6/6/15 (Part Three): Making Wrongs Equal a Right

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'80s action films, '80s films, action films, Anthony Franciosa, auteur theory, Ben Frank, Charles Bronson, cinema, crime thriller, David Engelbach, Death Wish, Death Wish 2, director-editor, E. Lamont Johnson, Film auteurs, film franchise, film reviews, films, gang rape, Golan-Globus, Jill Ireland, Jimmy Page, Kevyn Major Howard, Laurence Fishburne, Menahem Golan, Michael Winner, Movies, Paul Kersey, rape, rape-revenge films, Richard H. Kline, Robin Sherwood, sequels, set in Los Angeles, Silvana Gallardo, street gangs, Stuart K. Robinson, Thomas Duffy, thrillers, Tom Del Ruth, vigilante, vigilantism, Vincent Gardenia, Yoram Globus

When we last left everyone’s favorite vigilante, Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson), he had just finished avenging the rape of his daughter and murder of his wife by blasting half the criminal population of New York City straight to kingdom come. After being given a one-way ticket to Chicago by the NYPD (rather than reveal their complicity in not locking him up), we get the notion that Kersey won’t be any less forgiving to the Windy City’s scum than he was to the Big Apple’s. What’s a guy like this do for an encore?

As it turns out, he goes to Disneyland. Well, not quite: he actually goes to Los Angeles, which was probably a lot closer to New York City in the dawning years of the ’80s than it might care to admit. Our lovable avenging angel’s next act, the follow-up to 1974’s Death Wish, would be Death Wish 2 (1982). As with most sequels, Death Wish 2 would attempt to up the ante on the first film, featuring a more graphic rape scene, a more cold-blooded vigilante and a more over-the-top, ineffectual police force. The film would feature the same director, action-auteur Michael Winner, and a musical score by Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page that featured more guitar solos than a ‘Battle of the Bands’ competition. Death Wish 2 would also do something a little more insidious: by jettisoning Kersey’s previous moral quandaries, the film would place its sympathies almost wholly in the Dirty Harry (1971) school of “shoot first, ask questions later.” Rising crime rates…street gangs…the average citizen running in terror from armed lawlessness? Welcome to the ’80s, Paul: enjoy your stay!

When we meet Paul Kersey again, not much has changed since the fist time, aside from the location. He’s still an architect, he’s still taking care of traumatized daughter, Carol (Robin Sherwood) and he’s still got a romantic interest, albeit a new one: reporter Geri Nichols (Bronson’s real-life spouse, Jill Ireland). He’s also the same take-no-shit asskicker that he was before, as we see when he runs afoul of a highly colorful gang of street toughs, led by the squirrely Nirvana (Thomas Duffy) and counting one Laurence Fishbourne III among their august ranks (his absolutely insane sci-fi shades deserve their own film franchise, perhaps some kind of interstellar private-eye thriller).

The gang lifts Paul’s wallet and decides to head to his place to enact a little “justice” over his rough treatment of Jiver (Stuart K. Robinson). When they don’t find Paul at home, they opt for gang-raping his housekeeper, Rosario (Silvana Gallardo), in what has to be one of the most vile, protracted and gratuitous rape scenes in the history of cinema. When Paul and Carol return, the gang knocks him unconscious, shoots Rosario dead and takes Carol captive. After yet another gratuitous rape scene, Carol jumps through a plate-glass window and ends up impaled on a wrought-iron fence. Needless to say, this sequence of events pushes poor Paul over the edge and he takes to the streets once again, intent on hunting down and slaughtering the animals responsible for brutalizing Rosario and Carol.

To complicate matters, the same NYPD chain-of-command who let Kersey go in the first movie get wind of his recent activities in L.A. and begin to get a little worried: if Kersey gets caught, he might decide to blab about the NYPD opting to shuffle him out of town rather than do the paperwork. In order to prevent this, they send Detective Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia), Kersey’s foil from the first film, to Los Angeles in order to permanently deal with the problem. The only problem, of course, is that Ochoa doesn’t necessarily think Paul’s doing anything wrong. Neither do the citizens of L.A., for that matter, as they cheer on their vigilante hero in the same way that the New Yorkers did almost a decade earlier. Will Paul put down his weapons of war before he loses the rest of his humanity or have the bad guys pushed him too far this time? One thing’s for sure: the scum of Los Angeles have a death wish…and Paul Kersey’s just the guy to grant it.

