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It was late at night when I got to view Stay Out Stay Alive (2019) after a day of work. Rain was falling outside in a steady stream of tears from heaven and forest fire prevention. Reality television often puts ‘black ants’ and ‘red ants’ together to make what they think is a program that people will watch. A few of the human race like to see people fail in getting what they want or think they should have. What if that failure was the death of someone you had known for years? The old story of receiving a box with a push button in the post with instructions to push it and someone dies that is bothering you in your life. Would you do it? Well, these are the questions raised by Stay Out Stay Alive (2019).

Hollywood did this years ago with the non-genre gold standard (No pun intended) for greed,...

Stars: Brie Mattson, Brandon Wardle, Sage Mears, Christina July Kim, William Romano-Pugh, David Fine, Barbara Crampton | Written and Directed by Dean Yurke

[Note: With the film now out on DVD in the UK, here’s a reposting of our review of Stay Out, Stay Alive; now under the shorter title of Stay Out]

Another generic (and not very good) name for a low budget horror movie, so it’s fair to say that I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from Stay Out.

I’m glad to report though that this isn’t quite as generic as I expected and there is plenty of things to enjoy here. I was not surprised at all when I looked up director Dean Yurke and discovered that before this, his directorial début, he has worked a lot in visual effects and in big shows or films such as Loki, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and much much more. And it shows because despite a low budget the effects used here a very good on the whole. Clearly, they...

Stars: Brie Mattson, Brandon Wardle, Sage Mears, Christina July Kim, William Romano-Pugh, David Fine, Barbara Crampton | Written and Directed by Dean Yurke

Another generic (and not very good) name for a low budget horror movie, so it’s fair to say that I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from Stay Out Stay Alive.

I’m glad to report though that this isn’t quite as generic as I expected and there is plenty of things to enjoy here. I was not surprised at all when I looked up director Dean Yurke and discovered that before this, his directorial début, he has worked a lot in visual effects and in big shows or films such as Loki, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and much much more. And it shows because despite a low budget the effects used here a very good on the whole.

An intimate chamber piece that tightly interlaces remembrances of food and family, Wayne Wang’s quietly sensitive “Coming Home Again” adapts Chang-rae Lee’s award-winning 1995 New Yorker essay, a personal piece on Lee’s caring for his terminally ill mother and cooking her Korean dishes. A filmmaker with a diverse slate that includes the likes of “The Joy Luck Club” and female-centric populist films like “Maid in Manhattan” and “Last Holiday,” Wang operates loosely in the vein of his 1995 film “Smoke” here: incisively observant and attentive to items, mining in objects emotional traces of those who touched them.

But as with his other work, he is also precise in culturally detailing a contemporary San Francisco-based Asian American immigrant family facing a major life crisis. Wang is no stranger to exploring the immigrant experience in America — in films such as “Chan Is Missing,” “The Princess of Nebraska” and “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,...

Specialty film sales agent Asian Shadows has picked up international rights to “Coming Home Again” by Wayne Wang, one of Asia’s most celebrated directors. The film, which tackles food, family and mortality, will premiere as a special presentation at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival in September.

Based on a short story of the same name published in The New Yorker by bestselling Korean-American novelist Lee Chang-rae, “Coming Home Again” charts the emotions of what is to be the last New Year’s Eve dinner together for an Asian American family whose mother has terminal cancer.

“’Coming Home Again’ is a universal film that touched us by its delicate portrait of a son-mother relationship, by its detailed attention to food, traditions and family roots, and [Wang’s] masterful mise-en-scène,” said Maria Ruggieri, head of sales and acquisitions at Asian Shadows. “Watching the film has been a coming home again for us, bringing...

DVD Review

Office of the Dead

Directed by: Matthew Chung

Cast: Teddy Chen Culver, Christina July Kim, Shawn Parikh

Running Time: 1 hr, 12 min

Rating: R

Due Out: August 10, 2010

Plot: Life Corp has developed a method for electronically “rewriting” negative thoughts and sending them back into the brain as positive and affirming. Only there’s a minor glitch with the program: it turns its recipients into zombies. Now zombies are running amok in the Life Corp offices and Ben (Culver), Liz (Kim), and Raj (Parikh) have to make it out alive.

Who’S It For? It’s a vanity project for the people who made it. Not even really potent marijuana and a Lazy Susan of munchies can salvage it.

Overall

Office of the Dead was a great idea, but it failed miserably on two equally crucial fronts: 1) zombie movie and 2) corporate parody. It needed to pull off one of those...