I Don’t Want to be Born (1975)

I Don’t Want to be Born and I have a history...a long, turbulent history. I first encountered this film in the mid-to-late 1980s, I can’t pin-point the exact date –maybe 1985- but I am certain of the circumstances. I was on holiday with my parents and grandparents, staying at a caravan site/holiday camp every bit like the ones you see in movies like ‘The Best Pair of Legs in the Business’ and ‘Confessions from a Holiday Camp’, and I’d have been around the same age as the Nicholas Bond-Owen character in the Confessions film. Anyway, because we were all cramped into this caravan like sardines and because it was a special occasion I was allowed to stay up with the adults and watch the late night movie, which just so happened to be ‘I Don’t Want to be Born’.

Now, here’s a question...what horror film first disturbed you as a child, was it Night of the Living Dead, Psycho, The Birds, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? If so, I envy you, because those are the films that it is okay to admit to having being scared of as a kid, you can hold your head up high and proudly admit those films ‘got to you’. Me, I’m stuck with I Don’t Want to be Born, and I’ve had to go through life having to admit to this being the first horror film to get under my skin, embarrassing...isn’t it? So, this is a film I’ve had a long term love/hate relationship with, on one hand it is part of my past, forever intertwined with happy memories of childhood holidays and relatives who are no longer around. On the other hand, I’ve had to carry around the stigma that a film which is deservedly the source of ridicule, unintentional hilarity and scorn by so many, once had such an impact on me.



This wasn’t a film that ever seemed to go away either, indeed for a film that nobody actually seems to like, I Don’t Want to be Born has had quite the shelf life on British TV. If you grew up in front of the box during the 1980s and 1990s, I’m certain you will have had your own run in with I Don’t Want to be Born. This film, along with Psychomania and Crucible of Terror rarely seemed to be off the BBC back then, and I’m sure for a whole generation growing up then, that unholy trilogy were not only their first introduction to 1970s British horror films, but an early tip-off that there was more to explore Brit-horror wise beyond the confines of merely Hammer and Amicus. For the longest time I did wonder if the BBC didn’t just own I Don’t Want to be Born, Psychomania and Crucible of Terror outright. Those three were like the British horror equivalent of Dad’s Army or Only Fools and Horses, in that they were repeated so many times that you eventually began to resent them, especially as you became more and more aware that there were many, many other British horror films they could be showing. While I don’t think you can ever truly tire of Psychomania...he who is tired of Psychomania is tired of life...when it came to I Don’t Want to be Born and Crucible of Terror, repetition can definitely breed contempt. Eventually though those films did begin to get retired from late night television, Psychomania hasn’t been on the box since 2008, Crucible of Terror since 2009, and British TV has also been a I Don’t Want to be Born free zone since 2009.

Still you have to hand it to I Don’t Want to be Born, it is a film people do tend to remember. Throw its title in the direction of somebody who has seen it and after they’ve done rolling their eyes and remarking “OH GOD, THAT ONE” they are still able to paint you a mental picture of the film and remember things like Joan Collins playing a stripper...the dwarf...the possessed baby...the Italian accents. I Don’t Want to be Born isn’t one of those British horror films that people tend to mistake for any other. In a way that if you said ‘Vault of Horror’, someone might come back at you with ‘isn’t that the one where Peter Cushing comes back from the grave’, and you’d have to correct them and point out that they’re thinking of Tales from the Crypt, then they’d say ‘oh, Tales from the Crypt isn’t that the one where Joan Collins has a tree for a love rival’, and you’d have to point that no, that’s Tales that Witness Madness. I Don’t Want to be Born is in a class all of its own, and for better or ill it’s a film that stays with you over the years. Incidentally, of all of the multiple titles this film has had, I’m going with I Don’t Want to be Born on the basis that it was clearly close to the heart of its scriptwriter, given that they work it into the dialogue on at least three occasions (“this one doesn’t want to be born”, “I know why you hate me, you didn’t want to be born”). All of which is rendered meaningless if you are watching this as ‘The Devil Within Her’, ‘It Lives Within Her’, ‘Its Growing Inside Her’, ‘The Monster’, ‘The Baby’, ‘Sharon’s Baby’, ‘Evil Baby’, ‘The Devil’s Baby’, ‘Son of Satan’, and who knows how many more titles this film has had.



