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Plot: vigilante cop purges town of criminals and other undesirables.

In the eight years separating War Machine (2010) and Death Kiss (2018) there has been exponential evolution in the work of California writer-director Rene Perez. Not only did he helm the lucrative The Dead and the Damned (2011-2015) and Playing with Dolls (2015-2017) franchises, he also has started paying homage to classic titles that were influential on his own work. A benefit of sort is that Little Red Riding Hood (2016) appears to be the last of his European fairytale adaptations. It genuinely makes you wish Perez would branch out of horror a little and try out different genres. With an average of two-to-four productions per year Perez dedicated the first half of 2018 to paying tribute to his favorite movies, namely The Punisher (1989, 2004) and Death Wish (1974, 2018) with The Punished (2018) and Death Kiss (2018), respectively. Death Kiss is, for all intents and purposes, the best Rene Perez production thus far.

Written, photographed, directed, and scored by Rene Perez Death Kiss oozes with that grime retro aesthetic of urban decay and sparse production design that defined the best, or most memorable, of 70s exploitation. Death Kiss’ most obvious forebear is the Michael Winner directed Charles Bronson actioner Death Wish (1974) and there’s a fair bit of the Clint Eastwood western High Plains Drifter (1973) to even things out. In other words, Death Kiss is an old-fashioned vigilante justice action-thriller. Death Kiss is minimalist in every respect. The premise is as basic as these things come, and the main cast is all but four people with only a handful of extras. The greatest asset to the production is Hungarian actor Robert Kovacs who has the Bronson style and mannerisms down to a T. It’s uncanny how close of an approximation Kovacs is to the late Bronson, and the resemblance is striking, even if he might not be half the actor Bronson was back in the day. It seems that Perez has found a muse in Kovacs (who subsequently took up the Robert Bronzi alias) as he returned in future Perez features.

In an act of penance rogue cop K (Robert Kovacs, as Robert Bronzi) has taken to the streets of an unspecified California town and vowed to rid it of its criminal element; be they drugdealers, human traffickers, and other assorted undesirables. Years ago a shootout with druglord Tyrell (Richard Tyson) resulted in a number of civilian casualties and property damage, something which he greatly regretted and he has been working to make amends for ever since. For the past several years K has been delivering money to the mailbox of Ana (Eva Hamilton) and her wheelchair using daughter Isabel (Leia Perez). With the help of Justice Radio host Dan Forthright (Daniel Baldwin) K has been able to track down Tyrell and his gang. He draws the ire of Tyrell by extracting helpless platinum blonde Tanya (Stormi Maya) from their heavily guarded compound. In the resulting gunfight K manages to dispose of Torch (Reese Austyn) and Tyrell’s bodyguard (J.D. Angstadt) sending the druglord into hiding with his girlfriend Malorie (Malorie Glavan). With the threat of bodily harm still looming over Ana and Isabel a confrontation between K and Tyrell seems all but inevitable…

Before anything else Death Kiss is a tribute to the 1970s grindhouse exploitation and more specifically a valentine to Michael Winner’s revenge fantasy Death Wish (1974) and its gradually underwhelming sequels. Shot to next for nothing in California Death Kiss is a near-plotless pastiche of every known convention and recreation over every recognizable scene from the Winner original with an added dose of gunfire and gore to drag it into the 21st century. To drive the point home Kovacs’ character has a similar build and wardrobe as the late Bronson and that he simply calls himself K (no doubt in reference to Paul Kersey). As with the original Death Kiss wants nothing more than to be a taboo-breaker and Daniel Baldwin’s Justice Radio host discusses everything from institutionalized disenfranchisement, violence and crime, racism, to the merits of vigilantism, law enforcement malfeasance, and widespread corruption in politics and the electorate. Baldwin delivers his monologues on these hot button issues with near-religious fervor and zeal giving credence to the idea that Perez cares about these topics. If anything, it gave a good hint of Perez’ likely political affiliations, something which his manifesto The Insurrection (2020) (especially egregious and strangely prophetical in light of the actual January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection) and Pro God - Pro Gun (2022) have served to strengthen. Perez is the polar opposite of Neil Breen and he’ll let you know at every turn.

