THE DEAD DON'T DIE (2019) (Blu-ray Review)

THE DEAD DON'T DIE (2019) 

Label: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment

Region Code: A

Rating: R

Duration: 104 Minutes 

Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1, English Dolby Digital 2.0, Latin American Spanish DTS Digital Surround 5.1 with Optional english Subtitles 

Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.78:1) 

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Selena Gomez and Tom Waits

Anyone coming into The Dead Don't Die (2019) expecting a standard issue zom-com is in for a sad bit of disappointment I'm afraid, but for fans of Jim Jarmusch's deadpan comedies filtered through the Romero-verse of the undead this is amusing stuff in my opinion. Opening in the rural village of 

Centerville we have Chief of Police Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray, Ghostbusters) and Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver, BlacKkKlansman) driving through the local cemetery seeking the local eccentric Hermit Bob (singer/songwriter Tom Waits, Mystery Men) who keeps an off-the-grid encampment in the nearby woods. Hermit Bob is suspected of stealing chickens from a local farmer, the MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi, The Big Lebowski), who steals the show here. How the chief handles this encounter, even after the hermit fires a gun in his direction, is very low-key, establishing the idiosyncratic ways of this film and it's characters and how they will handle the soon-to-bee zombie apocalypse. 

We get lots of small town characters, we have nice guy Hank (Danny Glover, Predator 2), a local comic shop proprietor Bobby (Caleb Landry Jones, Welcome the Stranger), Chloë Sevigny (Gummo) as a female deputy, indie-stalwart Larry Fessenden (Habit) as a pet-friendly motel manager, and pop-singer Selena Gomez as a hipster travelling through town with a couple of friends. Most bizarrely of all is Tilda Swinton (Orlando) as an oddball Scottish undertaker who runs the local mortuary, with an interests in both Buddhism, swordplay and alien encounters.

The zombie origins come by way of large scale shale oil fracking that has seemingly caused their Earth to spin of it's axis in addition to some strange lunar vibes, with the undead rising from their graves and causing some carnage around town. Things start off small with a pair of unfortunate waitresses at the local diner being torn apart by some coffee drinking zombies, these initial undead are played by Sarah Driver (Stranger Than Paradise) and proto-punk rocker Iggy Pop (Coffee & Cigarettes). The zombie designs 5look very Romero-esque, but with a bit of a twist when, film's protagonists decapitate the undead instead of gore we get wisps of black smoke, which I thought was a cool but unfortunately gore-sapping invention. The film is really light on the bloodier aspects of a zombie film, choosing instead to lean heavy on deadpan humor. 

The comedy is off-kilter which is not unusual for director Jarmusch, there's a strange breaking of the fourth wall with the characters referencing the film their in and it's director, plus we get recurring motifs like the omnipresent title song "The Dead Don't Die" by country singer Sturgill Simpson, and lines of repeated dialogue like Officer Peterson constantly saying "this isn't going to end well", and indeed it doesn't,  along with the various characters commenting on the same horrific scene by saying "What the heck was it, a wild animal? Several wild animals?". It's not laugh out loud funny as comedies go but I did find it quite amusing, which is about my summation of the film as whole, not a great zombie film but an amusing excursion into the undead with Jarmusch in the driver's seat, helped along by a fun cast who deliver offbeat and deadpan humor throughout.  

Audio/Video: The Dead Don't Die arrives on Blu-ray+DVD Combo from Universal in 1080p HD Widescreen framed in 1.78:1 widescreen. The digitally shot film looks strong on Blu-ray, everything is crisp, nicely detailed and with good looking color reproduction and saturation. Audio comes by way of an English DTS-HD MA 5.1 with optional English subtitles. It's a solid mix with some nice atmospheric use of the surrounds throughout.

Extras are rather slim for this one, just three very brief featurettes that really don't add up to much, though we do get a Movie Anywhere digital copy of the film. The single disc release comes housed in a standard Blu-ray keecase with a one-sided sleeve of artwork featuring the original movie poster design. The accompanying

slipcover features the same artwork with embossed lettering and features on both the spine and front cover, which is cool. 

Special Features:

- Bill Murray: Zombie Hunting Action Star – Bill Murray discusses his fear of being typecast as an action hero (1 min) 

- Behind-the-Scenes of The Dead Don’t Die – A collection of behind the scenes moments from the set of The Dead Don’t Die (3 min) 

- Stick Together –  Jim Jarmusch’s frequent collaborators talk about his filmmaking style, and what makes The Dead Don’t Die stand out from other zombie films (5 min) 

The Dead Don't Die (2019) is a bit of a letdown if you're looking for a straight-up undead film and what that usually entails, but if you dig Jarmusch's deadpan-style comedies there's a lot here to love with it being wrapped in the trappings of a Romero-style undead film, that if not absolutely funny I at least found very amusing. 