Should you be among that rare and fortunate breed whose childhood wasn’t marred by I Don’t Want to be Born, the film stars the one and only Joan Collins as Lucy, a former stripper who has traded in the dens of inequity of Soho, for a plush Kensington address by marrying wealthy, Italian businessman Gino Carlesi (Ralph Bates). Lucy might have done gone throwing her bra and panties at all and sundry, but her sordid past threatens to return to haunt her after she gives birth to her first child. Formerly one half of a stripper and dwarf routine, the split between this double act wasn’t an amicable one, after Hercules the Dwarf (George Claydon) made sexual advances to Lucy, groping her breasts backstage on her last night working in the strip-club.



After rejecting Hercules’ advances, Lucy fell into the arms of strip-club owner Tony (John Steiner), the kind of crude, bit of rough that characters played by Joan Collins tend to be a sucker for, and ended up making love to him backstage instead. Bitter, frustrated and jealous, Hercules, who appears to move in both light entertainment and devil worshipping circles, places a curse on Lucy as she leaves the club “you will have a baby, an evil monster, conceived in your womb, as big as I am small, and possessed by the devil himself”.

A few months and one birth later, and Hercules’ powers seem to be validated when Lucy’s baby begins exhibiting such anti-social behaviour as scratching its mother’s face, kicking up a storm at its baptism and trashing its bedroom. Before long the baby has graduated to murder by hanging one character, decapitating a meddling party, and drowning another. Lucy’s evil offspring also likes to prank its mother by appearing to her in the form of the man who is possessing it. One minute Lucy is dotting on her baby, the next she is horrified to see Hercules, dressed in baby clothes, laying in the cot instead. A moment, that given Joan Collins’ recent involvement in those Snickers chocolate bar ads, surely cries out for a ‘You’re not yourself until you’ve had a Snickers’ meme.



All that stands in Hercules’ way is Gino’s nun sister Albana (Eileen Atkins) who detects possession and performs an exorcism. Sis Albana managing to get the upper hand over Hercules, who has become preoccupied from possessing the baby by the demands of performing in a song and dance routine at the strip-club. The film’s indifferent attitude towards Hercules has intrigued me for years. There is scope here to portray him as a tragic, Quasimodo type figure, cruelly treated by his employee, besotted by a beautiful woman who rejects him. An angle the film never pursues, instead Hercules is simply a predatory little creep, who the film encourages us to be repulsed by. Saying that, I Don’t Want to be Born doesn’t put much effort into demonising him either, with no cutaways to him scheming or performing black magic, we are left to take his villainy as hearsay. Indeed, whenever we see Hercules outside of the context of Lucy’s flashbacks, whether it is backstage with the other strippers or simply minding his own affairs, there is little evidence of the vengeful, vindictive character he is meant to be. An actor like Michael Dunn or Skip Martin could have brought much to the role. It is possible that George Claydon didn’t have the same range, which may have limited the amount of time we spend on Hercules. The rest of Claydon’s career consisting of bit parts, an uncredited role as an Oompa Loompa in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and a memorable appearance as the evil dwarf who eats the wing mirrors of Marc Bolan’s car in Born to Boogie (1972) , the concert film cum excuse for Bolan and Ringo Starr to piss about on film. Whatever Claydon’s limitations, the guy could do terrifying, his hateful rant at Joan does at least justify some of the childhood trauma this movie caused me.

Looking back at the film now though, I do have to come to the conclusion that it was simply the circumstances and the impressionable age I was at the time that caused I Don’t Want to be Born to have an effect on me. For me the film would have represented a number of firsts. It certainly wasn’t the first horror film I’d ever seen, I was already familiar with the Hammer films by this point, but the fact that the films of theirs I’d seen were gothic period pieces, gave a fairy tale like safety net to them. Whereas I Don’t Want to be Born was one of the first horror films I’d seen to be set in a more recognisable, contemporary world, which ludicrous as it sounds, made the film more believable in my eyes. Here you had characters who swore, drank, had sex lives and backgrounds working in seedy strip-clubs. It all seemed very intimidating, if not I’ll admit the source of some curiosity to my young eyes. The fact that I was able to stay up late and the fact that I was getting this tiny window into the world of adults –both on and off screen- all must have caused me to psyche myself up for the experience.



I Don’t Want to be Born opens with a violent, traumatic birth scene, which I remember as being the first aspect of the film to unnerve and take me off guard. Chances are that the people the film was especially targeting were pregnant women or new mothers, there is much in this film that plays on their anxieties about giving birth, failing to bond with and being violently rejected by their children, but I suppose the film can inadvertently also give you the fear if you are young and had previously had an idealised impression that babies were delivered by storks and didn’t involve all this screaming, pain, syringes and gynaecological equipment. As you might expect from a real life mother of three, Joanie sells that difficult birth scene with some conviction.

By rights I should have learned from Psycho and Night of the Living Dead that nice, sympathetic characters don’t always make it to the end of the horror movies. However this was a life lesson destined to be taught to me by I Don’t Want to be Born, which kills off one major character at around the hour mark, and another about ten minutes before the end. While at the same time allowing two hateful characters –the crabby old bat of a housekeeper and the spivvy strip club owner- to escape relativity unscathed. I Don’t Want to be Born was also- I’m fairly certain- the first time I ever saw Donald Pleasence onscreen, an actor who let’s face it is always going to leave a strong impression in whatever it is you first encounter him in, be it James Bond, Halloween or even Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The same could be said of Ronald Lacey, who I had simultaneously become aware of thanks to late night repeats of Crucible of Terror. I Don’t Want to be Born does also give you a sombre, humourless Donald Pleasence performance as well, bereft of the entertaining hamminess he was prone to in the later Halloween sequels.

It has to be said that everyone here is playing their roles with so much dedication and seriousness, nobody is mocking their roles or going the tongue in cheek route, even though the film doesn’t deserve a whole lot more. I Don’t Want to be Born does have one of the most preposterous , farfetched ideas behind it of any British horror film of the 1970s, and yet its delivered with an unbelievably straight face. I Don’t Want to be Born is a pompous, Emperor’s new clothes of a movie that walks around blind to its inherent silliness, and would probably slap you around the face, call you a ‘bastard’ and throw a glass of champagne in your direction if you dared make fun of it. There are scenes in this film- such as the possessed baby punching a guy in the nose after he looks into its cot, a dream sequence in which a dead Ralph Bates is dressed up as a nun, or Sister Albana performing an exorcism on the baby, which causes the baby to fly around the room like a burst balloon, which if you were to describe to someone they’d probably think you were talking about a horror spoof, if not an out and out comedy, but when you watch the film you are in no doubt that those involved genuinely thought they were making something that was going to be the equal of, if not superior to Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist. Perhaps the scariest thing about I Don’t Want to be Born is its delusions of grandeur.

 

The actual nationality of I Don’t Want to be Born is something of a minefield, at face value it appears to be an entirely British film, made here with a cast of well know British actors. All isn’t quite that straight forward however, the director Peter Sasdy was Hungarian born, but since the majority of his career has played out in Britain is considered an honorary Brit, the production was initially Canadian and Italian financed, but ran into money problems and had to be bailed out by The Rank Organisation. Officially making this a Spaghetti, Brit-horror, Canuxploitation film. The Italian aspects of the production tend to manifest themselves in the sheer amount of London that you see in I Don’t Want to be Born. It embodies the tendency of many Italian horror and giallos that partly filmed in the UK of overemphasizing the London locations, and making damn sure that the extra cash that was used to relocate these productions to the UK was all up there onscreen. Shots of student parades, black cabs, Big Ben, Chelsea, double-decker buses, the Kings Road, Fortnum and Mason, The Holiday Inn, Parliament Square...the film can’t get enough of this stuff. I Don’t Want to be Born piles on so much location footage that Harold Baim could have probably cut together a London travelogue from it, paid Telly Savalas to narrate it and pissed off on holiday with the Eady money.

Then there are the Italian accents, and the instance that two of the main characters in the film, Gino and Sister Albana be played as Italian, another decision which you suspect was born out of the Italian side of the production. Rightly or wrongly, whenever I think of this film’s origins, I can’t help imagining its co-writer/co-producer Nato De Angeles being along the lines of Giovanni from Mind Your Language and pitching the film to Barry Evans.

