Albert Johnson (Charles Motherfuckin Bronson) is a trapper drifting through snowy 1931 Canada when he happens to come across some assholes betting on dog fights. One of the dogs is injured and apparently Albert loves animals (when he’s not trapping them) so he takes the dog at gunpoint. In order to smooth things over he gives the owner $200, but just to be clear he’s not negotiating. He’s taking the dog. It’s just like a convenience charge or a dogfight interruption processing fee or something like that. The owner of the dog is Ed Lauter, so this whole incident must be why they don’t seem to like each other in DEATH WISH 3. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Charles Bronson’
Death Hunt
Sunday, September 12th, 2010
White Buffalo
Thursday, August 26th, 2010
WHITE BUFFALO opens with dread as John Barry’s eerie horror score rumbles through a view of a huge white buffalo grunting and snorting like a demon in a spooky cave somewhere. It feels like a nightmare and it is one. It belongs to Charles Bronson. He not only wakes in fright, he wakes with two pistols in his hands and he unloads them into the ceiling of the train car where he’s staying. Luckily nobody was upstairs and they let him off with a warning. (more…)
Pretty badass, as far as stickers go
Sunday, March 21st, 2010I got some new reviews on the way, but I figure as in-between conversation material it couldn’t hurt to post links to some odd Badass Cinema related materials like that Clint Eastwood letter. Today’s item is these Japanese Charles Bronson stickers.
click to see the whole sheet
If anybody knows where to get ahold of some of these fuckers, let me know. I have not historically been a sticker-user but if it ever did come up I would want these to be the stickers I would use. These would be good for if you were committing a series of vigilante murders and a police officer who looked like a young Christopher Guest identified you but decided to let you go, then you would send him a thank you card and decorate the envelope with a few of these for flair. But be careful about fingerprints in my opinion.
The Dirty Dozen
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
Man, it’s one of those concepts that’s too perfect to fuck up: twelve WWII era inmates of a military prison are sent on a dangerous mission to kill as many Nazi officers as they can. The Americans have this target, but they don’t want to waste good soldiers, so why not these lifers and death row cons, murderers and rapists? It’s kind of the same concept as “paint clothes.” You don’t paint the house in pants you’d wear to church, and you don’t want to waste your best soldiers on a suicide mission so you use these fuckos you got in storage. If they die – well, you weren’t planning on using them anyway. No loss.
For the cons it’s a good deal too. They get to go outside. If it’s true they like killing, here’s their chance for more. They get to postpone their executions, or kill some time before their executions. And if they do a good job and survive they might get pardoned, maybe, if fuckin Ernest Borgnine sees it in his heart. If they die in the line of duty, well, maybe they’d rather die that way than on a rope. (more…)
Death Wish V: The Face of Death
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008This one finishes off the series, it’s a goodbye to Paul Kersey and to Charles Bronson for those who aren’t gonna watch the three FAMILY OF COPS movies (the only thing he made after this). I’ve read that Bronson had Alzheimer’s, but he seems completely with it and in good shape.
The year is 1994, Paul has another girlfriend with another daughter. Like part 4 they don’t get mugged or raped, but like all DEATH WISH movies they’re in serious danger. This time Paul runs afoul of the Irish mafia, specifically his girlfriend’s crazy ex-husband Tommy O’Shea (Michael Parks, aka Sherriff Earl McGraw from FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, KILL BILL and both GRINDHOUSE movies). We find out Paul is in witness protection now, not on the run, and he calls an old friend at the D.A.’s office (Saul Rubinek) to help him with O’Shea. But of course that makes things worse, so Paul finds himself sneaking around picking off mobsters. It occurs to me that makes it kind of like a slasher movie where you root for the slasher. Oh well.
This installment’s strength is its colorful characters. Parks is a great villain, very eccentric, making odd faces, mumbling to himself, sinisterly amused by some joke even his own men aren’t in on. And he kills a mannequin, for which he will suffer dearly.
