NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Fun City Editions Blu-ray (September 2022): Fun City Editions have transferred Jeff Kanew's Natural Enemies to Blu-ray. It is cited as being "sourced from the best-surviving element, a 35mm deposit print held by the Library of Congress". It is not the most crisp image and the 1080P - on a dual-layered disc with a very high bitrate - shows color flecks (vertical streaks on the right edge) and can tend to look video-y in spots. Despite the lack of consistency of the source, I trust this is the best it will look in this format barring a full film-level restoration. Colors carry a richness and black levels have depth.  

NOTE: We have added 50 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Fun City Editions use a DTS-HD Master 2.0 channel track (24-bit) in the original English language. Natural Enemies has keen audios cues from a ticking clock to the loading of a rifle. This sports the final score by jazz-artist, musician Don Ellis (The Deadly Tower, The French Connection, French Connection II, The Seven-Ups) who died young at age-44 before Natural Enemies was released. The cello in the score can be quite haunting. The audio is fairly consistent in the lossless transfer. Fun City Editions offer optional English (SDH) subtitles on their Region FREE Blu-ray.

The Fun City Editions Blu-ray offers a new commentary by Bill Ackerman of the Supporting Characters podcast. He, rightly, feels the film is ripe for rediscovery. Bill talks about the director Jeff Kanew and the impact of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage, as well as other films that borrow ideas from Bergman like Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, Robert Altman's 3 Women, Paul Schrader's First Reformed and Woody Allen's Interiors, like Natural Enemies that establish moods reminiscent of Bergman's work - citing examples including the opening of Wild Strawberries. He talks about the music, Don Ellis and how the film was temp-scored with compositions by Gustav Mahler. Bill identifies differences from Julius Horwitz's novel. This commentary has fantastic analysis - some of the deepest I've heard this year. Excellent job! Further supplements include an introduction by director and an hour-long -two part - interview with Jeff Kanew entitled "The Road to Natural Enemies" produced and edited by Fun City's Jonathan Hertzberg where the director writer gives a frank account of his feelings on the final product, changes made, the cinematic climate of the time and much more. It is extremely revealing and very much worth the time. Included is the alternate ending. Following its November 1979 New York premiere, Rex Reed of the Daily News called Natural Enemies "the grimmest reaper of them all." When the film opened in Los Angeles later that year, director Jeff Kanew re-cut the film's ending, removing the newscast audio, so that it concludes on an ambiguous, though decidedly more hopeful note. This very simple edit was impactful enough to prompting critic Kevin Thomas to praise the film as "affirmative, expressing a belief in the restorative power of love." That 2-minute edit is included on this Blu-ray. Lastly are a theatrical trailer and the package has a reversible sleeve and 12-page liner notes booklet with photos and a new essay by Jason Bailey entitled "A Biting Indictment: The Psychology of Natural Enemies".

Jeff Kanew's Natural Enemies is a despondent skew of 'American Dream' values with an blunt annihilation of the traditional family. It carries themes of sexual dissatisfaction, inadequacy, nihilism and fatalism often evoking Peter Bogdonavich’s Targets. Permeated with depression, via a unique window of mental illness, Natural Enemies seem far ahead of its time and I agree with Bill Ackerman that it is well deserved of rediscovery. Thanks to Fun City Editions Blu-ray for probably my favorite release of theirs to date. Not only a new unmasking of this fascinating film, but a deeply analyzed commentary and supplements with significant participation of the director. It couldn't be any more different from Kanew's successful Revenge of the Nerds made a few years later. Wow. It certainly won't suit all tastes but is still very strongly recommended by this reviewer.

Gary Tooze