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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 gruesome murder has brought a looming shadow over a high school. However, the shadow is not great enough to thwart the spirits of a group of thespian high school seniors in the throes of their last Shakespearian performances of the year of Romeo and Juliet. Determined to excel, the peer admired Taylor Wilson keeps her college acceptance hopes high on her well-received nightly performances as Juliet, but when a terrible secret involving Taylor begins to circulate through the school body, friendship and enemy ties begin become taut with tension. Simultaneously, those with knowledge of Taylor’s secret are being killed off one-by-one by a deranged killer in a black, long nose masquerade mask.

“The Lurker” is a 2019 American slasher film from the first attempt at horror-director Eric Liberacki, whose legs have been grounded in short film cinematography work over the past 2010 decade with “The Pale Man” being his sole feature length credit. Liberacki’s sophomore directorial is written by the “The Pale Man” screenwriter and short film director, John Lerchen, who’s scribes the slasher version of HBO’s “Big Little Lies” starring hormone-driven and backstabbing high school seniors on a thespian high. “The Lurker” re-imagines the high school dramatics to further dig into taboo subtexts worthy of a Jerry Springer talk show episode and interweaves a non-linear narrative, filled with flashback mystery, due suspicion, and the utmost desire to know what secret Taylor Wilson is being exploited against her preservability. “The Lurker” is a joint venture between John Lerchen’s production company, Forever Safe Productions, and Silva Shots.

One thing, right off the bat, that heedlessly seems erroneous for the story is casting Scout Taylor-Compton in the lead role of Taylor Wilson. And here’s why. From 2007 to 2019, the now 30-year-old actress has played a high school student in Rob Zombie’s remake of “Halloween” and in “The Lurker.” While Taylor-Compton is a natural beauty who seemingly defies all physics of aging and her performance is solid, the once Laurie Strode portraying actress from Long Beach, California emits a now mature glow in life and rehashing another character in a high school slasher is ultimately beneath and behind her. Aside from her counterpart co-star Michael Emery being roughly the same age, the rest of Taylor Wilson’s entourage are in their internship-status, post-college years of the early 20s, including Kali Skatchke, Casey Tutton, Isabel Thompson, Emmaline Skillicorn, and Marissa Banker. Juxtaposing against a young cast, as a sort of out with the old and in with new or to brighten with short strands of genre highlights, is the minor roles and cameos of recognizable faces and film royalty, such as Ari Lehman (“Friday the 13th), Naomi Grossman (“American Horror Story: Asylum”), and, most surprisingly, Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, the daughter of Martin Scorsese, playing Taylor’s mother. The cast rounds out with Charles Johnston, Rikki Lee Travolta, Eddie Huchro, Bruce Spielbauer, Roy Rainey, Josh Morris, and Walter S. Bernard.

“The Lurker” has textbook aspects going for it in the case of an above par production value of fancy editing and set locations, a cache of young and seasoned talented actors, and a story with a twist ending, but that nagging itch gnawing from the back of my skull, slowly inching one molecule at a time, toward the core of my brain informs me that the Liberacki’s slasher misses the intended mark if only by a fingertip attached to a severed pinky. The story tries to sell an alternate version of itself that becomes inane from predictability at the very starting gate and continues trucking an exemplum despite giving away too much, too early. Surrounding the conundrum of calamity building to the potential proverb of shit hitting the fan is a paradigmatic slasher flick with a masked killer murdering toward the technique of a final girl narrative. Yet, “The Lurker’s” kills weren’t terribly flashy and were really met with an uninspired creativity to assist in drawing and sustaining captivation of a ruthless assailant over an abundance the teenage melodramatics, which essentially ran amok. We really shouldn’t have been surprised at the narrative’s untroubled tone because the first kill in the opening scene was inside the school and the school was open the very next day; in today’s day and age, school would have been closed for the rest of the week, if not the rest of the academic year, for bereavement and investigation.

Come down with a serious case of stage fright with “The Lurker” coming to DVD home video and now out on various digital platforms, including renting and buying options on Amazon, distributed by Indican Pictures. The visual and audio review portion for this release will not be covered since a screener copy was provided; however, the DVD will be presented in the original widescreen presentation of an aspect ratio of 2.39:1. With a check disc, there were also no bonus material to review as well as no bonus material before the credits and before or after the credits. John Lerchen and Eric Liberacki’s first crack at full length horror is a win in my book with a complex web streamed of lies, deceits, and snuff, but, with a little fine tuning, “The Lurker” could have sheered to a bigger, better 80 minutes.