2/19/15: Open Mouth, Remove Doubt

Tags

Addison Timlin, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Anthony Anderson, Ben Jonson, Charles B. Pierce, Charles B. Pierce Jr., cinema, Ed Lauter, Edward Herrmann, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, Gary Cole, horror, horror movies, Joshua Leonard, meta-films, Movies, remakes, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, slasher films, Spencer Treat Clark, Texarkana, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Veronica Cartwright

Despite an intense dislike of unnecessary remakes and reboots, I’m still able to concede one point: there are certain films that could actually benefit from a second take. Whether a good idea that was scuttled due to production issues or errant elements (bad script, bad actors, bad effects, etc…) or just something that could have used a little longer in the oven, some films just don’t get a fair shake the first time around. A prime example of this particular phenomenon is Charles B. Pierce’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976): while this proto-slasher – Pierce’s film actually came out a few years before Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and several years before it would influence Jason Voorhee’s sack-cloth mask in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) – has a lot to recommend it, including some truly ahead-of-its-time brutality and violence, it’s also plagued by a mess of tonal inconsistencies and unnecessary comedic elements. In fact, one of the single biggest problems with the film is director Pierce’s performance as a bumbling cop, a bit of comedic relief that’s as unwelcome as it is amateurish and grating. If ever there was a movie that could use the ol’ remake treatment, this would definitely be one of the front-runners.

This, of course, brings us to 2014 and a long overdue remake of Pierce’s original chiller, courtesy of TV director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. As previously mentioned, there aren’t a ton of crooked lines to straighten: keep the creeping sense of dread, the isolated Texas locations, the terrifying, masked killer, lose the stupid comic relief and voila: low-key exploitation shocker, ready to serve. In an era where remakes tend to become more straight-forward, streamlined, humorless versions of their predecessors, this seems like the biggest no-brainer of all time. Despite starting strong, however, Gomez-Rejon manages to screw this up more direly than Pierce ever could, all while breaking one of my cardinal rules of horror films: he turns a formerly silent killer into a chatter-box and, in the process, scuttles every last bit of tension, fear and power that the original film held. What we’re left with, unfortunately, is a meta-fictional mess that loses the intentional comedy but replaces it with a groan-worthy “tough talkin’ villain who’s hardly a better alternative.

The smartest thing that Gomez-Rejon’s remake does is to not only acknowledge the original film but to find ways to organically work it into the framework of the current one. To that end, we have a similar situation to something like Scream 3 (2000), wherein the events that took place in the original film are treated as fact: in this case, there really were a series of unsolved murders that were perpetrated in the Texarkana area in 1976. The burlap-masked killer was never caught, although suspicions and accusations have flown ever since. Pierce’s film became an ingrained part of the local culture and even became something of a Halloween staple in Texarkana. The events that we’re about to see, we’re told, took place in the area in 2013, nearly forty years after the original murders.

The events in question, of course, are more murders: copycats of the original killings, to be exact. It all begins when Jami (Addison Timlin) and her boyfriend, Corey (Spencer Treat Clark), leave a drive-in screening of Pierce’s film to go neck on Lover’s Lane. Faster than you can say “deja vu all over again,” the burlap-sack-bedecked Phantom shows up and brutally dispatches Corey, before letting Jami leave, albeit with a directive: make the towns-people remember. To that end, we get some bush-league detective work as Jami runs around and tries to dig up the backstory on the Phantom, all while the killer mows down the frightened civilians in pretty much the same ways as the original film. This all culminates in a final “twist” revelation that comes out of left-field, as surprise revelations, double-crosses and an ocean of red herrings come together to create one boisterous, if highly nonsensical, potboiler.

Before the killer speaks, Gomez-Rejon’s film actually builds up a decent amount of suspense and atmosphere. In ways, the beginning is reminiscent of the original Halloween (organically, not slavishly) and has no shortage of style. Once the Phantom opens his pie-hole, however, it’s almost as if the film takes a hard left turn into over-heated pulp and it never recovers. The style becomes gradually fussier and overly flashy, the dialogue becomes ridiculously pulpy and one unbelievable situation rolls into another stretch of belief with uncanny ease. It’s almost as if the arbitrary decision to make the Phantom talk necessitated pitching the film in a more frenetic, over-the-top direction than the original. It’s not a dark comedy, per se, but it’s also not a patch on the original film’s intentional comedy, either.

