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Check Out Kevin Spacey and “Peter Five Eight” on DVD!

A dynamic real estate agent and her loafing husband drink themselves in an abusive back-and-forth most nights living in a small mountain town. When a dapper new arrival observes her comings-and-goings about the community, he confronts her out of the blue with questions about a past life she’s desperate to forget. Her dark secret remains isolated within her, even kept under wraps from her townie husband who is trying to make a change toward contributing to their relationship. As she continues to heavily drink every night away, the stranger makes every effort to interactive with her, pushing the same questions for answers a faraway adversary seeks, as well as infiltrate the social bubble of her close friends and colleagues to try and obtain more information on the state of her mental anguish. The closer he gets to her, the more she drinks, and her secrets become exposed toward a deadly end of the cat-and-mouse game he plays.

Is it poor judgement to review a new film starring a blacklisted actor? The internal struggle is real when pondering whether review consideration and shining a time-of-day spotlight on the stain considering the damage done by the main actor with sordid personal affairs made public. This is the case with “Peter Five Eight,” a modern noir comedy-thriller that casted an ousted two-time academy award winner who we’ve really haven’t seen on the screen since 2017 after sexual battery allegations arose. Yet, ever since this actor won the sexual battery lawsuit against his accuser, an attempt to recoup a career has bene placed in the slow cooker and writer-director Michael Zaiko Hall, a “Cloverfield” and “Planet Terror” visual effects artist turned director, adds another step toward a reel redemption and provides a curiosity to reviewers who like to be the devil’s advocate. The 2024 released film was shot in Mount Shasta, California and is a productionally comprised of LTD Films, Ascent Films, Forever Safe and Mad Honey Productions with Hall, John Lerchen (“Vampirus”), Chavez Fred (“Hotel Dunsmuir”), and co-star Jet Jandreau producing.

That actor mentioned above is none other than “L.A. Confidential” and “House of Cards” actor Kevin Spacey in the shoes of the titular hitman named Peter. Now it’s unclear what the “Five Eight” exactly refers to, whether to be the explicitly noted Peter 5:8 verse in the bible which reads, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour,” and that scripture is also voiced over by Spacey in film’ opening, or “Five Eight” could also refer to the Peter’s age which is noted almost inconspicuously in the dialogue when Peter is pseudo-flirting with a potential asset. Now whether that age is in reference to his incognito, hitman persona of the passage is unclear, leaving the title more ambiguous than ever, but Spacey’s part is not so terribly vague as an expensive assassin willing to do whatever his employer requires of him. Stacey’s rakish, twangy charm is quintessential to his more recent onscreen personas and the actor continues to enact it quite well even in a role that often feels more like a stage play than an homage to classic film noir as intended. There’s a bit of tongue-and-cheek in every line and action cast, and not just in Spacey’s, that slips the tone of his “Peter Five Eight” into wafting black comedy and awkwardly dispositional encounters. Michael Zaiko Hall perhaps contributes to the latter with his inability to find a way to make Stacey be suave when being suave is required, such as with his pool hall/bar dance where Stacey sings a jukebox tune with an accompanied dance on the pool table felt and imitate the actions of a trombone with a pool cue. The scene just didn’t sit right and turned what should have been a crowd-pleasing spectacle of smooth coolness into this odd lump of Stacey peacocking around in order to attract a certain someone at the bar as part of his master plan. Opposite Spacey is co-star and co-producer Jet Jandreau (“Next of Vampires”) as the alcoholic real estate agent Samantha, aka Sam, harboring a dark, past secret and her channeling of Bette Davis cadences and inflections denotes that noir tone they’re aiming for and sinks into melodramatics of the prosaic fashion, serving more of ear sore of lampoon the subgenre rather than resurrecting it out of antiquated techniques. The character is built well in Sam’s overdrinking and over-paranoia the deeper into the Peter’s story of truth extraction and inevitable cleanup. Michael Emery (“The Intrusion”), Garrett Smith (“The Gates”), Dale Dobson (“Don’t Get Eaten”), John Otrin (“Friday the 13^th: The New Blood”), and “Dawn of the Dead” remake’s “Jake Weber and “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle’s” Rebecca De Mornay play an affluent and ruthless, revenge seeker and the local real estate agent head close to Sam.

