Extremes (1971)

Following the success of If… and Easy Rider, young, relatively inexperienced filmmakers with a jones for representing their generation onscreen suddenly found themselves en vogue with an industry that only a couple of years earlier would have probably crossed the street to avoid them. Two twentysomethings who benefited from this turn of events were filmmaking buddies Tony Klinger and Michael Lytton. Armed with equipment ‘borrowed’ from Lytton’s day job working on ITC shows, and with financing coming from exploitation film distributor Barry Jacobs of Eagle Films, the pair did a deep dive into the world of sex n’ drugs n’ rock and roll, and came back with the ‘shockumentary’ Extremes. Jacobs, who’d already displayed a keen eye for youth-oriented exploitation films with Groupie Girl and Bread, reportedly toyed with the idea of putting the film out under the title ‘Out-Bloody-Rageous’, a title presumably meant to anticipate any straight-laced cinemagoer’s reaction to the film itself. Jacobs eventually went with an ad campaign that emphasized the ‘X’ in the film’s title, simultaneously drawing audiences’ attention to its X certificate, in a manner that recalled Hammer’s publicity for The Quatermass Xperiment in the 1950s.

Whatever pennies Jacobs was throwing in Klinger and Lytton’s direction, proved to be money well spent. In exploitation terms, Extremes is a heavy number for 1971, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable on British screens what with its female and male full frontal nudity, unsimulated intravenous drug use, gay sex scene and uncensored language. Entirely unfaked and shot guerilla style, Extremes certainly lives up to its title, documenting the lives of the most extreme characters the period had to offer. Hell’s Angels, hippies, homosexuals and heroin addicts are all part of the parade here.

Extremes is the type of film that could have only been made by people who were themselves young, had a devil may care streak and a taste for life in the fast lane. Shared characteristics with their subject matter that allowed Klinger and Lytton access to worlds that would have been strictly off limits to the older generation. Klinger and Lytton could boast greater authenticity than the trashy paperback books and fictional exploitation films that tried to cash in on the youth of the day. Those tended to be made by people who only observed the counter-culture from the sidelines, or read about it in the Sunday papers, Klinger and Lytton on the other hand actually befriended these people and rode on the crazy train with them. The irony is that the reality that unfolds in Extremes, actually far exceeds even the most lurid and sensationalist fiction of the era. Although it’s a product of the hippie era, there is a proto-punk mentality to many of Extremes subjects, who seize the chance to be as revolting, indecent and threatening on camera as possible, and clearly have their hearts set on grossing out society. Never more so than the Hell’s Angels who are initially the main focus of attention, and are introduced belching and fighting their way through a pop concert. Attempts to engage them in an intelligent conversation about the legalization of drugs is met with the put down “you sound like you’ve been poking your dick in the wrong place” and the equally blunt observation “if they legalize it, the cunts pay taxes, so what’s the point, I mean they get it now, so why bother, fuck em”.



It’s difficult not to admire the ballsiness of Klinger and Lytton, who spent the entire film in the company of volatile, violence prone personalities who could easily snap and turn on them at any moment. “We can’t be angels till we’ve proved ourselves, which is fucking difficult” explains one of the gang, with wannabe angels expected to “drink pints of piss…eat lumps of shit” in order to gain acceptance. Naturally, following around a bunch of not very bright, shit-faced Hell’s Angels at some ungodly hour in the morning buys the filmmakers a ticket to sex, violence and the odd provocative punk-ish comment “I think they should turn the House of Commons into a fucking sewerage farm”. Scenes with the Hell’s Angels carry such a thick sense of danger that they leave you feeling slightly guilty about being able to experience them without being on the front line yourself. The Boris Karloff and Catherine Lacey characters in The Sorcerers would have loved Extremes. Not so fortunate are our men in the field Klinger and Lytton, who are forced into the position of being helpless bystanders, and would be in no position to intervene were things to get out of hand…which of course they do. The angels go all Psychomania on two girls, whose flash car gets surrounded by the gang. The girls are taunted with “want a dent in your car”, “is it daddy’s” and are ordered to turn the car radio down. Just as Extremes threatens to become insightful, with one of the Hell’s Angels espousing his thoughts on race relations, rival gangs and hippie culture, his chain of thought is interrupted by another of the gang drunkenly falling off his bike. Soon after everything descends into chaos, an aged city businessman finds himself being accosted by two skanks who pin him up against a wall and flash their tits at the mortified old sod. A fight breaks out amongst the angels, someone ends up partly stripped and thrown in a canal, the soundtrack is dominated by the agitated voice of a nearby homeowner berating the filmmakers for shooting without permits, only to themselves be shouted down by one of the angels “I still recon you’re a virgin”.