One of the biggest issues involving sequels is usually the disparity between the first and second films in a series: in many cases, different creative personnel handle the various films, particularly if they were never conceived as a unified “series” in the first place. Death Wish 2 avoids this pitfall, in part, by having Michael Winner return as director: both Death Wish 2 and its predecessor share a similar aesthetic and feel (despite swapping the first film’s cinematographer, Arthur J. Ornitz, for Part 2’s team of Tom Del Ruth and Richard H. Kline) which definitely helps to weld the films together. Unlike the completely over-the-top Death Wish 3 (1985), the second film still has enough of the first’s DNA to seem like a natural succession rather than just another product.

As mentioned earlier, however, Death Wish 2 certainly fulfills the stereotype of sequels in one big way: there’s more, more and more of absolutely everything here. While the rape scenes are more prolonged and nasty than the first film, the personalities of the various gang members are also bigger and more outrageous than the original. Keyvn Major Howard’s “hardcore Hare Krishna,” Stomper, could have been lifted directly from The Road Warrior (1981), while Thomas Duffy’s Nirvana gets one particularly ludicrous bit where he plows through several dozen cops as if he were an exceptionally pale version of the Incredible Hulk. While the gang from the first movie (which included an appropriately bug-eyed Jeff Goldblum) weren’t exactly the picture of restraint, the creepoids in Part 2 are one slim pen stroke away from complete comic book territory.

The political commentary is also much more pointed and one-sided than in the previous film. Gone are Paul’s “bleeding-heart liberalisms,” replaced by the kind of steely-eyed disdain for criminal lives (and rights) that mark any good ’80s crime fighter. Right from the get-go, we get talking heads and worried news reports that not only talk about the escalating crime rates but compare the whole situation to “being struck by an enemy bomb.” This is war, according to the film, and it’s us or the bad guys. Unlike the first film, there’s no need for hemming and hawing on Kersey’s part: he already did the heavy emotional lifting last time…all he has to do, here, is load the gun and pull the trigger, as many times as necessary.

Not only is Death Wish 2 a much nastier film than its predecessor but it also marked a shift in Bronson’s career from his earlier tough-guy ’70s roles into films that were much bleaker, more explicit and all-around more unpleasant. After Death Wish 2, Bronson would go on to 10 To Midnight (1983), The Evil That Men Do (1984), Death Wish 3 (1985) and Kinjite (1989), all regarded as some of the nastiest “mainstream” thrillers to hit in an altogether over-the-top decade.

Despite my lifelong appreciation for Death Wish 3 (oddly enough, it was one of the films that my father and I found ourselves watching the most, over the years, possibly due to the overt cartoonishness of it all), I’ll readily admit that Death Wish 2 is the better film. In many ways, I equate the first two films in this series to the first two films in the Halloween series. Carpenter’s original, like the first Death Wish, was a lean, mean statement of purpose, a film that was just as much art as exploitation, with very few frills and a simple, but effective, structure. Halloween II (1981), like Death Wish 2, has a very similar aesthetic to its predecessor yet manages to be much bleaker, more explicit and, arguably, less fun. The direct sequels also added storylines that made the inherent structure more complex, if not necessarily better (the Det. Ochoa bit never really amounts to anything and is, in and of itself, a pretty massive plot-hole), something that’s also par for the course with most sequels.

At the end of the day, Death Wish 2, like its predecessor and the vast majority of these ultra-grim and graphic ’80s crime thrillers, is always going to be an acquired taste. Whereas the Dirty Harry series always traded on Eastwood’s ever-present snark and way with a quip, the Death Wish series (at least for the first few entries) was a much more dour affair. While both series’ trade on the notion of a world run rampant and in serious need of an ass whuppin’, the underlying point behind the Death Wish series seems to be thus: your loved ones will be cut down in front of you, no one will help and it will be up to you to avenge them. In many ways, it’s easy to see the character of Dirty Harry as being a sort of right-wing superhero (for the record, despite any personal inclinations, Dirty Harry will always be one of my personal heroes), while the character of Paul Kersey is much muddier and more complex.

When he started out, Paul didn’t want to kill but felt he had no choice. Here, we get the first inclinations that he’s begun to develop a taste for it. By the time we get to the third film, where he gleefully blows a reverse-mohawked punk through the side of a building with a rocket launcher, we’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s getting a kick out of it. Is that progress? I’ll let you be the judge.

