Death Wish V: The Face of Death (1994)

So here we are at the end of the Death Wish series. Like part four before it, this one was given to us on VHS from our friend Kenner at Movies in the Attic, and you can go there to see what he thinks of all the Death Wish movies. Let's see how things wrapped up.

Death Wish V is the only one in the series to use a Roman numeral in the title, and stars our man Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, this time living in a New York suburb as an architect professor under an assumed name. He seems to have given up his old Death Wishing ways, until his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend (Michael Parks) decides he doesn't want her testifying against him, so he sends someone to cut up her face, and when that isn't enough, he just kills her. Why he doesn't just do that to start with is beyond us, but whatever, now Kersey is finally pissed and finally taking his gun back out of the safe (he like took it out earlier, then put it away for whatever reason). He's coming for Parks and his gang, one by one, and he won't stop until they're all dead.



This is a tale of two movies. The opening is atrocious. First off, it's really depraved, almost like a mild torture porn flick or something. People get all kinds of carved up and have hands and faces put into steam presses and whatnot. Who is the weirdo that made this movie? Second, even worse, Bronson is just driving around watching people, doing absolutely nothing. He pulls his gun out, so we think he's ready to get down to it, but apparently he puts it away, because when the baddies come by to kill off his girlfriend, the best he can do is fend them off with a potted plant, before he does a swan dive off a ledge, twenty feet into a pile of garbage. Yes, that's what we want from a Bronson flick, good work out of you movie. Finally, even better work, the whole deal with the girlfriend. Either you cut her face up, or you kill her, but you can't do both. Once you've spent that nickel, you're done, after that it's bad writing. So here we are, almost an hour in, and the movie has utterly sucked so far. Then, Bronson finally starts kicking ass, and it's pretty cool, but for me, it's not only too little too late, but a reminder of how much this movie was sautéed in wrong sauce to begin with. For me, the last was by far the worst.

The hardest part about this one was how much I wanted Bronson to kick some ass. Seriously, I'm not paying to watch Bronson drive around in a Jeep Cherokee and spy on people, much less to watch him run around his apartment scared because for some reason or another he put his damn gun away when he knew the bad guys would be coming for his woman at some point. I know they were trying to flesh out some idea that he wanted to let the law handle things, but we don't watch Bronson flicks in 1994 to see him conflicted about whether or not he wants to go Death Wishing again. Jesus Christ, we're watching a movie called Death Wish V: The Face of Death, not Death Wish V: Conflicted About Whether or Not He Wants to Death Wish. Just get the frickin' gun out and start mowing the suckers down!



And even worse about this is how great a baddie Michael Parks was. Because this takes so long to get going, his crew has this weird vibe where we're told how powerful he is, but he barely has any men, and it doesn't take long for Bronson to take them out--because, after the first near hour of blah, he doesn't have a lot of time left. One of the interesting things about this one is that, not only does it have a Roman numeral in the title, but it's the first one with a true main baddie. While Parks definitely hits it out of the park, the film itself leaves a little to be desired, which is too bad.

This had a bunch of other people in it. Lesley-Anne Dawn played his girlfriend. She's done a lot of Soap and TV work, but she had a small part each in the Seagal flicks Mercenary of Justice and Today You Die. That might be because her husband, Donald E. FontLeRoy, directed them. Robert Joy, who was in the Lambert flick Resurrection, plays Parks's crazy hit man. Great character actor Saul Rubinek plays the local DA, and another great character actor, Miguel Sandoval, plays his buddy. Finally, this was directed by Allan Goldstein, whom you may know from 2001: A Space Travesty, the Bosworth flick Virus, and one I remember from the mid-90s called Synapse with MTV VJ Karen Duffy. His direction was pretty solid-- it was his turn as co-writer that left a lot to be desired.



Erica Fairfield played Bronson's future step-daughter, and I was thinking, since this was made in 1994, if she had been in my high school she would've stood out, because she's always in a skirt, and back then, girls only wore skirts--at least in my high school--on a special occasion. I wasn't sure though if she was my age or not, because she looked a little younger than 14 or 15, which is what I would've been around the time period this was shot. So I looked her up, and it turns out she's much younger than me. I was born on April 1st of '79, and she was born on April 4th.

