Cry Havoc is the closest we’ll ever get to see the Charles Bronson vs. Leatherface movie that Cannon could in theory have made circa 1987 when they had both the rights to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise and Bronson as their action movie main man. Golan-Globus might have let such an opportunity pass them by, but in 2020 you can see Hungarian Charles Bronson lookalike Robert ‘Bronzi’ Kovacs trade blows with a masked serial killer in Cry Havoc. It’s a film that brings out the two big guns of Rene Perez’s directing career, this being both the fourth in his ‘Playing with Dolls’ horror series and a vehicle for his Death Kiss star Bronzi.
Wedding two of the strongest aspects of his career, means that Perez here has to juggle the responsibility of playing to the Death Kiss crowd, who’ve shown up to see a 1970s look Charles Bronson blowing away the bad guys in a 21st century movie, as well as deliver the horror movie goods with a fourth helping of his ‘slasher movie fused with the Most Dangerous Game’ series. Its quite a big ask to satisfy both these camps, but somehow Perez has done it again... put briefly and bluntly Cry Havoc is a fuckin’ doozy that finds Perez firing on all cylinders.
Cry Havoc catches up with the series’ villain, a man known only as The Voyeur (Richard Tyson) as he continues to use his vast wealth in the pursuit of the monstrous. Despite now being hunted by the FBI, The Voyeur still pursues his obsession for luring fame seeking starlets to his isolated compound and recording their deaths on CCTV. Expecting to star in a reality TV show, his victims instead find themselves being hunted down by Havoc (J.D. Angstadt), a hulking, barbwire clad mass murderer who The Voyeur has sprung from jail. Threatening to topple this macabre house of cards are two outside influences. One is Ellen Weaver (Emily Sweet) an ambitious local TV reporter who sees tracking down The Voyeur and scoring an interview with him as her ticket to the big time. The other is a rogue police detective, played by Bronzi, on the trail of his estranged daughter, who went missing after ‘auditioning’ for The Voyeur. True to the Bronson/Paul Kersey persona, Detective Bronzi doesn’t mind bending the rules to rescue his daughter, or unleashing a hail of bullets in the direction of the bikers and mercenaries who’ve been hired to guard The Voyeur’s compound.
Four star vehicles in and the spectacle of ‘Bronzi’ has lost none of its head turning appeal, it’s as if all the nostalgia and goodwill for the Cannon era movies has somehow willed Charles Bronson back into existence. While comparisons have been made between the Perez/Bronzi films and the ‘Bruceploitation’ kung-fu films of the 1970s featuring Bruce Lee lookalikes, you never truly bought into Bruce Le and Bruce Li really being Bruce Lee, certainly not to the uncanny degree that Bronzi evokes Bronson. The only accurate comparison i can think of would be with another Robert... Robert Sacchi, the so-called ‘Man with Bogart’s Face’ who made a career out of his resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. Whereas with the Bruce Lee clones your imagination had to do the heavy lifting when it came to kidding yourself that they were Bruce Lee incarnate, with Bronzi and Sacchi the difficult part is remembering that they are just lookalikes. It’s far, far easier to get lost in the illusion, Sacchi and Bronzi both having this ability to seemingly bring these Hollywood icons back to life in out of time, out of place contexts. There’s no way you should be able to buy into the idea of Humphrey Bogart being alive and solving murders in a 1970s giallo, but that’s what Sacchi managed to achieve when he played the lead in 1972’s The Bogeyman and the French Murders. Likewise Bronzi manages to convince you he IS Bronson here, despite being parachuted into an extreme 21st century horror film franchise.
The head-trips that the Perez/Bronzi films play on the unsuspecting are entertaining in itself. Overhearing a puzzled ASDA customer questioning what an ‘old’ film like Death Kiss was doing among the new DVD releases, since “he’s been dead years” was priceless, but the confusion appears to work both ways. A recent viewing of The White Buffalo (1977) prompted a friend to ask “is that the real Charles Bronson or the Hungarian one?” Not even hearing Bronzi’s real speaking voice in the recent ‘Once Upon a Time in Deadwood’ failed to shatter the illusion, the resemblance is such that you talk yourself into believing that ‘Bronson is playing a Hungarian character in this one’.