Case in point: the tough-as-nails Texas Ranger that Ben Jonson portrayed in the original has been replaced by Anthony Anderson’s outrageously over-the-top ‘Lone Wolf’ Morales in the remake. Anderson mugs and chews scenery ferociously, although he manages to stop just shy of original director Pierce’s slapstick performance. It’s an odd choice, especially when we get the scene where Lone Wolf watches a copy of the original film and studies Jonson’s performance: it’s a meta-moment within a meta-film but it doesn’t seem to reveal anything about either Lone Wolf or the film, itself. It’s a problem that comes up again and again: the remake seems to draw attention to or accentuate elements from the first film but to no end.

In certain ways, the film’s devotion to uncovering the Phantom’s backstory (his origin story, if you will) makes this akin to Rob Zombie’s redos of the Halloween series, rather than the murder-procedural of the first film. It’s a decidedly different tone, especially once the film really gets going and seems to be a way to humanize or sympathize (at least to some extent) with the killer, ala Zombie’s abused Michael Myers. I’ve never been a fan of the Halloween remakes and this sometimes brought those to mind in unpleasant ways.

Despite my numerous issues with the film, Gomez-Rejon’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown is certainly not without its charms. The film is constantly stylish, even if it often feels cluttered and overly busy and the effects work is quite impressive: while the original film was no shrinking violet when it came to violence, the remake ups the ante in some pretty significant ways. A setpiece involving a severed head is pretty silly but a protracted stabbing has the uncomplicated, reptilian zeal of a true nightmare. If nothing else, the film usually looks pretty good and is satisfying on a purely visceral level.

The film also has an impressive supporting cast, with familiar faces like Gary Cole, Ed Lauter and the late Edward Herrmann showing up in various capacities. While the whole film is over-the-top and rather feverishly pitched, there’s plenty of game performances to go round. For her part, Addison Timlin (one of the best things about the otherwise depressingly mundane Odd Thomas (2013)) does a fine job as the hero, even if the script keeps trying to saddle her with unnecessary love stories. If anything, I kind of wish that this cast could have come together in a better project: they’re all fun, in pieces, but don’t really add up to a cohesive whole.

Ultimately, I can’t help but feel that Gomez-Rejon’s film is a heap of missed opportunities. In many ways, Pierce’s original was a perfectly serviceable car that just needed a new door: the remake replaces the door, true, but also overhauls the engine in ways that cause the car to cease running. There’s nothing quite as terrifying as a silent, emotionless, motiveless killer: when you can’t reason, bargain or plead with someone, then there truly is no hope. Charles B. Pierce knew this, as did John Carpenter. By making his Phantom speak, taunt, bully and bluster, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon throws out the one element of the original film that unequivocably worked. It’s not how you’d work on a car and it’s definitely not how you build a horror film.

 

8/31/14 (Part One): Ubu Don’t Sit

Tags

'80s films, Alligator, bad dogs, based on a book, bats, Billy Jacoby, Cat's Eye, Christopher Stone, cinema, Cujo, Daniel Hugh-Kelly, Danny Pintauro, Dee Wallace, domestic vs feral, Ed Lauter, film reviews, films, horror films, infidelity, Jan de Bont, Jewel of the Nile, Kaiulani Lee, killer pets, Lewis Teague, Mills Watson, Movies, Rabies, St. Bernard, Stephen King, Who's the Boss?

For many of us (I hesitate to say “most of us,” since I would hate to put words in your mouth), our pets aren’t just animals that get to hang around in the house, eat food and act like idiots when the vacuum is on: they’re part of our families, to a greater or lesser extent, and many of us become quite attached to them. As with anything that we hold dear to our hearts (love, freedom, alien invasions and super heroes), pets make great fodder for popular entertainment. In most cases, this is a case of tugging at the heart-strings: after all, what childhood could possibly be complete without at least one tearful viewing of Old Yeller (1957), The Incredible Journey (1968) or The Neverending Story (1984)?

