Early in writer-director Rene Perez’s 2017 micro-budget feature From Hell to the Wild West, a familiar-looking figure saunters into view, tracking an offscreen foe. He’s dressed in a dark gray fringed jacket and a worn-out cowboy hat. He wears his black hair in a shaggy cut, and he has a thin black mustache. He pauses, reaching down to examine the dirt for signs of his enemy’s movements. In the distance, he spots the man he’s been tracking, a killer in a sack-like mask. “There you are, you son of a bitch,” he says in a voice that sounds a bit like Hank Azaria on The Simpsons talking about “going down to Emmett’s Fix-it Shop to fix Emmett.” Is that … Charles Bronson?
Of course it’s not Charles Bronson, because Bronson died in 2003. But in the cutthroat world of direct-to-video content, any kind of recognizable face is a valuable commodity. On the higher end of the low-budget spectrum, producer Randall Emmett is notorious for his “geezer teasers,” recruiting aging stars like Bruce Willis, John Travolta and Robert De Niro for brief appearances in movies that can then be sold on their presence. If he were still alive, Bronson would be a perfect geezer to tease, given his long history in Westerns and action movies. Instead, there’s Robert Bronzi.
A Hungarian acrobat, stuntman, horse trainer and martial artist, Bronzi was performing Wild West stunt shows in Spain when Perez spotted him. Bronzi had already been working as a Charles Bronson impersonator in Europe, but it was Perez who had the idea to build entire movies around Bronzi playing Bronson-like characters. Bronzi’s filmography looks like Bronson has been resurrected and given the current career of someone like Tom Sizemore or Michael Madsen or Michael Paré (who co-starred with Bronzi in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Deadwood).
Prolific B-movie filmmaker Perez has been instrumental in shaping Bronzi’s bizarre, off-putting screen presence, as the director (and writer and editor and cinematographer) of Bronzi’s first four films. Both From Hell to the Wild West and Once Upon a Time in Deadwood draw on Bronson’s status as a Western icon, with roles in classics like The Magnificent Seven and Once Upon a Time in the West. Bronzi is styled to resemble Bronson in those old Westerns, dressed like a 1970s movie star appearing in a film set in the 1880s. Bronzi’s stunt show experience comes in handy for chases on horseback and shootouts in replica Western towns. He’s great at striking classic-looking hero poses, although that’s pretty much the extent of his acting talents.
In From Hell to the Wild West, Bronzi is mostly overshadowed by the villain, a hulking serial killer who lures women to an empty frontier town via help wanted ads and then gruesomely murders them. Bronzi’s unnamed drifter has been falsely accused of the murders, and he teams up with a local marshal to catch the killer and clear his name. A series of jarring present-day scenes establish that the killer is actually Jack the Ripper, and an opening title card rather dubiously claims that the movie is “based on true events.”
Bronzi fares better in Once Upon a Time in Deadwood, the best of the Bronzi/Perez collaborations. The production values are still abysmal, with nearly every actor looking like they’re participating in a hastily organized Wild West re-enactment, but the story is more substantial, and Paré brings charisma to his role as the villain. The movie piggybacks on both Bronson Westerns and the HBO series Deadwood, with most of the action set in the Dakota Territory town of Deadwood, where Paré plays a local kingpin named Swearengen.
Obviously, Paré is no Ian McShane, and Perez is no David Milch. The dialogue and acting are mostly stiff and awkward, and Bronzi comes up against the limits of his range when he’s called upon to express pain and anguish. He’s a remarkably inexpressive actor, and it doesn’t help that Perez insists on having someone else dub his lines, to cover for Bronzi’s thick Hungarian accent. In From Hell to the Wild West, that voice comes closest to sounding like Bronson, and in other Perez movies it just sounds like a bored voiceover artist in a recording booth.
In between those two Westerns, Bronzi and Perez made Death Kiss, a contemporary thriller capitalizing on Bronson’s most famous role, as vigilante Paul Kersey in the Death Wish movies. Dressed in what looks like Paul Kersey cosplay, Bronzi’s character, known only as K, stalks the streets of a generic American city, encountering criminals seemingly at random and then gunning them down, resulting in geysers of fake blood.
The Death Wish movies are known for their ugly reactionary tone, but at least Paul Kersey has theoretical motivation as a vigilante, after his wife and daughter are attacked by street criminals. Death Kiss provides no such back story for K, who doesn’t even seem to care much for the people he’s saving. Rescuing a young girl from sex traffickers, he brutally murders her abuser as she watches in horror, surely only adding to her trauma. Later, after he saves a woman from being raped, he forces her to shoot her rapist, so she’ll be complicit in the murder and won’t report him to the police.
The nastiness of Death Kiss, which also includes a ranting right-wing radio host played by Daniel Baldwin, comes off as more lazy than malicious, and that’s also evident in the final Bronzi/Perez film, last year’s Cry Havoc. In time-honored B-movie tradition, Perez is an opportunist, and with Cry Havoc he inserts Bronzi into the fourth movie in his Havoc horror franchise, pitting a Bronson-style cop against a third-rate slasher villain. There’s no coherent point of view to any of these movies other than grabbing the audience’s attention, and all Perez really needs for that is Bronzi’s leathery, expressionless face.
Bronzi’s latest film, Escape From Death Block 13, is his first without Perez, and it’s easily the most movie-like movie he’s ever starred in. Writer-director Gary Jones lets Bronzi use his real voice, even making his character Hungarian and giving him Bronzi’s actual last name (Kovacs) — in the first instance of a Bronzi character having a name at all. The movie itself is a sloppy, overlong mess that starts as a revenge story about Bronzi’s Miklos taking down a mobster (exuberantly played by Nicholas Turturro) responsible for his brother’s death, before shifting into a prison drama that culminates in a bloodbath as dangerous inmates stage an insurrection.
Freed from the obligation to dress like Charles Bronson or sound American, Bronzi loosens up a bit, although he’s still largely incapable of expressing any emotion other than badassery. It’s hard to imagine him ever being cast on his own merits, and if he cuts his hair or shaves his mustache, he won’t have anything distinctive to offer to producers. For now, though, Perez’s vision of Bronzi as an American B-movie sensation seems to be coming true. His next movie, The Gardener, is out on December 28, and he has several more lined up. He’s no Charles Bronson, but then again, neither is anyone else. 
“From Hell to the Wild West,” “Death Kiss,” “Once Upon a Time in Deadwood,” and “Cry Havoc” are streaming for free on Tubi and other services. “Escape From Death Block 13” is available on VOD and will be out on DVD November 23.