All right, before this gets weird, let's wrap it up. For me, this is by far my least favorite of the Death Wish films, and a big part of that is the lack of any positive action on Bronson's end early on. The cover shouldn't be an image of him holding a gun, it should be him peering through the window of a Jeep Cherokee while other people do things, because that's the whole first hour or so. Despite a decent ending, this ultimately too sautéed in wrong sauce.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109578/

Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987)

It has finally happened, I am now getting around to the last of the VHSs Mr. Kenner at Movies in the Attic sent me over a year ago. I know, it has taken forever, but it's what happens when I get submissions, especially multiple movie submissions, some are looked at right away, and some are lost in the shuffle. But we're here, it's better late than never, and I appreciate him sending me these, because they've all been a lot of fun. Also, for Kenner's take on all the Death Wish films, click here.

Death Wish 4 seems like a more natural sequel to part two, as if three didn't happen or was a different time line-- like the Highlander movies and the TV series. Anyway, life looks good, Bronson has a hot younger girlfriend, the architecture biz is going nicely, and he hasn't had to use his guns in awhile. Things change though when his girlfriend's teen daughter is killed by a coke overdose, and with the possibility of a mother/daughter threesome out the window, Bronson wants revenge, so he kills the dealer that sold her the junk. That's when a mysterious millionaire comes to him with a proposition: unlimited resources to take out the two main drug operations in LA. Bronson jumps at it, and starts an epic gang war that has the city's law enforcement scrambling to find that damn Vigilante again.



I really dug this one. It was a Yojimbo paradigm, with Charles Bronson in full bass mode. How can you not love him with unlimited havoc-wreaking resources? This, along with part three, are the full realization of the Cannon/Golan-Globus Death Wish combination, just a lot of kicking ass and taking names. It may be a little over the top (Stallone style), it may be a little cartoonish, but if that's an issue for you, then what are you doing watching Cannon's Death Wish 4?

Bronson was getting up there in years as this one was made, and though watching him mix it up with David Wolos-Fonteno was a bit of a stretch, overall Bronson really worked as the lone, aging Ronin for hire. It's actually a common theme in Japanese samurai pictures, the aging samurai whose skill and wisdom that comes with age is an asset over the lost step and athleticism from his youth. For Golan-Globus, of course, it's not just wisdom and skill, but stunt doubles that overcome the lost youth too. Either way, at 65-66, Bronson still had the screen presence to carry this thing off and carry it off to the point that I was thoroughly entertained.



I want to go back to that scene with David Wolos-Fonteno for a second, because it was pretty fantastic on a lot of levels. It starts with Fonteno getting ready to go to the opera with his girlfriend, and he's constantly berating her. Normally I don't go in for that kind of thing, but his cracks were so funny, and I don't know this for a fact, but I think they were ad libbed. He was telling her she needed to lose weight to fit into her dress, that the dress made her look like a damned rooster, and she was giving it right back to him, which was even better. Then he goes back upstairs and finds Bronson there, and he's beating the crap out of him, before Bronson knocks his head into a TV set, then matadors him out the window. Whenever I see Wolos-Fonteno on Law and Order as a judge, I think of him here, telling his girlfriend she looks like a rooster, and hunting Bronson in his apartment.

As far as Star Trek goes, the one I followed the most was The Next Generation, but that doesn't mean I didn't know Voyager existed, didn't recognize the guy who played Tuvok appearing in Death Wish 4 as a drug dealer. We also had Kay Lenz as Bronson's girlfriend, and Dana Barron as her daughter-- you may remember Barron as the girl who David Silver cheated on Donna with on 90210. DTVC favorite Danny Trejo makes an appearance as a hatchetman for one of the gangsters, rocking some great hair, before he's blown up. Then we have the great Soon-Tek Oh as the detective following Kearsey. Finally, my favorite was the late John P. Ryan as the mysterious rich man. He was great as the mob boss in Bound.



I want to take a second here to bring to your attention the cover photo. Usually with cover photos I hotlink them from illegal download sites, mostly because what they're doing is bad (at least in the case of films still in print), so they won't be upset if I grab their cover photo and not give them credit-- though I'm sure they've hotlinked them from other places too. But tonight, for the first time in DTVC history, I've actually scanned the VHS cover myself. That's right, that's the exact one Kenner sent me. A DTVC first, but hopefully not the last-- and feel free to hotlink it, it'll make me proud.