A reoccurring problem with Extremes is the lack of clarification over just what is happening onscreen. Klinger and Lytton tending to favour a hands off approach to documentary making, employing the bare minimum of voiceover narration and unspooling the footage pretty much as filmed. An approach that often leaves you having to grab your deerstalker hat to try and piece together what is being put before you, frequently without success. Were those two wild gals who flashed at the old man hanging around with the angels, or were they just in the vicinity and caught Klinger and Lytton’s attention, it’s never made clear. A further excursion into London similarly leaves the audience deep within the West End Jungle without a map. There is footage of what appears to be a student protest, under heavy police guard, but it’s unclear what they are protesting for or against. At this point Extremes becomes the cinematic equivalent of listening in on the tail end of heated arguments, without fully understanding the context. Bad vibes are everywhere as filming rolls on into the night. Klinger and Lytton’s nose for danger is all present and correct, everyone they meet appears drunk or confrontational, often both. A bearded, intense, wildman appears to be blowing his top over race relations, but as the film only captures him mid-rant, it is hard to say for sure. “There’s no race thing, it only appears to be a race thing in the papers” he tells an elderly black guy, before laying into the police and black MP David Pitt, echoing Enoch Powell be prophesying “blood will flow in the streets”. Suddenly there are police sirens. As the Extremes crew rush towards the crowded scene a young man breaks free of the crowd, bolting past them. An eye-witness fills in some of the missing details for the Extremes crew “blood all over his face…he used a knife on him, stabbed him in the neck and that”.

After the explosive violence of nighttime London, the film cuts to the comparatively peaceful, hippie bliss of the second Isle of Wight pop festival. Early morning shots of festival goers waking up, setting up tents, wandering around picturesque fields and coastlines. It’s not long though before Extremes reverts to cynical type, and starts tearing down the illusion of this being any kind of hippie utopia. Everything shitty about pop festivals is focused in on by Klinger and Lytton’s lens. Extremes must be fairly unique for being a documentary covering a pop music festival, that couldn’t give a flying fuck about the musicians. There isn’t a second of footage of the bands that actually played the Isle of Wight festival in the film. Instead Lytton and Klinger take in shots of hippies being hustled through a turnstile, iron fences, barbed wire, tons and tons of garbage on the floor, people in boiling hot cars caught in a traffic jam on the way to the festival. A sign reads “urinals – don’t piss in the cubicals”. As you might expect from a film made by a pair of jack the lads, who were on the payroll of an exploitation film distributor, any shots of hippie chicks walking around with their tops off are considered holy here. Ariel views of hundreds of tents make the pop festival look as unsanitary and uninviting as a refugee camp. Since no live acts were caught on camera, the actual music in Extremes was put together after the fact, including tracks purchased from a down on their luck, pre-fame Supertramp, and contributions by ace movie soundtrack composer Roy Budd, who’d just scored ‘Get Carter’, a film produced by Klinger’s father Michael.



