Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (J. Lee Thompson, 1987)

We're back again with the continuing saga of the world's unluckiest man, architect turned vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson). After his return to New York in Death Wish 3 culminated in him wiping out the head of another gang of multicultural street punks (along with the wall of an apartment building) with a missile launcher (fired from inside the apartment!), he's somehow free from imprisonment and back in Los Angeles working as an architect. In the two years since his Brooklyn gang war throwdown, he's settled down with a new girlfriend, investigative journalist Karen Sheldon (Kay Lenz), and her teenage daughter Erica (National Lampoon's Vacation's Dana Barron), who wants to be an architect and has submitted some sketches and drawings to Paul's firm that meet with Paul's approval. This kid is going places. Unfortunately, since Paul Kersey is in her life, those places are the morgue.

Erica is a sweet kid, but she and her boyfriend have been experimenting with drugs, to Kersey's quiet disapproval. The guy's murdered at least 80 people by this point, but he's no fan of puffin' tuff. Sadly, Erica's not just hitting that sticky icky. The sinsemilla is a gateway to the white stuff. The powder. C-c-c-c-c-cocaine! After they hit up their dealers for some weed at a quintessential '80s arcade the pushers use as a base of operations, one of the dealers gives Erica a free bag of coke, just as the '80s authority figures prophesized in their Just Say No propaganda. Dealers giving away expensive drugs, shake my damn head. Because the accidental angel of death Paul Kersey is a father figure to Erica, she dies of an overdose upon her first taste of the coke.

Kersey follows Erica's boyfriend back to the arcade after the funeral and watches him confront one of the dealers. They take the argument to the parking lot near the bumper cars, where the young man stupidly and repeatedly announces his plans to go to the cops. The dealer knifes the kid, but Kersey takes out the trash Death Wish-style. A hilarious punk rocker with a distinctive Valley accent played by Mark Pellegrino (who had small but memorable roles in The Big Lebowski and Mulholland Drive) gives his eyewitness account to Detectives Reiner (Blue Velvet's George Dickerson) and Nozaki (Soon-Tek Oh). (When pressed to come up with the full license plate number after he's only able to remember the last three digits: "Hey, I ain't a fuckin' detective. You are.") Our detectives think his description sounds an awful lot like suspected '70s and early '80s vigilante Paul Kersey. Somehow, no one has heard about the multi-block full-scale Brooklyn gang war of two years earlier, even though roughly 18 gangs and a missile launcher were involved and several buildings exploded, but this is LA, baby. Let New York handle New York.

After the bumper car blasteroo, Kersey gets a blackmail-threatening phone call from a mysterious wealthy stranger, newspaper magnate Nathan White (cult movie legend John P. Ryan), who knows all about his vigilante past. A limo is already waiting to take Kersey to White's mansion. White says his daughter died of a cocaine overdose, and he's ready to destroy the Los Angeles drug trade in revenge. He'll pay Kersey to use his murderin' skills to take out the two major drug suppliers in the city, Ed Zacharias (Perry Lopez) and the Morello family and as many of their henchmen as is necessary. (One of Zacharias' henchmen is a pre-fame Danny Trejo.) 

White has a dossier on Zacharias, the Morellos, and all their employees and gives Kersey some colorful descriptions. My favorite is his assessment of Frank Bauggs (David Fonteno), one of the Morellos' top guys: "He's a trained baritone and an upwardly mobile super-achiever."  If you're thinking Nathan White and his bizarrely indeterminate accent, eyebrows, and wig have ulterior motives and maybe aren't what they seem, then you may be a sentient being, which is more than we can say for half the American voters.

Kersey takes two days to think it over, decides against it, and the movie ends. Just kidding. He of course says yes and starts blasting away as well as pitching the crime organizations against each other, Yojimbo-style. While all this is happening, Karen decides to turn her grief at losing her daughter into a series of articles about the local drug trade and its human cost for the newspaper she writes for, at which point the movie completely forgets about her until the concluding scenes.

What follows is a series of exciting, hilarious, stupid, and, dare I say, underrated Death Wish moments taking place in such cinematically satisfying locations as the aforementioned video game arcade, bumper car ride, luxury condo, drug dealer mansion poolside birthday party, spooky parking garage, oilfield, fish processing factory/drug front (with guards Mitch Pileggi and "Judo" Gene LeBell), video store (with standees of Leatherface and Harrison Ford promoting new releases The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Witness) and an absolutely hoppin' roller rink, and weapons including an array of guns, an exploding wine bottle (hilariously, two of the characters' dummies are left onscreen a few seconds too long before the explosion), a damn grenade launcher, and the classic but deadly hands and feet of Chuck Bronson.