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2/3/15: It’s Always the Quiet Ones

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Aloha Oe, alternate title, Carl Marznap, Carl Panzram, child abuse, childhood trauma, cinema, crime film, dark films, dark tourism, Dark Tourist, disturbing films, dramas, film reviews, films, flashbacks, Frank John Hughes, gang rape, grief tourism, Grief Tourist, hallucinations, Hawaiian songs, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, homophobia, horror, insanity, isolation, juvenile detention facility, juvenile offenders, loners, Lovely Molly, Melanie Griffith, mental breakdown, mental illness, Michael Cudlitz, misanthropes, misanthropic, mother-son relationships, Movies, murdered prostitutes, Nayo Wallace, Pruitt Taylor Vince, serial killers, Suri Krishnamma, Suzanne Quast, Taxi Driver, transgender, Travis Bickle, twist ending, unpleasant films, voice-over narration

In certain cases, I can predict exactly what I’ll be getting when I sit down with a previously unknown film. Sometimes the cover art will give clues or there’ll be some strategic stunt casting that sets off alarm bells (anything with a WWE personality, for example, is probably not going to be “a contender”). It might be a filmmaker that I’m familiar with, giving me a general idea of what lays ahead, or a screenwriter that’s intrigued me with other scripts. In some cases, certain films just project an aura of…well, let’s just call it “compromise” and be generous, shall we? These are the equivalent of the direct-to-video detritus that used to line store shelves back in the glory days of VHS: they’re still here, of course, although now they clog virtual racks rather than physical ones.

There are always those films, however, that end up defying, destroying and resetting expectations. Every once in a while, a film that might seem completely forgettable from the outside ends up surprising me and boring straight into my brain-pan. One of my favorite examples of this is Eduardo Sanchez’s Lovely Molly (2011), a film which seems so generic and bland from the outside that it feels like you’ve been dipped in lava once it reveals itself to be an absolutely unholy hell of an experience. Without a doubt, Lovely Molly is one of the single most unpleasant films I’ve ever watched: it’s also completely unforgettable and, quite possibly, one of the greatest unknown films of the 2000s. While Suri Krishnamma’s Dark Tourist (2012) isn’t quite the film that Lovely Molly is, it still managed to obliterate my low expectations, positioning itself as a sort of cross between Taxi Driver (1976) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). When Dark Tourist is good, it’s absolutely riveting and, easily, one of the most grueling, unpleasant cinematic experiences I’ve had in months. This is definitely not a film that can (or will) appeal to everyone. If you’re ready to take a trip to some seriously damaged locales, however, Dark Tourist is saving you a seat on the bus.

Our protagonist is Jim (Michael Cudlitz), a misanthropic security guard who works the over-night shift at some sort of factory. Via his near constant voiceover, we learn a few handy things about our wannabe hero: he absolutely loves his solitude, eschewing human contact whenever possible; he’s obsessed with serial killers and their lives to the point where he makes yearly “pilgrimages” to check out their childhood homes, murder sites, etc.; he’s a virulent homophobe, racist and sexist, who decries Hollywood as “for the faggots,” bitches about his “Jew fucker” doctor and cheerfully describes his co-workers as “sluts, drug addicts, whore mongers and child molesters.” That Jim is able to be this terrible of a human being while still maintaining the outward semblance of normalcy is admirable, to say the least: we know how fucked up the guy is, since we’re getting the info straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. To everyone else, however, he just comes across as a standoffish, polite but cold guy with some weird hobbies. In other words, the epitome of “he seemed like such a nice, quiet guy.”

For this year’s trip, Jim has set his sights on the life and times of one Carl Marznap (based on real-life serial killer/monster Carl Panzram). Marznap was a killer/arsonist who was gang-raped in a juvenile facility and sought to take out his anger on the rest of the world, culminating in burning down a church full of people. Jim traces Marznap’s journey from his boyhood home to the (now abandoned) juvenile facility and the remains of the burned church, trying to get some sense of who the real Carl was. Along the way, Jim strikes up a tentative friendship with a lonely diner waitress (Melanie Griffith) and stays at a fleabag motel where the constant activities of the resident hooker, Iris (Suzanne Quast), start to provoke some rather “Travis Bickle-esque” feelings in him. Soon, Jim is having a hard time concentrating on his “vacation,” a situation which becomes even more difficult once he starts to see visions of an adult Marznap (Taylor Pruitt Vince). As Jim’s grasp on reality gets more and more precarious, he finds himself rocketing towards a revelation that is both impossibly sad and unrelentingly horrifying.

One of the greatest tricks that Krishnamma and screenwriter Frank John Hughes pull with Dark Tourist is making the misanthropic Jim such a thoroughly fascinating character. Chalk this up to a combination of good writing and a great performance by Cudlitz (who instantly reminded me of a younger Ron Perlman) but it’s a real coup: Jim should have been an absolutely miserable character to spend 80 minutes with but we still end up on his side (kind of/sort of) right up until the whole thing goes ass-over-tea kettle in a holocaust of violence. For a time, it’s easy to believe that Jim is just a severely damaged individual, ala Travis Bickle, who still has some deep-buried sense of morality, however perverted. When the worm turns, however, we’re smack-dab in Henry territory and it’s a pretty nasty place to be.

Craftwise, Dark Tourist isn’t exactly a home-run. The cinematography is often flat and kind of ugly, at its worst, and serviceable, at best. There’s an unfortunate lens-distortion effect used on the flashback scenes, which is rather cheesy, and the supporting performances range from good (Donna Ponterotto as Jim’s waitress mother) to serviceable (Pruitt Taylor Vince’s performance as Marznap is fine, if rather clichéd and perilously close to a cameo) to rather dreadful (I adore Melanie Griffith but the less said about her awkward, halting performance as Betsy, the better). There’s also an unfortunate tendency to hammer things home a bit hard: the part where Jim’s voice-over explicitly lays out his mental state is way too obvious, especially since the film had been so good at subtly laying out the same notion prior to that.

When the film follows through on its convictions, however, it comes perilously close to being a truly soul-shattering experience. The “twist” is a real gutpunch, which allows the previously foregone conclusion to pack much more emotional weight than it might otherwise have. The violence is sparse but genuinely disturbing when it comes (similar to Henry, if you think about it) and Krishnamma’s use of traditional Hawaiian instrumentals and songs such as “Aloha Oe” help keep the whole thing off kilter. For every familiar beat, Krishnamma throws in something so outside the box that it makes the whole production feel much fresher than it probably should have. This is, without a doubt, the very definition of something being far greater than the sum of its parts.

Ultimately, for as good as Dark Tourist ends up being (and the film is very, very good), it’s still the kind of movie that will have extremely limited appeal. Similar to Simon Rumley’s misery-epics The Living and the Dead (2006) and Red, White & Blue (2010), there is no sunshine to be found here whatsoever. Things begin on a grim note and degrade from there into abject and complete despair: it’s not spoiling a thing to say that nothing in Dark Tourist will end positively because there’s no way it could…Jim (and the world he inhabits) are way too fucked up for any sort of “fairy tale ending.” This is the kind of film that is best described as an “endurance match”: for as much as I respected Krishnamma and Hughes’ bleak vision, I would be extremely wary of anyone who said that they actually enjoyed it. Gentle readers, take note: if you’re not ready to descend to the depths of human depravity, you might want to book passage on an entirely different cruise.

1/30/15: Toecutter’s Last Jam

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'70s action films, '70s films, A Clockwork Orange, action films, Australia, Australian films, auteur theory, Brian May, children in peril, cinema, co-writers, cops, cult classic, David Bracks, David Cameron, David Eggby, Death Wish, dramas, dystopian future, feature-film debut, Film auteurs, film franchise, film reviews, films, gang rape, gangs of punks, Geoff Parry, George Miller, highway patrol, Hugh Keays-Byrne, iconic villains, James McCausland, Joanne Samuel, law and order, Mad Max, Max Fairchild, Max Rockatansky, Mel Gibson, motorcycle gangs, Movies, Paul Johnstone, post-Apocalyptic, revenge, road movie, Roger Ward, set in Australia, Sheila Florence, Steve Bisley, The Warriors, thrillers, Tim Burns, Toecutter, vendetta, vengeance, vigilante, Vince Gil, writer-director

When George Miller first introduced the world to Max Rockatansky in 1979, I wonder if he could have predicted that the character would be popular enough to warrant reexamination almost 40 years later. With three films in the Mad Max canon and a fourth coming this year, however, it’s pretty clear that Miller’s Australian “Road Angel of Death” has had some serious staying power. While the upcoming Fury Road (2015) appears to follow the template set by latter-day high velocity outings like Road Warrior (1981) and Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the original film, Mad Max (1979), was a much leaner and meaner affair, albeit no less over-the-top and prone to some particular comic-book affectations. Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Death Wish (1974) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) while bearing more than a passing resemblance to The Warriors (1979), Miller’s initial outing is a real doozy and one that would go on to influence generations of action and post-apocalyptic films to come.

Kicking off with an epic, 10-minute smash-and-bash car chase between the howling mad Nightrider (Vince Gil) and a group of unfortunate highway patrol officers, we’re thrust into the middle of the action with no info-dump or warning. As things gradually settle down, a bit, we come to discover that this appears to be a rather lawless, possibly post-apocalyptic, society, where cops and criminals duke it out on the dusty highways that stretch across Australia. At first, Nightrider seems unstoppable, a Tazmanian Devil behind the wheel who handily out-runs, out-drives and out-bravados every cop he comes across. Cue our hero, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), the coolest, toughest and most badass patrol officer of the bunch. Max shows up, mirrored shades reflecting back the blistering sun, and proceeds to drive Nightrider straight into an early grave. This, ladies and gentlemen, is his business…and business is very, very good.

