The Mermaid’s Curse (2019)

I never thought I’d live to see a film that simultaneously reminded me of the work of both Jean Rollin and Guy N. Smith, the unlikely achievement of The Mermaid’s Curse, a film that also manages to tap into two of men’s biggest fears: women and being cannibalised by them!

Workshy, is something the director of this film, Louisa Warren, is never likely to be accused of. Despite only having film directing credits going back to 2018, Warren currently has 13 feature films to her name. That is more feature films than her British horror namesake Norman J Warren managed during the course of his entire career. In another career parallel, both Warrens began their filmmaking careers in the world of softcore erotica, before finding their career footing in low-budget horror instead. Louisa Warren’s earliest screen credits, Dirty Work, which she directed, and Darker Shades of Elise, which she produced, being attempts to mine the then lucrative 50 Shades of Grey market.

This fishy tale takes us away from the bright lights and BDSM of London and to the seaside town of Worthing, West Sussex, where according to local legend men folk are being lured to their death by the seductive singing of a cannibalistic Sea Siren (Rebecca Finch). Most women love a sailor or a cage fighter, but couldn’t eat a whole one. However, the Sea Siren of Worthing is the exception to the rule, and proves the extent of her carnivorous appetite in the opening scene of the film, when she devours a randy cage fighter and his girlfriend, who’ve crept onto Worthing beach for a bit of the other. The discovery of the cage fighter’s blood splattered Hyundai the next morning, brings not only the attention of the police, but Jake (Tom Hendryk), a young American journalist who works for a local newspaper. Investigating a cannibalistic sea siren, proves to be just the diversion that Jake needs, his private life having itself hit turbulent waters. Jake recently walked in on his girlfriend cheating on him with his roommate Cameron (A.J. Blackwell), another American who while not meant to be a cage fighter, certainly comes across like one, as the two men go at it hammer and tongs, getting in each other’s faces and threatening “don’t ya push me” as if they’re about to jump into the ring.



Wandering around Worthing beach in the early morning, the lonely, heartbroken Jake proves to be the ideal candidate to fall under the seductive spell of the sea siren, whose beauty and singing are able to turn red blooded men to jelly...although given the south coast setting maybe that should be...turn red blooded men to jellied eels. When Jake encounters the Sea Siren on the beach, she isn’t...it’s fair to say...looking her best. The result of a night on the tiles that has left her with a couple of stab wounds, courtesy of a fisherman, who managed to get a few slashes of the knife in, before the Sea Siren gobbled him up. Taking the injured woman home with him, Jake is persuaded against calling an ambulance by the Sea Siren. Then when Jake’s back is turned, (rushing out to the nearest off-license to pick up medical supplies) the Siren turns to self medicating by seducing and devouring Cameron. A turn of events that does wonders for the Sea Siren’s complexion, the devouring of human flesh, curing both her injuries and restoring her to her former beauty, her body having a habit of decaying if she doesn’t get a regular fix of flesh and blood.

As romance blossoms between man and siren, Jake quickly becomes consumed by his obsession for the mystery woman, and alienated from his friends and workmates...which isn’t hard to do when his new girlfriend is intent on eating all of them.



The Mermaid’s Curse is one of two films Warren made in 2019, linked by the theme of doomed romances that even from the outset are clearly not going to end well. Its thematic companion piece being Warren’s sci-fi movie ‘Cyber Bride’, in which a widower commissions a robotic replica of his recently murdered wife, only for her to malfunction and turn on his friends, neighbours and pet dog. Both films share the same leading lady, Rebecca Finch, who leaves her mark in two similar, but very difficult roles. Cyber Bride needing you to buy into the idea that Finch is in fact a machine, while The Mermaid’s Curse requires her to play a major role largely mute, yet Finch’s alluring, otherworldly presence as an alternatively sensual and violent character is one of these films’ strongest elements. The Mermaid’s Curse and Cyber Bride, both definitely represent a step in the right direction for Warren, the pair are lively, involving and busy films, suggesting that the pacing issues which marred some of her earlier forays into horror, are being ironed out. For additional oomph, Warren trots out a few other sea sirens, who keeping the blood flowing by emerging from the sea to chow down on more horny revellers, and occasionally move inland to stalk their prey through the back alleys of Worthing. There is also a subplot, involving an old sea dog Mr. Andrews (Tony Manders), whose wild, initially disbelieved tales about the ladies of the water appear to tie the sea sirens to the Salem witch trials.