ANTIBIRTH (2016) (IFC Midnight Blu-ray Review)

ANTIBIRTH (2016)

Label: Scream Factory / IFC Midnight 
Release Date: February 7th 2017 
Region Code: A/1
Duration: 95 Minutes
Audio: English DTS-HD MA Surround 5.1 with Optional English SDH Subtitles, Dolby Digital 2.0, Dolby Digital 5.1 
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.85:1) 
Director: Danny Perez 
Cast: Chloë Sevigny, Mark Webber, Meg Tilly, Natasha Lyonne

Antibirth (2016) is a movie dripping with drug addled imagery and loaded with a mind-fuck amount of sci-fi weirdness and visceral pregnancy paranoia. At the heart of the movie we have the thirty-something party girl Lou (Natasha Lyonne, American Pie), a scuzzy sort of woman who seems to live only to drink, rip bong hits, and do whatever drug she can find, anything to numb her to the reality of her grungy low-life existence. Her best friend Sadie (Chloë Sevigny, Gummo) is slightly more put together, and while she also enjoys the party lifestyle she does attempt to keep her wayward friend in line to a degree, but she has her own issues, such as her drug peddling/whore pimping boyfriend Gabriel (Mark Webber, Green Room)who will do just about anything for a buck. 

The movie opens at a party, The Gories lo-fi rocker "Feral" is blasting and Lou is already wasted. She blacks out during the rager and it seems something sinister happened to her during this lost time. The next day she feels green around the gills, and all signs point to a possible pregnancy. However, Lou insists she hasn't been laid in months, and with the threat of a pregnancy looming Lou steps up her smoking, drink and drug routine, seemingly trying to make her womb as unfriendly as possible to any sort of would-be life that might be manifesting down there. Lyonne as Lou is wonderful, while not a likable person she is funny in a caustic sort of way, it worked for me. She the sort of friend that probably stinks like chain-smoking hobo, a hard-living dirty woman, the sort of woman who would maybe offer to give you a blow job if you would just go to the pharmacy and buy her a pregnancy kit, which is an offer you would definitely refuse, she is a gross person, but entertaining enough that she might be fun to hang around with.  

As the movie rolls along as Lou drinks, snacks on 7-11 munchies, vomits and generally just gets fucked up, she's always got a smoke between her lips and a bottle of booze at her fingertips. She begins to show signs of an abnormally an swollen stomach, indicating the feared pregnancy, but there's nothing natural about this one, her body begins to change in some seriously Cronenberg-ian ways, replete with gooey blisters and veiny weirdness. The whole movie has a certain trashy aesthetic, imagine Harmony Korine (Gummo)channeling David Lynch (Eraserhead) through the white-trash filter of Rob Zombie (Lords of Salem), with a lots of strobe-light effects, hallucinatory nightmares and seizure inducing editing. Director Danny Perez is a visual guy, I like his style, which is good, because this movie is about ninety-percent style and ten-percent substance, but I can dig it. 

Meg Tilly (Psycho II) shows up as a disheveled nut-job named Lorna who seeks out the increasingly swollen Lou. Lorna may or may not know what's happening to the young woman, but she sort of seems to be there for a gore-gag towards the end of the movie,  with her character receiving an unpleasant vaginal blood-blast to the face from Lou, so it's got that going for it. It's a small role, but Tilly is always a welcome addition, and she does what she can with the material. 

Speaking of the cast, they're all very good. Lyonne, Sevigny,and Webber elevate the lackluster material, which is sort of dumb to be honest. The movie belongs to Lyonne though, she nails it, her drug-addled antics are reason enough to watch this movie.

Antibirth is light on substance I dig the wild visuals and lo-fi hallucinatory trip of the whole thing. Sure, it's 94-minutes of arthouse mindfuckery, but if the thought of bloody miscarriages in toilets, mangled-lipped pee freaks, drug-culture weirdness and seizure inducing funhouse visuals sound like a good time then Antibirth is definitely worth a watch. 