Max’s partner, Jim Goose (Steve Bisley), is a good egg and loyal as the day is long, while his superior officer, Fifi (Roger Ward), treats Max like royalty and holds him up as shining example for the rest of the officers. At home, we get to see the softer side of Max: his loving wife, Jessie (Joanne Samuel) blows a mean sax and he’s got a cute baby named Sprog. Life seems pretty darn groovy for this Down Under Dirty Harry but there’s big trouble brewin.’

This big trouble arrives in the form of the dastardly Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his marauding biker gang. Seems that the gang has a bone to pick with Max for snuffing out their beloved Nightrider and Toecutter has sworn vengeance, the bloodier the better. When the gang blows into town to retrieve Nightrider’s coffin, they end up trashing the place, ala an old-fashioned Western, and chase a couple out onto the open road where they destroy their car, chase the guy away and gang-rape the young woman. Max and Goose arrive in time to pick up the pieces, finding the chained, traumatized woman and one of the gang members, Johnny (Tim Burns), so drugged-out that he forgot to run away when the others did.

Faster than you can say Dirty Harry (1971), however, the case gets tossed out and Johnny is released because none of the victims, including the young woman, will come forward to testify. Johnny walks, after taunting the cops, and Goose is furious. When the gang ambushes and attacks Goose in a particularly terrible way, however, Max will have to decide which path to follow, the one that leads to his family or the one that leads to revenge. As Toecutter, his cold-blooded lieutenant, Bubba (Geoff Parry), and the rest of the gang get closer and closer to Max, they will learn one very important lesson: you can do a lot of things to Max Rockatansky but the last thing you wanna do is get the guy mad.

Despite the often grim subject matter (children in peril, rape, collapsing society) and the often intense violence (immolations, dismemberments, semi driving over people), there’s a sense of buoyancy and energy to Mad Max that makes the whole thing a lot closer to a comic-book movie like RoboCop (1987) than to something more serious like, say, The Road (2009) or The Rover (2014). In addition, Miller uses several techniques, such as the wipe transitions between scenes and the jaunty score (courtesy of Australian composer Brian May) that help to elevate this sense of action-adventureism. To be honest, Mad Max often feels like a synthesis of Lethal Weapon (1987) (not specifically because of Gibson’s involvement but more for the depictions of Max’s home-life and the way in which the film’s action constantly toes the “silly/awesome” dividing line) and A Clockwork Orange (the gang’s affectations, slang and Toecutter’s casual brutality all reminded me explicitly of Kubrick’s adaptation), as odd as that may sound.

While never completely serious, aside from the film’s handful of heartstring-pullers, Mad Max never tips all the way over into campy or silly. This isn’t quite the novelty of The Warriors: Toecutter’s gang has an actual air of menace to them, an air that’s not helped by their propensity for rape and assault on innocent civilians. Keays-Byrne is marvelous as the insane gang leader, easily going down as one of the most memorable villains in these type of films: his polite, slightly foppish mannerisms are completely off-set by his hair-trigger barbarity, making for a bracing combination. Nearly as memorable is Geoff Parry’s turn as Bubba Zanetti: his laconic delivery perfectly contrasts with his hot-headed personality making for a character who would’ve been perfect going up against Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western.

In fact, more than anything, Mad Max is like a spaghetti Western, albeit one filtered through all of the influences listed above. The interplay between the gang members, between Max and his superiors, between the law and the lawless…the setpieces that could have easily been chases on horseback or wagon…the lonesome, wide-open devastation of the Australian landscape…Sergio Leone might have been proud to call any of them his own.

As one of his first roles, Mad Max set a course for Mel Gibson’s career that would serve him quite well, right up to the point in time where he self-detonated it. Here, however, we get Mel before the headlines, stupidity and career suicide: he’s rock-solid as Rockatansky, bringing just enough vulnerability and indecision to the role to prevent him from ever seeming as completely callous as someone like Eastwood’s Harry Callahan. He also brings a physicality to the role that helps make the whole enterprise seem that much more authentic: Gibson’s performance is so “all-in” that the scene where he limps and drags himself down the pavement genuinely looks like it hurts like hell. It would be the easiest thing in the world to play Max like a video game character but it’s to Gibson’s immense credit that he makes him both so human and so completely badass: it’s easy to see why this became a franchise so quickly, as the magnetism is undeniable.

In some ways, the differences between Mad Max and its predecessors is the same as the difference between the first two Alien or Terminator films: Mad Max is more of a small-scale revenge drama (very similar to Death Wish, particularly in the final reel) whereas the films that followed it are more wide-screen, adventure epics. Despite this, however, I was genuinely surprised to note how honestly cartoonish the film is. Perhaps I picked up on this when I watched the film in the past but it was more apparent now than ever before that the first film fits in perfectly well with the more OTT vibe of the other films. While it may be smaller scale, it’s definitely of a piece with The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome: Toecutter would have fit in nicely in either of those.

