EVIL Comes to Town to Extract Your Deadly, Dark Secret. “Peter Five Eight” reviewed! (Invincible Entertainment / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on October 1, 2024

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 War Criminal’s Evil Influence. “Apt Pupil” review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on March 12, 2019

Next time you suspect your neighbor is a wanted criminal, they just might very well be as in the case of Todd Bowden, an excelling high student who discovers a WWII Nazi war criminal has been secretly living in his quaint hometown. Through his own investigation of photograph comparisons and retrieval of finger prints, Bowden confronts the old man, Kurt Dussander, about his notorious past. Living under a pseudonym and wanted by the Israeli government, Dussander attempts to dismiss the boy’s claims until his bluff to call the police is called, resulting in Bowden’s curiosity to become a blackmail gambit that puts Dussander under the student’s quizzical thumb. In return for not informing the authorities, Bowden requires Dussuander to reveal his story, the story of his stint at the extermination camps without sparing any details no matter how gruesome. Bowden even goes as far as purchasing a replica SS officer uniform that he forcibly commands Dussander to put on and march. Through his reminiscing of the past, an evil reawakens in Dussander and their banal friendship of psychological warfare goes into the dangerous trenches of survival and eradication that spreads like a cancer inside and outside their private lives.

Before the monumental eruption of continuous claims of sexual misconduct by various accusers, Bryan Singer furnished significant prominence as a director and overall filmmaker before he inadvertently kick started a very long, very successful, and very lucrative series of superhero films and their related and unrelated sequels and spinoffs, starting with Marvel’s “X-Men” in 2000…19 years ago, Holy sh*t! Well, in 1998, coming off his success of “The Usual Suspects” with fellow accused celebrity and now blacklisted actor Kevin Spacey and currently untarnished Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, Singer and Phoenix Pictures presented and released the suspense-thriller, “Apt Pupil,” a Bad Hat Harry production. Inspired by the Stephen King novella, “Apt Pupil” is the polarizing observation of two evil souls where one might be significantly eclipsing the other. Brandon Boyced (2005’s “Venom”) drafted a script based of King’s novella that was comprised of a different, and less pessimistic, ending to the novella while still uncompromising King’s baseline evil theme.

High school students, especially males, often have an aggressive temperament. Whether it’s sports, girls, or just trying to fit in, guys almost always take their tunneled focus to the extreme. For Todd Bowden, a brilliant young student, a fascination with the grim extermination of Jewish people and the Nazi culture tickled his fancy. Brad Renfro, only 14-years-old at the time of filming, stars as Bowden and really digs into the character’s adolescent psyche of relentless obsession, having his character converging all power from a big time war criminal and, even more simplistically, an older adult male, to himself, but when things go sour and Bowden starts to lose grip of his pawn, panic sets in and Kurt Dussander’s wicked and warped mind structures a counterattack that seemingly befriends the boy, but really demonizes Bowden’s already appalling obsession. Sir Ian McKellen, in a performance of pure brilliance, masterfully crafts a representative of evil in Kurt Dussander. The scene with McKellen stepping into a SS officer uniform and then marching with prerogative purpose that’s topped with a Nazi salute is perhaps one of the best chilling and unsettling performances of our lifetime. The dynamic in the scene between Renfro and McKellen, carefully shot and executed in direction by Singer, respects the bleak humanity enthralled by Stephen’s King body of literary work. There are some other amazing performances here by the supporting cast including David Schwimmer (“Friends”), Bruce Davison (“Willard”), Ann Dowd (“Hereditary”), Joshua Jackson (“Urban Legend”), Elias Koteas (“The Prophecy”), James Karen (“The Return of the Living Dead”) and Heather McComb (“Stay Tuned”).

As aforementioned, “Apt Pupil” has an evil duality narrative that contain descriptive horrors of the past, paints the means of callous obsession, and symbiotic necrosis of any good left in Todd Bowden or Kurt Dussander when together, but on the surface level, Kurt Dussander’s murderous duty to the cultural cleanse severely overshadows Bowden’s seemingly curious obsession, his blackmail of a notorious war criminal, his deception amongst those close to him, and, the inevitable, stony perception to murder. More than likely innocence could be blamed for the fact that Bowden is a child and Dussander’s a man living the last moments of his life, but Bowden becomes the catalyst for Dussander, reigniting the evil thoughts and actions of SS officer’s former life. Dussander attempts many degenerate actions from his past and never successfully succeeds in completing them whereas Todd ultimately finishes it either for Dussander, willing or not, or for his own self-preservation. By the end of “Apt Pupil,” the question you might ask yourself is how do you feel about either character? Despite the scale of their evils, which character ultimately, in the scope of Singer’s film from beginning to end, is the true representation of evil? To me, the finale feels like Dussander inadvertently passes the torch to Bowden and with his obsessive nature toward Nazism and extermination, the boy will grow up to continue being that representative of evil?

Umbrella Entertainment presents Bryan Singer’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, “Apt Pupil” onto Blu-ray home video. The region B, full HD, 1080p Blu-ray is presented in anamorphic widescreen, 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and the quality is crisp excellence with a sharp hi-def scan of textures and the details in Mckellen’s facial curvatures that just open up to expose the wily diabolical smirk from the vet actor. Coloring and skin tones are okay despite the release being slightly yellowish and inkier in comparison to other releases. The English 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio does the job and is balanced all around with dialogue clear and present and the John Ottoman (“X-Men” franchise) is menacing without being overwhelming, but the ambience’s depth and range are stiffened from a lack of surround sound that could have been achieved with this release. The special effects are slim with a behind-the-scenes featurette that’s more surface level depth with cast brief cast and crew interviews and also includes theatrical trailer and TV spots. Viewers too caught up in the superhero hype might not recognize that Bryan Singer helmed “Apt Pupil” or might not even care in lieu of sexual accusations, but hardcore Stephen King fans and horror aficionados can certainly appreciate a blanket thriller with haunting performances that will be remembered more than the marring scandal behind-the-camera.