No one emerges from Extremes smelling of roses, including Klinger and Lytton themselves. Their vox pop interviews represent the most worthless, waste of film, moments that Extremes has to offer. No one seems to want to give Michael and Tony the time of day, many decline to be interviewed or turn away from the camera, at best people regard the pair with polite irritation. Hanging out with Hell’s Angels seems to have rubbed off on Michael and Tony, who get their kicks by bugging one of the Queen’s guards, knowing full well that the poor bastard isn’t allowed to respond to the public. “I’m not supposed to speak, mate” is his monotone response to their questions. An American businessman initially plays along, giving not very interesting sound bites “I like to talk to young people, but I don’t enjoy young people…don’t put me on the spot” before losing patience with these jokers “you just keep talking to me”. Most of the pairs’ attention seems to be focused on chatting up and/or shocking a pair of American girls “what about the young people, the drugs, the sex, and everything…and the depravity, would you participate in both…freely” sniggers Klinger.

In nighttime Piccadilly Circus though, the action is anything but heterosexual. A pair of shameless gays smooch, as a straight guy looks on, pulling pained expressions of disapproval. A hysterically funny, handbags at dawn, bitchfest kicks off between two queens. “What would I wanna screw you for…a fucking bitch” shrieks one, for all of Piccadilly Circus to hear. Evidentially size does matter, especially in the after dark Piccadilly Circus of 1971. “Fucking great queen, you ain’t even got fucking six inches down there” protests one, prompting the other to unzip his trousers in order to prove the mouthy bitch wrong. Tempers calmed, and with libidos needing to be satisfied, the pair retreat to the safety of a nearby park, where they end up putting on a live show for the Extremes crew. “These are two queens, homosexuals, fairies, AC/DC, anything you want to call them” explains Klinger “they’re here, it’s a good enough reason for us to be here”.



Extremes then cuts to the man with the worst job in London, patrolling the underground toilets after dark. Crouching down on a piss soaked floor, he peeks under the occupied cubicles. Since this is intercut with the drama taking place above ground in Piccadilly Circus, you automatically assume that Dan, Dan, the Lavatory man is trying to catch guys cottaging, but it is actually the area’s junkies he is on the lookout for. Extremes’ camera once again spares you no sordid detail, whether it is blood splattered on the cubicle door as a result of people shooting up in there, or the hole in the backside of Dan, Dan’s trousers that allows him to contribute some unwanted bare flesh to the film. An old, cadaverous junkie finds himself cornered in the cubicle by Dan, Dan, making his last stand by feebly complaining “fucking cunts….fuck off”. Outside, a younger junkie stumbles around outside of the London Pavilion, eventually flaking out against the cinema’s marquee for ‘Goodbye Gemini’ a horror film about a pair of young people who come to London and get fucked up….art mirrors life, eh?

It’s all building up to Extremes’ strongest moment, an unflinching look at the tail end of heroin addiction. The sequence opens with Klinger’s voiceover admitting that he felt sick filming it. “Here you see the living dead, evidence of hard drugs and their effects, look closely before thinking of joining in”. Bill, an older junkie with glasses has taken in a youthful ward, who does all the talking. “They used to call me the abscess king in this house” admits the younger guy, who recalls getting into hard drugs while working as a male nurse. On the sly he’d steal morphine from his day job and shoot up on a daily basis, but short sleeve nurses outfits and his track mark collection eventually brought the good times to an end. He and Bill have a mutually beneficial relationship. Since Bill’s eyesight is shot to hell he needs a younger pair of eyes around to shoot him up, in return the younger guy got a rundown roof over his head. The younger guy prides himself on being an expert worksman, as he shoots up Bill with a filthy old needle that he’d just pulled out of his own shoulder. “It’s just a knack I’ve got for hitting people” he admits, but his own fucked up body has a different tale to tell, what with his open sours, abscesses and collapsed veins. He confesses to nearly having lost a leg at Christmas time “at the hospital I never met such cunts…because I wouldn’t take a suppository, the sister came up and said either you take the suppository or we don’t give you any gear…so naturally I took the suppository”. Extremes then gives you the grand tour around their living conditions, a dirty mattress on the floor, pornography on the walls, carpets long since stripped from the bare floor, doors bashed in as a result of an earlier police raid…you’re left with the impression that both men will likely die in that room, probably with a needle sticking out of their arm. In terms of shock value, this sequence has more power than any anti-drugs film doing the rounds in schools during the 1970s and 80s.



Extremes winds down with a return to the Isle of Wight pop festival, where the film’s subjects finally turn on the men behind the camera. It’s filming naked pop fans that turns out to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Klinger and Lytton excitedly grabbed their camera when they spotted hundreds of festival goers heading to the beach and stripping off en masse. Only it seems, some of the crowd objected to being filmed in the nude, and began pelting the Extremes crew with rocks… footage of which remains in the film. Licking their wounds, Klinger and Lytton came up with the ingenious solution of stripping off themselves, allowing them to slip back among the naked masses incognito, and resume filming. Extremes ends with hundreds of naked people grooving around in the sea, while a police helicopter hovers above, futilely trying to get them all to put their clothes back on. The kind of big budget, action movie spectacle that would have been beyond the film’s budget to stage. Barry Jacobs, who measured a film’s quality by the amount of boobs that were in it, and was known for impatiently asking filmmakers “what reel has the tits on it”, must have been in his element. Hundreds of people taking their clothes off in his movie…and for free as well. The end credits thank Jacobs and ‘the police sometimes’.

Extremes doesn’t so much document its era, rather sticks its fingers into the era’s wounds and watches the puss flow out. It’s one for those with a strong stomach for the squalid, an obnoxious, dirty, pimple faced punk of a movie that frequently spits in the audience’s faces, don’t be surprised if you occasionally want to spit back. Extremes is a reminder that while the past was a different country, it was every bit as fucked up as where we are now.
Extremes is meant to have had a VHS release in the early eighties on the ultra-obscure Knockout video label, a tape so rare that not even the most ardent pre-cert video collectors have ever managed to unearth a copy. After remaining dormant for decades, the film eventually resurfaced in 2017, when a combi-pack containing the film on DVD and a copy of the soundtrack on CD was released. Incongruous photos of John Sebastian and The Who’s Pete Townshend, taken at Woodstock, appear on the cover. The good times and flower power optimism of those images being a far cry from the early 1970s comedown nature of Extremes itself. Extremes doesn’t embody the idealism of the 1960s, it serves that decade’s severed head to you on a plate.

Death Has Blue Eyes (1976)

Despite its giallo sounding title, this Tigon released, Nico Mastorakis directed WTFery, instead spans sexploitation, political thriller, buddy movie and horror, as two freewheeling con men get caught up with a blonde psychic who has been targeted for political assassination, after apparently witnessing a murder and inadvertently reading the mind of the killer. Death has Blue Eyes begins as an ode to male hedonism, as the two protagonists party, cheat and hustle their way around 1970s Greece, smashing plates, getting drunk and encountering butt naked housemaids, sweary parrots and sexy female racing drivers along the way. Somehow such amorous hi-jinks (notable for featuring as much male nudity as female), eventually give way to a film that antisapates The Fury and Scanners when it comes to using violent telekinesis as a plot device. The blonde with the titular blue eyes having the ability to yank pursuers off motorbikes, cause people to burst into flames and even be used as a human bomb.

Death Has Blue Eyes is very much a young, horny, guy's movie, with Mastorakis filling the film with fast cars, loose women, Cold War era espionage, pop culture references (Serpico, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), and above all else the male fantasy of flying through life by the seat of your pants, devoid of any worldly responsibility. Pursuit by helicopter, motorbike and numerous car chases hint at Mastorakis' future in 1980s direct to video action movies, but as anyone who encountered Death Has Blue Eyes on UK video (where it was known as 'Para Psychics') will testify, this groovy, hyper-sexual, genre cocktail is a far cry from Nick the Greek's later, more conventional American fare.

