Shasta County filmmaker Rene Perez.
The first thing you need to know about Rene Perez is that he’s an artist. The 46-year-old Cottonwood resident has written, directed, and scored 36 B-movies during the past 15 years, mostly low-budget action and horror flicks in the grindhouse tradition. By now he’s mastered the genre’s tropes.
If a sledgehammer appears at the beginning of a Rene Perez film, rest assured someone’s getting their legs broken or head bashed in before film’s end.
Rene Perez’s films feature blood, guts, and gore galore created with old-school special effects. The blood is dark, thick, and goopy. Faces get blown off by shotguns. Eyeballs dangle from their sockets. Heads are cleaved in with axes.
Female nudity is mandatory in a Rene Perez film; at least one of his attractive out-of-town actresses bares her breasts in almost every film.
“This is not what I want,” Perez told me by telephone, explaining his dedication to the craft. “This is what the people want.”
“Blood and guts and boobs,” he chuckled. “It’s how you get the message across.”
Perez purposely shoots for an R rating with his films because it boosts viewership. His audience consists mainly of older male fans of ’70s and ’80s grindhouse films and younger males who’ve just discovered the genre.
While not exactly in high distribution, Perez’s films are available on the internet, including pirated versions of titles such as The Dead and the Damned, Snow Queen, Playing with Dolls, and Death Kiss. Add it all up and Perez reckons he has a platform with maybe one million viewers.
The second thing you need to know about Rene Perez is that he’s gone deep, deep down the conservative rabbit hole, in real life and in his films, which are sometimes difficult to distinguish from one another.
Perez believes American culture is in rapid decline brought on by an undefined ruling class, which uses government institutions and mainstream media including films and television to control the masses and spread “sexual perversions” that go against nature and traditional values.
To combat this perceived decline in American culture, Perez established Rebellion Flix two years ago. While he says he has included some covert conservative moralizing in his previous films, Rebellion Flix signaled the merging of Perez’s grindhouse aesthetic with his own ultraconservative Christian morals up front and center.
“You’ve got to fight fire with fire,” Perez said. “I just want to get good morals out there in the world to the people who need it the most.”
Like many low-budget sci-fi and horror film directors, Perez speculated on a film about the government using a virus to cull the population well before COVID-19 came along; post-pandemic he’s become a virulent anti-vaxxer who now dedicates his films to teachers and first responders who were fired after they stood up to the government’s “tyrannical vaccine mandates.”
Conversely, teachers and other public servants who obeyed the mandates and kept their jobs are deemed “collaborators” who groom students for the global pedophile ring that controls the planet.
Needless to say, Perez and his wife home-school their three children.
“They’ve grown up without the stress of a school, or what I call indoctrination centers,” Perez said.
Of Mexican and Cuban descent, Perez is firmly convinced that Hollywood has deliberately villainized straight white males. He points to Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm including the Star Wars franchise in 2012 as a prime example. Some hardcore fans have complained over the years about increased diversity in Disney’s Star Wars products, including Perez.
“I’m a Mexican, but I don’t want to see a Mexican samurai,” Perez said.
Masculinity has been ruled toxic by Hollywood according to Perez’s zero-sum take on Tinseltown, resulting in the decline of the male action hero and the rise of the promiscuous single woman in film. He claims Hollywood now mandates the inclusion of LGBTQ “perversions” in all movies and TV programs. In his view, the Oscar-winning film Joker is a propaganda piece designed to elevate the mentally ill over the heroic.
Perez thinks Joker elevated the mentally ill over the traditional straight white male hero.
Perez imagines Rebellion Flix as a mini Netflix. For $1.99, viewers can access Perez’s last four films: They Want Us Woke … Not Awake, Only Fans Allowed, The Insurrection, and Pro God-Pro Gun.
