Only a Rene Perez movie could begin as a drama about a reformed drug addict attempting to regain custody of her daughter and end with a fight between a hipster serial killer and a Nosferatu look vampire who wears a suit of armour, whilst in-between finding time to squeeze in a zombie invasion, a witch’s curse, a cameo from Reggie ‘Phantasm’ Bannister, a monster under the bed and whatever else has escaped from the Rene Perez house of horrors.
The Obsidian Curse might well be the ideal primer for someone wanting an idea of what Rene Perez is all about, its multi-genred plot allowing for elements of fantasy, reflecting Perez’s adaptations of The Snow Queen and Little Red Riding Hood. We also get a zombie attack sequence straight out of Perez’s ‘The Dead and the Damned’ series, and a last minute serial killer/ladies in distress subplot that harks back to his ‘Playing with Dolls’ series. Even having seen The Obsidian Curse I’m still finding it difficult to comprehend that one film can find the time to do so much, but Perez is a pretty diverse kind of a guy.
The Obsidian Curse evolves around Blair Jensen (Karin Brauns) a character who has lost her way in life, partied hard and is now paying the price for having gone off the rails. Having been arrested whilst snorting cocaine off the belly of another party girl, Blair emerges from a year long stint in Shasta County jail to discover that allot can happen in the space of a year. She is turned down for a succession of jobs on account of her drug conviction. Worse still, she discovers that not only has her husband remarried but that his new wife is scheming in install herself as a full time mother to Blair’s daughter, despite having open contempt for the girl. At times Perez seems to be restaging a fairy tale in modern dress here, with a ‘Wicked Stepmother’ motif running throughout scenes of the stepmother behaving cruelly towards the girl, as well as scenes of Blair herself being upstaged, humiliated and outclassed by her rival.
All this real world drama dominates the opening act of The Obsidian Curse, with only a pre-credits scene featuring the castle dwelling, blue skinned Nosferatu fellow, hinting at the monster mash to follow. The Obsidian Curse really kicks into horror movie gear once Blair goes for a job as a tour guide at an underground cave, only to fall victim to a witch, who places an Obsidian curse on her. This isn’t Perez’s first ‘Obsidian’ outing, and if you’ve seen his earlier Obsidian movie 2012’s Obsidian Hearts (aka Demon Hunter) you’ll known that an Obsidian curse makes the heart of the cursed party a magnet for evil of both the supernatural and non-supernatural varieties. Once Blair becomes the owner of an Obsidian heart, all hell breaks loose, as various creatures begin popping up to terrorize Blair and dispatch her friends and other interested parties.
Its a premise, that like the earlier Obsidian movie, allows Perez to go full throttle in the action and horror departments, whilst royally pulling the rug from an audience who’d become accustomed to a down to earth movie up until this point. Although I’m not sure if it was a direct influence, The Obsidian Curse does gradually take on the mantle of a 21st century version of ‘Spookies’ (1986). The narrative acts as an excuse to shunt the heroine from one horror movie set piece to another, as well as showcasing a mind boggling array of monsters.
First up is a sightless, twisty faced creature that lives under beds and uses a severed eyeball to see out of. This is a creature we’ve seen before in Perez’s version of Little Red Riding Hood (which begs the question do all of Perez’s movies exist in a shared universe or does he just think a good monster is always worth repeating) and here makes short work of one of Blair’s galpals, leaving another monster to chow down on her remains. Blair escapes but soon has to contend with a zombie invasion, after the witch causes the undead to rise from their graves. Blair’s fight back against the zombies, which involves energetically jogging around a field, pausing only to bash in their skulls with a bat, suggests her real calling in life might be as a baseball player.
The Obsidian Curse pauses only slightly for breath to trot out a couple of name actors. Reggie Bannister shows up as a paranormal investigator who is one of few people to buy into Blair’s story (and let’s face it, only someone who has been in five Phantasm movies would believe a story like Blair’s). Richard Tyson- formally of Kindergarten Cop- plays a Professor who narrowed escaped the witch, and has a mutated brother who wasn’t so lucky. In a moment that still leaves me unsure whether it was meant to be funny or not, a creature with a gas mask like face appears at Tyson’s window, causing him to nonchalantly turn to Blair and ask “is that person with you?”
The more Rene Perez movies you watch, the more they take on a cozily familiar quality. Part of their charm has become spotting people from his other films and pointing out “oh look, there’s that woman who was force-fed an eyeball in Playing with Dolls: Havoc” or “oh, there’s that little girl who was in a wheelchair in Death Kiss, and wired to a drip in The Punished”. Then there are the locations, the ginormous cave being familiar from Playing with Dolls: Havoc, the vampire’s castle having played host to characters in Perez’s Sleeping Beauty adaptation, and an airport being the same one where Bronzi punched the guy in the stomach in Death Kiss.
A ticket to a Rene Perez film always buys you a guided tour around Shasta County, a mountainous, woodland area of California that has become as distinct a part of his film’s character as his actors. Even relatively urban Perez films like Death Kiss can’t resist the call of the Shasta wilderness for very long. There appears to be a special pact going on between filmmaker and location in Perez’s films. The location lends Perez the kind of breathtaking backdrops that money can’t buy, but in return no filmmaker can claim to have done more for Shasta County tourism than Rene Perez. His films truly put Shasta County on the map as a place of natural beauty, even if they do also portray it as a regular hunting ground of hulking, mask wearing serial killers.
Although Perez’s films openly embrace elements of their exploitation movie forefathers (if there is an attractive female in his cast, chances are you’ll see her hooters at some point) they also portray Perez as a highly moral man as well. Redemptive themes, traditional values and positivity have become as much part of his formula as gore and female nudity. If Perez’s approach to filmmaking is far removed from Hollywood, so too are the attitudes of his characters, who have a sometimes amusing habit of getting on their soapboxes about off-topic subjects. In ‘The Dragon Unleashed’ the heroine has a rant about a ‘progressive’ guy she hooked up with, who turned out to be gay and left her to move to Washington and campaign for the legalization of marijuana. A similar moment occurs to ‘The Punished’ when a SJW gets read the riot act after she thrusts a petition- about breast feeding in public- under the nose of one of the lead characters. Perez’s Death Kiss also seems more comfortable with embracing the politics of the original Death Wish series than the 2018 Hollywood remake, thinking especially about Death Kiss’ ‘Dan Forthright’ character here.
Despite the films provocatively going out of their way to be the antithesis of political correctness though, female characters are a strong point and Perez has made more female led movies than many self-congratulatory ‘progressive’ filmmakers. Perez also casts the type of actors whose heavy accents and foreign backgrounds would in all likelihood work against them in mainstream Hollywood. Cast members who fit that bill include Hungarian Charles Bronson lookalike Robert ‘Bronzi’ Kovacs, the Russian Natasha Blasick from the first Playing with Dolls movie and Perez regular Robert Amstler who was allowed to deliver most of his Obsidian Hearts performance in German.
Obsidian Curse’s leading lady, Karin Brauns, is another heavily accented member of the Rene Perez players, whose well travelled accent is a hybrid of Swedish, British, Latvian, Australian and Los Angeles. Brauns might not be the best actress Perez has ever had to work with (in my opinion the greatest performance ever given by a woman in a Perez film was Gemma Donato in Sleeping Beauty), but Blair Jensen is the type of foreign underdog –determined to claw back some self respect and asking for a second chance in life- that Perez movies are so fond of championing. Given that the road to redemption is here paved with vampires, zombies and serial killers…you’d have to be pretty heartless to not root for a gal who can take on all that, and still emerge espousing such air punching, action heroine sentiments as “I’ll burn down the whole world if I have to”.
Non-supernatural adversaries that Blair comes up against here include the shallow and privileged stepmother and the horrid bureaucracy of a court official who continually looks down her nose at Blair. Types that, along with progressive men and petition thrusting SJWs, are unlikely to find their way onto Rene Perez’s Christmas card list this year.
By rights, people should be loudly banging the drum for Rene Perez, for my money this guy is really knocking it out of the park at the moment, and shows little sign of slowing down. Currently in the pipeline are a killer clown movie (It Hungers), a western (Once Upon a Time in Deadwood), a Playing with Dolls sequel (Cry Havoc) and another masked serial killer goes nutzoid in Shasta County movie (Cabal). Perhaps the fact that Perez is so prolific causes some to automatically write him off as one of those B-Movie ne'er-do-wells whose films have a catchy title, a decent DVD box and little else going for them…which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Prior to The Obsidian Curse I’d seen fifteen of his films and enjoyed thirteen of them, and after seeing The Obsidian Curse I’m happy to report that the number of good ones has now risen to fourteen. Quite honestly, could you watch 16 successive films by say, Lucio Fulci or Jess Franco and realistically expect those kind of good to bad movie experience odds. Perez’s films are the heir apparent to the absolute crème of the grindhouse era, and if the movie theaters of 42nd street hadn’t been allowed to turn to dust, they’d surely be playing Rene Perez films as we speak. Some films might be stronger than others, but for the most part, to miss out on a Rene Perez film, is to miss out on a fucking good time.
No comments:
Post a Comment