“Hey professore, I gots an idea to makea one of those X-rated horror movies, and itsa gonna havea that Joan Collins in it, but I thinka she’da be a bit too mucha for an English man to handle, I thinka her husband such be a red hot Italian lover, not unlika yours truly, capeesh? So, we gotsa to get that Ralpha the Bates to put on an Italian accent. Scusi?, whats the filma about? It’s about a poor bambino who gets possessed by the day-vil, Santa Maria!!! All because Joan didna wanna do it with a little tiny man. Whatya mean that sounds stoopid, ah shaddap you face, it’s a gonna be better than anything by that William Shake-A-Spear ”. 



I don’t think I’ve ever read a review of this film that doesn’t guffaw and bring up the exaggerated Italian accents sported by Ralph Bates and Eileen Atkins in this film, which conspires to bring both of these competent thespians to their knees. Eileen Atkins might become a Dame, win as many Baftas, and appear in as many series of Doc Martin as she likes, but to me she’ll always be the nun who pronounces ‘the devil’ as ‘the day-vil’, and yet somehow still manages to get complimented by Donald Pleasence’s character on how good her English is. You have to wonder just what the Italian backers of the film made of those wonky accents, not to mention the catty remarks in the script about Italian men being under the thumb of their mothers or being part of the Mafia. Let’s just hope Nato De Angeles had a sense of humour about himself, in fact let’s hope that anyone who had money in this film had a sense of humour when they saw the end result.

Like many horror films of the mid-1970s, I Don’t Want to be Born lives in the shadow of The Exorcist, a film that had particular resonance in catholic Italy. Watch a few of the Italian Exorcist clones, and it becomes clear that many of their makers had personal demons to exercise of their own, filling their movies with blasphemy, sacrilege and attacks on the church, before wrapping things up with some phony baloney ‘good triumphs over evil’ climax to appease the conservatives. In comparison, I Don’t Want to be Born is a well behaved, good Catholic movie. Sister Albana ain’t got time for none of that doubting, crisis of faith shtick that appeared to be mandatory for characters in movies chasing the Exorcist dollar. While you’d understand it if Albana resented her brother running off and marrying a social climbing former stripper, Sister Albana is surprisingly forgiving and faultless in that respect too, being not only the ideal sister (in both senses) but the ideal sister-in-law too. There is also the sub-plot about Albana working in the field of animal pathology, which doesn’t really go anywhere, other than to defensively emphasize that Albana can be equally involved with the religious, medical and scientific worlds, without there being a conflict of interests there. A subject that the film returns to in Albana’s tete-a-tetes with Donald Pleasence’s character, and you have to hand it to Sis Albana , she is right when she points out that while she’d make a very good doctor, Donald Pleasence wouldn’t make a very good nun.

By far the rudest thing about I Don’t Want to be Born are the lamps you see in Gino and Lucy’s abode. Is it me or are those the most obscenely phallic looking lamps ever seen in a 1970s horror film. Suspiciously these orange coloured, boner shaped kitsch monstrosities only seem to grace the screen when Joan Collins and/or Caroline Munro are present. Note, that despite Sis Albana being in that house allot in this film, she is always relegated to the hallway, Lucy’s bedroom or the bambino’s room. The closest Albana gets to them is a scene in the adjoining dining room, and even then the naughty lamps are hidden in the shadows, and the only lamp that is visible is a far less bulbous and sexually suggestive one. All a coincidence, or were the makers of this film trying to splice in hidden sexual imagery which carry the message that while it is okay to be turned on by Joan Collins and Caroline Munro in this film, Sis Albana is off limits when it comes to getting the horn. No nunploitation movie, is this.



I have to hold my hands up and admit that my enthusiasm for writing about this film greatly diminished upon watching it again. I guess you had to be too young to see the film in order to appreciate it. Outrageous as the film sounds as an anecdote, I have to concede that it is a dull, lifeless film to experience, representing the middle of the road side to the 1970s British horror film. Even the Omen fashioned deaths, and strip club sleaze are thrown in there without a great deal of enthusiasm, and come across as condescending concessions to the exploitation market which the filmmakers seem to view as being beneath them. Is it possible to have affection for something while never really thinking highly of it, if so then that’s me and I Don’t Want to be Born in a nutshell. I Don’t Want to be Born is the cinematic equivalent of white dog shit, it’s something you don’t see around often these days, therefore has an undeniable in-built nostalgic quality to it, but at the same time it’s not something I’m keen to step into again anytime soon.

