Quartz Vein – review

Director: Jared Masters

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

Writer/director/star Jared Masters has, according to IMDb has made a slew of low budget B movies and from what I can gather crowdfunded this one. But prodigious output is not an indication of quality and this suffers much through ambition (a sci-fi set in the near post-apocalyptic future is not going to be the easiest to film) but also through poor storytelling.

It is one of those moments where I feel cruel – but the film is its own worst enemy. But first let’s cover off the vampire aspect. From the DVD cover we get; “2047. After the humanitarian disaster, one gold miner, Eon Pax, must risk it all to save the girl. Enslaved by a wicked mutant race of gold-injecting vampires…” the blurb goes on but that’s the key, along with the tagline “Sustained by blood, immortalized by gold”.

cloaked mutant

So we start with a girl (Elizabeth Rath) running down a hillside. She is stalked by a cowled and cloaked figure. Intercepted she asks what it wants, she is an anonymous untagged seeking asylum. I assume then it is the same girl we see captured and in a rag bikini (or a clone thereof – clones are mentioned often). Elsewhere a car pulls up (looking rather well kept given it is, in 2047, a museum piece). Out of the car comes Eon Pax (Jared Masters).

Jared Masters as Pax

He is a gold prospector (variously pickaxing into a cliff face, panning for gold or even metal detecting as the whim takes him). He has a pet fly (!) and is looking for gold for evil leader of the mutants Gargoya (also Jared Masters). There then occur a series of encounters such as the one with a mutant who he kills, or with Beba (Dawson Boese) a mechanic who fixes his car and is then stung by wasps, passes out and is injected by Pax with something that will sort her out in an hour but she comes round apparently days later having been left unconscious in the desert, and also with ne’er-do-well Lippy McGhee (James F Gregory) who loses a series of dice games against Pax and so eventually steals his car.

Stealthia and Gargoya

In the meantime, he is getting dreams to follow a quartz vein and rescue a cloned girl held by Gargoya and his minion Stealthia (also Elizabeth Rath). This leads to him running around the same few tunnels and also going into (a remarkably intact) LA in order to stop a ritual where she will be sacrificed. Its all a bit of a mess to be honest, as far as stories go. We do get a vampire bite or two, however, so it’s definitely a vampire sci-fi flick.

bitten

The costumes seem to be Halloween costumes and your continuity is blown when you show a stream, then a close shot of koi carp (in a pool one assumes) and then cut back to the clearly fish empty stream and have the hero fire into the (now invisible) mass of fish to, obviously, miss. Acting is flat and dialogue over-preposterous. On the other hand you can tell that Masters believed in what he was doing and that has to count for something – in this case it counts for about 2 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK