Death Kiss

• Written and Directed by Rene Perez
• October 2, 2018 (US)

A vigilante with a mysterious past moves into a crime infested city to protect a young mother and her child.

It’s weird how Robert Kovacs has become part of a subgenre that only he can star in (Bronsploitation) based on his strong physical similarities to the legendary Charles Bronson. Some of his movies have titles that just parallel well-known Bronson vehicles while others have plots as well as titles that liberally borrow from Bronson. Such as Death Kiss which comes off an awful lot like the original Death Wish. 

Renee Perez is the Michael Winner of the current crop of Z-List directors. He is often serviceable but never great. I can’t complain too much having seen some of his Bronsploitation work and enjoyed them. Plus he seems to work almost exclusively with Robert Kovacs/Robert Bronzi/Charles Bronson’s clone. And Charles Bronson reached a point where he worked almost exclusively with Michael Winner. Kind of like Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Anywho…

Sticking with the Charles Bronson parallels this is a Death Wish-style film. It’s very hard to not think this is Charles Bronson in a brand-new Death Wish film. Kovacs plays a mysterious stranger out to clean up a crime ridden town by murdering every criminal he can find at random. Like Death Wish!

Death Kiss was better than expected. Maybe because it is an overt rip off of the Death Wish films. In general it just has the general feel of the unnecessarily violent thrillers of the 80s. There is a charm and entertainment value in this that one would not expect. Perez knew what he had and he knew how to handle it. 

English is not Kovac’s first language and rather than have him struggle through English dialogue it looks like they dubbed over his lines with a voice that just doesn’t fit. The sound matches the movement of the lips, but the voice does not fit the man. Don’t copy Bronson’s voice for obvious legal reasons but use something gruffer. In the future as AI becomes cheaper should they wish to do such a thing again it would be smart to use AI somehow to give him a different voice more in line with the disposition of the character. Our star, despite not using his own voice, physically conveys toughness and ultimately even sensitivity when the scene calls for it.

This movie has numerous CGI blood squibs. That’s becoming more of a thing even amongst cheap films. The problem here is those bits of blood don’t always match up with any of the wounds you see after the action is all over. I swear there is at least one crotch shot but the guy has no damage to his frank ‘n beans when we see him next on the ground bleeding.

The character is sending random cash most likely from what he takes from his victims to a young woman named Ana (Eva Hamilton) and her disabled daughter. Right away you are asking two big questions about this movie: why is our mysterious stranger killing all the criminals in town and why is he giving wads of cash to this woman and her paralyzed daughter? I really thought they would take the cliché way out and have it turn out that the woman is his daughter with the little girl being his granddaughter. I was pleasantly disappointed when it turned out he felt guilty because his one-man war on crime led to the girl’s condition. 

Why is The Stranger acting as judge, jury, and executioner? We never learned that. Given the basis for this one-man subgenre my bet is on this being an unofficial sequel to the five Death Wish films. An in-film reason would have helped even if it was vaguely like what we got for Paul Kersey. If you come into this expecting anything other than a rip-off of a better known film that is on you.

The Stranger has developed a grudge against local criminal Tyrell (Richard Tyson) for everything he has done including what was going on with a girl we see in the beginning. That still does not explain why he is blowing away the local scum like someone playing an FPS on the original Xbox.

Nor do we figure out how he came entangled with right wing radio host Dan Forthright (Daniel Baldwin) who spouts some mildly stereotypical right wing talking points. I really thought he was going to end up being fluff but Forthright (really?) is neatly tied into the quest even if we never know why. He acts as the information man and his scenes with the dubbed look-alike establish a personal connection for the pair. 

This is not an Academy Award winning movie but a solid idea for a revenge thriller. I think with a slightly better budget and a more appropriate voice for our non-English-speaking actor, this could’ve been something of a minor hit rather than a curiosity. An entertaining and surprisingly good curiosity but still a curiosity.

Death Kiss is a good bit of Bronsploitation. It’s violent but with a little more intelligence than its low budget warrants. If you miss Charles Bronson then I think this will satisfy you.