With Fury Road on the horizon, I thought it might be useful to go back and revisit the film that started it all. As always, Mad Max doesn’t disappoint: from the rousing action setpieces, astounding car chases, cool-as-a-cucumber lead character, colorful villains and genuine sense of danger and tension, Mad Max is an absolute blast from start to finish. Here’s to hoping that Miller manages to maintain this classic feel with his newest: the world has been without a Rockatansky for way too long now…we need our Mad Max now more than ever.

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

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'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.

6/2/14 (Part One): Taking Back the Cities

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'70s films, '70s-era, 1970's cinema, actor's debut, based on a book, Charles Bronson, cinema, crime film, cult classic, Death Wish, debut acting role, drama, electronic score, film franchise, film reviews, film series, films, gang rape, Herbie Hancock, Hope Lange, iconic film scores, Jeff Goldblum, Kathleen Tolan, liberals vs conservatives, Michael Winner, Movies, muggers, New York City, Paul Kersey, rape, Robert Kya-Hill, Steven Keats, Stuart Margolin, vigilante, Vincent Gardenia, violence against women, William Redfield

A middle-aged husband and wife frolic on a tropical beach, very much in love and having a blast. As they fall into each others’ arms, the wife asks her husband if he’d like to go back to their hotel room. “What about right here?”, he slyly asks. She rebuffs hims gently, reminding him that they’re “civilized now.” With a small sigh, the husband responds: “I remember when we weren’t.” Far from being just a wistful rumination on the trials of aging and the permanence of love, however, this reminder of our civilization has a far different meaning: we are civilized now…but at what price? For, you see, this isn’t just any tale of love (whether found, lost or unrequited). This, after all, is Michael Winner’s incendiary, though-provoking Death Wish (1974), one of the most popular, bracing meditations on vigilantism ever brought to the big screen. While it may have eventually turned into a rather silly action franchise, the original film is powerful, painful and asks the kind of questions that we, as a society, don’t usually like to ask: How far would you go to protect your loved ones? How many would you kill to avenge them?

The husband in the opening, Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson), is a loving family man, architect and “bleeding heart liberal,” at least as far as his co-workers are concerned. He shares a modest little home with his wife, Joanna (Hope Lange), and has a grown daughter, Carol (Kathleen Tolan), who’s happily married to Jack (Steven Keats). In most ways, Paul is living the American dream. He’s also living in New York City in the mid-’70s, however, several decades before Times Square morphed into a family-friendly playground. As his co-worker, Sam (William Redfield), is only too happy to point out, there were 15 murders in the city while Paul was on vacation: if it were up to Sam, he’d “put all of the underprivileged into concentration camps.” It’s a war-zone and they need more cops…but no one will pay for them. Paul brushes it all off, knowing in his heart that punishment and confinement won’t do anything to stem the tide: you need to attack the core problems, deal with the crushing poverty, disenfranchisement and isolation that lead desperate people to commit crimes. For Paul, there are no lost causes, just people who have given up the fight.

Paul receives the ultimate test of his convictions, however, when his wife and daughter become the victims of terrible crimes within the “safety” of his own home: after a vicious gang of punks (led by a very young Jeff Goldblum, in his first acting role, wearing a ridiculous Jughead hat) follow her and Carol back their place, the monsters beat Joanna and brutally gang-rape Carol. When Joanna ends up dying from her injuries and Carol is reduced to a catatonic state, Paul sees his entire world (and everything he believes in) come crashing to the ground. When the police tell him that there’s “always a chance” that they’ll catch the animals responsible for the crimes but “just a chance,” the message is loud and clear: in this world, you really are on your own. Paul decides to head out into the night, wielding a roll of quarters in a sock. After a would-be mugger receives a sockful of quarters to the face and flees (his expression is priceless), Paul suddenly feels like a million bucks: he’s been reborn, reconnected with his “primitive roots” and rampages about his home like a frat boy on a bender. Taking charge of your life, as we see, is a helluva drug.

After Paul’s company sends him to Tucson, Arizona, to work on a project, the next step in his “evolution” begins. Paul meets Aimes Jainchill (Stuart Margolin), a well-spoken, folksy and intelligent local land developer who’s a study in contrasts. He’s an uber-wealthy individual who wants to keep as much of the desert intact as possible, even if it means cutting into his profit margin. He’s a plain-spoken, quiet man who becomes a friend (and father-figure) to Paul. He’s also, perhaps most importantly, an outspoken supporter of the NRA and a gun enthusiast. After taking his “citified” friend to a shooting range, Aimes is surprised and delighted to discover that Paul is actually a crack-shot: he did grow up a hunter, after all, even if he hasn’t touched a gun since his father was killed in a hunting accident. “Somebody once said he never looked back, because something was gaining on him. What’s gaining on you, Paul?,” Aimes asks, although we already know: Paul’s primal self is gaining on him…and looks set to take the lead.