Also included is The Importance of Being a Virgin, a one-hour program featuring the Sweet Soul Sisters, Perez’s 12-year-old and 15-year-old daughters, who extolled the virtues of purity culture, the Christian abstinence movement that began in the 1990s and continues to this day.
Having watched all of Rebel Flix’s content, I can say the results of infusing Grindhouse with conservative Christian moralizing are predictably pedantic. Perez’s single white female heroines share his bleak weltanschauung, Perez‘s films take an exceedingly dim view of the modern world and the human condition.
This is occasionally relieved by writing, acting, action choreography, scoring, and cinematography that is surprisingly competent for films shot on a “microbudget” of $30,000 to $50,000. With the exception of the acting, Perez does almost all of the creative work.
While these films aren’t coming to your local Cineplex anytime soon, there are moments of drama and intended and unintended humor as they oscillate between indoctrination and good, cheap entertainment. Nevertheless, Perez’s movies aren’t for everybody, so I’ve taken the trouble to watch them for you. Let’s begin with the Sweet Soul Sisters.
Jadzia and Lia Perez are the Sweet Soul Sisters, your purity culture experts.
The Sweet Soul Sisters: The Importance of Being a Virgin
There’s something a little unnerving about watching two precocious teenagers pontificate about the virtues of not having sex until marriage and the pitfalls of giving into “life’s simple pleasures.” Lia and Jadzia Perez were 15 and 12 when two episodes of the Sweet Soul Sisters were filmed in 2021, The Importance of Being a Virgin and Marry an Older Man.
The Importance of Being a Virgin begins with the sisters comparing “people to things.” They agree people are more important than things. An automobile is a thing. Is a man more likely to pay top dollar for a brand-new car or a used car? So why would a man accept a used woman when he wouldn’t accept a used car?
After taking a few jabs at “sissy males” who don’t care if you’re a virgin, the sisters offer girls who’ve already made the mistake of having sex before marriage a chance to opt-out, lest they be triggered by “nonapologetic straight talk.”
“We’re here to speak to the young girls who still have a chance to live happy lives,” Lia says.
“We want to make sure we have a partner at all stages of our lives, unlike modern-day women who will most likely spend the second halves of their lives alone and bitter,” says 12-year-old Jadzia.
The girls have never had boyfriends but that’s OK because the only things dating boys in their teens will gain you are a “tarnished reputation and other long-lasting scars.”
“The only thing you gain by giving yourself to a boy is a bad reputation,” says the all-knowing Jadzia. “But maybe those things don’t matter to you. Maybe you’re fine marrying a man who’s just settling for you. Because there are no champion men who purposely marry a slut instead of a virgin.”
“Champion men” are ideally aged 12 to 20 years older, the sisters proclaim in a second video, Marry an Older Man, that explores the appropriate age gap between husband and wife. An 18-year-old woman should seek a spouse between the ages of 30 and 38. A 23-year-old should seek a spouse between the ages of 35 and 43. Above all else, champion men cherish “youth, beauty, and purity.”
The Sweet Soul Sisters claim women age quicker than men, so if you marry a man of the same age you’ll end up being the old lady “barking in his ear” who gets dumped for a younger woman. If you marry a man 20 years your senior, he’ll always think you’re too good for him because he can’t trade you in for a younger model.
(It occurs to me that the sisters may have miscalculated here since they’re likely to be left alone and bitter after their older husbands kick the bucket 20 years before them.)
Just when you’re thinking this all sounds like some sort of gold-digger academy, the Sweet Soul Sisters complain that the media makes the appropriate age gap out to be a terrible disgusting thing, like “you’re just some gold digger.”
“I’d rather not play Russia roulette with my entire life,” Lia says.
There’s nothing wrong with encouraging teenagers to abstain from sex until marriage, but that can be accomplished without slut-shaming girls and women who choose to have premarital sex. Make no mistake, this is about controlling the sexual activity of girls and women, not boys and men, as Rene Perez freely admits.
