Posts Tagged ‘vigilantes’

Death Wish V: The Face of Death

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

This 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…)

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Death Wish 4: The Crackdown

Friday, March 28th, 2008

For 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…)

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Death Wish 3

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Well, 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…)

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Death Wish II

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

For 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…)

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Death Wish

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

After 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…)

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The Brave One

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

I’m not totally sure why she’s The Brave One, but Jodie Foster plays a public radio host who gets attacked in Central Park one night by some assholes. They steal her dog, beat her fiancee to death and leave her in a coma. All of which I’m against. Then she tries to get revenge. Good stuff.

Since the director is Neil Jordan, and especially since it stars Jodie Foster, I kind of thought it was gonna be a pretentious “serious” take on the vigilante genre, maybe even condescending toward it, looking down on these types of movies and trying to do the respectable version of them. But thankfully the movie doesn’t have that feel, and if you check the publicity interviews on the DVD they all check out. Foster states that it is in fact a genre movie, and Neil Jordan drops names like Don Siegel and Sam Fuller. I guess I forgot Joel Silver was the producer, he’s not gonna get all fancy pants on us.

So what’s the twist, besides Charles Bronson is a lady? Well, I’m sure this must’ve been done before but I can’t off the top of my head think of a vigilante movie where the vigilante feels this bad about it. For example in DEATH WISH Charles Bronson’s character Paul Kersey feels so good about shooting people that he spruces up his apartment and listens to happy music and it freaks out his son-in-law who wonders “what do you have to be so high about?” Usually it takes a while to push them but the movie will stack the deck so that the bad guys are so bad and the system is so broken that you gotta applaud the Brave One’s brave activities. Here you definitely get the feeling she might be going too far. One incident in particular, some kids are bullying people on a subway, stealing iPods. One of them does pull a knife on her, but does she really need to kill them? Both of them? And does race play a role in it? It’s obviously meant to remind you of Bernard Goetz, and also of DEATH WISH, where Kersey sits in the same place on a subway, also gets a knife pulled on him by two African-Americans, and also shoots them both. But Kersey doesn’t feel bad about it. The Brave One does and admits that she could’ve just shown them the gun and they would’ve left.

There’s even a scene where she tries to turn herself in, but the police don’t know what she’s babbling about so she leaves. In a big city like New York and all the crazies they must deal with there I thought this was believable and kind of a scary thing to think about. (more…)

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The Exterminator

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

THE EXTERMINATOR is a crude but enjoyable vigilante action movie from 1980. It’s kind of in the vein of ROLLING THUNDER but closer to the quality level of THE PARK IS MINE. Robert Ginty plays a troubled Vietnam vet whose best friend (Steve James, more on him later) gets paralyzed by a gang so he kills them in revenge, then decides to declare himself The Exterminator and go murder various criminals. Now that I think about it this is actually in the vein of THE PUNISHER (either version), but it came before those movies.

You know this movie means business when the very first shot is the main character being tossed through the air by a huge explosion. There’s not even a studio logo before that, that is the very first shot. It starts out with a gruesome battle in Vietnam that explains why a dude would be troubled enough to become The Exterminator. There’s a very realistic and disturbing beheading in this scene. Stan Winston was one of the effects guys. It’s one of those action movie paradoxes because on one hand these things are what torments the main character, they are what cause him to go crazy and what he flashes back to when he’s murdering criminals. But on the other hand we think they are awesome. We want to see explosions and beheadings. As viewers, what’s worst for him is best for us. We are cruel gods.

(Not so, by the way, in most horror movies. In horror movies if they’re working you are hoping the person gets away. I mean how many beloved horror movies can you think of that show very little violence? HALLOWEEN, TEXAS CHAIN SAW, and many earlier classics. There are many. But an action movie is not an action movie if it doesn’t show the action. That makes it a drama. I don’t know why these “torture porn” people aren’t up in arms about action movies. I guess we’ll have to wait until they start making good ones again, then they’ll go after them.) (more…)

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Vigilante

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

I don’t know how familiar anybody is with William Lustig. The guy is no genius. He made the MANIAC COP series. He made the picture UNCLE SAM which is a decent holiday slasher picture with subversive Gulf War themes, but it’s kind of a bummer because there is almost no use of stilts after the initial appearance of the Uncle Sam costume in a parade. Anyway after many years of directing bad horror pictures this guy started that company Anchor Bay which put out alot of better ones on video and DVD.

But there are some pretty good ones in his filmography, especially the first one, MANIAC. That was a sleazy, brutal horror picture about a sweaty New York pervert who kills women, staples their scalps to a mannequin, handcuffs himself to the mannequin and cries. Then during the daytime he puts on shades and tries to make it as a hip fashion photographer. It’s a real sick movie with ridiculous gore effects by Mr. Tom Savini. Not recommended for anybody unless they like that kind of crap, which in this case I do.

VIGILANTE is not as good but it’s sort of like what you might expect in a DEATH WISH type revenge movie from the director of MANIAC. It follows the completely stripped down revenge movie formula with the occasional bit of more gore than you expect. Good ol’ Robert Forster plays an everyday type dude with a wife and young son. But he lives in New York City and they got lots of ’70s/early ’80s style crime. One day while he’s out drinking with some car work buddies, his wife has a run-in with some asshole Hispanic gang members in berets (they must’ve seen THE WARRIORS) who spray gas on her, then follow her home, stab her repeatedly, and blow the baby son out the window with a shot gun. At least in the director’s cut that’s available on DVD, this is a real brutal scene. I couldn’t believe they actually blew the kid away. I don’t want to sound like a prude but I don’t care if some lady insulted you at the gas station, you don’t shotgun a cute little kid like that. It’s just not right, in my opinion. Cut it out, babyshooters. (more…)

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The Executioner, Part II

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

When I brought THE EXTERMINATOR back to the video store I went to the action section and grabbed part 2. But it was a VHS box and the cover was just a picture of Mario Van Peebles wearing a ROAD WARRIOR type outfit, so for a second I thought I grabbed the wrong one, so then I picked up the other one next to it with the badass painted cover that seemed more right than the Van Peebles one.

But wait a minute, this is THE EXECUTIONER PART 2, not THE EXTERMINATOR 2. Where’s THE EXECUTIONER PART 1? I didn’t see one. But I decided to rent part 2 anyway.

Turns out there was a good excuse for part 1 not being there: it doesn’t exist. This “part 2″ really is designed to trick people into thinking it’s a sequel to the movie it’s a rehash of, THE EXTERMINATOR. It starts in Vietnam, it goes to New York, a Vietnam vet has traumatic flashbacks that cause him to go around murdering criminals (in this one his buddy doesn’t get killed), and there’s also the cop who tries to catch him but sort of understands him (Chris Mitchum from RICCO THE MEAN MACHINE and from Robert Mitchum’s loins).

But while THE EXTERMINATOR was kind of a cheap ripoff of DEATH WISH and ROLLING THUNDER, this is another step down in quality. It makes the actual EXTERMINATOR 2 look like THE GODFATHER PART II. The storytelling is awkward and sometimes hard to follow, the voices are dubbed, and they explain all the moronic themes of the movie by having a radio announcer just say them as narration. While alot of the shittiness is funny there’s also a rape scene and some long scenes of a dude roughing up a young prostitute. Generally that type of business is a comedy killer. (more…)

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