Audio/Video: Antibirth (2016) arrives on Blu-ray/DVD combo from the joint forces of Scream Factory and IFC Midnight looking vibrant, like a Rob Zombie version of a funhouse apocalypse, with loads of deeply saturated colors, the whole affair is very crisp, vibrant and sharp. Audio options on the Blu-ray include both DTS-HD MA Stereo 2.0 and Surround 5.1, with optional English SDH subtitles. The surround is nicely mixed and features some cool atmospheric use of the surrounds, the lo-fi garage rock score featuring The Gories, Suicide, and Dead Moon among others, sounds terrific. 

Extras are a bit on the thin side, but on par with the other scream Factory/IFC Midnight releases. We get 3 minutes of the psychedelic shorts that are featured in the film, 10 minutes of storyboards and the trailer for the film, plus the usual Scream Factory /IFC Midnight trailer reel as the disc starts up. Packaging wise we get the standard blu-ray keepcase, a sleeve of reversible artwork, and the DVD and Blu-ray discs feature the two art options as well. 

Special Features:
- Psychedelic Shorts (3 min) HD 
- Storyboards (10 min) HD 
- Theatrical Trailer (2 min) HD 

Antibirth (2016) is a fun WTF movie, a caustic mash-up of conspiratorial sci-fi weirdness and depraved thirty something dirty livin'. It's an acquired taste, and that taste is along the lines of cinematic ashtrays and vomit, so bring a breath mint and dig into this vile slice of WTF-ery. Looking forward to what comes next from director Danny Perez, I love his style, and would like to see how that mixes with something with a bit more substance next time around. 3/5

#HORROR (2015) (Blu-ray Review)

#HORROR (2015)

Label: Scream Factory I IFC Midnight

Release Date: April 5th 2016

Region Code: A

Duration: 98 Minutes

Rating: Unrated

Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1 with Optional English Subtitles

Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.40:1)

Director:Tara Subkoff

Cast: Chloë Sevigny, Emma Adler, Haley Murphy, Lydia Hearst, Annabelle Dexter-Jones,Balthazar Getty, Blue Lindeberg, Bridget McGarry, Mina Sundwall, Natasha Lyonne, Sadie Seelert, Stella Schnabel, Taryn Manning, Timothy Hutton

Synopsis: You've got followers… cyberbullying goes offline. #Horror follows a group of pre-teen girls living in a suburban world of money and privilege. But when their obsession with a disturbing online game goes too far, virtual terror becomes all too real. Chloë Sevigny (American Horror Story, American Psycho) leads an ensemble cast that includes Timothy Hutton (American Crime, The Dark Half) and Orange Is The New Black's Natasha Lyonne and Taryn Manning. This chiller, inspired by a shocking true story, is written and directed by actress/designer Tara Subkoff (The Cell, The Last Days Of Disco).

#Horror seems to be trying to tackle the very real issue of cyber bullying among the pre-teen crowd through the use of social media framed within the context of a slasher movie. We have a group of six awful adolescent girls who gather inside the pimped out glass mansion home of one of their own, they play dress-up, adorn themselves with costume jewelry, drink straight Vodka and hurl insults at one another from start to finish. All the while they snap pics on their iPhones of each other and post them on some strange mean-spirited social media site, tagging the images with hurtful things like #fatuglybitches. At first these are played off as innocuous cattiness among friends, but before long the insults begin to cut deep and young girls start crying and then dying, each of the bland murders are posted and live streamed to the same social media site garnering the much coveted likes and shares. 

I found the whole thing a bit ugly and confusing mess of a movie, the screen is lit up with annoying emoji and #tags, and the young girls are the worst sort of over privileged snots you can imagine, and hope your kids never turn into to. About the only character building is when the girls share parenting and period horror stories with each other for about a minute, and when they start dying you cannot help but sort of cheer the unidentified killer on, the world is a truly better place without them. 

And what of these young girls parents, what is their role in all this, you may be wondering. We have Chloe Sevigny and Timothy Hutton slumming it as parents of separate children, but with some sexual link between the two, and both are as annoying as their offspring. They play it over-the-top, chewing up the scenery in a fun sort of way, which I must admit I did not loathe. 

The actresses do maybe a bit too good of a job portraying bitchy pre-teen, they're full of sarcasm and hurtful insults for each other, though I cannot fault their performances, just the dire script and narrative stricture of the movie which is a hot seizure inducing mess of poor editing. Along the way we are fed details about the former owner of the glass mansion, a nutty artisan who murdered a house full of party guests back in the '60s, but whom has since disappeared, which would seem to inform the slasher element of the movie, but don't get your hopes up, by the time you figure out what the heck is happening and who the killer is you will have long since stopped carrying. On the other hand my fifteen year old daughter who enjoys horror told me it was meant for teens, not old guys, haha. 2/5