If we hate to see our beloved pets die, however, we’re also not particularly fond of seeing them turn into merciless killers. While there are plenty of “killer animal” movies out there (the list is way too long to bother with here but suffice to say that I can guarantee that at least 90% of the film-watching public have seen at least one killer animal flick, even if it was only Jaws (1975) or Anaconda (1997)), the number of “killer pet” films is decidedly smaller, possibly in the single digits. To be honest, only two of them come readily to mind: George Romero’s Monkey Shines (1988) and Lewis Teague’s Cujo (1983). While Romero’s film has its charms, Teague’s adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller is the Citizen Kane (1941) of wacko pet flicks, if you will, and still manages to hold up fairly well some 30 years after its initial theatrical release.

There are two questions one must ask regarding any movie adaptation of a Stephen King story: how closely does the film follow the book and is it actually any good? Since King adaptations are notoriously hit-or-miss, almost to the point of urban legend, the second question ends up being particularly valid. In both regards, Teague’s adaptation scores fairly high marks: Cujo is a pretty close translation of the book and is, for at least half its running time, a tense, genuinely frightening film. In a decade exemplified by its excesses, Teague’s “less is more” approach ends up suiting the story remarkably well.

Plot-wise, Cujo is a marvel of simplicity. Our protagonist is Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace), married to ad exec Vic (Daniel Hugh Kelly) and raising a precocious son, Tad (Danny Pintauro, better known as Tony Danza’s young charge on Who’s the Boss?). Donna is also having an affair with Steve (Christopher Stone), a local carpenter who makes stuff for the family and plays tennis with Vic, in between schtupping his missus. Donna ends up breaking off the affair at roughly the same time that Vic realizes something is going on, making her revelation a bit of a wash. Vic needs to take a business trip to shore up a failing account, leaving Donna and Tad back at home with their increasingly broken-down car.

When the car seems ready to give up the ghost, Donna and Tad take it to local hardass/amateur mechanic Joe Camber (Ed Lauter, playing one of his patented shithead characters). Joe’s a real jerk who recreational past times appear to be berating his wife, Charity (Kaiulani Lee) and son, Brett (Billy Jacoby), getting soused with his equally sleazy buddy, Gary (Mills Watson) and bullying his customers. He’s also got an isolated farmhouse, which makes the perfect locale for a horror film. And, of course, his son’s got a big, friendly St. Bernard named Cujo.

As we see from the opening moments of the film, Cujo is the typical happy-go-lucky pooch, chasing rabbits through sun-dappled fields of flowers and living the life o’ Reilly. Dark skies appear, as it were, when Cujo chases the rabbit into a hole in the ground, which is revealed to be the opening to a pretty creepy, bat-filled cave. One of the bats chomps down on poor Cujo’s nose, leaving a nasty bite mark. The bat, of course, has rabies: our lovably gentle giant is now a ticking time-bomb.

By the time Donna and Tad’s junker gives up the ghost in Joe Camber’s dusty front yard, Cujo’s reign of terror has already been in full-swing, as we witness him (literally) tear Joe and Gary to shreds. When Cujo jumps at Tad’s car-door, in a heart-stopping scene that must stand as one of the greatest “monster” reveals in cinematic history, Donna quickly locks them in the vehicle. At this point, the film, essentially, becomes “Jaws with paws,” as the terrifying Cujo traps Donna and Tad in the car, cut-off from friends, Vic and the outside world. As Donna must desperately try to keep the car from falling apart against the increasingly violent attacks by the rabid dog, Vic tries to call his family but gets no answer and decides to hurry home. As time ticks down, Donna is locked in a desperate life-or-death struggle against a ferocious beast that used to be a dewy-eyed, beloved family pet. Will she succeed in keeping her family together or will she end up graphically proving Jack Handey’s old adage: nothing tears apart a family like wild dogs.

As director of the classic “killer animal” flick, Alligator (1980), Lewis Teague certainly knows a thing or two about this type of film and Cujo’s second-half is absolutely thrilling: claustrophobic, vicious, bloody and merciless, the film’s final 45 minutes are solid-gold horror and just about as good as it gets. There’s a heartbreaking dichotomy between Cujo’s initially gentle demeanor and his increasingly erratic, violent actions. Once the fluffy dog’s face is smeared in blood from his kills, this schism becomes even more extreme: it’s no hyperbole to say that Teague’s version of Cujo’s titular “monster” is every bit as scary as a handful of Jasons, Freddys or Predators. There’s nothing goofy about Donna’s mano-a-mano combat with Cujo: the film constantly feels high-stakes and we never get the impression that she’s swatting a fly with a Buick, as it were.