Cupid (2020)

There has been so much activity lately Brit-Horror wise, especially on the low budget end of the spectrum. Activity that has not necessarily been for the better, as 2019's triple threat of The Manson Family Massacre, Mask of Thorn and Invasion Planet Earth managed to prove. Slightly more promising are the films of Scott Jeffrey, although the films Jeffrey directs tend to be several notches above the films where he is merely the producer (I couldn’t make it through the Jeffrey produced ‘The Mummy Reborn’, and only just about made it to the end of ‘Mandy- The Doll’). Still Jeffrey is quite the filmmaking workhorse with the IMDb crediting him with directing 15 movies and producing 47 since 2016. Mostly horror, although among his forthcoming slate is "The Gardener" a British action thriller starring Hungarian Charles Bronson lookalike Robert 'Bronzi' Kovacs as a green fingered vigilante. Jeffrey can clearly knock ‘em out quickly, but there seems to be a tiny bit more effort and personality at work in them than the "why make a proper movie when you can film an am-dram rehearsal" approach of, say, Andrew Jones.

Cupid is in the long standing tradition of British productions that are pretending to be American. A shtick dating back to the days of Fire Maidens of/from Outer Space although given its high school setting and revenge theme 1986's Slaughter High is perhaps this film's closest blood brother. My main issue with 'pretend American' British horror is that they tend to lack any real atmosphere, due to having to conceal their locations. A dilemma that Jeffrey's films tend to get around by simply ignoring the issue. Having their cake and eating it by making cast members adopt American accents and play American characters, while the location work of these films soak up the unmistakably British atmosphere of ye olde churchyards, pubs, deserted train stations and quaint old villages. Thus, Cupid takes place in a transatlantic never neverland where the school setting is obviously British, yet a large proportion of the teachers and students just happen to sport US accents and where even the British students are prone to Americanisms. Cupid can lay claim to the most unusual yet ludicrous monster to come along in a long while, yes the baddie is that romantic bow and arrow guy, but he ain't no cherub, rather this Cupid is a skull faced demon who is summoned up by the lovelorn. Bullied teenager Faye is the latest to call on Cupid to draw back his bow, after her life is made a misery by her schoolmates. A bunch lead by the particularly spoilt and malicious Elise, who has personal with Faye (due to the fact that Faye's mum has shacked up with Elise’s dad). The straw that breaks the camel's back comes when they prank Faye into believing that her good guy teacher Mr. Jones has a thing for her, which also threatens to jeopardize his career too. Enter Cupid, who Faye calls upon for revenge, only to find the lives of her friends, enemies and teachers are equally in peril - the Cupid Stunt!!

As with other 'bullied teenager reaches out to the supernatural for revenge' films like Carrie, Fulci's Aenigma and Evilspeak, there is an awful lot of persecution and schoolyard drama to contend with before the horror elements fully kick in, but likeable performances by Georgina Jane, Michael Owusu, plus Sarah T. Cohen as detestable, yet entertaining mean bitch Elise make it compelling enough for you to stick with. Elise gets the best, laugh out loud, piece of dialogue in the film, when she attempts to justify her behavior towards Faye, by telling her "if your mum had just kept her legs closed, then I would have never hated you this much". The payoff is definitely worth the wait as Cupid shoots people through the eye with arrows, carves heart shaped cookies out of the flesh of one victim (which the other school kids unwittingly eat) and slices open throats with love letters. A wildly over the top arm severing scene - which ironically Cupes is only indirectly involved with- is unquestionably the film's gore highlight though. Cupid is far from perfect (some of the supporting actors are cringe worthy and the Cupid make-up looks equally shoddy in some shots) but on the basis on this and the even better 'Don't Speak' (a knock-off of 'A Quiet Place' featuring more phony Americans, this time being terrorized by a blind mutant) Jeffrey might yet be a talent to watch.

