a reminder to turn off your cell phone, and then a set of movie-themed trivia questions for you to amuse yourself with while you're waiting for the feature presentation. Meanwhile, a digital display counts down from ten minutes to zero.

The introductory piece is pretty much passive entertainment; the only interactivity possible is to skip ahead with the "skip" button to go more rapidly through the trivia questions and answers. For more features, we need to go to the main menu.

The trivia section has a number of themed sections: some are fairly general, dealing with horror films, science fiction, drama, and comedy, while we also get specific trivia sets on  Star Trek and Marty McFly. Choose one, and you start a sequence of trivia questions in which you select your answer with the remote. Get it right, and you move on to the next question. Get it wrong, and you get a "Try Again!" screen... and you get bounced back to the trivia menu again. Then you have to start your series of trivia questions all over again, from the start, with the same questions in the same order. I got sick of seeing the same Star Trek questions again and again just because I didn't remember which starship was eaten by a single-celled organism... (I did remember what the T stands for in James T. Kirk, and the main element in Vulcan blood, so I haven't forfeited my Trekkie credentials.)

Another main section gives us a set of short Dolby Digital trailers: these short CGI pieces are just demonstrations of Dolby surround sound, with some adequate CGI settings or themes, like a deserted temple, rain falling, a desert canyon, or a helicopter flying through a nighttime city.

Lastly, Movie Night Custom offers a set of audio/video calibration options: color bars, Pluge test, resolution test pattern, overscan test, grayscale test, and an audio test. This is probably the weakest part of the DVD in comparison to other options available: there's no explanation of how to use the different tests, either on the DVD or in an insert, and the tests themselves are not anywhere near as good as the Avia Home Theater test DVD offers. The audio test in particular is fairly useless; many receivers have a built-in test option that's better than what's provided here.

How could Movie Night Custom have been more of a success? Well, let's think about when you'd want to play it. One way that's hinted at but really not lived up to is the DVD's potential as a show-off demo disc. It would be great to have a DVD with some mind-blowing demo clips to demonstrate your great home theater setup before starting the actual movie. Unfortunately, the graphics and sound of Movie Night Custom are just not good enough to serve as any sort of interesting demo. The closest we get is in the Dolby trailers, and these are not even all that impressive.

I can also see it as a fairly fun way to start off a group movie night, with its introductory segment and its trivia questions, but it needs more polish in that area, or maybe just more personality. How about having the soundtrack really reproduce being in a theater... with people talking around you ("Mommy... I want some candy..."), crunching popcorn, slurping drinks, and so on? As a minimum, it at least needs music during the trivia questions!

The DVD

Movie Night Custom is a DVD-R, which means that it may not play on all DVD players, particularly older ones. The web site order form is quite clear that it's a DVD-R, requiring you to click a box to say that you understand that before ordering, and providing a list of DVD-R compatible DVD players.

Video

How does one evaluate a feature like Movie Night Custom for video quality? It's tough, given that there's not a whole lot of "traditional" video footage to look at.

All of the material is presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1), which is nice. As far as the transfer quality taken by itself goes, it's fine: the image is clean, with bright colors and no discernable noise or print flaws. For the overall "video" rating, though, I'll consider it in a slightly broader sense. The introductory clip and the menu are entirely made up of rather lackluster 3D computer graphics: they're basic, blocky shapes that look like they've come straight out of any old virtual walkthrough program... and certainly not the most up-to-date one, either. The color scheme and general artistic design is nothing to write home about, either, so the CGI doesn't manage to transcend its chunky ordinariness.

Audio

Movie Night Custom gives viewers the option of a Dolby 5.1 or a DTS soundtrack, but there really isn't that much to listen to. The introductory clip is really the only time that the sound system is used extensively, and at this point it's entirely center-focused: there's no use of the side channels at all, in either 5.1 or DTS. The trivia portions are rather disappointingly presented in silence, with no music in the background; and the sound effect for "try again!" (wrong answer) is entirely hit-and-miss.

The best-sounding parts of the soundtrack are the Dolby Digital trailers, which provide a nice workout of the surround channels, though it's nothing exceptional.

Extras

I don't really consider any of the content to be "bonus" material, since it all seems to be part of the main package, so I'll restrict myself to talking about the presentation here. The "main feature" (the introductory segment) launches automatically upon putting the disc in, which makes sense if the disc is considered a warm-up for your main feature. Navigating among the menus is easy, with straightforward menu choices, except for the annoying bump to the menu that occurs if you get a wrong answer in the trivia section.

The one real "special feature" for Movie Night Custom is that when you order it from Cinemawise.com, you get to specify the custom text that appears in the logo at the very beginning of the introduction. You get to choose the type of logo (movie ticket, clapper, letters in space, and "Beverly Hills" lettering, which is just gold letters on a striped green background), your "custom text," and "custom text format" (Theater, Home Theater, Screening Room, Family Theater, and Cinema). For instance, I might choose mine to read "Holly E. Ordway's Home Theater" on a movie ticket. The web site notes that you can also make special requests (on a blank that they provide on the order form) if none of the options suit you, and that they'll contact you if your choice is too long to fit nicely on the image you've chosen.

You also get to specify the default audio (Dolby 5.1 or DTS) when you order. I have to say, the customization is kind of neat, but it would have been nicer if the personalization had been worked into more aspects of the presentation than just the brief logo at the beginning.

Final thoughts

Movie Night Custom is a strange little production, one that dips its toes into a potentially interesting DVD area but doesn't really dive in. I have to admit, there's potential for it being a fun disc to have on hand, particularly for viewers with multi-disc changers where it would be a snap to start up Movie Night for a few minutes before starting the movie. As it is, though, it doesn't live up to its promise, so it's more of a curiosity than anything else. Trivia buffs may find it worth picking up for its set of about 100 movie trivia questions. More than anything else, it suggests the potential for a fairly cool DVD, without actually being that DVD; maybe sometime we'll see another iteration with more substance.