The Mermaid’s Curse is actually a remake of a film from 2015 called ‘Deadly Waters’. An early Scott Jeffrey production that starred Becca Hirani in the siren role....both of whom have gone on to become significant players in 21st century British horror. Hirani, acting in genre films, sometimes under the name Becky Fletcher, and directing and producing under the name Rebecca J. Matthews. It is not uncommon for modern British horror filmmakers to revisit their old films, and attempt more moneyed and professional takes on the same material. 2017’s House on Elm Lake is a remake of a 2014 film called Lucifer’s Night, and Hirani/Matthews’ recent 2020 film The Candy Witch reworks a few of the themes of 2017’s Mother Krampus. It would certainly be interesting to compare and contrast The Mermaid’s Curse with Deadly Waters, but...despite only being five years old...the earlier film appears to have disappeared into the great blue yonder.

The Mermaid’s Curse follows in the footsteps of recent Scott Jeffrey films by being a brand of British horror that is slightly tailored to the American market, presumably with an eye on selling the film at places like Walmart and US streaming services. In the past British horror films that have gone down this route have had to completely forgo their nationality, making their entire casts adopt US accents and disguising their locations by favouring interior shooting. A position that left many British horror films from the 1980s and 1990s...Slaughter High, Breeders and Grimm... distinctly lacking in personality and atmosphere. Fortunately, more recent genre films by Warren and Jeffrey aren’t quite as compromised. If anything Warren and Jeffrey seem to be having their cake and eating it, making films that are rich in very British atmosphere and locations, yet keep the US market sweet by being filled with young, American characters. The Mermaid’s Curse, like Jeffrey’s Cupid and Don’t Speak, taking place in a version of Britain that is heavily populated by Americans, whose accents don’t always ring true. The only cast members who are exempt from American accents in The Mermaid’s Curse being the actresses playing the sirens, characters who communicate using gargling, fishy noises, and more mature cast members Tony Manders and Kate Lush who are allowed to play their roles with their British accents intact. The discrepancy between the film’s locations and its characters does prove to be a source of awkward amusement in The Mermaid’s Curse, as Warren and her cast stage a plot that often feels like it should by taking place on the sunny beaches of California, rather than a freezing cold, off-season Worthing. In reality, the selection of rocks and pebbles that dares to call itself a beach, the deserted pier and amusement arcade settings, have more in common with the southern, seaside seediness of Pete Walker’s The Big Switch, The Flesh and Blood Show and Michael Winner’s Dirty Weekend, but Warren and Co valiantly do their best to sell the location as a credible spring breaker destination. In the world of The Mermaid’s Curse, young horny Americans turn to Worthing, West Sussex as a place to party hard. A cute, catchy l’ttle pop song, which sounds like something Madonna or Kylie Minogue might have recorded circa 1989, accompanies three doomed Americans as they ecstatically win a cheap cuddly toy on the pier, roast marshmallows, make out on the beach and go skinny dipping, before their inevitable encounter with the bloodthirsty sirens.

For all of the transatlantic aspects to The Mermaid’s Curse, it is a film that also illustrates the current cultural differences between UK and US horror fare. In the post Sharknado era, low budget US horror films tend to gravitate towards the winking, played for laughs, mockbuster approach, whereas for the likes of Warren, Hirani and Jeffrey, horror is a comparatively serious business. Some cringe worthy, but mercifully brief, meta dialogue at the start of The Mermaid’s Curse “if it were a horror film, you’d only die if you get your tits out” being Warren’s only concession to the tongue in cheek brigade. Either due to low budgets or personal preferences, CGI also tends to be eschewed in current British horror, in favour of the more traditional approach of throwing stage blood over actors. Warren in particular has an obvious fondness for very red looking stage blood, which personally I’d take over bad CGI any day. Even if it does at times admittedly look like characters have fallen victim to an explosion in a strawberry jam factory rather than a pack of sea sirens. The frequent visits to the shoreline, striking images of women emerging from the water and the tragic romance at the heart of the film lends The Mermaid’s Curse a certain Jean Rollin-esque quality, but it is equally reminiscent of the trashiest of 1980s horror paperbacks, what with its parade of dumb, sex crazy characters going to their deaths on British beaches. If you ignore the fact that its sea sirens rather than giant crabs doing the flesh-eating, this might be the closest anyone has come to putting Guy N. Smith on the screen. The dialogue tending to get a bit Garth Marenghi at times, “get away from me, you sea bitch!!!” being a standout in that respect.