Choudenshi Bioman (1984)

Taking my first dip into the "Super Sentai" genre, which in layman's terms appears to mean Japanese TV shows where peeps save the world while wearing spandex, superhero costumes, and frequently hop on board a giant robot in order to cobber monsters. Choudenshi Bioman is the kind of hyper, action packed, sugar rush of a TV show (with a fiendishly catchy theme song) that you'll really wish you'd experienced as a kid, rather than arrived to the party more than thirty years too late. I doubt though that 1980s children's TV in Britain would have been ready for a show where the heroes get to say "bastard" or where villainess Farrah Cat is allowed to attack people with the dreaded nunchucks. Considering that the show has five protagonists (Red one, Green two, Blue three, Yellow four and Pink five), one villain (Dr. Man), three deputy villains (Farrah, Mason, Monster), minions of the deputy villains, five 'beastnoid' villains, and the type of camp, comic relief robot that appeared to be mandatory post-Star Wars, it is nothing short of amazing that the first episode manages to whizz through the premise in just under twenty minutes, it is that fast paced. The actor who plays deputy villain Monster has the even cooler real life name 'Strong Kongo', although I think Farrah (not to be confused with Farrah Cat) might well be my favourite of the baddies. My initial reaction to seeing a picture of Farrah- played by the late Yûko Asuka -was “there is no way I can go through life without seeing this show”, closely followed by “could this possibly fill the hole in my life that has been left since I ran out of Spectreman episodes to watch”.


The genre crossed over to the West in the 1990s with Power Rangers and arguably continues to exert its influence on Hollywood, thanks to the Pacific Rim and Transformers movies, but even on lower budgets and with 1980s practical effects, you have to agree that the Japanese managed to pull off this type of crash, bang, wallop with much more panache.

The Insurrection (2020)

Too much, rather than a little, knowledge is a dangerous thing in The Insurrection, Rene Perez’s multi-purpose conspiracy thriller, siege movie and intended takedown of modern Hollywood. Perez’s films have never been shy when it comes to voicing opinions that go against the grain of Tinseltown. Immediately setting the likes of Death Kiss, Cabal and The Punished apart from standard Hollywood fare, but what has occasionally boiled to the surface in those films, is allowed to fully erupt in The Insurrection. It is a film whose premise- a female CEO with ties to Hollywood and the political elite, effectively marks herself for death by blowing the whistle on their machinations- allows Perez free range to voice his thoughts on the illuminati, abortion, transgenderism, gun control, racism, the dark secrets of Hollywood, social engineering, the #metoo movement and the hidden agenda behind the film Rosemary’s Baby. The Insurrection is a film that will never be accused of having nothing to say. If Perez is something of a 21st century answer to John Milius, then The Insurrection may well be his ‘Red Dawn’, capturing the director at his most outspoken and provocative, and in doing so probably earning himself many powerful enemies in Hollywood as a result. It’s arguably his most personal and heartfelt movie to date, yet it’s also the one perhaps destined to become his ‘lost’ movie. At a time when Perez’s horror film ‘Cry Havoc’ has been generating greater interest and receiving a warmer reception than his movies are usually afforded, The Insurrection has in comparison been ignored and allowed to fly under people’s radar. The Insurrection has by all accounts had a tough time of it distribution wise, with many of Perez’s regular doors of distribution being shut on him with this movie. For evidence of this film being blackballed, blocked, persecuted and suppressed, consider that another recent Perez film ‘Cabal’ currently enjoys a DVD and Blu-Ray release and is available on multiple streaming services like Amazon Prime, FandangoNow, Vimeo, Google plus, Redbox on Demand, Microsoft, Vudu and Apple. On the other hand The Insurrection is currently without any kind of physical media release, and of the streaming services, only Vimeo and Amazon Prime are currently willing to give it a home.