In the context of the Death Wish series, this is more like the part 3, and part 3 is more like an interlude or one of those franchise Star Wars novels that take place outside of the major storylines. Regardless, if we're going to separate out the first one from the sequels and judge the sequels on their own, I put this right up behind three and right ahead of two (and you'll have to wait for part five). Thanks again to Kenner for sending us the VHS.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092857/

Death Wish 2 (1982)

This movie has been the subject of much vituperative discussion. Just a look at our friend Kenner's Movies in the Attic review of the Death Wish series, and you'll see he has this as Bronson's worst ever. Ouch! And in the comments section to Death Wish, it was nearly unanimous, of all the sequels, two was the worst. Let's see if it lived up to the hype.

Death Wish 2 picks up six years or so after part one, and finds Charles Bronson back as Paul Kersey, now living in LA with a hot girlfriend and his daughter improving at an area mental health hospital. All that changes though, when some thugs lift his wallet, and he chases one down and beats him up. That guy goes back to his friends, and they decide to go back to Kersey's house, brutally rape his maid, then kill her, beat Kersey, and kidnap his daughter, whom they rape back at their hideout, and she dies trying to escape them. Well, that was all ol' Kersey needed to get his gun and get his revenge, which he does, hunting them all down. At the same time, the NYPD finds out Kersey is up to his old tricks, and they send Vincent Gardenia out to LA in order to stop him, fearing Kersey'll lead the LAPD back to New York, and the NYPD will be revealed as having let him go.



This is definitely lacking. It feels like it's trying to be a bigger, badder version of its predecessor, but never quite gets there. There's also the muddled situation with Gardenia, where he essentially flies all the way out from New York only to be shot by some thugs in a gunfight. Ultimately though, this suffers from us as an audience having to wonder, when is enough enough? Killing his catatonic daughter just as she's starting to get better? But then the way she dies is kind of comical, after a really bad rape scene, so all that together has me wondering where I'm supposed to go. Despite all this it still had its moments. Bronson was Bronson, and no matter what, he's compelling to watch, especially when he's killing bad guys. Other than the odd Gardenia element, after the daughter dies, this does hit a pretty decent stride, with an almost Batman-esque quality to it, where he's hiding his behavior from the people in his life. I don't know, I'm not ready to kill this yet, and I think it's worth checking out if you're a Bronson fan.

It got me thinking: how could this have been better? Where do I think they could've rectified the things they did wrong? First and foremost, leave the damn daughter out of it. In fact, add some depth by keeping her alive and improving while he's out there doing his Death Wish stuff. I even thought about the scenario where he's only mugged, and there's no home invasion, and he still goes out and kills all the guys. Now that adds some new layers, and we have to wonder if we can root for Bronson or not. In that scenario, we keep Gardenia in it more, right? We wonder what side he should be taking, because Bronson is not so clearly in the right this time. Maybe the maid rape comes later on in the film, with the thugs going to her to get back at him. I think there were a lot of places this could've gone with the Death Wish story that would've made it better than what we got.



Bronson keeps this movie from being a total dud for me. I can understand having issues with the way his character was treated, because I had those issues too, but there's something about seeing Bronson in cold-blooded revenge mode that is awesome. I also understand that, compared with some of his other stuff, this may not stand up, but I'll watch Bronson's bad stuff more than I'll watch a lot of other actors' good stuff, because, as I can attest with this one, his bad stuff isn't always that bad.

That's big Larry Fishburne there in some pink Pizza Hut shades-- though I guess in 1982 that was before the Pizza Hut/Back to the Future II promotional campaign. He's in this slightly more than Jeff Goldblum was in part 1, but like Goldblum, also playing one of the thugs that attacks his family. He just turned 50 this past summer, but it seems like he's only gotten better as an actor with age-- or maybe he's always been this good, but only been given the good parts as he got older. Either way, Laurence Fishburne: good stuff.



I had to include a PBR photo. I've always been a big PBR drinker, which I know draws some gasps and eye rolls, because it's the hallmark of... the Hipster! Maybe I should give a brief history of my PBR love affair in order to clear up any confusion. Growing up, my father was only allotted so much money per week on beer, so often PBR was a great choice because of its value. I took that knowledge with me to college, where I was often mocked for my taste in "bad beers", but the way I saw it, I couldn't afford to drink anything else, other than maybe 40s, but $3.50 for a pack of pounders makes even a 40 a tough sell. Anyway, so time goes on, I graduate from college but am still broke and drinking PBRs, and I start seeing in magazines like GQ that PBR has become big in trendy parts of New York, in come cases going for as much as $6 a can. Enter the Hipsters. Now it's gone from "PBR, eww, how can you drink that?" to "PBR, eww, what're you, a Hipster?" Sometimes you can't win for losing, but I've decided I don't care what people think, I'll drink what I want, and what I want is Pabst Blue Ribbon.