To his everlasting credit Rene Perez always knew how to stage and lens an action scene, even as far as back as his laughably inept Little Red Riding Hood (2016) (thankfully Alanna Forte and Irina Levadneva provided the proverbial fireworks there). This being a Rene Perez feature there are a few headscratching moments. In the first act it is established that Ana feels unsafe and during the second act K instructs her how to handle a rifle. The lack of thematic follow-through in the closing act makes you wonder why the entire subplot was introduced in the first place. Had there been a third act scene where Ana saves K from certain death thanks to her newly-acquired marksman skills then at least there would have been some kind of narrative payoff. In another scene K has Stormi Maya’s Tanya bloodily kill her captor, but the scene seems to exist solely to have Maya wield a gun, as K never again (either before or after) will be seen exacting such punishment. Daniel Baldwin’s Dan Fortright acts as both as a Greek chorus and a replacement internal monologue for Robert Kovacs’ K, very much in the same way as Richard Tyson has done, and continues to do, for the Playing with Dolls (2015-2017) franchise. Except that Fortright has no arc of his own and mostly exists to humanize the cipher-like K. The special effects from Marcus Koch and Oliver Müller are put to good use once again. For an action-thriller the gore is either excessive or absent.

As these things go any Rene Perez feature is measured by the quality of the babes and here Eva Hamilton and Stormi Maya raise the temperatures. Stormi has been with Perez since Playing with Dolls: Havoc (2017) and Perez debutant Eva Hamilton (apparently the new brunette Perez muse with Nicole Stark notably absent) would be seen again in The Dragon Unleashed (2018) and his other exploitation tribute Cabal (2020). It wouldn’t be a Rene Perez film without at least one topless scene and Death Kiss has both Hamilton and Maya flaunting their bust. Death Kiss is the sort of stylistic exercise that makes you wish Rene Perez would finally helm that long awaited LETHAL Ladies imitation we know he has been pining to make. Imagine what a director like Perez could do with a stretch of beach, palm trees, a warm color palette and a female ensemble cast in pastel-colored bikinis. If Andy Sidaris could do it in the 80s and 90s with the LETHAL Ladies and Jim Wynorski made a career out of boobs, so can he. All it takes is some perfunctory story to line up Alanna Forte, Elonda Seawood, Eva Hamilton, Spring Inés Peña, Jenny Allford, Omnia Bixler, Irina Levadneva, and Stormi Maya; Breen babes Jennifer Autry, Victoria Viveiros, and Danielle Andrade or low budget genre queens as Samantha Robinson, Fulvia Santoni, Madeline Brumby, Ellie Church or Alyss Winkler against his usual team of stuntmen. Hell, he could call it B.U.S.T. (or Branch of Unity, Strategy & Tactics). Just make it happen, Rene. Eventually someone’s gotta do it.

If Death Kiss is proof of anything it’s that Perez has finally come to the point was he has assembled the necessary skills to convincingly imitate the very films he was inspired by. Death Kiss effectively captures the misanthropy, the nihilism, the gratuitous violence, and rampant urban decay that made Death Wish (1974) the cinematic classic that it is. The ambiguous open ending leaves the door wide open for potential sequels, but if Perez is smart he’s not going to dilude Death Kiss by any unnecessary sequels. After all it were four sequels that directly sent Death Wish to its death throes. Death Kiss is a fine piece of low budget filmmaking exactly because it is a stand-alone feature. If Rene Perez does want to do capitalize on a trend he’d better put a gun in Eva Hamilton’s hand and make his female-centric action flicks as Furie (2019) or Maria (2019). Given his penchant for helming derivates or imitations of classic action cinema, it makes you wish how Perez would fare in doing a Die Hard (1988), The Terminator (1984), Above the Law (1988), Under Siege (1992), Commando (1985), or Hard Target (1993) imitation. That, a much overdue Nemesis (1992) sequel, or that Ginger (1971) or Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987) derivate he was destined to direct. In little less than a decade Perez has become a suprisingly effective and brutally efficient low budget filmmaker. Bravo, Rene.

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Plot: businessman gets lost in the Yugoslavian wilds and encounters vampires.

The Night Of the Devils (or La notte dei diavoli back at home in Italy) is a minor entry in the continental European vampire horror canon at the dawn of the wicked and wild seventies. The basis for the screenplay was the 1884/1950 Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy novel The Family of the Vourdalak. Mario Bava had first adapted it in the ‘I Wurdulak’ segment of his Black Sabbath (1963) and now almost ten years later it was time for a more contemporary adaptation. Overall it leans closer to the understated dread of Damiano Damiani's The Witch (1966) than to the psychotronic exuberance and excess of Jean Rollin, Mario Mercier, Luigi Batzella or Renato Polselli. In more recent years Tolstoy’s story was faithfully adapted in the Crimean gothic Vurdalaki (2017).