Yes, some of this feels more like the usual lone badass vs. organized crime '80s action movie landscape than a Death Wish movie, but all of it is pretty damn enjoyable. This fourth film has less of a cult following than its predecessors (especially the bonkers third installment), but it honestly may be tied with the third one as my favorite. (Almost everyone agrees that the fifth and final film in the franchise sucks, including Bronson.) It's less of a right-wing fantasy than the others, with the "drug pushers are killing our kids" moral panic mostly just a pretext for a bunch of kickass action sequences, and it dispenses with the rape obsessions of the Michael Winner-directed first three. There is an attempted rape scene at the very beginning, but it's part of a dream sequence that parodies the first three films and lets us know this one is going to be a little different.

Winner and Bronson were on the outs at this point, and veteran Hollywood filmmaker J. Lee Thompson took over. Thompson directed his first film in 1950 and was a few years away from retirement when he made Death Wish 4, though he worked at a prolific pace all the way through the '80s (mostly with Bronson) and may have directed more movies '80s American kids watched with their dads, uncles, or classmates than any other filmmaker on earth. Any time groups of dudes were sitting around a TV watching a movie between 1982 and 1992 in the United States, there was a one in twelve chance they were watching a Thompson movie (I made up this statistic but I stand by it.)

Thompson is a better technical filmmaker than the rough and ready Michael Winner, which has its pros and cons. His Death Wish movie has a smoother construction, more graceful camera movements (weren't expecting the word "graceful" in a Death Wish review, were ya?), and some impressive shot compositions. It's the best-looking movie in the franchise. Winner is better at the raw stuff and the gritty grindhouse scuzz, which is missed here ("hey man, where's my scuzz?"), but he compensates by creating some truly nutso action sequences and packing every frame of this thing with character actors, weird-looking dudes, and weird-looking character actors. I also love that a bumper sticker on a drug dealer's van reads "I ❤️ New Wave." Modern filmmakers tend to leave out these absurd little details that give a movie so much life.

Thompson made a lot of modest theatrical hits and cult films, but his movies did their best business on home video and syndicated local television networks. My favorite Thompson movie is the original Cape Fear, with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, memorably remade by Martin Scorsese in the 1990s. Other notable pre-1980s peak Dude Cinema Thompson films include The Guns of Navarone, Mackenna's Gold, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the 1974 adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, and The White Buffalo, but most of his '80s movies were in even higher rotation on the televisions of my youth. His non-Bronson films that decade were the cult slasher movie Happy Birthday to Me; The Ambassador, a loose adaptation of Elmore Leonard's 52 Pick-up with Mitchum; the adventure movie King Solomon's Mines, with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone, that was on WTBS and KWGN almost as often as The Beastmaster; and Firewalker, with Chuck Norris and Louis Gossett Jr.

Thompson made seven movies with Bronson in the '80s in addition to the four non-Bronsons. Besides Death Wish 4, the collaborations included Cabo Blanco (Bronson looking for Nazi gold in Peru), 10 to Midnight (Bronson versus a serial killer of young women), The Evil that Men Do (Bronson versus a foreign dictator's go-to torture guy), Murphy's Law (Bronson versus the real killer who framed him for the murder of his ex-wife), Messenger of Death (Bronson versus a killer targeting Mormons in rural Colorado), and Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (Bronson versus sex traffickers of underage girls). Somehow, Thompson also found the time to direct an episode of Code Red and write the screenplay for sci-fi b-movie Future Hunters that decade. No wonder the guy retired after wrapping up Kinjite.

 

The Ghost Breakers (George Marshall, 1940)

This week, we're taking a one-movie respite from Death Wish, Deathstalker, and Boris Karloff to go on a convoluted excursion with a reunited Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard, teamed together for a second time in a horror-comedy after the success of 1939's The Cat and the Canary, reviewed on this site in 2023.

I've never been a Bob Hope superfan, and neither of these horror-comedies are particularly hilarious, but Hope's dry deadpan style, which is mostly free of the mugging and overperformance that can occur when a comedian is dropped into a horror movie, works well with the material, and he has a nice, breezy chemistry with Paulette Goddard, who has a lot more oomph and pizzazz than your standard damsel in distress. Both movies make up for their lack of knee-slapping hilarity with plenty of visual atmosphere, a cast that plays the material straight without too much winking at the audience, and well-constructed but off-kilter narratives that never drag.