The biggest problem with the film ends up being the largely uninvolving first half, in particular the tedious infidelity angle. Unlike the similar storyline in the novel, this particular story arc is never fully developed and feels like something tacked on to pad the running time. I wholeheartedly appreciate and endorse the character building moments, especially with Cujo and the Cambers and have no problem with the film taking its time to stretch into the horror elements. As previously mentioned, the affair subplot makes more sense and bears more emotional fruit on the page than on the screen: perhaps it was one more bit of “real” emotion that Teague couldn’t be bothered with but I found myself checking my watch more than once during this time. Once we get to Donna and Tad in that broken-down car, however, the film really comes to life and becomes a pretty much non-stop thrill ride all the way up to the closing credits.

Dee Wallace gives an assured, emotional performance as Donna and acquits herself quite handily as a badass, when need-be. One of my favorite beats here involves the bit where Donna snaps back at Tad after he repeatedly whines about his father coming back: it’s an intensely real moment that feels both painful and completely honest. For his part, Pintauro walks a good balance with Tad: the character could have come across as obnoxious, especially in such a confined space but is rarely eye-rolling. The rest of the cast is decent, with Lauter and Watson having a blast as the loutish friends but Daniel Hugh Kelly is largely a non-entity in the role of Donna’s largely absentee husband. The character ends up being a bit thin, on paper, and Kelly does nothing whatsoever to add substance to the role.

For the most part, Cujo works quite well, especially for a King adaptation. The editing in the dog attack scenes is pitch-perfect (modern action films could learn a thing or two from this film’s sense of space and blocking) and the cinematography, in general, is quite nice. Astute viewers might recognize DP Jan de Bont as the camera-man behind such iconic films as The Jewel of the Nile (1985), Die Hard (1988) and The Hunt For Red October (1990), although he might be better known as the director of such box-office grand-slams as Speed (1994) and Twister (1996).

Despite a few handicaps (the aforementioned first half and a little too much reliance on slo-mo and overly sentimental schmaltz), Cujo ends up being a pretty ferocious, mean little film. Dog lovers may find this to be rather tough going, although certainly no more so than anyone who harbors an innate fear of dogs. As someone who’s always loved cats and been a little apprehensive about “man’s best friend,” there was plenty about Cujo that made my blood run cold. If you’re keeping score at home, put a checkmark in the “Successful King Adaptation” column and wait for the inevitable remake.

6/2/14 (Part Two): From the Sublime to the Rocket Launcher

Tags

'80s action films, 1980's, action films, Alex Winter, Assault on Precinct 13, bad cops, Charles Bronson, cinema, crime wave, Death Wish, Death Wish 3, Deborah Raffin, Ed Lauter, film franchise, film reviews, films, Fraker, gang rape, gangs of punks, Gavan O'Herlihy, gun enthusiasts, guns, Jimmy Page, Kirk Taylor, liberals vs conservatives, Mad Max, Marina Sirtis, Martin Balsam, Michael Winner, misogyny, Movies, New York City, over-the-top, Paul Kersey, post-apocalyptic wasteland, revenge, rocket launcher, sequel, sequels, set in the 1980's, the Giggler, The Warriors, Tony Spiridakis, Troma films, vengeance, vigilante, vigilantism

As a youth, many of my favorite films tended to be of the ultra-violent action variety. While I watched a lot of different things, there was a certain group of films that seemed to get rewatched endlessly, as if on a loop: Magnum Force (1973), Pale Rider (1985), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Death Wish 3 (1985), RoboCop (1987) and Die Hard (1988). Most of these could probably be chalked up to the fact that Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson were two of my parents’ favorite actors, thereby gaining plenty of airtime in our household. As for RoboCop and Die Hard: what 11-year-old boy wouldn’t love those? As time passes, I find that my opinion on most of them still holds up: for one reason or another, these are all fundamentally solid films.

