The Survivalist (now on video)

The SHOUT! Factory video release of Stephen Fingleton’s grim, minimalist dystopian drama-thriller is an item which actually works best in the DVD/Blu-ray format - not downloads, not on a big screen, not even on good old VHS. The menu presence of a handful of related Fingleton-scripted short subjects, clearly set in the same doomsday vein as the feature (one is, in fact, the prequel), makes the whole experience complete. That it's a complete feelbad mini-spectacle, well. that's for your individual tastes.

Some viewers may note a resemblance to Hollywood's film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with its small cast's ground-zero-eye-view of the post-apocalypse. Only an opening graphic gives the backstory, that oil and electricity have run out for mankind, cueing a massive population die-off.

Now only remnants of humanity fight it out, these particular ones in some green part of the UK (the film was Northern Ireland production, and the milieu certainly does have a tragic aura).

Stay (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I guess most of the attention to STAY will be focused on the leading actress, Taylor Schilling. This pretty lady is a hot property for the moment thanks to the success of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. Which I have never been paid to watch so cannot speak to its virtues.

But I can say that, with the rate of our celebrated actors meeting untimely ends lately (Paul Walker, James Gandolfini, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Williams, Richard Kiel, the werewolf guy from Harry Potter), my advice to Ms. Taylor Schilling might roughly be RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! SHOWBIZ KILLS! Get out while you can! Who could say how much longer Lauren Bacall might have lived and what she might have achieved, had not Hollywood drained and degraded her?

Besides, for my part, the cool thing in STAY is seeing steely longtime Canadian actor Michael Ironside, late of villainy in countless cable-TV thrillers and sci-fi potboilers (not to mention being the bad guy in FREE WILLY and a doomed good guy in STARSHIP TROOPERS) finally getting to play a fairly normal-bloke supporting role.