With credits dating all the way back to 1936 director Giorgio Ferroni was a dyed-in-the-wool craftsman who had a solid, if mostly undistinguished, career in Italian genre cinema. True to form he did everything from spaghetti westerns and poliziotteschi to comedies and documentaries. What he seemed to excel at, however, were peplum and horror on a budget. In that capacity he directed the atmospheric little gothic Mill of the Stone Women (1960) (an underseen and underrated Italian sub-classic) and a slew of entertaining pepla, including but not limited to, The Trojan Horse (1961), Conquest of Mycene (1963) (with Rosalba Neri) and The Lion Of Thebes (1964). His most prestigious and widely seen features were probably his liberal adaptation of Euripides' classic tragedy The Bacchantes (1961) and the World War II epic The Battle of El Alamein (1969). Amidst the vampire horror craze of the early 1970s he contributed the minimalistic, anachronistic and quiet The Night Of the Devils. Produced by Eduardo Manzanos and featuring an ensemble cast of Italian veterans as well as special effects from Carlo Rambaldi The Night Of the Devils would be Ferroni’s last horror outing before his death in 1981. Another minor classic is hardly the worst way to go out.

Yugoslavia, 1972. On his way to a business appointment Italian lumber importer Nicola (Gianni Garko) takes a dusty road through some particularly thick woods wrecking his 1967 Fiat 124 Sport Coupé as he tries to avoid crashing into a mysterious woman. Forced to look for help in these unhospitable environs he happens upon a family of eccentric woodcutters sequestered away in a 19th century tenement somewhere in darker bowels of the deep woods. When he spots the world-weary Ciuvelak clan they are in the process of burying the recently deceased brother of patriarch Gorka (William Vanders, as Bill Vanders). As Nicola asks Gorka whether there’s any possibility of someone driving him to the nearest village for repairs the old man spouts an ominous warning about the woods not being safe whenever night falls. Gorka invites Nicola to stay overnight at the family homestead and continue his journey home the following day. In short order he meets Gorka’s wife Elena (Teresa Gimpera), eldest son Jovan (Roberto Maldera, as Mark Roberts), daughter Sdenka (Agostina Belli) as well as his cousins Irina (Cinzia De Carolis) and Mira (Sabrina Tamborra). The next morning Jovan commences repairs on Nicola’s car as Gorka announces that he’s going to hunt down the “living dead” witch (Maria Monti) that supposedly haunts the woods and has cursed the Ciuvelak clan with an unspecified malady. If he doesn’t return that same evening at 6 o’clock sharp they are to kill him with no questions asked.

That night Gorka does return to the homestead and comes bearing a severed hand as evidence for his slaying of the witch. As the hours pass Sdenka insinuates herself into Nicola’s chambers and Gorka spirits little Irina away into the blackness of night. The strangeness becomes almost too much to bear when Nicola is witness to Irina returning as one of the living dead and Jovan is forced to drive a stake through Gorka’s heart. As one by one members of the Ciuvelak fall victim to the curse of the living dead Nicola soon finds himself in a fight for life and limb as the clan descends upon the homestead. Bloodied and bewildered he manages to escape within an inch of life and somehow he’s able to navigate the woods. Exhausted from his ordeal Nicola passes out near an idyllic stream. He’s brought to the local mental ward where he’s examined by doctor Tosi (Umberto Raho) and before long law enforcement in the form of officer Kovacic (Renato Turi) wants to interrogate the vagrant in expensive attire. The physician informs the inspector that the man spends his nights peering out of the window, “looking into the darkness like a scared, cornered animal.” Shortly thereafter a beautiful woman introduces herself claiming she knows the wealthy foreigner. As the doctor takes the woman to see the man, he flees from his room in abject horror.