“No of course not!” he said when I asked him if the same rules apply to boys and men. “Women have youth, beauty, and purity. Men have to get it all out of their system. A man should be of the world with experience and scars and broken bones.”
I pointed out that his daughters were obviously very intelligent and destined for lucrative careers if they choose to pursue them. What the heck does either one of them need a man for?
“I think the only career they care about is being a mom,” he said.
Chelsea Evered in They Want Us Woke … Not Awake.
They Want Us Woke … Not Awake
Unintended humor makes its first appearance at the very beginning of the 34-minute short film They Want Us Woke … Not Awake, shot in 2021. Chelsea Evered, one of the mainstays in Perez’s stable of out-of-town actors, plays a divorced mom named Sasha. As the film opens, she walks toward us with the federally funded Lassen Volcanic National Park in the background as an anti-federal government narrative unspools inside her head.
“The government’s pressure to make us all live by liberal ideologies is literally destroying my life because I hold conservative opinions that differ from government-approved opinions,” Sasha tells us.
Her list of liberal laments sounds somewhat hackneyed, perhaps because screenwriter Perez claims to not follow politics all that closely. He’s never voted in an election, hasn’t watched TV since 1993, consumes very little mainstream media and it shows in his characters’ shallow political monologues.
Sasha is hated by her family for her conservative views. Her beta male soy boy ex-husband left her for a like-minded feminist. Her social media posts were taken down because she wants to execute criminals, not unborn babies. She’s against paying reparations to African Americans and relieving student loan debt for tapped-out losers.
Her mother, a liberated single mom who allowed Sasha to start dating at age 13 and sexually pleasure “useless men,” won’t talk to her now because Sasha is unvaccinated.
Sasha has become the queen of bad choices, and now she’s lost the most important person in her life because of her conservative views. Before we find out who that person is, she stands at the edge of a cliff and takes a tentative step off the ledge. The viewer realizes she’s come to Mt. Lassen to kill herself.
If that’s what it takes to shut her up, then so be it.
Michael Jarrod plays a conservative talk radio host in They Want Us Woke … Not Awake.
But before Sasha can jump, the film cuts to the interior of what looks like the Cottonwood militia’s meeting hall. Cottonwood militia leader Woody Clendenen has played supporting roles in several Perez films that typically end with Clendenen getting “killed” in action.
In the meeting hall, African American actor Michael Jarrod sits behind a desk with a microphone in front of him; it takes a quick second to figure out he’s playing a conservative talk radio host who is interviewing Sasha. I mention Jarrod’s race here because as much as Perez complains about Hollywood’s push for diversity in films and television programs, the casts and crews working on his films are fairly diverse.
As the radio program unfolds, we finally learn what drove Sasha to the edge: More than a year ago, her 7-year-old son came home from school and informed her he was a transgender girl. Sasha went ballistic. School officials called her crazy and her ex-husband hired a lawyer. In court, she lost custody of her son after she refused to provide gender-affirming health care.
When Sasha says she thinks all teachers aren’t bad, the radio host corrects her. Teachers who quit their jobs instead of following the government’s public health mandates are good. Teachers who followed the mandates and kept their jobs have chosen a side: evil!
“There’s a word for people like that,” the host prompts.
“Collaborators,” Sasha says. “In my opinion that label goes out to anyone who knows what’s right but still sides with evil just to keep their jobs. In the future, every teacher, doctor, policeman, soldier, government worker and official who put their jobs in front of their morals will be labeled by history as …”
“Collaborators!” the host finishes the sentence for her.
Chelsea Evered tearing up the scenery once again in They Want Us Woke … Not Awake.
Evered gives a heartbreaking performance as Sasha pines for her lost son and teeters on the edge of insanity. A liberal woman calls into the program, and the questions she poses suffer from Perez’s stunted conception of liberalism. Sasha’s responses consist of easily debunked LGBTQ stereotypes.