The other most memorable character is Robert Joy (the guy with the burned face in LAND OF THE DEAD) as Freddy Flakes, a schizophrenic hitman who is introduced in drag, is obsessed with security, and suffers from severe dandruff. (Seriously, they make a huge deal about his dandruff.) Paul goes after him with a radio control soccer ball. So we are pretty far away from the tone of part 1 at this point. (more…)
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
Friday, March 28th, 2008For part 3 Michael Winner stripped DEATH WISH down to its crudest elements. There was nowhere further to go within. So for THE CRACKDOWN new director J. Lee Thompson (GUNS OF THE NAVARONE, the last two PLANET OF THE APES movies, THE EVIL THAT MEN DO, tons of other shit) dresses it back up again. You know this right away from the opening which contains suspense, mood, atmosphere, build, surprise, and symbolism, all forbidden by part 3’s strict DOGME style rules.
Kersey is an architect again, and has a family again – another reporter girlfriend with a teenage daughter he regards as his own daughter (we know this because he says “I regard her as if she were my own daughter.”) Oh jesus, not more gang rape, right?
Well, we’re in luck. Kersey’s regarded-as-daughter dies not from an attack but from a cocaine overdose. Kersey follows her boyfriend to the video arcade/roller rink, sees him confront and get stabbed by their dealer, ends up shooting him so his body falls and gets shocked by the top of the bumper car rink.
The admirable thing about this sequel is that the only punk or “creep” in the whole movie is the guy who gives the cops a description of Kersey’s car after the arcade/roller rink shooting. Kersey goes after the organized crime figures who get rich off of the drugs that killed that girl. So finally the class conflict of DEATH WISH is reversed. It’s not this well-to-do architect going after poor people who dress funny. It’s Kersey vs. rich guys who wear suits and live in mansions or penthouse condos. And to enter their world he pretends to be the help, sneaking into a party as part of the catering staff, or pretending to be a worker at the drug front fishpacking plant. (more…)
Death Wish 3
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008Well, L.A. didn’t work out too hot for Paul Kersey. Might as well head home. So Part 3’s opening credits show Kersey taking a bus back into New York City, looking out the window to the tune of the most in-your–face, half cheesy/half cool blast of white-man’s-keyboard-rock meets jazz-fusion-’80s-cop-movie-establishing-shot-of-the-city theme this side of HARD BOILED. Jimmy Page is back in the composer’s chair and comes up with a pretty weird and experimental sound more often than he comes up with the crappy guitar noodling you usually got after LETHAL WEAPON came out. He’s still no Herbie Hancock, but he’ll do.
Director Michael Winner returns for his last at-bat in the DEATH WISH series, but you immediately gotta wonder what the hell’s up because this feels nothing like his other DEATH WISHes. I’m honestly not sure if it’s a deliberate artistic choice or a sudden case of not giving a shit, but he has completely removed whatever traces there were of subtlety, thoughtfulness, ambiguity, class or elegance, not to mention realism. It looks cheaper, plays out more clunky and seems to have been made all in a week or so with no time to prepare or to stop to take a breath. And that’s exactly why it’s the most popular of the sequels. This movie is pretty fuckin nuts.
The first two took questionable morality and made it go down easier with execution that’s just a little smarter than the material. No time for that in III. The writing and editing both go for a sometimes hilarious bluntness and minimalism. No beating around the bush. No time to set up or explain things, no time to set a mood, to develop an idea, to linger on anything at all. For example a scene will start with some place already on fire – why bother to show how this starts? Let’s just skip to the burning. Maybe the funniest example is the lawyer who Kersey strikes up a relationship with during a few scenes. They start to see each other and before you have time to catch your breathe Kersey has left her in the car for a moment, the bad guys have punched her out, put the car in neutral and rolled it down the hill where it crashed and exploded. And Kersey is pissed but I don’t think he 0ever mentions her again. The movie’s saying, “yeah yeah yeah, revenge, etc. You get the idea, I’m not gonna blow a bunch of smoke up your ass about it.” (more…)
Death Wish II
Sunday, February 24th, 2008For the first DEATH WISH sequel we trade down from Dino DiLaurentiis to Golan and Globus producing. Apparently Menahem Golan almost directed, but Bronson wouldn’t do it unless they got Michael Winner back. I bet he said “why get a loser when you can get a Winner?” Anyway we caught a lucky break there. I guess Winner must’ve broken up with Maria from SESAME STREET by this time so Herbie Hancock was out. Instead he got one of his neighbors to score, a neighbor who happened to be Jimmy Page. I was worried but there’s only guitar soloing on the beginning and end credits, the rest is standard old school score, not cheesy ’80s keyboards and rockin guitars and shit. So I’m not gonna complain.