All right, enough about my beer choices and Hipsters, let's wrap this up. Though nowhere near as good as the first 1, and in some cases a little too mean spirited and all over the place, it's still a Bronson revenge flick, and on that score for me, it still works. You may feel differently.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082250/

Death Wish (1974)

Obviously this is not a DTV flick, though back when I did my Wild Card posts at the end of the week, this would've been one, because, while it isn't DTV, it had a huge influence on DTV bad actioners, even if very few ever truly capture what this one was going for. Anyway, even though we don't have the Wild Card post anymore in practice, I wanted to look at this one because our friend Kenner at Movies in the Attic (link is to his review of the Death Wish series) sent me VHS copies of part IV and V, but I wanted to watch the earlier ones first, and figured I'd review them as I did so.

Death Wish stars Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, a successful New York architect whose wife is murdered and daughter brutally raped and traumatized by a home invasion. His job sends him to Tuscon after to work with a rich landowner, Stuart Margolin, and the guy changes his worldview. Instead of being anti-gun, he's now in favor of an armed response to the New York crimewave, and when he gets back, he starts a vigilante campaign, luring muggers and other criminals into thinking he's an easy mark, then gunning them down. It creates an international sensation, leaving the NYPD between a rock and a hard place: they want him to stop, but they don't want to arrest him when he's so popular. They assign detective Frank Ochoa (Frank Gardenia) to the case, and he has a tough job as he tracks Bronson throughout the city-- especially when he's not even sure he wants to arrest him if he does find him.



I am in firm agreement with Kenner on this one. It's a truly great film, and not simply for its action elements-- in fact, it has relatively few. What it does do is blur the social commentary, blend the brutal with the black humor extremely effectively, while throughout never getting away from the core of the film, which is one man's struggle with a brutal tragedy that he ultimately can't do anything to fix. And like Kenner, I thought the fact that he never actually tracks down his wife and daughter's attackers, and is instead killing thugs in general, gives this a very different kind of revenge motif. Is it justice he's after? Catharsis? A sick thrill? Or maybe a combination of all three. But you can't help rooting for Bronson and being compelled by his character. Often imitated, but never duplicated, Death Wish.

Charles Bronson has a strong charismatic presence, but I don't think he gets enough credit for being a solid actor too, which he shows here. He starts the film as a cool guy, but very mild mannered. There are some jokes made about him being a bleeding-heart Liberal, but we find out later that there's more to it than that, and he wears those layers well. Later, as he starts fighting back, it's not an all at once suddenly he's a badass situation, it's something his character has to get used to, and Bronson does a great job with that as well. I loved the metamorphosis, and when we consider these scenes aren't shot chronologically the way we see them, it demonstrates the kind of quality of acting Bronson brought to the table. I also had to throw in a shot from early in the film of him in a Speedo. Any light beer commercial that wants to define manhood based on swimwear choices needs to shut the hell up (anyone remember that commercial?), because Bronson's much more manly than light beer, and he wore a Speedo.



The Rockford Files is one of my all time favorite shows, so it was sweet to have two-time Emmy winner Stuart Margolin in this as the Arizona landowner. In honor of that fact, I uploaded an MST3K riff on The Rockford Files on the image page. Here he's as far from Angel as he can be, and I almost didn't recognize him. He plays a really great character, a kind of antithesis to the New York urban elite, and I loved watching he and Bronson play off each other.

This had some great cameos and co-stars beyond Stuart Margolin. We had the late Frank Gardenia, who was excellent as the detective tracking Bronson. We had cameos from Jeff Goldblum, who was in the gang that killed Bronson's wife and raped his daughter; and Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who had a short scene near the end as a member of another gang. The latter was unremarkable, just a cool novelty; but the former, the Goldblum one, was a trip, because he was a scary dude, channeling some Clockwork Orange or something. I think because we know going in what happens to Bronson's family, that scene of the attack had to be particularly chilling to draw us in, and Goldblum was a big part of why it did.



One thing I thought was interesting as I was watching this, was the fact that in New Hampshire, the state I almost live in, none of what Bronson was doing would have been illegal. They have a stipulation in the law that if one is attacked, one has the right to use deadly force in self-defense. If we look at what Bronson does in Death Wish, he never provokes an attack, he has a licensed handgun-- or, at least it would be in New Hampshire, a man of his stature would have no trouble getting a concealed weapons permit--, and he's simply defending himself from muggers. If no one were to attack him, no one would be killed, and as a citizen, it is his right to walk the streets at any time of night and not have to accept that he might be attacked. I don't know how New York mitigates these aspects of the law, but it is an interesting dynamic to consider, because I'm sure New Hampshire isn't the only state that has that stipulation in the law-- though New Hampshire's motto is Live Free or Die, so you never know.