“I’m not a person of faith, but I do know that people who have faith in God live happy lives following the teachings of selflessness and giving,” she says when asked by the caller if she’s OK with bringing Jesus into public schools. “Now for the reverse, I’ve never seen any success stories of transgender people living long happy lives. Have you?”
Why yes, Sasha, I have. Here are 19 transgender individuals who’ve led long happy lives.
Then Sasha — or rather screenwriter Perez — really steps in it.
“I don’t know of a single straight or conservative person who’s ever caused harm to a gay or transgender person ever!” she says. “Not a single one!”
Perhaps Perez, who moved to Shasta County 15 years ago because he fell in love with its lakes and waterfalls and volcanoes, is unaware that in June 1999 two local young men steeped in the neo-Nazi Christian Identity movement killed two gay men, Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder, in the home the couple shared in Happy Valley, not too far from Cottonwood.
“The worst mistake I made is allowing the government to educate my child!” rants Sasha, who would eliminate all sex education in public schools. “How long before your precious government legalizes pedophilia? Will that also be acceptable to you? Because that’s where all this is leading! You’re siding with the government, you’re siding with evil …”
Thankfully, someone off-camera throws a grenade through the window and cuts Sasha’s anti-LGBTQ tirade short. The film cuts to what appears to be the shuttered wood pulp mill in Anderson, where Sasha is chained to the ground in the blazing sunlight.
Let the grindhouse begin!
Rene Perez specializes in cheap but effective wardrobes.
Two figures speaking with Slavic accents stand over the unconscious Sasha. One is a kidnapper who has turned over Sasha and the radio host to an organ harvester who looks like Darth Vader outfitted in dusty WWII Army surplus gear, including a German helmet, a gas mask and oxygen breathing apparatus, a trench coat, and enormous boots.
“They will not survive the evisceration!” he laughs.
When the organ harvester throttles Sasha and begins dragging her to the killing room, the radio host offers up himself, a frequent occurrence in Rene Perez films—men must be heroic. The organ harvester latches on to him, and during the struggle, his keys fall to the ground, just out of Sasha’s reach.
What’s a girl to do? As the organ harvester hauls the radio host to the killing room somewhere in the bowels of the mill, Sasha, who’s already spitting blood after being roughed up, unbuttons her blouse, removes her bra, ties a rock to one end of the bra strap and after several casts during which her breasts are fully exposed, she manages to reel in the keys.
Technically, it’s not gratuitous nudity, it’s straight-up grindhouse. For the first time, it feels like you’re watching a movie.
Meanwhile, the organ harvester discovers his keys are missing, picks up a sledgehammer, breaks both of the radio host’s legs to hobble him, and returns for his keys only to discover Sasha has just escaped and is running loose around the mill with an axe.
A bloodied but unbowed Chelsea Evered in They Want Us Woke … Not Awake.
Sasha is recaptured and this time the organ harvester gives her a revolver with a single bullet. She can’t shoot him because she’s chained up again and he’s standing out of reach with the keys. He gives her a choice: Either she can die of exposure to the sun or she can shoot herself.
“A bullet in the head is like slipping into a bed with silk sheets,” he suggests. No spoilers here, other than to say never underestimate Chelsea Evered.
Perez occasionally comes up with snippets of good hardboiled dialogue. One of my favorites in They Want Us Woke … Not Awake occurs when Michael Jarrod’s radio host regains consciousness at the pulp mill and cries out, “Where is my phone? Why am I here?”
He could have been talking about real life.
Viviann Vankeith as the Only Fans personality Roxy Cotton.
Only Fans Allowed
The somewhat preposterous plot of Only Fans Allowed, made in 2021, features stunning redhead Viviann Vankeith playing Pluto the Relentless, an anti-government provocateur masquerading as Roxy Cotton, just another girl with a peep show on Only Fans, the London-based subscription service that caters to sex workers.
