Anchor Bay: Cursed in Baja (2024) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Anchor Bay

Chicago based character actor turned writer-director Jeff Daniel Phillips is a familiar face in modern horror.  With his intimidating scruffy look and bold eyes, the actor has been in several of Rob Zombie’s films including playing the main character Herman Munster and more recently Joe Begos’ Christmas Bloody Christmas.  A staple of the indie horror scene, soon the actor began dabbling in his own short film work leading towards his debut feature as a writer-director-star of the hazy surreal regional neo-noir/psychedelic horror flick Cursed in Baja.  Wanting to posit itself in between Robert Rodriguez, Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch with a rubber-masked wolf man and nonstop experimental editing and filmmaking ala Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, the film never really gets off the ground as it saunters from one increasingly peculiar episode to the next drawing towards some dogged measure of conclusion.  It’s Wild at Heart with the budget and creature of Cocaine Werewolf running around in it.

 
Jeff Daniel Phillips plays Pirelli, an ex-lawman who is tasked with tracking down a wealthy heir who has vanished without a trace.  Compounded with his own mercurial background largely told through noirish voiceover narration from the crusty Phillips, his trail leads him to Mexico in the middle of the Baja Desert where he encounters a myriad of dangerous characters keen on spilling his blood.  As the film goes on, it takes on a kind of Under the Silver Lake or Inherent Vice approach where the narrative becomes increasingly incoherent and even hallucinatory.  However where those films were polished dividers shot in lush 35mm, Cursed in Baja is in crisp 4K digital by Keith Coleman however with the usual broken movement in shifting frame rates or drone photography.  While featuring horror icons like Barbara Crampton of From Beyond and Re-Animator, the whole thing feels less like a robust feature than the hyperkinetic scribblings of a first-time film student.

 
Anchor Bay’s disc release is good with crisp video of the 4K digital photography and the lossy Dolby 5.1 mix is fine.  Jeff Daniel Phillips is definitely invested in this piece even though he features scenes of a rubber-masked werewolf man disemboweling characters with effects that feel less like horror than surreal comedy.  Barbara Crampton and musician Finnegan Seeker Bell who the director did some music videos for turn over decent performances while Phillips more or less shoulders the whole thing in front of and behind the camera.  Phillips is a decent enough actor but as a narrative storyteller it was hard to stay invested or care about the proceedings however wacky they became.  A genre-hybrid fish-out-of-water crazy cop thriller as horror movie, despite running at a tight eighty minutes it feels like a dress rehearsal.

Hard to say who exactly the audience of this Anchor Bay title will be.  It sort of fits into the rule-bending neo-noir of Nicolas Winding Refn whose recent television crime sagas both drifted towards science fiction, but while that film is visually enthralling with wild and deliberately dulled performances across the board Cursed in Baja for all of its hyperkinetic Oliver Stone intercutting is just kind of stagnant and flat.  You can see the blueprint of a serviceable noirish mind game descent into madness flick in the middle of an open desert ala The Outwaters or Punto Rojo also released by MVD, but in its present form it feels like a microbudget collection of dailies.  I wish Jeff Daniel Phillips the very best in his future filmmaking endeavors as he shows a lot on his mind but this won’t get rewatched anytime soon by yours truly.

--Andrew Kotwicki