While I’m unsure whether Warren herself is a horror buff, or someone who has merely drifted into working in the genre, The Mermaid’s Curse does appear to offer many call-backs to British horror cinema’s past. The Siren puts her sea sister underlings in their place when they attempt to feast on Jake, recalling Christopher Lee’s Dracula exerting his dominance over his vampire brides in Hammer Horror films, and the Siren’s appearance and sexual hold over men gives The Mermaid’s Curse the appearance of a small scale, bedsit version of Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce.



Within her own filmography, The Mermaid’s Curse is yet another Warren film to use ‘Querioo’ as a plot device. Querioo being a Yahoo/Google like internet search engine (right down to aping the Google logo) that characters in modern British horror films tend to turn to whenever they need to brush up on their knowledge of sea sirens, evil scarecrows, the tooth fairy, etc etc. I’m sad enough to look up whether Querioo actually exists, and indeed, there really is such an internet search engine. Inevitably though Querioo is less handy when it comes to researching monsters and the supernatural in real life than it is in the movies. To save you the trouble of doing so, running terms like ‘cannibalistic sea sirens of Worthing’ through the real-life Querioo, just brings you to the same handful of film industry links that running anything else through Querioo does. In Warren’s films however, clicking onto Querioo always leads to a cameo by Youtube star Shaun C. Phillips, alias Coolduder, who has managed to become a British horror film regular...seemingly without ever leaving his couch in Baltimore. These little cameo roles presumably being sent to the producers via Skype. For those keeping record, Coolduder has popped up as a cyber dating expert in Cyber Bride, a tooth fairy expert in The Tooth Fairy, a scarecrow expert in Bride of Scarecrow, and expanded his Brit horror career beyond Warren’s films by recently cameo-ing as a candy witch expert in Hirani/Matthews’ The Candy Witch. In The Mermaid’s Curse, Coolduder adds to his growing reputation as an all round know-it-all by bringing his excitable, rosy cheeked, enthusiasm to the role of a sea siren expert, whose viral video gets checked out by Jake and his ex-girlfriend on their laptop. Thanks to these Coolduder cameos there is a case for all these films being part of shared cinematic universe, whilst also positing Coolduder as the Youtube generation’s answer to Edgar Lustgarten.



Aside from keeping Coolduder in gainful employment, British horror cinema has been considerably raising its game recently. Low budgets and tight schedules haven’t stopped Warren developing an ambitious streak of late, even branching out into historical adventure movies, including the horror/historical crossover ‘Pagan Warrior’ which...would you believe...pits Vikings against Krampus. Hirani/Matthews’ films Pet Graveyard and The Candy Witch are- despite their off-puttingly unoriginal titles- well worthy of your perusal, and Scott Jeffrey in particular has been knocking it out of the park, with the strong run of ....Don’t Speak, Cupid, Clown Doll and The Final Scream. The latter of which features both Hirani and Warren in acting roles, the world of modern British horror films being a very small one... fer’sure. I doubt 2020 is likely to go down as anyone’s favourite year, but as far as British horror films are concerned, these are truly exciting times to be alive.

For a film called The Mermaid’s Curse, the word ‘mermaid’ and indeed any part woman, part fish action is notably absent here. Although in fairness to Warren, The Mermaid’s Curse sounds suspiciously like a distributor insisted re-titling, Warren’s original, shooting title apparently being ‘Witches of the Water’. Call it what you will, this is a film that –in the minds of Americans who buy horror films from Walmart at least- will forever make Worthing, West Sussex synonymous with cannibalistic sea sirens. Quite what the residents of Worthing will make of it is anyone’s guess, particularly the chap who inadvertently cameos in the film by staring out of his hotel room window during filming. A man who may well go through life forever wondering why people were stripping down to Ann Summers underwear and talking with pseudo American accents on the beach that night- unless of course he logs on to Querioo for an answer.

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.