The Ghost Breakers opens in a fancy Manhattan hotel room during a fierce lightning storm. Mary Carter (Goddard), an heiress, has recently inherited a mansion and adjoining plantation in Cuba from a distant relative and is preparing to take a late-night ship to check out the property in person, despite repeated warnings that she will die if she spends the night there from diplomat Havez (Pedro de Cordoba), solicitor Parada (Paul Lukas), and a mystery man played by a young Anthony Quinn. Mary has moxie and will not be deterred by terrifying rumors. 

Meanwhile, popular radio host Lawrence "Larry" Lawrence (Bob Hope) (middle name also Lawrence) ("my parents had no imagination") returns to Manhattan with his personal assistant Alex (Willie Best) after a multi-city tour shortly before his latest broadcast. Larry's show presents the hot gossip about gangsters and the criminal underworld, with insider info from his informer Raspy Kelly (Tom Dugan), who indeed has an extremely raspy voice. After his show, Larry is summoned to the same hotel and floor as Mary by gangster Frenchy Duval (Paul Fix), who is not very happy with tonight's gossip. Alex gives Larry his gun, just in case. Pandemonium ensues.

The film's opening scenes take such a twisty, byzantine route not just to get the characters inside the haunted house in Cuba but also to even get them on the boat taking them there that I was baffled but consistently amused by how the hell we were all going to get to the second half of the movie. I like when movies aren't afraid to zigzag with their narratives, and I didn't mind spending time in any of the film's main locations (the hotel, the ship, a Havana nightclub, and the haunted mansion).

Once inside the mansion, the movie continues its eclectic streak, throwing zombies, ghosts, mysterious echoes, hidden passageways, and nefarious schemers up to no good into the mix. The actors handle this material in understated and naturalistic fashion, which works better for me than the usual hooting, hollering, and screaming.

My heart sank a little when I saw Willie Best's name in the cast. Best had a great reputation as an actor on the stage, but his filmography is full of the racist, stereotypical roles black actors were forced to take in this era if they wanted a Hollywood career. There are two or three racist jokes delivered by Lawrence at Alex's expense, and one scene where Best has to give the big-eyed, teeth-chattering routine when he's scared, but for the most part, his character here is a three-dimensional intelligent guy making most of his own decisions. He's mostly part of the team. It gives you a glimpse of what could have been if Best hadn't been stuck in driver, servant, unemployed layabout, and racist comic relief roles. His '30s films in particular are extremely hard to watch. 

I don't want to give this film too much credit since there are still racist moments here (Virginia Brissac has a small brownface role in addition to the handful of racist jokes at Best's expense), but this is a more well-rounded character for Best than he usually got in the movies. Unlike some of Best's other roles, nothing here feels mean-spirited or degrading, just ignorant and embarrassing, and Best gets to put a lot more of his personality into the character than he usually got the chance to do on film.

Aside from those few moments that haven't aged well (though what era in this perpetually racist country ever has?), The Ghost Breakers is an offbeat and entertaining slice of classic Hollywood. Director George Marshall skillfully and successfully handles the blend of genres and the twisting narrative with a steady hand. Marshall was one of those jack-of-all-trades journeymen filmmakers who worked in multiple genres in both the silent and sound film eras, made several industrial films about improving your golf game in the early days of sound, and closed out his career in the early 1970s in television. 

Unlike today where you succeed in Hollywood by having a famous and/or wealthy parent or a hit podcast or YouTube channel, Marshall was a mechanic, newspaper reporter, and lumberjack before getting work as a movie extra. He moved on to stunt work in westerns and then larger acting roles. He didn't enjoy acting but grew fascinated by the guys working behind the scenes, so he switched his focus to screenwriting and directing. Bring back the lumberjack to filmmaker career track.

Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (Jim Wynorski, 1987)

The week began with my wife in the emergency room and continued with the lawless fascist cretins running the country destroying due process and ignoring court orders, so I really needed the 85-minute dose of undiluted stupidity and fun that was Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans.

The first Deathstalker was a Roger Corman-produced Conan the Barbarian rip-off that had a reasonable b-movie sense of humor about itself but mostly played things straight. The sequel is a defiantly silly parody of the first movie and sword-and-sorcery fantasy in general, directed by Chopping Mall's Jim Wynorski (a b-movie legend whose career stretches from 1984's The Lost Empire to last year's DinoGator), with Chopping Mall's John Terlesky taking over as Deathstalker and Penthouse Pet Monique Gabrielle (my wife: "You know that if an actress is named Monique Gabrielle you're going to see her boobs") in a dual role as deposed princess Reena the Seer and her evil doppelganger Princess Evie, the latter conjured by evil sorcerer and usurper of the throne Jarek (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls' John LaZar) ("This is my happening and it freaks me out!"). This is a fine example of HYBC (Hell Yeah Brother Cinema) because when you see it, you say, "Hell yeah, brother!" (That's a Mid-Atlantic-era Ron Bass "brother" and not a Hulk Hogan "brother." Hulk Hogan sucks.)