This is currently on Watch Instantly, but if you can get it on DVD in widescreen format, I'd go for it. This is a true classic, and a real landmark film that has had a huge influence over the action genre. On top of all that, it's actually really well made and deals with a lot of social and moral issues in a compelling, yet not preachy or agenda driven kind of way. It's a movie that's surprisingly as relevant today as it was 37 years ago.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071402/

Death Wish 3 (1985)

The second of two Charles Bronson films featured in our week long celebration of Golan-Globus is Death Wish 3, the third of five films in the series. Though the sequels are considered far inferior to the original, part three is really, for our purposes, the one that has had the greatest impact on the DTV action genre.

Death Wish 3 has Bronson back as Paul Kersey, in New York to visit an old friend in need of his help. He gets there too late and finds the friend beaten to death. The cops arrest Bronson, and Ed Lauter, the chief inspector, press-gangs Bronson into working for him to clean up the crime ridden neighborhood his friend was beaten to death in. The idea is, he kills the bad guys, and Lauter and his men get the credit. Once Bronson goes back to his dead friend's apartment, the guy's neighbor, Martin Balsam, gives him the lay of the land, and it's only a matter of time before Bronson goes to work.



This is awesome, the ending especially. Urban warfare carried out by civilians, gangs, and Bronson, with a little help from Lauter. Sure, the action throughout could've been more frequent, but the end was so good it more than made up for it. You have Bronson with a high powered machine gun mowing down gang members like me using a power steamer to clean metal racks that held the pots and pans in the first kitchen I worked in in high school. How do you not love that?

I'm not sure how many more Bronson films I'll do after this one, because he's more of a mainstream theater guy than a DTV guy, but I'm sure I can make exceptions along the way. The guy is just amazing. His work in films like this paved the way for the Dolphs, Seagals, and Van Dammes. Not only that, but the way Golan-Globus amped up the action and turned down the plot, especially at the end, is something these newer guys could think about when picking their next roles. Dolph has done well with Command Performance and Direct Contact, but Seagal with Against the Dark and Van Damme with pretty much everything until Shepherd: Border Patrol aren't looking as hot. I used to make excuses for Seagal and say "well, he's almost 60, we can't blame him for winding down." Not anymore. Bronson made this when he was 64, and it was better than almost everything Seagal has done in the past ten years.



We've had our share of Ed Lauter sightings at the DTVC, but none better than in this role. I wonder what he thought acting opposite C. Thomas Howell in The Sweeper. It must've been a joke to see Howell trying to play a role that Bronson would've killed ten years before, when Howell was still a runt with a machine gun in Red Dawn. It's a perspective on Lauter I never considered when I reviewed that film, but with Death Wish 3, I couldn't not consider it.

One thing that's really apparent from a movie like this is just how much of an influence Golan-Globus had on the Grand Theft Auto video game series. I would even go as far as to guess that the Belmont district in part III was named after the neighborhood this film was set in. Just the violence and chaos on the streets combined with people trying to carry out everyday tasks like going to the grocery store is so indicative of that game. The one difference, of course, is that the Grand Theft Auto series is about a gray area-- your character kills innocent people, runs over hookers after he sleeps with them, blows up police helicopters with rocket launchers, but still kills bad guys-- while Paul Kersey was a good guy through and through, who just played the part of judge, jury, and executioner, but he would never kill innocent people.



MST3K fans will love seeing Martin Balsam in here. I know he's known for a lot more than just Mitchell, probably the biggest being Psycho, but are any of those roles as much fun? "Mitchell, nobody likes you, why is that?" Every line he had in this just made me think "He refrigerates his bowling bag?" or "Mitchell, I'm not going to your parents' house for Christmas." Even better, Balsam was playing the WWII vet retiree looking for someone to clean up his neighborhood while Bronson was playing the younger Korean War vet there to do the cleaning, when Balsam's only two years older than Bronson. Awesome.

I imagine eventually I'll have all five Death Wishes reviewed up here, and it is kind of a shame that I've been at this for three and a half years and this is only the first one, but we're working on it. It goes without saying that these are all required viewing, but I think my friend at Movies in the Attic was right in picking this one for this week.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089003/