The irony about this situation is that Cabal and The Insurrection share so many of the same themes, concerns and personnel. They were directed by the same man, produced by the same man and share a number of cast members. They even share a great deal of plot- a woman blows the whistle on her bosses, and has to hire a cynical, tough guy to protect her- but take the material in such different directions that their storyline comparisons only become apparent in retrospect. Whereas Cabal’s elegance was with 1980s slasher films and the grindhouse era, The Insurrection is a sombre descendant of Nixon era conspiracy thrillers. They are effectively cinematic twins who have followed very different paths in life. If you’ve ever wanted proof that horror movies are allowed to get away with far more subversive content than regular movies, look no further than the contrasting fates of Cabal and The Insurrection. Cabal sets out to make the same enemies as The Insurrection, takes pot-shots at the same targets, and is equally anti-SJW, anti-woke in its worldview, yet because it is a horror movie, a genre that still isn’t taken seriously in some quarters, has escaped censure and failed to set the alarm bells ringing. The Insurrection... hasn’t been so lucky.

The Insurrection follows a disgraced Sergeant Major (Michael Pare- Streets of Fire, Eddie and the Cruisers, and of late Perez’s Once Upon a Time in Deadwood) as he is released from Shasta County Jail and not exactly welcomed back into society with open arms. Awkward phone calls to his estranged, grown up, son quickly make it clear that any reconciliation there seems unlikely. Trouble also immediately catches up with Pare’s character, when having barely taken a few steps away from the jail, he is hassled by the kooky Dakota (Rebecca Tarabocchia, given a substantially larger role here than in Cabal) who explains that her boss has used her ties to the illuminati to secure his release and pay his bail money. Things go from bad to worse when the Sergeant’s attempt to shake her off attracts the attention of an aggressive, African American guy. Initially appearing to fancy himself as Dakota’s saviour, jumping in and waiving a baseball bat around when the Sergeant roughs her up against a fence, this would be hero quickly reveals himself to be a threat, hurling accusations of racism at both the Sergeant and Dakota, and challenging Pare’s character to a fight. It’s the first, of many, times that The Insurrection steps outside of Hollywood’s comfort zone, with two white characters being irrationally and unjustly called out as bigots (Pare’s character is called a “honkey motherfucker” and “old racist peckerwood”) possibly intended as a dig at the social media era’s over-eagerness to throw around allegations of racism. Since a return to jail is now a likely possibility, the Sergeant’s hand is now forced into meeting Dakota’s boss, Joan Schafer (Wilma Elles) “the liberal queen of outrage” who has previously been moving in opulent Hollywood and Political circles (photos meant to show Schafer with Obama and the Clintons, have curiously had these real-life figures pixelated out in the film itself, although they remain intact in the film’s trailer). Formally a social justice campaigner turned movie executive, Joan now regrets her career decisions, and has decided to make amends by spilling her bosses’ darkest secrets via a series of Q&A sessions, broadcast live on the web. The Sergeant’s role in her plan is to defend her against several waves of attack, as Joan’s bosses try to silence her for good by sending scores of militia to her remote safe house. Stepping up their efforts when Pare’s character proves to be an enemy to be reckoned with.

The Insurrection is a film about whistle blowing that may constitute an act of whistle blowing in itself. Much of Joan’s insider information about the Hollywood system reportedly being borne out of Perez’s own experiences at the fringes of Hollywood. Among the more explosive allegations made by the protagonist of The Insurrection, and by association its director, are that the #metoo and #timesup movements were conjured up by Hollywood in order to deflect attention away from powerful paedophiles within the movie industry, resulting in a few heterosexual sexual predators being thrown under the bus in order to save them. That left-leaning corporations have been buying up the rights to old movie franchises -which have traditionally been aimed at males- in order to demonize masculinity and espouse feminist ideology instead. The Insurrection also accuses Hollywood of hypocritically championing women while being indifferent towards the sex trafficking taking place on its own doorstep, with Joan claiming that Tinseltown turns a blind eye to the practice of young, aspiring actresses being lured to fake auditions where they are kidnapped, abused and trafficked in Hollywood. “The Studio executives rely on having fresh vagina being imported daily” according to Joan. Tales so disturbing that they make you wonder if they didn’t help inspire the plots of Perez’s ‘Playing with Dolls’ series. For all the expletives thrown around in The Insurrection, ‘Hollywood’ is by far the dirtiest word in this film.