“Peter Five Eight” likes to live in between layers and forces audiences to read in between the lines on multiple surfaces. Sam’s escape to the mountains, to flee from her past’s problems, has little footing when husband Travis comes into play as Travis borders being a flake of a husband, a fellow alcoholic, who Sam shares her addiction by proxy or maybe uses as a crutch in an exploitative manner, but he becomes a throwaway character from never being fleshed out and same goes with Garrett Smith’s role as Sam’s ex-husband who enters the picture unwillingly but shows up a little too late to be of importance. We also needed more from Jake Weber’s richer-the-God Lock who hires Peter to track down and punishing Sam for her past transgressions that, we assume, tragically hurt him. Peter’s base price is a cool $50 million, and Lock even adds another $8 for Peter’s efficiency, but that egregious, astronomical figure is chased away by Lock’s mysterious career background. A cryptocurrency motif is sprinkled into the fold, mentioned here and there by various characters in various situations, and that’s perhaps Lock’s key to success but, again, never fleshes out. There was a real desire to enjoy “Peter Five Eight” and while Kevin Spacey doesn’t necessarily sully the film, and on the contrary entertains with flamboyant articulation, Hall has a hard time creating coherency with his wish-wash noir.

Though intrigued by the premise and Kevin Stacey’s resurrection out of being totally eclipsed from in front of the camera, “Peter Five Eight” arrives onto an Invincible Pictures DVD home release in what is a surprising dreary A/V folly. The MPEG2 encoded DVD5 is every much the resolution of 720p with smoothed over details and you can see the outlined splotch patches on the RGB model. Hall and director of photography Eric Liberacki (“The Pale Man”) use mostly natural lighting of the sunny mountainside community and the window-laden interiors. Night scenes are often lightly misted with a drifting fog or smoke but the weird part of this is it’s mostly in interior sets, creating that noir illusion but mostly just plays havoc on the already suffering details. No issues with aliasing or noise with the digital playback. The audio oddly enough is an English Stereo 2.0. Unsure why a surround sound mix was not in the mix, so to speak, as there’s gunplay, explosions, townsfolk chatter, car crashes, and other elements that add to the range and depth. The compressed result is a flat, muted track that has zero vitality in its audio projection, and this is also reflected in the decoding kbps that retains a constant flatline rather than a dynamic decoding based off the action. I have not seen this before on modern DVDs and was taken aback by its feebleness. English subtitles are optionally available. The only bonus feature, to which you access straight from the static menu, contains a Kevin Spacey helmed promotional featurette for the film as well as to give the audience a historical lecture on the film noir subgenre. Invincible Entertainment’s release comes not rated, with a 100-minute return, and a region 1 playback.

Last Rites: Though weird to watch a blackballed actor back on top of the horse, but the black comedy noir that is “Peter Five Eight” is not totally sullied by his name, it’s tarnished by the aphonic character development and the poor A/V basics for the home release that continue to beat the horse with a sprained ankle.

Check Out Kevin Spacey and “Peter Five Eight” on DVD!

A despondent Amy is convinced she will die tomorrow. Wanting nothing more than to be useful in her death, she wishes for her skin to be sewn into a leather jacket, much like hardwood floors are elegantly fabricated from cut down trees. When her friend Jane checks in on her once alcoholic friend to ensure that Amy hasn’t fallen off the sober wagon, she brushes off Amy’s death talk as nonsensical, ruminating verbiage, but Amy’s intense convictions of imminent death spread like a contagion, serving up paranoia, fear, and hopelessness to every ear reached. Like wild fire, the prospect of death begins to infect a chain of people directly and indirectly connected to the source, Amy, and there’s no stopping the terror that looms knowing that’ll their fate is sealed in an ill-fated predestination that is seemingly coming tomorrow.