Of the group, Death Wish 3 is one of the ones I watched the most, while younger, but have revisited the least as time goes on. As part of my personal film festival, I decided to finally revisit the film, pairing it with the original (if I had access to the second film and hadn’t just watched the fourth a few months back, this would have been the whole quadrilogy). As seen in my previous entry, I found that the original Death Wish (1974) still holds up some forty years later, retaining lots of subtle power among the flying bullets. How, then, would one of my formerly favorite films hold up? Journey behind the curtain and let’s find out.

As far as genre franchises go, the Death Wish series actually tells a continual story, give or take the rather large lapses in time between the first and third entries (8 years). In the first, we were introduced to the character of Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson), a mild-mannered, pacifistic New York City architect who becomes a vigilante after a gang of punks rape his daughter and kill his wife. The second film continues the storyline as Kersey and his daughter, Carol, move to Los Angeles in order to start a new life. After Carol is once again attacked and ends up killing herself, Paul picks up his revolver and hunts down the creeps responsible. By the end of the film, we see Paul all alone, the last of his family gone: the assumption is that he will continue to hunt the streets, cleaning up the criminal element. Since there ended up being a third (and fourth) film, that assumption would be right on the nose.

After some time has passed, “legendary” vigilante Paul Kersey boards a bus and returns to New York City, the place where it all began. He’s on his way to visit an old war buddy, Charley (Francis Drake), but this isn’t the same New York City from a decade before: this is the ’80s, baby, and shit’s bad…real bad. It seems that roving gangs of punks, similar to the creepazoids from Max Max (1979) or Troma’s Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986), have taken over the city and Paul gets to his friend’s apartment just after the punks have beaten him nearly to death. Charley dies, the cops burst in and Paul is hauled off to the station house for a little good-natured “interrogation.”

Once there, Paul catches the eye of Lt. Shriker (Ed Lauter), who just happened to be a beat cop when Paul went on his initial “cleaning” spree in NYC. Seems that Shriker is fighting a losing battle against the punks on the street and he needs something that his entire police force can’t provide: he needs the “bad guys” to start dying. Shriker knows that Paul used to handle that particular “job” quite handily and offers him a deal: he can return to the streets, killing as many punks, criminals and ’80s metal-heads as he wants, as long as he keeps Shriker in the loop and throws him a few choice busts every so often. When the alternative is a hefty jail sentence, Paul agrees: time to hit the streets, once again.

As Paul wanders the post-Apocalyptic neighborhood outside Charley’s apartment (seriously: the place is like a cross between The Warriors (1979) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) on a bad day), he starts to figure out the hierarchy. Seems that Fraker (Gavan O’Herlihy), the platinum-blonde psycho that Paul briefly encountered in lockup, is the ringleader, ruling everything with an iron fist and really sharp knife. With his gang of goons, including The Giggler (Kirk Taylor), The Cuban (Ricco Ross) and Hermosa (Alex Winter), Fraker has the entire neighborhood terrified and paying protection money in order to stay alive. It’s a bad bunch of dudes…but there’s big trouble coming.

Paul also meets the residents of Charley’s apartment building, including Charley’s best friend and fellow war vet, Bennett (Martin Balsam), Manny and Maria Rodriguez (Joseph Gonzalez, Marina Sirtis), Eli and Erica Kaprov (Leo Kharibian, Hana-Maria Pravda) and Mr. and Mrs. Emil (John Gabriel, Mildred Shay). To complete his merry circle of friends, Paul also becomes romantic with Kathryn Davis (Deborah Raffin), the attractive young public defender that he met at the police station. It would all be so lovely, of course, if Fraker wasn’t so dead-set on running Paul out of the neighborhood, one way or the other. In short order, the place becomes an absolute war-zone and death comes to visit them all: it comes for the punks, of course, because Paul is one helluva shot. It also comes for the innocents, of course, because this wouldn’t be Death Wish without a whole lotta revenge. As the body count rises on both sides of the line, one thing remains clear: Kersey ain’t leaving until he’s either outta ammo…or targets.

Right off the bat, there’s absolutely nothing subtle or subtextual about Death Wish 3 whatsoever: this film is all raging id, rampaging from one extreme to the other. Unlike the basically good but ineffectual cops from the first film, every cop in DW3 comes across as a steroid-addled, trigger-happy goon, particularly the incredibly dastardly Lt. Shriker. Hell, he was technically only one twirled mustache away from a Perils of Pauline-era villain. He bashes Paul around, snarls that he could have him killed at any time and punches him square in the face just because it’s “his” jail.