Previously seen as the goody-two shoes girlfriend in Perez’s The Dragon Unleashed, Emily Sweet is given the chance to play a far more morally ambiguous character this time round. There are echoes of Stretch from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Barbara Crampton’s character in From Beyond about Sweet’s character Ellen Weaver, who lets her ambition override common sense. Her quest for a one to one with The Voyeur dictates Weaver has to hand over her mobile devices to The Voyeur’s second in command Mrs Wallace, and allows herself to be blindfolded and lead to The Voyeur’s lair. If that wasn’t enough she also has to get dolled up in a tacky, light up bridal dress for his amusement.
Cry Havoc offers up a particularity bone-chilling incarnation of The Voyeur and a terrific Richard Tyson performance to bring it to life. No longer the handsome, thrill seeking bachelor seen at the series’ outset, The Voyeur of Cry Havoc is a bearded hermit of a man, resembling Jim Morrison towards the end. There is an amusing personality clash between the naive and cheery Ellen (“to law enforcement agencies and reporters you’re Elvis”) and the abyss gazing nihilism of The Voyeur. While he goes to his philosophical dark place “truth is realising that if god did exist he would be ashamed of us for being a bunch of self-serving apes that only care about acuminating wealth” she futzes about with her hair and struggles with the straps of the ridiculous bridal dress she’s been forced to wear. It’s not long before Weaver commits a journalistic faux pas, managing to offend The Voyeur by making reference to snuff films. “I refuse to call my work something as loathsome as snuff films” complains The Voyeur “they were the most honest expression of humanity that I’ve ever seen”.
In keeping with his sadistic nature, The Voyeur wastes no time in turning the tables on her, tapping into Ellen’s estranged father issues and metaphorically twisting the knife. There is the unnerving realisation that as a single woman without a father figure in her life, Ellen perfectly matches the profile of his regular victims, and that she too has gotten caught up in his trap.
The ghosts of 1980s slasher movies and Charles Bronson vehicles might haunt Cry Havoc, but this tête-à-tête between Ellen and The Voyeur does also provide some relevant 21st century commentary on the rich’s increasingly sociopathic attitude to the poor, society’s blind worship of celebrity and reality TV, and the demeaning hoops that young, career minded women are expected to jump through in order to achieve success. As Mrs Wallace tells Ellen “if you want to interview the extremely wealthy, you’re gonna have to get used to being toyed with”.
Full of dreams of dollar signs, stardom and an anchor job at CNN, Ellen Weaver initially comes across as the epitome of the vacuous, fame seeking culture which the series has cast a critical light on in the past, most notably in the reality TV show themed Playing With Dolls: Bloodlust. A likeable performance by the up and coming Emily Sweet (soon to be seen in the Castle Freak reboot) does however gradually convince you that Ellen Weaver is a cause worth investing in. Weaver earning her Playing with Dolls spurs by surviving a mauling by Havoc, proving to be a surprisingly formidable opponent by killing off a major character with an axe and becoming a sidekick to Bronzi. What with Weaver’s father issues, and his guilt over being an absent parent, the pair even develop a surrogate father-daughter relationship, which makes the briefness of this union all the more tragic. In a series that has always been big on female characters, Sweet’s performance holds its own against previous series headliners Natasha Blasick, Karin Brauns and Nicole Stark.