What if you knew you were going to die tomorrow? What sensations could possibly overwhelm your rationality? Are there differences in how we react between apparent death and actual death? These are all questions posed without much elucidation in Amy Seimetz’s 2020 sophomore full-feature film directorial, “She Dies Tomorrow,” coming eight years behind the writer-director’s 2012 debut road trip thriller, “Sun Don’t Shine.” Seinmetz, who has battled Xenomorph’s in Oliver Stone’s “Alien: Covenant,” tried to escaped animal masked killers in “You’re Next,” and burdened the supernatural forces of a Native American burial ground in the remake of Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary,” has wriggled her way in front of the camera with indie and big budget thrillers in the last decade, but has also found a small, but significant, auteur niche behind the camera as well, exploring the human dynamic in an avant garde veneer that involves the very core of what affects us all – death – in what Seinmetz describes it’s spread as an “ideological contagion” and how processing our determined for us death date can morbidly spill into what little life is left. “She Dies Tomorrow” is majorly self-funded project by Seinmetz, whose quoted that “Pet Sematary” paid for the film in full, and it gave the filmmaker nearly total autonomy in stylizing her vision of a dry, dark comedy with science fiction and horror elements that bridge the reality and fantasy gulf. Also, Rustic Film’s Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson also serve as producer. Moorhead and Benson, two filmmakers who I admire quite a lot, have proven to invest and create new and fresh otherworldly features, such as “The Endless” and “After Midnight.”

Returning to collaborate with Seinmetz is the director’s lead star from “Sun Don’t Shine,” Kate Lyn Sheil, portraying “She Dies Tomorrow’s” first despaired, Amy. The New Jersey born actress has built a career working with Seinmetz, co-starring alongside her in such as “You’re Next” and in television with “The Girlfriend Experience,” the latter being co-created by Seimetz, but Sheil has also established a wealthy career on her outside the Seinmetz bubble, landing a reoccurring role on the Kevin Spacey turmoiled Nextflix series, “House of Cards” and staying steadily busy with filmic roles over the last five years that has been continues even into the new decade. As Amy, Sheil decompresses Amy’s gloom upon the world in a manner of a stumbling, lost soul trying to find ways of being useful after death. Amy’s alcoholic issues are relatively on the backbunner, adding past strife to her character, but not really the centric focus of Amy’s communicable mellow anxiety. Each of the infected express their contract in a multitude of different ways. “Poltergeist” remake’s Jane Adams engrosses Jane’s fear around how she’ll die that then spreads to her on-screen brother, Chris Messina (“Birds of Prey”) and his snarky wife, Katie Aselton (“Black Rock”) who process as a natural parental fear and duty to comfort and control what they conceive as the inevitable. As the spate of infections increase, the fear lineage evokes honesty, regrets, sympathy, acceptance, and wonder from the support cast that includes Josh Lucas (“Session 9), Michelle Rodriguez (“Resident Evil”), Adam Wingard (director of “The Guest” and “You’re Next”), Jennifer Kim, Tunde Adebimpe, Olivia Taylor Dudley (“Dude Bro Party Massacre III”), Kentucker Audley (“V/H/S”), and Madison Calderon.

“She Dies Tomorrow” cultivates responses to the spreading of the ideological contagion rather than express just exactly how these people will die. Are they so sure they’ll die tomorrow to the point of inflicting self-harm? The story never really takes it that far to exhibit where the individuals, riddled with anxiety, their mortal status will land, whether it’s gratuitous gruesome or just nature taking course. Seinmetz makes light their becoming stricken with dying. While I mean in a more dry humor context, I also literally mean the filmmaker makes light, like the luminescence emitting from a rainbow firefly, glow upon characters’ faces inside Jay Keitel’s cinematography when death strikes their senses like an epiphany. The grim future washes away everything in their past, a key point of obsession honed in by the filmmaker that platforms the short span till death overshadows much, if not all, of our past achievements in life. The obsession is so strong and overwhelming that you, yourself, will start thinking about your own demise, whether it’ll be tomorrow or another 50 years from now, to which then sympathy for each of these characters will begin to set in and remain until the credits roll. “She Dies Tomorrow” seethes as a colorfully cosmic thanatophobia amplified by the current pandemic climate and common death anxiety, furthering Amy Seinmetz’s growth as a gifted filmmaker.

Neon presents the distribution of Amy Seinmetz’s “She Dies Tomorrow,” coming to drive-in theaters on July 31st and landing on video on demand the following week, August 7th. Since this was a digital screener of an upcoming move, there are no home video specifications to review, but Jay Keitel’s scenes are softly lit, down to Earth, and turn ethereal during the flashing of lights. The score by the composing duo, Mondo Boys, reteams Seinmetz with the soft, haunting melodies that can invoke a classical sadness and presage inside princely compositions that included interweaving Mozart’s Requiem into the mix. There were no bonus features included with this screener nor were there any bonus scenes during or after the credits. “She Dies Tomorrow” is a well-crafted, well-timed harrowing allegory on the psychological properties of coping in the face of death.