Cabal (2019)

Masked psychos, masked assassins with a guilty conscience, beautiful babes, all under a Californian woodlands setting. What else can it mean but that Rene ‘The Darkest Machines’ Perez is back in town, this time with a newbie called Cabal.

Like the other recent Perez film ‘Cry Havoc’, Cabal is another horror and action crossover, drawing equally upon the 1980s influences of slasher movies and Cannon action fare. Cabal also sees Perez revisit many of the themes of his own 2018 film The Dragon Unleashed. Like the protagonist of that film, our hero here, a man known only as ‘Dragonfly’ is a top drawer killing machine, clad in a cyber-ninja costume, whose sense of morality is increasingly beginning to put a strain on his occupation as an assassin for hire.

Salvation appears in the form of a beautiful woman, who recognises a shred of decency hidden behind Dragonfly’s self-loathing steel-cold exterior, and is determined to pull it out of him, and place him on a more righteous path. The mysterious woman in question being Elizabeth, –played by Perez regular Eva Hamilton- who works for Dragonfly’s shady employees and breaks protocol by reaching out to him. Elizabeth offers Dragonfly the lucrative but perilous task of tracking down and killing a muscular, woodlands dwelling serial killer called Sallos.



Its difficult to watch Cabal without flashing on the idea that Eva Hamilton has the makings of a terrific Bond girl, she is even shot like one in this film, what with all those stylish shots of her walking along the shoreline, and Hamilton and the character she plays in this film both have a certain Bond girl quality to them. Until that day comes though, she is definitely one of the stronger elements to Perez’s films, acting wise, and you can see why Hamilton has increasingly become the go to girl when it comes to solid female support characters in his films.

I’ve found you can tell allot about a character in a Rene Perez film by how they react to female breasts. The decent ones tend to do the gentlemanly thing and avert or shield their gaze should they inadvertently chance upon boobs, a scenario that tends to occur a great deal in Rene Perez movies. The hero of The Dragon Unleashed turned away from a woman undressing in that film, Bronzi did the same in Death Kiss, even Havoc has done this in a few of the Playing with Dolls series. So, in the film world of Rene Perez at least, the age of chivalry is not yet dead. Dragonfly does kind of pass this test too....well, he does pull Elizabeth’s bra off while she is in the hot tub at one point. Don’t worry though, as this is only so he can be sure she doesn’t have any listening devices on her...which is a very Connery era Bond thing to do...but he does then do the right thing and turns away when she gets out of the hot tub. So, with a few reservations, you’re reasonably assured that Dragonfly is the good guy in this film. Not so with Sallos, who is introduced terrorising a girl, pulling her top off and not looking away...the giveaway sign that Sallos doesn’t have a shred of goodness in him... that and the fact that he is carrying a bloody axe, wears a mask of human flesh, looks like a poster boy for roid rage and moments later is ripping the girl’s guts out.



If you are au fait with Rene Perez’s films you might recognise the Sallos mask from the 2018 fantasy movie ‘Quest for the Unicorn’ where it was worn by the head of the cannibal tribe. Quest for the Unicorn aka The Wishing Forest is one of those ‘is it or isn’t it’ a Rene Perez film. It’s very much in his style, features many of his regular actors and was filmed in his neck of the woods, so I’m inclined to think of it as one of his, despite it being officially credited to two female directors, who to further muddy these waters, are also called Perez. The fact that Quest for the Unicorn now shares a prop with one of his films, pushes me even further in the direction of thinking that Quest for the Unicorn is an unofficial Rene Perez film. It is a terrific mask though, with several faces gruesomely sown into it, and you can’t blame Perez- especially as a low-budget filmmaker- for bringing it out for another airing in this film. It’s too good to just be a one movie prop.

