Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		1.5

Antibirth Blu-ray Movie Review

Dead fetus in the womb.

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson February 14, 2017

It is perhaps apropos that the plot of Antibirth sinks to the lower depths, a region that is coterminous with the plight of its down-in-the-dumps characters. Hard-drinking, pill-popping, bong-ripping Lou (Natasha Lyonne) and her best friend Sadie (Chloë Sevigny) spend a lot of their time stuck on the couch smoking dope and watching late-night conspiracy theory shows on the tube. The film begins with Lou jiving with her friends at a neon-lit warehouse party. Lou awakens in a daze and flabbergasted to the realistic possibility that she's become pregnant despite being abstinent for six months. Lou has served in the military and is the daughter of a deceased Vietnam veteran. She is a classic war baby and retro hippie who belongs in a bygone era but is displaced among the lower class in her community. She works as a motel custodian and her life is going nowhere. Sadie has also been in the military and is smitten with local Marine Gabriel (Mark Webber). The couple are close to fellow Marine Warren (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who dresses up as a mascot and performs for kids at the bowling alley. Unbeknownst to Lou, she may be the latest female druggie victimized by a hallucinogenic drug experiment conducted by Gabriel and Warren on unsuspecting women. Is Sadie also part of their plan?

Meg Tilly's Lorna is by far the most interesting character in the movie. She's a vagabond and a tough survivor of military life who tries to pick Lou up and enlighten her to what's really happening. Lorna is the only character who makes some semblance out of the conspiracy theories revolving around women who have been either abducted by aliens or implanted with alien fetuses. Lorna could understand, for example, the electromagnetic energy that percolates Lou's swelling belly when she's in front of the microwave.

Lou and Sadie smoke dope and chill on the couch.

However, Lorna cannot salvage this train wreck of a movie. Music video artist Danny Perez made his first full-length feature with this scattered and unfocused body-horror comedy. With a cast that stars Natasha Lyonne and Chloë Sevigny, with supporting turns by Meg Tilly and Lili Francks, Perez could have made a much different and infinitely better genre picture than this dreck. Though it seems difficult to make a respectable picture out of this class of people, there have been many fine ones produced about misanthropic youth. The problem with Antibirth is that Perez's thin script doesn't give the actors any viable material to work with and as a result, nothing of any consequence happens to their characters for the first forty-five minutes. Then Perez finally delivers the psychedelic imagery that his niche audience has been waiting for. Unfortunately, he executes it so quickly that we're left with fragmentary glimpses into this other world that the narrative has been building towards. Perez adopts elliptical editing akin to Michael Bay in which jittery camerawork leads to abrupt cutaways. For example, Perez uses Lou's subjective POV to lead into her drug-induced haze before switching to another scenic marker. The finale is unsurprising and should have delivered the ultimate payoff but it comes across as either camp or becomes unintentionally silly beyond absurdity. In evaluating Perez and his direction in Antibirth, several critical reviews have made references to some great filmmakers but any comparisons to the likes of Cronenberg, Lynch, and Araki are unwarranted and unjustified. (Critics have also been overly generous with their inflated star ratings of this film.) There have been some wonderful horror films set in Michigan (e.g., It Follows) but Antibirth lowers the bar to a new nadir. (While Perez deploys the Great Lakes state as his film's fictional setting, Antibirth was actually shot on location in Ontario.)

Antibirth Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Antibirth makes its global debut on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory on this AVC-encoded BD-25. The disc sports a total bitrate of 30.31 Mbps, with an average bitrate of 23994 kbps. Scream presents the film in the aspect ratio that it was presented in at Sundance and other film festivals: 1.85:1. This is a typically stellar transfer from one of Scream's IFC Midnight titles. Blacks are deep and skin tones appear as if they haven't underwent any tweaking. The image captures the neon colors well. Reds and pinks pop out with strong definition. (See Screenshot #s 8, 9, and 15). The only detectable flaw is that the lower-lit scenes retain some murkiness (although no black crush).

Scream Factory has divided the film up into twelve chapter stops.

Antibirth Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Scream provides Antibirth's sound track with options for a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround (2837 kbps) and a DTS-HD Master 2.0 Stereo (1591 kbps). The 5.1 mix swells during much of the dozen songs played over the course of the film. The surrounds are given the most activity during scenes accented by loud f/x. The characters in Antibirth frequently mumble (speaking in slang or with incomplete sentences) so be sure to switch on the English SDH. I played them during the feature and they are accurate and thorough. Scream has additionally supplied optional Spanish subtitles.

Antibirth Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Psychedelic Shorts (3:05, 1080p) - a set of TV infomercials seen in the film and presented here unabridged. In English, not subtitled.

• Storyboards (10:00, 1080p) - Scrolling images of storyboards that were drawn for the film.

• Theatrical Trailer (2:03, 1080p) - official trailer for Antibirth.

• Previews - some trailers for other Scream titles that play after the disc is inserted.

Antibirth Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

With Antibirth, I was expecting Danny Perez to unleash a great burst of creative energy along with awe-inspiring visuals but what I got was an abominable disaster. I truly believe that the small audience that Perez was trying to reach will fail to find a kernel of redeeming value. I would much rather see Meg Tilly's sister, Jennifer, appear in another Child's Play film than to watch her famous sibling have to suffer in a sequel to Antibirth. Scream Factory return high marks on the BD's visuals and sonics but only the most hard-core fans of horror trash should consider giving this film a look.