Death Wish 3 (Michael Winner, 1985)

If the first Death Wish was a downbeat '70s New Hollywood spin on masturbatory right-wing vigilante fantasies that at least paid lip service to moral ambiguity and Death Wish II was the ultra-sleazy grindhouse version, Death Wish 3 (Roman numerals be gone) goes full '80s over-the-top live-action cartoon absurdity. It's the most ridiculous Death Wish and the most fun (though Winner of course manages to shoehorn in a minute of rape content anyway), and parts of it even feel like a Troma movie. This is hilariously nutty, hilariously stupid stuff.

Charles Bronson is back in Death Wish 3 as the most cursed human being to ever walk the earth, Paul Kersey, pacifist architect turned gun-toting vigilante. In the first film, Kersey hits the 1974 New York City streets killing a rainbow coalition of street trash after his wife and daughter are assaulted and his wife is murdered. He moves to Chicago at the end of the first film, but by the time Death Wish II hits screens in '82, Kersey is in Los Angeles, trying to put the past behind him until some multicultural street punks rape and murder his daughter and his beloved housekeeper/chef (well, technically, his daughter jumps out of a window to her death to avoid more torture, but potato/potahto). The Kersey killing spree resumes, and this time it's bicoastal. By the time II ends, his girlfriend dumps him after discovering his vigilante ways (lifesaving move on her part), so poor Paul is alone again, naturally.

In Death Wish 3, Kersey is back in New York City (though half the movie was filmed in London for financial reasons) to visit an old friend. Like everyone who builds a relationship with Kersey, his buddy is attacked and killed by street punks. The once-vibrant working-class Brooklyn neighborhood where Kersey's friend lived is now in disarray, with only a handful of apartment buildings and small businesses left unabandoned after a vicious street gang takes over the five-block area. The elderly and young people who can't afford to move remain; everyone else splits.

Kersey has a terrible first day back in New York, walking in to his friend's apartment to witness the last few minutes of his life and then getting arrested when the cops show up because they immediately assume he's the killer. Surprisingly for a right-wing fantasy, this movie portrays the cops as stupid, corrupt, lazy, ineffective, and violent flouters of constitutional rights, but this is more about bolstering the film's macho vigilante agenda of a bureaucracy-free gun-toting land of instant street justice than it is about genuine criticism of policing in America. The main problem, the movie repeatedly hammers home, is that New York's gun laws are too strict.

The cops take Kersey to the station and start whaling on him. The chief, Richard Shriker (veteran character actor Ed Lauter), comes in, tells the other cops to scram, lets Kersey know that Shriker knows about his vigilante ways from a decade previously, and calls Kersey "dude" multiple times. Ed Lauter repeatedly calling Charles Bronson "dude" is what I go to the movies for. Kersey denies being Kersey so Shriker starts roughing him up, but Kersey punches him right in the balls. Boo-yah! Shriker throws Kersey in a packed holding cell with a bunch of New York City maniacs and specifically tells the other cops to disregard all of Kersey's constitutional rights.

In the holding cell, Kersey tries to keep his head down and mind his own business, but the dude's a magnet for street punks. He gets in several scraps and comes out on top, but a weird dude with a reverse mohawk singles him out. Despite a five-on-one imbalance, Kersey nails Reverse Mohawk with one hell of a punch. Before the weirdo can retaliate, he makes bail and leaves the cell, telling Kersey he'll kill an old lady that night in his honor and gives him the neighborhood address of his home turf. Guess what? That's the Brooklyn neighborhood of Kersey's buddy.

After Shriker cools down and his balls recover from the Kersey knuckle sandwich, he makes Kersey an offer. He'll let him out of jail and leave him alone if he resumes his vigilantism, fucks up the street punks, and throws the department a bone in the form of a few high-profile arrests once in a while. This is Kersey's dream. His favorite hobby is fucking up street punks who have killed his loved ones, so he happily agrees. As he's being released, a public defender, Kathryn Davis (Deborah Raffin), tells Kersey she'll represent him if he wants to sue for having his rights violated. Kersey tells her thanks, but no thanks, which somehow makes her fall in love with him at first sight. They'll have some good times later, which means she's fuckin' doomed. If this was Death Wish II, she'd be raped for 10 minutes and killed, but since this is Death Wish 3, she's knocked out while waiting in the passenger seat of a car and pushed into oncoming traffic, where the car hits another car, causing both cars to explode.

Kersey returns to the apartment building of his dead friend, where he quickly befriends his buddy's neighbor, Bennett (Martin Balsam). Stay away, Bennett. This guy is cursed. (Bennett surprisingly survives the film, but he does end up in the hospital and his small business explodes.) Bennett introduces Kersey to the rest of the neighbors, and everyone loves him, especially an elderly Jewish couple, a young Puerto Rican couple (the wife is played by non-Puerto Rican future Star Trek: The Next Generation star Marina Sirtis, who said about Winner after his death, "I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I hope that he will rot in hell for all eternity"), and a young black kid who appears to be the only child in the entire neighborhood, except in one crazy scene I'll mention later. These characters are an insurance policy against the racism charges leveled at the Death Wish franchise, a franchise that loves to have its cake and eat it, too (diversity is scary and bad but also good, cops are bad when enforcing laws but good when letting good people take laws into their own hands, vigilantism is morally ambiguous and will cost you but is also extremely great, rape is bad but extended rape scenes are awesome, etc.).