I have my doubts on whether it was a direct influence, since the 1980s appears to be more Perez’s jam, but Cabal does occasionally put you in mind of the 70s drive-in movie Shriek of the Mutilated. Whereas in that film, the big reveal was that its murderous yeti was a smokescreen for a bunch of cultured, wealthy cannibals to indulge in their taste for human flesh, Cabal updates this concept for an era of social media and ‘deep state’ conspiracy theories. The villains behind the villain here being the titular ‘Cabal’ a secret society of rich nihilists who allow Sallos to continue on his killing spree, since they are using the blood and the organs of his victims to replenish their health and youth. Linda Bott, who plays a similar role in Cry Havoc, is especially good at spitting out all these horrible, elitist insults in Dragonfly’s direction “how dare you ask questions, you obtuse piece of filth”.



Cabal topically taps into fears of the one per cent, and of the most privileged among us being wine drinking, emotionless, suit and tie wearing monsters, who regard the rest of the population as ‘cattle’ to be controlled and lived off. Usually when genre films pit the haves against the have nots, as in the case of John Carpenter’s They Live or Society by Brian Yuzna, they are coming at this from a leftish perspective, but Cabal turns this notion on its head and instead represents a conservative voice coming out fighting. Perez’s movies do have a habit of rattling cages politically, mainly the left, but he has gotten it from the right on occasion as well. His zombie movie ‘The Dead and the Damned 3: Ravaged’ –which pits Aryan, alt-right villains against an Asian-American hero in another cyber-ninja costume- evidently wound the right up the wrong way, judging by its IMDB reviews. One of which dams Perez as ‘someone spouting all the leftish clichés about white men being evil and everyone else is good’. Which I’m guessing was written by someone who hasn’t seen that many of Perez’s films, ‘leftish clichés’ isn’t something you tend to associate with the man. Hollywood liberalism is a big bête noire in his films, and Cabal is no exception. The right leaning social commentary in this film basically evolving around the Cabal having tentacles in Hollywood, and social media and using these tools to wage war on religion, family values and heterosexual procreation. The idea being that the cabal are trying to control the masses by emasculating and demonising male culture, and instead are throwing their weight behind feminist, gay and transgender causes. So, this is a film that uses horror and sci-fi elements as a way of espousing conservative fears about the influence of Hollywood and social media on the American psyche. At times it feels as if Cabal is Perez’s red rag retort to the current crop of horror films, emanating from Hollywood that make their woke values a major selling point. There is no two ways about it, Cabal’s politics will be a deal breaker for many. Politically there is more meat on the bone here than in your average Rene Perez horror movie, meat that might not be to everyone’s taste. If you take nothing else away from Cabal it is the knowledge that Hollywood and Rene Perez will never be good friends. Cabal is practically gleeful about burning bridges there and taking pot shots at the Hollywood film industry, with Linda Bott’s character being commended by the Cabal for mingling with “filthy celebrities” in order to further their cause. Something tells me Rene Perez won’t be on Hollywood’s Christmas card list this year...or any other year.



Declaring open season on Hollywood also seems to be on the menu of Perez’s next movie ‘The Insurrection’ which appears to be channelling similar concerns as Cabal, but drops the horror/sci-fi angle and plays them out in a more ‘real world’ context. It’s a little difficult to get a handle on The Insurrection, since all I’ve currently seen is the poster and the trailer, and the latter has taken the unusual step of muting/censoring a particular plot point, on the basis that this is too controversial and too dangerous to be included in the trailer, and you have to see the film itself to discover what it is.....the spirit of William Castle lives. A bit of digging around though would suggest the big, dark, secretive plot point that was retracted from the Insurrection trailer is that the female protagonist blows the whistle on how powerful ‘deep state’ figures are exerting their leftish influence on Hollywood and the internet, an element to the film that reportedly has made The Insurrection a hard sell, distribution wise. Vimeo being one of the few media outlets to be currently carrying the film.  So, it does feel that with Cabal, Perez was prepping for the plot of that film, and that the ‘cabal’ were meant as a proxy for the deep state figures that The Insurrection has gotten itself into hot water for depicting in a more direct fashion.