Upon returning home, Paul opens a mysterious wrapped package from Aimes and discovers that his friend has given him a gun: time to hit the streets and take back the city. As Paul walks his own nightly beat of the city, baiting and gunning down the muggers, creeps and thugs who rule the night, the NYPD finds themselves with a bit of a problem: they seem to have a vigilante on their hands…and the locals love it. Soon, Lt. Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia) is in a bit of a bind: the crime rate is plummeting, civilians have become emboldened to take matters into their own hands (whether a hat-pin wielding granny or a mob of irate construction workers) and the unknown vigilante is becoming a bit of a folk hero. As the Police Commissioner (Stephen Elliot) and District Attorney (Fred Scollay) pressure Lt. Ochoa to “deal with” the issue, Paul goes deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, putting his own life (and freedom) in jeopardy, all in his desperate quest to clean up his city and bring some meaning to the pointless death of his wife and abuse of his daughter.

In a way, Death Wish and Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) are a matched-set: both came around early in the ’70s, when the crime rate in metropolitan cities was on the rise; both films spawned franchises that became, over time, increasingly silly and action-oriented; both films take extremely black-and-white views on criminals (spoiler: they all suck); and both films see pacifism and anything short of Draconian law enforcement techniques as wins for the “bad guys.” In many ways, however, Death Wish is the much more subtle and intriguing of the two (although I’ll go to the grave calling Dirty Harry one of the single best films in the convoluted history of cinema), mostly because Bronson’s Paul Kersey is much more sympathetic and “relatable” than Eastwood’s “Dirty” Harry Callahan. While Dirty Harry is, for all intents and purposes, an “action hero,” Paul Kersey is a broken, sad man who’s attempting to regain control of his life. Whereas Dirty Harry comes into everything with a cynical attitude (when we first meet him, he’s got a sneer on his lips and an implied eye-roll that most teens would kill for), Paul actually begins in a place of love and acceptance, before being hardened and made “feral” by the evils of the world. At the beginning, there is no joy for Paul in killing the muggers: he celebrates clocking the first guy with his “club” but pukes his guts out when he actually shoots his first bad-guy.

Despite Paul’s initial reluctance to kill, however, it’s important to note one thing: at no point in time do the filmmakers ever hedge their bets or waffle on their initial premise. Death Wish is very much about what happens when “civilization” fails and “good people” are forced to resort to brutal tactics. Although the police are usually depicted as being fairly benevolent in the film (especially the character of Lt. Ochoa), they’re never portrayed as particularly effective. In this case, the message is pretty clear: buy into the fantasy about “law and order/punishment/rehabilitation” and get wasted or take matters into your own hands and survive. At the beginning, Sam’s hardcore conservative bent seems to be played for laughs (this is the guy who advocates putting the “less fortunate” into concentration camps, after all, which seems kinda…well…bat-shit crazy) but we’re later given a much more reasonable, well-spoken advocate for a similarly hard-line approach: Aimes Jainchill. Not only is Aimes one of the most well-spoken, charismatic characters in the film, he’s also an avowed gun enthusiast and avid supporter of the NRA. In one of the film’s least subtle scenes, Aimes takes Paul to an Old West gunfight re-enactment, where we get the necessary reinforcement about law and order back in the “good ol’ days.” As Aimes explains to Paul, the West is much safer than New York City: out here, you can just carry a gun and blow away the bad guys, before they get a chance to harm you.

This, then, becomes the true focus for the film: when society has degraded to the point where the traditional mechanisms of law and order no longer work, men and women must take the law into their own hands. At one point, Paul argues with his incredibly ineffectual son-in-law about the ramifications of self-defense versus “cutting and running.” “If we’re not pioneers, what have we become? What do you call people who, when faced with a condition of fear, run and hide?” “Civilized?,” Jack responds. Paul snorts, derisively, shaking his head: “No.” The point is clear: you can only back away for so long before you get pushed into a corner. Paul has decided to be pro-active and shoot his way out of the corner.

While the film does nothing to obscure its ultimate premise, it actually functions as a more thought-provoking than didactic. For one, the film is quite clear to spell out the inherent limitations of revenge/vigilantism: namely, people are humans and humans make lots and lots of mistakes. It’s not difficult to cheer on the old lady who wards off a would-be mugger with a hat-pin but it becomes a little fuzzier when we get to the construction crew that chases down and enthusiastically “subdues” a would-be purse-snatcher. This, of course, is the gray line between legitimate “policing” and “retribution.” It’s quite interesting to note, in addition, that Paul never actually gets to kill the punks who destroyed his family: he shoots several people in the course of the film but we never get to see him take revenge on those particular individuals. In a way, perhaps this is the film’s most subtle critique against vigilantism: ultimately, it can do nothing to bring back the dead.