“The Monarch,” played by longtime Perez producer Joseph Camilleri, is the head of a one-world government that has an outpost at the Hat Creek Observatory. The government is concerned that a growing number of red-blooded American males who are logging on to watch porn have instead become captivated by Pluto’s deeply conservative anti-government screeds.
Having watched Rebellion Flix’s five current offerings and interviewed Rene Perez at length as he drove to Sacramento International Airport to pick up an actress for his latest film, I can make two general observations.
One, the beliefs espoused by Rebellion Flix heroines and Rene Perez are one and the same.
Like Perez, Pluto believes teachers who obeyed vaccine mandates are collaborators and public schools are indoctrination centers designed to produce sex slaves and docile “tax cattle” for the ruling class, who are never quite identified but are definitely pedophiles.
Both Perez and Pluto believe public schools are useless. Give a kid piano lessons for a year and they become an expert; send them to public school for 12 years and they’re an expert at nothing, they both claim fallaciously.
Both Perez and Pluto bemoan the bygone days when boys played with G.I. Joes and used their imaginations instead of staring into glowing screens and playing video games.
Both believe the federal government is capable of “unleashing a virus on us and teaching our children not to breed,” as Perez puts it.
Viviann Vankeith as Pluto the Relentless in Only Fans Allowed.
Secondly, Perez’s heroines are broken women who haven’t followed the advice offered by his daughters, the Sweet Soul Sisters. “They are reflections of the modern world,” Perez said. “I try to make them relatable.”
In They Want Us Woke, Sasha’s downfall is a liberated single mom who established no boundaries. In Pluto’s case, she stopped being a liberal after having a mid-term abortion and discovering the fetus had nerve endings.
Now, in the wake of the pandemic, she’s become a rebel without a clue.
“Guns and mass disobedience are the only things that can save us,” Pluto advises her young male followers as the actual phone number for the California State Militia rolls down the screen.
That’s a bridge too far for the Big Tech government operatives played by the totally evil Chelsea Evered and crusty Don Johnson clone Mike Markoff. They kidnap Pluto’s biggest fan, who happens to be vaccinated. They tweak the vaccine to produce more adrenalin to increase aggression, and Patient X proceeds to mutilate his own face.
He then attacks Evered, tearing her blouse off, exposing her breasts, gouging one of her eyes out, and beating her to death.
PatientX, created by tweaking the COVID vaccine in Only Fans Allowed.
Convinced they have created the perfect killing machine, the government agents drop Patient X off at Pluto’s house along with a sledgehammer. But when he encounters Pluto relaxing naked in the bathtub, he can’t bring himself to kill his idol. For grindhouse fans that’s great, because they’re treated to near full frontal nudity from the lithe Vankeith when she climbs out of the tub.
Have no fear, that sledgehammer will be wielded to great effect before the film ends. It’s not necessarily a motif in Rene Perez’s films. He just happens to have collected a lot of stage prop sledgehammers over the years. Using the existing props helps keep costs down.
German actress Wilma Ellis as Joan Schaefer in Insurrection.
Insurrection
Another reoccurring theme in Rebellion Flix films as well as Perez’s encounters with the real world is the notion that the truths he and his protagonists are telling are so controversial, government goons are already on their way to shut them down. While I haven’t been able to verify it, Perez claims Big Tech platforms like Google and Facebook won’t permit him to post his newer more politically provocative films.
“I can’t even put up a poster of Pro God—Pro Gun,” he said, referring to his latest film. “Our posts get taken down.”
Insurrection, made in 2019 and at 1 hour and 15 minutes the longest film in Rebellion Flix’s oeuvre, features statuesque blue-eyed blonde German actress Wilma Ellis starring as celebrity Hollywood mogul and activist Joan Schaefer. As the film opens she informs the audience in a mild German accent, “By the time this video is aired I’ll be dead.”