Whereas the punks from the first film weren’t exactly multi-dimensional (Jeff Goldblum’s sneering mug was about as much character development as we got), the gangs in DW3 are completely over-the-top and cartoonish. Many of them do seem to have been lifted wholesale from The Warriors, right down to the odd matching outfits for certain groups within the gang (Gang subgroups? What nightmare of micro-management is this?!) and by the time we get to the finale, where gang members ride around on motorcycles while hurling grenades willy-nilly, it will be pretty impossible to not expect Mad Max to come zooming over the horizon. Fraker is so evil that he easily surpasses Bond villains, winding up somewhere in the neighborhood devoted to Marvel villains.

In many ways, there’s definitely a consistent through-line from the first film to the third: after all, director Michael Winner was on board for the first three films and the overall message (a good man with a gun trumps a bad man with a gun) is unwavering. Where Death Wish was careful to portray both sides of the issue, even if it obviously only gave credence to one side, DW3 dispenses with this facade completely. Paul isn’t on any kind of journey in DW3: he’s already there. While the first film grappled with the disparity between wanting to defend yourself and taking revenge, there’s no question as to what needs to be done by the time the third film opens. If Death Wish and its first sequel could be seen as drama-suspense hybrids, DW3 is almost entirely an action picture. In the first film, Paul has to deal with both the police (polite society) and the criminals: the police didn’t condone his activities, they just ran him out of the city. In the third film, not only do the police condone Kersey’s vigilantism, they actively push him into it. By the time we get to the finale, where Paul and Shriker run down the street, side by side, merrily gunning down anonymous bad guys (the body count in this thing, for the gangs alone, has to be in the mid-hundreds), DW3 is the furthest thing from the original film it could possibly be. The thought-provoking, gut-quaking violence of the first film has been replaced by a Ren and Stimpy-level of carnage that certainly befits most mid-’80s action sequels but makes it impossible to take anything seriously.

Perhaps the biggest issue with the film, however, and one that continually flew over my head as a kid, is the rampant misogyny. Admittedly, the first and second films were precipitated upon the sexual assault of a young woman but they also featured peripheral female characters: in DW3, every single (good) female character is either assaulted or killed. It’s such an obvious part of the film that it’s hard to believe the filmmakers didn’t intend it but it’s unpleasant, nonetheless. ’80s action films were never known for their progressive gender politics, in the best of situations, but the female characters in DW3 all seem doomed from their introductions. When combined with the over-the-top, testosterone-fueled action sequences, the absolute lack of surviving female characters makes this very much a “boys’ club.” To be honest, it’s probably no wonder that this film appealed to me so much as a kid: this movie was pretty much made for boys in their early teens, rating be damned.

And yet, despite its inherent flaws and ham-fisted politics, there something kind of charming about Death Wish 3. The parts that I remembered loving as a kid (blowing away the purse-snatcher, Paul’s ingenious booby traps, Fraker’s delicious villainy) were just as enjoyable this time around. Sure, the film may be full of holes and uses a disturbing amount of fantasy to glide over the rough patches (the cops are nowhere to be found, while everything is blowing up, until they’re needed for the big finale, at which point they all swoop down, en masse: were they all on break or something?) but it also has a gonzo sense of energy and vitality to it. The film looks pretty great, full of rich, vibrant colors and the soundtrack, by Jimmy Page (yep, that Jimmy Page), is pretty awesome: it’s a keyboard-heavy, funky batch of tunes that perfectly evoke the theme songs to various ’80s cop shows…in the best way possible, mind you).

Unlike Death Wish, which operated in shades of gray, Death Wish 3 is very much a black-and-white film: the bad guys are all absolutely bad, the good guys are all absolutely good. Guns are not only good but absolutely necessary. When the law fails you, take measures into your own hands. There’s no room for dialogue or division here: you’re either standing with Paul, shooting at the creeps, or you’re getting shot at…simple as that. When I want to watch something thought-provoking and visceral, I’ll undoubtedly return to the original. When I want to turn my brain off and root for the white hats, however, there’s no doubt that I’ll be returning to Death Wish 3. After all, any film that features a reverse mohawk, giggling purse-snatcher and death by (close-range) rocket launcher can’t be all bad. It was the ’80s, after all.