Craftwise, Death Wish is gritty, tightly paced and well-acted. Bronson, obviously, is one of the chief draws here and he manages to blend just the right amount of “average, everyday Joe” with “steel-eyed, flinty killer.” There’s a reason why Bronson has always been considered one of the “old guard” of classic cinematic tough guys, along with Clint Eastwood: there’s a vulnerability to him that’s never completely subsumed by the fire inside. He’s the epitome of the retired gunslinger, called back into battle for “one last fight,” and his world-weariness marks a potent contrast to wise-cracking action heroes like Bruce Willis or Ahnald. The rest of the cast provides able support, with Vincent Gardenia being nearly a match for Bronson, as the equally world-weary but much more cynical Lt. Ochoa. His police-station address to his officers as the vigilante story blows up across the city is great (“We want to tell the American public that we’re looking for this vigilante and have definite clues…we just don’t want to tell them that we have about a thousand definite clues.”) and Gardenia goes a long way towards putting a human face on the issue of law enforcement.

Unlike many popular “action” films, there’s a dark, disagreeable heart that beats deep within Death Wish. The film is not simply one visceral thwarted mugging after another and, on occasion, can be downright difficult to watch. In particular, the scene where the punks bust into the apartment and attack Joanna and Carol is almost impossible to sit through: the rape scene is just as terrible, violent and graphic as any that came before or after (in particular, I was reminded of the rape in Irreversible (2002) and the pain and fear is almost too “real” for a fictional film. Similarly, many of the scenes where Paul “defends” himself are skewed to be more about chaotic activity than cinematic “badassery” – Paul is no trained killer, after all, but just your average dude.

For all of its lasting power, there are still several issues that I have with Death Wish. While the film is always careful to take a more even-handed approach, there really aren’t any viable viewpoints on display, save the call for vigilantism. The police are never portrayed as effective (at one point, they seem to send a whole squad-room to tail Paul, which seems a little stupid since, you know, there’s all that other increased crime to deal with) and any arguments for pacifism pretty much begin and end with the cowardly Jack, one of the most simpering creations in modern cinema. There’s also no blurring of the line regarding Paul’s actions: even if he baits his victims, each and every one of them obviously has it coming. At one point, Paul even steps in to prevent a group of men from assaulting another: his vigilantism is always more effective than law-and-order, mostly because the argument in the film is so one-sided.

From a filmmaking perspective, I found the film’s score (composed, conducted and performed by Herbie Hancock) to be rather underwhelming and, occasionally, completely baffling. Whereas something moody and bluesy, like the score for Dirty Harry, would have helped to pull out the emotion, Hancock’s score is too often experimental and propulsive, sort of like discordant cocktail jazz. While I have nothing but respect for Hancock, I can’t help but feeling this wasn’t his finest hour. There were also a number of scenes (in particular the repellent rape scene and the Old West shootout) that seemed to go on forever: whereas there’s probably a spurious claim to be made regarding the overall impact of the rape scene, the shootout scene makes its point early and then beats it into the ground for what seems like an hour. It went on for so long, in fact, that my mind wandered from the actual film and began to consider the intense irony of veteran Western actor Bronson appearing in a film where he played a modern man watching an Old West gunfight. As a rule, the scene’s not working if you have the opportunity to ponder the metaphysics of the actor involved, rather than the actual scene, itself.

Ultimately, Death Wish is one of those rare films that’s managed to lose very little of its original power as the passage of time puts it more and more in the rear-view mirror of life. Unlike the increasingly insipid (if much more action-packed) sequels, the original Death Wish is a film that asks some very serious questions (In an increasingly “civilized” world, what happens when you need to become “uncivilized”? When does “retribution” become murder? If the police can’t protect you, does that mean you get to do whatever it takes to protect yourself? Can criminals be rehabilitated or is a bullet to the brain the best we can hope for?). If the movie already has its answers lined up (the film makes no bones about the fact that it is, in some ways, a love letter to the NRA), it at least has the courage to ask them in the first place. If you’re one of the people who grew up thinking that Death Wish was simply a one-dimensional, gunpowder-scented, revenge fantasy, you owe it to the film to give it another look. Regardless of which side of the law-and-order debate you land on, Death Wish has been fostering conversations and discussions for the past 40 years: as our “civilized” society keeps evolving, I can only imagine that it will continue to be relevant for the next 40 years, as well.