“It’s time,” says a prison guard (Hugo Armstrong) to the inmate Pirelli (Jeff Daniel Phillips, also the writer/director) at the beginning of Cursed in Baja, before leading him to an elevator. What seems to be the final walk of a death row convict will turn out to be the last moments that Pirelli will spend in prison before being released – but not before the sequence is interrupted by scenes, shuffled out of chronological order, in which Pirelli rides a motorbike through the desert, in which Helen Kemper (Robbyn Leigh) dances in monochrome and exhibits unmotherly indifference to her young son Quinn, and in which Pirelli follows a woman into a drug den and viciously attacks a dealer, followed by close-up shots of a nightmarish canine creature attacking no less viciously, all to the accompaniment of Pirelli’s voiceover in which he declares his love for ‘damaged’ Helen from the moment he first laid eyes on her. Here time is confounded and wraps in on itself, while entrapment and escape seem two sides of the same coin.
“The real danger for an ex-con is you,” parole officer Jill Garvey (Barbara Crampton) had warned Pirelli before his release. “We live in cycles and we repeat the same mistakes, get involved with the same bad influences… you need to understand the evil that you’re capable of, or you’re gonna end up right back here or worse, dead.”
Cursed in Baja is structured around cyclical recurrences and repetitions, with constant slippage between past and present, as Pirelli, now straight for a year, is hired once again by old, dying patriarch Robert Kemper (Jim Storm) to find his missing, now adult grandson Quinn (Finnegan Seeker Bell), just as Robert had many years earlier contracted Pirelli to locate and recover his daughter Helen. Pirelli had certainly found the abducted Helen in Baja, but too late, and his failure and loss had led the Iraq veteran and one-time LAPD detective to become a suicidal junkie drug addict, and then to return to the LAPD narcotics division only to get framed for police corruption and homicide, and be sent to jail. Now, with great reluctance, Pirelli takes on this second case and returns to Baja, perhaps trying to square the circle, or even to redeem himself. Yet as Pirelli’s meds run out, as his traumatic flashbacks grow ever stronger, and as his grip on reality itself starts to loosen, it seems that the past still has its haunting hold on him and the same old predicaments are coming all over again.
Pirelli is not just retracing his own previous investigation in Baja, but is also following in the footsteps of another PI (Michael Shamus Wiles) whom Robert’s lawyer Thomas Durivage (Mark Fite) hired to find Quinn and who has since vanished without trace. The stories of these two detectives unfold in parallel, even as Pirelli has increasingly surreal run-ins with local gangster rapper Satanás (Jose Conejo Martin), Quinn’s two-timing girlfriend Jocelyn (Jacely Fuentes), small-town Swedish dealer Otto (Kent Isaacs), a Russian actress/heiress (Jacqueline Wright) and her wheelchair-bound Babushka (Tina Preston). All this – the ‘tec’s drawling voiceover, the return of troubles from out of the past, the near impenetrable narrative leaps, and several femmes fatales – comes written in the key of noir.
Yet Cursed in Baja crosses genres as much as borders, and woven into its hallucinatory textures is a sacrificial cult (local, albeit observed entirely by foreigners) and even a cryptid creature, the chupacabra. The scenes with this man-eating canine monster, if taken literally, are gratuitous and incoherent – but one might equally read the creature, within Pirelli’s messed-up, unreliable narration, as figuring both the bestiality of characters willing to sacrifice the lives of others, even kin, for good fortune (or a suitcase full of cocaine), and the monstrous, murderous impulses within Pirelli himself (even if it is never entirely clear whether he really acts on these, or they merely remain fantasies). In the end our reformed hero has come full circle, heading right back not just to LA but to mad-dog criminality – cursed, like the Kempers, to dig up old demons and to repeat history.
Cursed in Baja had its world première at FrightFest 2024, 23 August
