Reviews

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  ★★★★★ review by nathaxnne walker on Letterboxd

  bioluminescent acid reflux, bong ash, dirty afghans spread over dirtier couches, vega/rev dance parties, leggings under dazzey dukes, alien abduction infomercials, uninsured body horror as daily grind. this is a world that i not only understand and worse yet it is a world i still live in even though that world is gone and i don't live in it anymore. these things are what home feels like no matter how lost or contingent that sense of home might be. that home could fall away or slip out from under you, leaving you old and wasted and adrift, with what appeared to be semi-stable referents no longer referring, just junk in a pile of eviction trash from weekly rate motels off the highway or buried in a series of them. how women are the most threatened, excluded, vulnerable and forgotten in economies of liminal legality, how the costs are always greater. how these grey and black market economies nest inside larger economies of force and spill forth from them.

  we used to make movies about our dystopian futures or if we weren't feeling so good that day or month or year or decade, our dystopian present. now things have gotten so we pine for the comforts of a dystopian past still within reach. this includes me. i am that target audience and i say lay it on, help me remember what it felt like, to know the general countours of how terrible things were. this is what it means to live outside of that knowledge, of that security that things were just as bad as could be and now that things are just as bad as can't be, we turn back to face the wreckage of how here was even gotten to but there is so much causal debris in the path of vision so overdetermined, that our here is a post-arrival choose yr. own history, the possible narratives so thick and overlapping and glowing with an awful illumination that they can't be read but the heat of them all together is felt like when a dirty coffee mug is in the microwave for a little too long so that the handle can't even be touched, not by human hands. this world of garbage we have come to, with live-streaming murder, sludge-spraying broken arctic pipelines, double-barrelled russian space robots and that's just today, a cursory glance on the toilet from the illuminated omnidevice, waiting for an entire season of mosquito-borne viruses shifting gears into STD outbreak. Note to self: get some camo tank tops anyway.

  we'd wish for something that wouldn't consume us needlessly, where we weren't just a medium, a means to other means, without an end, or with nothing but.

  Fort Thunder's Whitley Streiber's Communion? Sure, ok, whatever.

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  ★★★½ review by Hollie Horror on Letterboxd

  Antibirth is a kaleidoscope of garishness meets gross body/pregnancy horror, I'm contractually obliged to at least enjoy it, add Natasha Lyonne in a starring role and things are only looking up from here, right?

  Mostly.

  As much as I love Meg Tilly (and she was great, because she's always great, and I'm so glad she has returned to acting), I could have done without her character because she seemed tacked on and unnecessary, but nothing deserved to be cut from Antibirth more than all of the "Fun Zone" Mascot scenes that were forcibly tacky, sort of like a knock-off White Zombie music video.

  Other than that, this was a stylish horror film that leaves me very curious about, director, Danny Perez and where he goes from here.

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  ★★★½ review by pd187 on Letterboxd

  watching this is kinda like meeting somebody who likes all the same stuff as you and gets all your jokes and its great but after an hour youre like, ok

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  ★★★★½ review by rotch on Letterboxd

  Hay un valemadrismo muy padre en Antibirth que recuerda a esos horrores ochenteros enojones de gente como Frank Henenlotter o William Lustig. Y con su paleta de colores vivos, infinito mal gusto y personajes desagradables me recordó un montón a mi consentida Street Trash.

  Y pese a su maravilloso tufo a película chafa, las actuaciones son impecables. Sobre todo Lyonne, dando el que creo es el papel de su vida.

  Sumen a eso que le tengo cariño a Perez por Animal Collective, la música es de Eric Copeland después de haber sacado uno de mis discos favoritos del año y el póster es We Buy Your Kids (mis graduados de Mondo favoritos) y la verdad es que no pude evitar enamorarme un poco de esta película.

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  ★★★★ review by Simon Abrams on Letterboxd

  Wheatley, Zombie, Lynch, even Jacob's Ladder...it's all here. More soon in my RogerEbert.com review.

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