June 25, 1994
The day after WYATT EARP came out, HBO debuted a western of their own. BLIND JUSTICE stars Armand Assante (PARADISE ALLEY) as Canaan, a blind gunfighter who wears goggle-like sunglasses, enjoys cigars, and is introduced carrying a baby. When he’s surrounded by bandits he hands the baby to one of them and shoots the others. It made me think this was gonna be a western riff on ZATOICHI + LONE WOLF AND CUB, which sounds like a fun time to me, so I thought oh no, I’m gonna seem like a real heathen if I’m more enthusiastic about the cheap ass made-for-cable western of summer ’94 than the expensive theatrical ones by Richard Donner and Lawrence Kasdan. But I had nothing to worry about.
The baby isn’t his, and is too young to participate in the violence, as good ol’ Daigoro does in LONE WOLF AND CUB. This one’s an infant girl he doesn’t even know the name of because “the poor man” he took her from died before he could tell him her name. “It was a shame I had to kill him,” he says. But he promised to bring her to her mother in some town called Los Portales that no one has ever heard of. In his search he ends up in San Pedro, a border town where cavalry men are holed up, protecting a shipment of silver for the mint, unable to leave because the only road through the canyon is blocked by the sadistic bandit Alacran (Robert Davi, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: THE DISCOVERY) and his men. (read the rest of this shit…)
One thing the DEATH WISH remake has in common with the original: it feels kinda disreputable. I went to it knowing it had gotten poor reviews, that it had been delayed, that the trailers had been scoffed at by anybody I ever heard talk about it. People have looked down on Roth’s movies since 