There is no two ways about it, The Insurrection is a film with plenty to get off its chest, but sincerely and passionately argues all of its talking points without its exposure of Hollywood’s dirty laundry coming across as mere tabloid sensationalism. Since it obviously wants to be taken far more seriously than your average Rene Perez film, The Insurrection is less inclined to go as wild and crazy as his other films of late. It may well be the most character and dialogue driven of his films, perhaps realising that such Straw Dogs/Assault on Precinct 13 type siege movies only really work when you’re emotionally invested in the characters who are under threat. The Sergeant and Joan confirm to the gender roles that have become standard in Perez’s films. The Sarge being the latest in a line of strong, no-nonsense, alpha males who throw themselves into the role of protector to female characters. The type of male character that, if this film is to believed, Hollywood is currently at war with and attempting to eradicate from movies. The Sarge might be burdened with regret and bear the scars of bad life decisions, but he is also an enigma who doesn’t reveal much or show his emotions too easily. To the degree that, like the Bronzi character in Death Kiss, he isn’t even allocated an actual character name. A seemingly deliberate decision, rather than an oversight. Pare’s character does though snag the greatest, macho line of dialogue in the film “no one deserves to die comfortably”. 

The Insurrection offers a far greater window into Joan, an obvious mouthpiece for the director, what with the film’s Q&A sessions serving as a way for Perez to vent his spleen over just what’s wrong with the movie industry, and the world in general. Joan Schafer might well be Perez’s most well realised female character to date. A haunted, tragic figure, forever living in the shadow of death, having resigned herself to a violent death early on in the film, who also has to ensure the guilt that her actions are endangering the lives of those closest to her, pseudo-daughter Dakota, and pseudo-father figure Francisco (Joseph Camilleri, another Cabal cast member, who also produced both movies). 

Action scenes in this film are as anti-Hollywood as its sentiments, everything feels played as realistic as possible, don’t expect to see civilians pick up guns and magically become firearm experts. When Joan takes up arms, she is hopelessly ineffectual against the professional militia as you’d imagine a real person to actually be in that situation. Shootouts between the Sarge and the militia bad guys are equally a stickler for realism, taking place in a very un-glamorous junkyard, and involving lots of futile gunplay, running about and wasted ammo, while frequently showing the Sarge being brought down by enemy fire and only saved by his bullet proof vest. A world away from the Hollywood approach, which would have dictated that every one of the Sarge’s bullets hits its target, and that the hero be an invulnerable figure. Only once does Perez allow himself to go wildly over the top with the gore, but it’s a doozy, as the Sarge squares off against a kickass sniper, played by Master John Ozuna, another Cabal cast member. A fight whose payoff also allows for a welcome screen comeback of Perez’s ‘severed eyeball’ prop, previously seen in The Obsidian Curse, his adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood and a few other of his movies. The Insurrection doesn’t totally abstain from female nudity either, throwing in a topless scene that is so random it feels like a defiant gesture against the lack of female nudity in current Hollywood movies. Since The Insurrection has broken so many of Hollywood’s rules by this point though, one more doesn’t really seem to matter.

Perez is hardly alone when it comes to being a vocal critic of modern day Hollywood, but he is, as far as I’m aware, the first to use Hollywood’s most valuable tool, movies themselves, as a weapon against it. The Insurrection might simultaneously be his most restrained film (in terms of violence and female nudity) and his most outrageous one (in terms of what it has to say). There’s no masked serial killer running around in this Rene Perez film, but if even a tenth of what Joan Schafer has to say is true, it could also be his most terrifying film as well.

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.