As we’ve come to expect from Perez, Cabal is exploitation filmmaking without apologies. One that manages to put its own distinct 21st century spin on the genre while respectfully paying tribute to its video era linage. Marion Cobretti looks to have been a big fashion influence on Mr Dragonfly, what with Dragonfly’s black leather jacket, 5 o’clock shadow and insistence on wearing designer sunglasses, even when in dark, indoor settings. I couldn’t help but be amused by the fact that in the final confrontation, Sallos is delivering all these punishing blows, and blood and teeth are flying about, yet Dragonfly somehow manages to keep those sunglasses on. Not even a beat down from a well pumped psycho gets to fuck with Dragonfly’s Stallone Cobra look. Cabal’s leading man, Master John Ozuna, not only looks the part, but as his name implies is a real life black belt and martial arts instructor. There are actually two masters for the price of one in this film, Ozuna’s onscreen adversary, Sallos, being played by another master....Master Tony Jackson. It is fair to say that both parties...in the words of Cannon’s The Apple ‘know how to be a master’, and the fight scenes in the film, choreographed by Ozuna, have an electrifying authenticity that puts bigger budgeted Hollywood fare to shame. If you were to categorise this film in terms of its influences, as tends to be popular with the quotes that appear on DVD boxes these days, you’d probably have to go with ‘Cobra Vs Friday the 13th, with the politics of a Chuck Norris film’. As with other recent films made by people who grew up on a diet of 1980s slasher movies, Adam Green’s Hatchet series for instance, Cabal can’t help but trump its own influences when it comes to ultra-violence. The bloody shootouts, stabbings and disembowellings here are starting to make those later Friday the 13th sequels look anaemic in comparison, and what with blood and guts here thrown around like confetti at a wedding, Cabal takes the bloodletting to a level that back in the Eighties was mainly the preserve of Euro-gore extremists. A partially underwater kill, in which Sallos stabs a girl in the back of the head with such force that the blade emerges from her mouth, suggesting that either The House by the Cemetery or J.P. Simon’s Pieces were also an influence here.



As is the norm with Perez’s films, Cabal mostly takes place in the woodlands of California, which has become such a distinct part of his films’ character. Shot around August 2019, the landscape here is a warm, lush and summery one of lakes, forests and parklands, that manages to look inviting, even when being portrayed as the stomping ground of ninjas, masked serial killers and snooty human organ traffickers. The impression you get is that the people who appear in the Rene Perez films which are shot over the summer months are the lucky ones, whereas the actors who appear in the movies of his that are made later in the year are somewhat less fortunate. Gorgeous as these locations appear in the summer, they take on the appearance of a chilly assault course during the winter months. I challenge you to watch ‘Quest for the Unicorn’ and not admire the grit and stamina of an actress/singer called Stormi Maya, who they have walking around in snowbound conditions, wearing very little other than a fur bikini and a massive pair of antlers on her head, or the actors in ‘Once Upon a Time in Deadwood’ who shoot it out in knee deep snow, or take a dive into an icy cold lake. The topless scene by the lead actress in Once Upon a Time in Deadwood may well play on the conscience of your average male viewer. On one hand the male in you finds the idea of seeing an attractive woman undressing, a very agreeable turn of events, it’s just a little difficult to ignore the voice in your head that is saying “oh, surely they’re not gonna make this poor actress take her top off in these Arctic looking conditions.” Cabal fortunately spares you such a guilt trip or male soul searching, as various female characters shed their clothes in a more humane, sun drenched context. As I’ve said in the past, if there is an attractive woman in a Rene Perez film, chances are that you’ll get to see her naked at some point, and Cabal does nothing to disprove this little theory. If anything, your sympathises tend to transfer over here to the male actors, who are slugging it out in boiling hot conditions whilst often wearing body armour and masks.



There is a far bit of mask wearing in Cabal, Dragonfly wears one, Sallos wears one, and has inherited a trait from Havoc in the Playing with Dolls movies of forcing his female victims to don these strange, raven like masks. Which under regular circumstances would be a twisted, serial killer thing to do, but given the current mess we are in, actually makes it seem like Sallos is merely helping these girls out and doing his bit to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus. Cabal inadvertently might prove to be the source of some mask wearing fashion tips over the next couple of months. Whatever you’re choosing to wear on your face at the moment though, I doubt any of us will be able to look as cool as Dragonfly does on his way to work with his cyber-ninja get-up and matching all-black ‘Bat-Quad’ bike.