Kersey promptly moves into his dead friend's apartment since the rent is paid through the month, which is enough time for him to teach this ragtag group of solid citizens to come together and take out the trash ... the street trash. This plan will ultimately succeed, but several of them will die, lose loved ones, get injured, and/or have their businesses explode. This will mostly be wildly entertaining.

Remember that reverse mohawk freak from a couple paragraphs ago? He's the gang leader, Manny Fraker (Gavan O'Herlihy). The punky/new wave-looking gang is too large to get much of the individual treatment of the previous films (and is even larger when Manny calls in reinforcements for the final showdown), but a few stand out, including Angel (Tony Spiridakis), The Cuban (Ricco Ross), and, everyone's favorite, The Giggler (Kirk Taylor), who has a habit of giggling as he runs during his frequent purse snatchings. In the accidental tradition of a member of the gang getting much more famous a few years later (Jeff Goldblum in part one, Laurence Fishburne in part two), one of Manny's thugs is Hermosa, played by Alex Winter two years before The Lost Boys and three years before Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. This tradition will continue in Death Wish 4 with Danny Trejo.

The rest of the movie is Chuck Bronson hilariously massacring street punks with increasingly large weaponry (regular pistol, Wildey hunting pistol, Korean War-era military machine gun, missile launcher), the gang retaliating, and Kersey going bigger and bigger. The final third of the movie is a comically over-the-top battle between Kersey, Shriker, and the neighborhood citizens against Manny's gang and several allied gangs, including more punky new wavers, Rastas, bearded bikers, indescribable maniacs, denim aficionados, and a gang who looks like they just clocked out of an insurance office. Several buildings explode, Looney Tunes-style booby traps deliver a comical beatdown to several gang members, at least 30 guys and their stunt dummies fall off roofs and fire escapes (Winner saved money by getting a lot of the actors to do their own stunts; there were some injuries and hard feelings), TV news helicopters deliver the play-by-play, and you can probably guess who gets incinerated by a missile launcher along with the entire wall of an apartment building.

The third installment in this ridiculous series is highly enjoyable trash. Again, I can't defend this slop politically, but I laughed harder and more consistently at Death Wish 3 than I have at any Hollywood comedy of the last I don't know how many years. "They killed The Gigglah, man!" (I'm also dealing with some pretty intense stuff in my personal life and my work life, and, of course, the general state of the country and the world right now is a nightmare, so I'm really punchy, but I still think this movie would have delighted the animal part of my brain no matter what was happening.) I enjoyed it when I watched it on TV as a kid, but I think it thrilled me even more watching it as a weary, middle-aged man. What other movie would present one of its most disturbing and serious moments with a group of extras doing the robot and other breakdancing moves in the background? What other movie (besides a Troma movie) would show a group of heretofore unseen children dancing in the street in celebration after a street punk is shot to death? What other movie would show us Martin Balsam wielding a machine gun?

Sometimes I grow exasperated at the idiocy in this world, but without it, we'd never have Death Wish 3, so maybe that idiocy isn't all bad. Speaking of idiocy, I'll leave you with a fun fact. Jimmy Page is once again credited with composing the film's score, but he had zero to do with this movie. Winner just reused bits of Page's score for Death Wish II along with some outtakes (without asking Page or informing him) and slapped his name on the credits. The very 1985 trebly synth, sax, and drum machine opening and closing music was composed by Mike Moran.

"They killed The Gigglah, man!"

Black Friday (Arthur Lubin, 1940)

Black Friday is an oddball buried treasure that combines mad scientist brain transplantation hokum with the Jekyll-and-Hyde story and hardboiled film noir, starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi in an atypical part, and Stanley Ridges in a dual role that really lets him flaunt his acting chops. If you can roll with the absurd premise, it's a great time.

Black Friday begins almost identically to the last Boris Karloff movie I reviewed for this site, Before I Hang. This made my heart sink a little. Dr. Ernest Sovac (Karloff, in kindly doctor who took things too far mode), is about to be executed by electric chair (gallows in the previous film). He accepts his fate but hands his written notes to a journalist representing the only newspaper Sovac deemed fair to him and encourages him to spread his story and get someone to carry on his research. (This plea was delivered as a prepared statement at the sentencing hearing in the previous film.) "Here we go again," I thought. This would be the third Karloff movie in a row for me where he plays a kindly old medical scientist whose research obsessions get him in trouble. I liked those previous movies, but I was ready for something different.

Fortunately, in flashbacks as the journalist reads Sovac's notes, we learn that Sovac is not so kindly after all. He's a manipulative man in the driver's seat of his own ruthless obsessions who can easily set his humanity aside in the name of research. We also get two much more interesting interweaving stories and not a single scene taking place in a test tube-filled laboratory. Hallelujah.