The film then flashes back to the day before. Schaefer’s assistant Dakota (Rebecca Tarabocchia) bails out the Sergeant Major, played by real-life movie star Michael Paré, who played Eddie in the cult hit Eddie and the Cruisers and other roles in the 1980s. When Sergeant Major and Dakota get into a heated argument in a back alley, African American actor Mike Davis attempts to intervene with a baseball bat and a handgun.
“I’ll bet you’re just dying to call me a n*****, ain’t you?” Davis snarls at the Sergeant Major, as Perez pays homage to Quentin Tarantino films in which black actors are permitted to say the N-word.
“Maybe,” the not-so-sure Sergeant Major replies. “I don’t want a murder charge upgraded to a hate crime.”
He punches Davis in the jaw, takes his bat, beats him with it, and then takes his gun.
Michael Paré means business in Insurrection.
Tough guy bona fides confirmed Dakota and the Sergeant Major proceed to the hide-out, a secluded house at a sprawling ranch littered with old vehicles and rusty farm equipment. Schaefer informs him she’s going to go public and expose Hollywood’s dark plan to “glamorize all manner of degeneracy” to transform the lower classes into docile, mindless consumers at the behest of the ruling class.
Again, just who these so-called rulers are is never mentioned, but in addition to being pedophiles they also control “banking, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and politics.”
Who are these guys?
Schaefer tells Sergeant Major her forthcoming revelations will be so controversial the government will immediately send teams of assassins to kill her the second her broadcast begins. He’s being paid $1 million to protect her. Sure enough, men with assault rifles appear on the periphery as a series of journalists begin interviewing the celebrity activist and mogul.
The film switches back and forth between men hunting each other down amongst the machinery and Schaefer delivering her message to the world, which includes everything we’ve already heard before, including the claim that “champion men aren’t looking for divorced single mothers with baggage.”
Schaefer is another woman broken by the modern world. Her husband and children were killed in an automobile accident caused by a drunk driver, a young women who was taught that partying and promiscuity were perfectly fine to engage in by Hollywood executives such as Schaefer, who has taken the blame upon herself.
There’s no shortage of fake blood in Rene Perez films.
The action scenes are realistic, with lots of shooting and missing in between the hits. Armed with a pump action shotgun, the Sergeant Major shoots one invader right in the mouth and his face explodes in a gush of blood. Other invaders are shot in the gut or the legs. One of the supporting actors who’s killed is Woody Clendenen, but it’s difficult to tell which one he is.
Schaefer’s revelations are hardly anything new. She takes credit for elevating the LGBTQ community and ending white male patriarchy. She admits to using music and media to control people. She pays homage to the “glowing screen initiative” that keeps kids glued to their cell phones. The old franchises like Star Wars have been turned into tools of indoctrination. It all began with Rosemary’s Baby (1968) which was directed by convicted pedophile Roman Polansky.
“They’ll have you killed!” the first journalist warns.
Will they? As the assassins close in, a sniper lasers up Dakota as she relaxes in a hot tub during the middle of a firefight. Topless, she leaps out of the hot tub, fulfilling the obligatory female nudity requirement for Rene Perez films.
The Sergeant Major pledges to defend Schaefer to the death.
He does, but once again, no spoilers. Former Shasta County District 5 Supervisor Les Baugh, a pastor at Anderson Community Church where Perez and his family occasionally attend services, appears in the credits for blessing the film shoot.
Perez is currently working on a new film with Baugh and other church members. It will be “grandma safe” and not R-rated, Perez assured me. As of now, Jason’s Redemption is the working title.
Les Baugh, Rene Perez, and actor Chase Bloomquist from Pro God—Pro Gun.
Pro God – Pro Gun
Advertised as “an anti-woke movie starring a straight white male hero,” Pro God—Pro Gun is actually the least preachy of the five films offered on Rebellion Flix. It opens in a nursing home during the pandemic when family members weren’t permitted to visit sick loved ones. A nurse who refuses to wear her mask discovers one of her patients, Joe Colton, has died and left a note confessing to four killings in 1974.