It’s 1982 now, 8 years later, but they say it’s 4 years later. (The magic of cinema.) Paul Kersey lives in L.A. now. His adventures in Chicago (portrayed in the book Death Sentence) are ignored. He’s still an architect, h has a new girlfriend (Jill Ireland) and he’s moved his daughter to a hospital in California. She’s still so traumatized she doesn’t speak.
His life seems happy but then he has a run-in with some weirdos in the park. They steal his wallet so he chases one of them down and beats him up in an alley. Very satisfying, but too bad his driver’s license was up to date. They go to his house, rape his housekeeper, hit him over the head with a crowbar, kidnap his daughter, then rape his daughter until she kills herself.
One time a guy at the DMV scolded me for not updating my address after I moved, and he said if the police were looking for me they’d go to the old address. I said that was a pretty good case for not updating your address, and DEATH WISH II is another one. If Paul was still carrying around his Illinois driver’s license his daughter and maid would still be alive. And those thugs would be wandering around Chicago trying to find him. (more…)
Death Wish
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008After enjoying recent DEATH WISH ripoffs and spinoffs like DEATH SENTENCE and THE BRAVE ONE, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the source, and to see those sequels I never got around to watching. (By the source I mean the first Charles Bronson movie and not the book by Brian Garfield, which is apparently similar but clearly anti-vigilante in the end – that’s why he wrote the sequel Death Sentence, because he was so mad about the DEATH WISH movie.)
Charles Bronson plays Paul Kersey, New York architect, happily married father, “bleeding heart liberal,” Korean War veteran with conscientious objector status. A cool guy. Then one day a gang of hoodlums (including Jeff Goldblum in his first movie role) follow Paul’s wife and daughter home from the grocery store and rape them. Mrs. Kersey dies and the daughter is so traumatized she’s hospitalized in a near catatonic state.
Paul’s annoying son-in-law (who calls him “dad” way too much for comfort) convinces Paul to take an opportunity to go work on a project in Tucson to get away from it all. Hanging out with ranchers he ends up going to the gun range, where he gets a condescending lecture about how the city wouldn’t be so violent if everybody had guns like out here. When he leaves they give him a gun as a gift. So, uh, that might end up being used for something. Who knows?
Of course Kersey ends up in a one man war against crime, going out late at night waiting for people to try to mug him so he can shoot them with his new gun. It makes him feel good. Strangely, he never ends up tracking down or even trying to track down the dudes who attacked his family. Since this was the start of the urban vigilante formula it hadn’t yet occurred to them that that was a good way to make the story satisfying. Or maybe they just knew it was unrealistic. That didn’t become a part of the formula until part 2. (more…)
Mr. Majestyk
Saturday, January 1st, 2005I think it was my colleague in Badass Studies, Mr. Jeff McCloud, who first recommended MR. MAJESTYK to me a year or two ago. When he said that Charles Bronson played a watermelon farmer in it, I knew it was my type of movie. What better way to fulfill the criteria of the THEORY OF BADASS JUXTAPOSITION than to grow a field of watermelons? I mean I guess maybe if they were flowers it would seem more sensitive, but this business of a dude growing watermelons is definitely not the obvious choice for a Badass. Which is why it’s such a good choice.
So I was an idiot to put off watching the movie as long as I did. What really did it was I was lookin through a used book store (seriously, I read books) when I saw the book MR. MAJESTYK by none other than Elmore Leonard. I pulled it out. The dude on the front was definitely not Charlse Bronson. But I read the back, and sure enough, it was about a badass watermelon farmer.
Well shit man, you should’ve mentioned it was Elmore Leonard. If the movie is an indication, this is one of his leaner ones, with less of the clever dialogue and irony, and more of the ass kickin. The filmatism is that raw ’70s type, where it sometimes feels less epic and more like CHiPs, but not usually. (To be fair the video is full framed and could use a little of the remastering, and that always makes ’70s movies seem like TV.) There is a pretty great theme song that lets you know right off that the movie means business, just like a Dirty Harry movie or the better Robert Clouse karate pictures. (more…)