In the small college town of New Castle, Dr. Sovac is best friends with his daughter's English literature professor George Kingsley (Ridges). It's unclear whether this is the New Castle in New York, a small town 36 miles from Manhattan that was once the home of former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley (though it has no college) or the New Castle in Delaware, a small city 125 miles from Manhattan that is the birthplace and possible current home of former UFO guitarist Vinnie Moore. The Delaware New Castle has colleges in and near the city. The mystery will never be solved (unless I missed a line of dialogue), but we do know our characters live and work in a town called New Castle that is reasonably close to Manhattan.

Dr. Sovac, his daughter Jean (Anne Gwynne, the grandmother of Chris Pine, the mother of character actor Gwynne Gilford, and the mother-in-law of Robert Pine, the sergeant on CHiPs), and Prof. Kingsley's wife Margaret (Virginia Brissac) take Kingsley out to dinner to celebrate his upcoming interview for a position at a larger and more prestigious school. Our gang makes a brief pit stop for Kingsley to run an errand before the meal, but Kingsley is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets caught in the middle of a car chase and shootout between New York gangster Red Cannon and his former cronies, led by Eric Marnay (Lugosi). When Cannon is shot, he plows his automobile into the building Kingsley is standing in front of, gravely injuring the professor.

Back at the hospital, Sovac gets a dark idea. He's already been successfully transplanting animal brains in secret (possibly the reason he lost his job at a major university and ended up in New Castle), why not transplant part of injured gangster Red Cannon's brain into the damaged part of dying buddy Kingsley's brain? The ol' partial brain switcheroo (a favorite plot of co-screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who would later write the novel Donovan's Brain, which was adapted for the screen three times) works, Cannon dies, and Kingsley makes a miraculous recovery. No one is the wiser but Dr. Sovac.

Before his surgically assisted death, Cannon revealed that his gang was after him because he hid half a million dollars of loot somewhere in New York City and didn't cut them in on it. Sovac hatches a wild plan. If he can somehow bring out the dormant aspects of Cannon's personality in Kingsley's hybrid brain, he can find out where the money is hidden, steal it, and use it to fund his brain transplantation research. He lies about needing to attend a meeting in New York about some local hospital business and talks Kingsley into going with him and leaving Margaret at home. He says it will be good for Kingsley's convalescence and give Margaret a break. The mild-mannered Kingsley warms up to the idea after initially rejecting New York as too loud and noisy. He likes to read, teach, and study English lit away from the hubbub of city life, but he decides New York may be just what he needs after all.

Once in Manhattan, Cannon's old memories start to come back to Kingsley, partially engineered by Sovac. After a shock to the system while attending Cannon's favorite nightclub, seeing a performance by the gangster's girlfriend, nightclub singer Sunny (Anne Nagel), and spotting a member of Cannon's former crew, Kingsley gets a pounding headache and extreme fatigue. Back at the hotel, he wakes up and is transformed into Cannon (complete with his gray hair turning dark, the only part of this science I have a hard time believing). Cannon takes the brain and body switcheroo pretty well, especially since he can no longer be recognized by the police or his former friends turned enemies. He starts bumping off his gang one by one, reconnecting with a mystified Sunny, and heading for a showdown with Marnay (though Lugosi and Karloff only share one scene and aren't even on screen at the same time in that one), while occasionally turning back into kindly old Kingsley. Events grow even more complicated, with Sovac cranking up his manipulations and Cannon/Kingsley's Jekyll and Hyde act making a mess of both men's lives.

The hair color change is silly, but Stanley Ridges otherwise convincingly takes full advantage of the opportunity to physically inhabit two completely different men in the same body. Karloff was originally hired to play the part but decided he'd be more comfortable and effective playing Sovac. Lugosi, originally hired to play Sovac, was moved to the smaller supporting role of Marnay (though he kept his second billing) after the producers thought a seasoned American character actor would be more suitable for the Kingsley/Cannon part.

He has less screen time than the other two men, but Lugosi acquits himself nicely playing a gangster. It's an unusual role for him, and he nails it. Lugosi is mostly remembered today for Dracula and his later declining years of addiction and financial struggles while appearing in the Ed Wood movies (which are much better than their reputation as kitschy trash) and Martin Landau's portrayal of him in this period in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood, but I think he's still underrated as a physical performer. He finds a particular and distinct way of carrying himself and moving his body in each character he plays (even in his worst films), and the way he occupies the physical space as a gangster here is a Lugosi I'd never seen before.

Directed by jack-of-all-genres journeyman filmmaker Arthur Lubin, most famous for the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the Francis the talking mule movies (though my non-Black Friday favorite is Rhubarb, a screwball comedy about an orange cat named Rhubarb who inherits a professional baseball team and a sizable fortune after his eccentric millionaire owner dies), Black Friday was one of six feature films Lubin directed in 1940 (the Hollywood studio system work schedule was beyond insane). The other five included two mysteries, a gangster movie, a crime thriller, and a musical. Black Friday has all of that (yes, even a musical number) plus some mad scientist horror. The disparate elements work on their own and as part of the whole. I haven't seen anything quite like it, I had a great time watching it, and I recommend it to fans of Karloff, Lugosi, '40s noir, and the Jekyll and Hyde story.