The screen switches from rectangular to oblong and we’re transported back to the 70s, when TVs were shaped like that. It’s a somewhat cheesy effect but it works in Grindhouse.
Chad Bloomquist plays Joe Colton, a returning Vietnam veteran with a serious undercut who’s carrying a locket given to him by his deceased squad member Emilio. The locket belongs to Emilio’s sister Alma who lives in rural northern California.
Alma is played by the striking brunette Anna Isabel Rosso, who like all of Perez’s heroines exhibits classic beauty and long hair parted down the middle. Perez claims some of his actresses have difficulty getting work in Hollywood because they’re too feminine by today’s standards.
Alma lives with her father Emilio Sr., a pastor played by producer Joseph Camilleri, in a remote home without a telephone. The sheriff drops by to warn them that a gang of bank robbers who’ve already killed several people are on the loose. Joe leaves, but Alma chases after him in a 70s Chevy station wagon and they have an impromptu picnic.
They return home to find the bank robbers have taken the pastor hostage. They too are taken hostage by a group of three men led by the completely over-the-top Chelsea Evered. Evered exceeds all expectations as leader of the gang, a crazy psychopath who knocks Alma out with chloroform and then evilly fondles one of her bare breasts, fulfilling the female nudity obligation in the creepiest way imaginable.
A bank robber played by Chelsea Evered takes a hostage, played by Anna Isabel Rosso, in Pro God—Pro Gun. Note the oblong shape of the screen.
Meanwhile, Joe and the pastor escape but find themselves armed with only a BB gun, which is quickly discovered and confiscated by the bank robbers. The robbers include actor Michael Jarrod, who scoffs at the weapon, saying the only way you could hurt someone with a BB gun is if you shot them in the eye with it.
In the best tradition of Chekov’s gun, that’s exactly what happens before the movie ends, with spectacular results.
Pro God—Pro Gun, at least the portion that takes place in the 1970s, finds Perez really stretching his legs as a filmmaker. An accomplished pianist, Perez scores all of his films under the name The Darkest Machines, generally with a nod to the synthesizer scores of horror director John Carpenter. Here, he’s composed his own disco and 70s hard rock songs to accompany the soundtrack, and they’re passably good.
The music, the cinematography, the period automobiles, the dialog—“Ever since your president took us off the gold standard!” one robber complains—all give the film an authentic 70s feel. Without giving too much away, we know that Joe and Alma survive this incident, get married, and live happily ever after, until Joe dies from COVID-19 in a nursing home 50 years later without his wife being able to say goodbye.
Such tragic deaths certainly happened in Shasta County during the pandemic’s early days, and you might shed a tear for Alma, who never appears again in the hour-long film. But back in the here and now, there’s nothing heroic about dead Joe Colton’s nurse, who refuses to wear a facemask in a nursing home full of senior citizens dying from a highly contagious airborne respiratory virus.
I’m not sure if Perez realizes this. The nurse scenes bookend the film, tacked on to send an overt political message to the audience in a film that was surviving just fine on the power of its own story. At any rate, Perez is hopeful that his mash-up of grindhouse with Christian morality and anti-government sentiment will spur enough interest to keep him busy making low-budget movies.
I think that’s a hard sell, but Perez calls himself “an unambitious filmmaker.”
“I just want to make B-movies,” he said. “They don’t have to have the biggest budgets. You do the best you can with what you have.”
Perez can be paradoxical. He may be waging a war against woke now, but two of his favorite television programs from the past are Star Trek and Mash, which are among the most “woke” programs ever made.
Perez was very pleasant to talk to, and we agreed to disagree several times without rancor. As I’m coming to learn, people believe the most outlandish things in Shasta County, and there’s not too much you can do about it.
“It’s crazy, I didn’t know it would get this bad,” Perez said about the storm he sees coming. “I do believe in these things. I hope I’m wrong.”
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