Ferroni managed to assemble quite the cast for this atmospheric little horror ditty. First and foremost, there’s peplum and spaghetti western veteran Gianni Garko. Garko was a mainstay in Italian pulp cinema that somehow always remained somewhat of a second-stringer. His credits, among many others, include the giallo The Flower with the Deadly Sting (1973), The Psychic (1977) as well as the German sex comedies Three Swedish Girls in Upper Bavaria (1977) and Summer Night Fever (1978). The lowest he had to go was with Alfonso Brescia’s craptacular space opera Star Odyssey (1979) and bounced back with Luigi Cozzi’s space peplum Hercules (1983). The other monument here is Umberto Raho. Raho was a pillar of peplum, spaghetti western and Eurospy. Raho had acted alongside two of Britains greatest imports. First with Barbara Steele in The Ghost (1963), Castle Of Blood (1964) and The Long Hair of Death (1965) and in between with Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth (1964). Towards the end of the decade he acted alongside unsung Polish import Magda Konopka in the fumetti Satanik (1968). He was in the giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) from Dario Argento as well as Amuck (1972) from Silvio Amadio. Other noteworthy appearances include, among others, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) (with Erika Blanc) and the slightly deranged The Exorcist (1973) imitation Enter the Devil (1974) (with Lucretia Love and Stella Carnacina) from Mario Gariazzo.

Agostina Belli was one of the classic redhead belles that effortlessly alternated between mainstream fare, comedies and horror. As such she could be seen in the sugary sweet Romina Power-Al Bano musicarello period piece Symphony Of Love (1970), the horror Scream of the Demon Lover (1970), the giallo The Fifth Cord (1971), the Lucio Fulci sex comedy The Senator Likes Women (1972), Scent Of A Woman (1974) (the American remake with Al Pacino, Chris O’Donnell and Gabrielle Anwar from 1992 was as soulless as it was unnecessary – but, god forbid, if the average American has to read subtitles on an import), The Career of a Chambermaid (1976), the amiable The Omen (1976) imitation Holocaust 2000 (1977), the period piece Manaos (1979) as well as the comedies Dear Wife (1982) and Go Ahead You That Makes Me Laugh (1982). Her strangest outing was perhaps the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) imitation The Brother from Space (1988) from the specialist in such things, Mario Gariazzo. The other illuminating presence is Teresa Gimpera, a reliable pillar in continental European pulp, who could be seen in Night of the Scorpion (1972), the gothic horror Crypt Of the Living Dead (1972), the Alfonso Brescia giallo Naked Girl Murdered in the Park (1972), the sex comedy Healthy Married Life (1974) and León Klimovsky's illicit The Last Man on Earth (1964) remake The People Who Own the Dark (1976).

What this most closely resembles are the two Mario Mercier features Erotic Witchcraft (1972) and A Woman Possessed (1975) as well as the American fantastique Blood Sabbath (1972) (with Dyanne Thorne, Susan Damante and amply endowed Swedish softcore porn star and sometime Russ Meyer muse Uschi Digard). Ferroni understands, perhaps better than anyone else, that less is always more. For this atmospheric, gothic-tinged horror he and director of photography Manuel Berenguer make full use of the sylvan location and the arboreal surroundings. It’s not a big leap from here to the naturalistic environs in which Jean Rollin frequently dabbled or something like Seven Women For Satan (1974) from Michel Lemoine. What little money there was, was obviously spent where it mattered. One year later León Klimovsky would use a similar premise for his The Vampires Night Orgy (1973), except there an entire town of vampires descended upon a travelling couple thrown together by circumstance. Amidst the deluge of gothic horror revivals, The Night Of the Devils was a sobering earthy and grounded affair with none of the supernatural overtones that more or less were the standard of the day. Instead it uses a sprawling natural environment to utmost effect and electrifying performances from Garko and Belli heighten the experience.

While arguably 1973 was the banner year for Italian gothic horror, 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of this little talked about slice of Italian gothic pulp. For an Italian production it comes off as either very French or British, depending on your preference. If you’re looking for a low-key production that’s overflowing with atmosphere and not some extravagant special effects spectacle as, say, The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973) (with Rosalba Neri) or The Dracula Saga (1973) (with Helga Liné, Betsabé Ruiz and Cristina Suriani), The Night Of the Devils will be right up your alley. What Night Of the Damned (1971) was to the giallo and what The Witches Mountain (1972) was to the Spanish fantastique and witchcraft horror, this is to the Italian gothic. This is a wonderfully understated feature that banks heavily on its natural surroundings to sell what otherwise is on its face a patently ridiculous premise. Just like Mill of the Stone Women (1960) twelve years earlier The Night Of the Devils is a boundlessly atmospheric and creaky gothic that manages to push all the right buttons and is custodian to exemplary performances from Gianni Garko and Agostina Belli. With the benefit of several decades of hindsight it’s near criminal that Giorgio Ferroni has gone down in history as a reliable but underappreciated second-stringer.