Cry Havoc flies off the scale when it comes to the gore score. Not only do we have Bronzi’s gun battles with the voyeur’s goons threatening to turn the woodlands setting into blood squib central, but there’s also Havoc living up to his name. Havoc’s parade of carnage this time around includes depriving one unfortunate henchman of his jaw, splitting open heads, drilling a hole directly into someone’s jugular vein, squishing heads with a mallet, pulling out entrails and near enough cutting one character in two. Flashbacks to the previous movies cunningly provides a way of showcasing material that has frequently been censored from them. The entrail pulling from the first Playing With Dolls film, the toe severing from Playing with Dolls: Bloodlust and the chainsaw to the groin scene from Playing with Dolls: Havoc, all presented intacto here, serve as a reminder that this series has never been a slouch when it comes to ultra-violence. These flashbacks –which take place during Ellen’s Q and A session with The Voyeur- also conveniently act as a way of explaining the events of the first three movies, thus giving Cry Havoc legs as a standalone movie. It’s certainly true that you don’t need to have seen the first three Playing with Dolls films in order to watch Cry Havoc, although it’s hard to believe any horror fan wouldn’t want to check out those earlier entries based on the blood drenched morsels from them that are presented here. Cry Havoc is a riotously gory movie that holds nothing back, and more than earns the status of what the late Chas Balun used to call a “chunkblower”.
By the time of the 4th instalment most horror franchises are let’s face it, usually in a less than healthy shape. Phantasm IV: Oblivion, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, Hellraiser: Bloodline, House IV: The Repossession...need I go on. Plots have been recycled too often, characters have become too familiar to be frightening, attempts to bring something new to the table –by delving too deeply into character’s backgrounds- only succeeds in demystifying them. Cry Havoc though does manage to dodge all of these bullets. True, we do learn a bit more about The Voyeur and Havoc here, how The Voyeur’s obsession with Havoc first began, and how The Voyeur came to have a masked serial killer for a pet. However it is a reasonably measured amount of back-story that gets the balance perfectly right when it comes to feeding your curiosity about The Voyeur and Havoc, without revelling too much about them.
Four movies in and Havoc still registers as both a force of brute strength and the stuff of nightmares....particularly if you don’t like scarecrows. I know that technically the character isn’t a scarecrow...but with that sack like mask, gloves and several layers of filthy clothing...Havoc may well be the scariest horror movie scarecrow, who isn’t actually a scarecrow. It’s easy to get caught up in The Voyeur’s obsession over just what is going on underneath that mask. It still remains a mystery whether the toying about Havoc does with his female victims should be chalked up as misguided romantic gestures or just stone cold perversity. Either way Havoc’s attempts to endear himself to the heroine of Playing with Dolls: Havoc, by force-feeding her an eyeball, or here making Ellen down a fresh from the jugular glass of blood...are clearly the actions of a man who has allot to learn when it comes to wooing members of the opposite sex.
Action movie set pieces aren’t completely alien to the Playing with Dolls series, even the first film had its gun battles and fist fights, but the decision to port over Bronzi and Death Kiss elements into the series has undoubtedly brought an extra oomph to the proceedings. Each Bronzi movie that Perez makes seems to be referencing a particular period of Bronson’s career. Bronzi in Death Kiss recalls the businessman look of Paul Kersey in the first Death Wish film, with a costume change into the pseudo vagrant, beanie hat wearing Bronson of Death Wish 2 for Death Kiss’ final act. Once Upon a Time in Deadwood channels mid-1970s Bronson westerns like Breakheart Pass and From Noon Till Three, with a bit of Chato’s Land native American cosplaying thrown in for good measure. Here the cool, leather jacket wearing Bronzi suggests Bronson circa The Mechanic, while scenes of Bronzi stripping down to his vest and taking on Havoc with just his fists pays tribute to the bare knuckle fighting Bronson of 1975’s Hard Times/The Streetfighter.
Havoc appears equally furious over being challenged on his own turf and ecstatic to be facing a worthy opponent as the pair slug it out till the point of exhaustion. Every bone crushing blow registers and you can practically taste the blood, sweat and burnt woodlands as the actors smash into the ash covered ground. The film having been shot amidst the aftermath of the 2018 Carr fire which reduced large sections of Perez’s usual Shasta County filming locations to an eerie graveyard of dead trees, mounds of ash and burnt out vehicles. By the end of this battle of King Kong Vs Godzilla sized proportions, it difficult to know what is in worse condition, the actors or the location.
Like its Bronzi Vs. Havoc match, this is one for the history books, relentlessly entertaining, Cry Havoc is proof positive that the American grindhouse movie is alive and well and living off the grid in Shasta County.