Like the first film and most other sword-and-sorcery movies, Deathstalker II contains a beefcake hero, sword battles, epic quests, black magic, a deposed court, a formidable but cowardly villain who has stolen the throne, lots of bare skin, horseback riding, and unappetizing stews eaten in huts. Unlike those movies, this one also has zombies, a bar open 24 hours, a pro wrestling match between our hero and Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling star Queen Kong, more one-liners than a Naked Gun movie, a 100 percent increase in the first movie's number of pig-men from one to two, and a hero who looks like he just got back from organizing a frat kegger instead of living in an ancient mythical era.

Terlesky, who is now a successful television director, is the epitome of the chisel-chinned, smirking '80s prep-school jock and could not look more mid-1980s if he tried. His casting lets you know right away that Wynorski is not playing it straight. Terlesky even keeps his '80s hairstyle, looking more like an asshole in a John Hughes movie than Conan on a budget. He leans into his '80s dudeness and plays the part as a wisecracking party guy in it for the babes and the glory who can rise to the heroic occasion when circumstances call for it. Most of his one-liners aren't particularly hilarious, but the quantity of them is funny. It's the dad-joke ratio. The numbers are what's important. Resistance is futile. 

His romantic interest/mythic quest partner Gabrielle is legitimately funny in her dual good/evil roles. Most of these Playboy and Penthouse sex bomb pictorial stars turned actors have a wooden presence onscreen when required to do anything besides being sexy, but Gabrielle has a natural goofiness, silliness, and warmth that work perfectly for this movie. 

Weirdly, John LaZar, who gave one of the great unhinged performances in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as Z-Man, is relatively subdued here as the evil sorcerer, but you totally buy him being an evil sorcerer anyway, especially if you're familiar with his Z-Man work. Still, I wanted LaZar to go wilder in this. (Also, his doppelganger magic potion subplot is inexplicably dropped in the final third.)

The movie opens with Deathstalker fighting some masked swordsmen in a castle and occasionally taking five to kiss a woman we never see again. After a narrow escape from Jarek's feminine counterpart Sultana (Toni Naples), Deathstalker leaps out of a castle window onto a horse and rides away. Sultana leans out the window and says, "I'll have my revenge, and Deathstalker, too!" Bam! The opening credit title card hits. Hell yeah, brother.

Deathstalker stumbles across more masked castle guards giving Reena the business on his way to the 24-hour bar, Abud's, and decides to intervene. He lets them know that he's not completely opposed to manhandling women if they deserve it, but he doesn't like what they're doing to this woman. (Has Deathstalker gone woke?) He beats up the guards, except for the last one, who runs away with the great line, "Leave me alone, I don't even know these guys." 

Finally making his way to Abud's, Deathstalker has somehow picked up two babes on the quick jaunt over and is ready for some beer drinking, hand over candle tomfoolery, and an eventual threesome in a room upstairs. He gets cockblocked by a massive bar fight and rides away with Reena, who followed him into the bar and talks her way onto his horse. She takes him to her hut and reads his fortune while feeding him unappetizing stew. She says he will become famous and wealthy if he undergoes a brutal quest to defeat Jarek. Deathstalker loves the wealthy part and starts the quest immediately. Reena tags along, not revealing that she used to be the princess. Something tells me these two kids are going to earn a grudging respect for each other and maybe, just maybe, fall in love.

What follows is 70-plus minutes of nonstop action, horniness, wisecracks, and insanity that should entertain anyone who is not made of stone. Our heroes fight Sultana's henchmen and their exploding arrows, zombies in a graveyard, a wall of moving spikes in a mausoleum, a sexy Amazon tribe and their queen (Maria Socas) who inexplicably have a wrestling ring and force Deathstalker to wrestle Gorgo (Dee Booher aka Queen Kong) to the death and who also inexplicably break the match into rounds like it's boxing (the Amazons later become allies), unwanted marriage proposals, steaming hot water tubs, swinging axes, castle guards, Princess Evie (who can eat men's souls after booty calls and turn their bodies into weird masks that hang on her headboard), Sultana, and Jarek.

Deathstalker II works as both a low-budget sword-and-sorcery movie and a low-budget comedy. These Conan knock-offs are usually relatively entertaining, but a lot of them take themselves so seriously. Wynorski foregrounds the humor that is already inherent in scantily clad beefcakes and buxom babes fighting magical weirdos and mythical beasts with swords while also keeping all the stuff you like from the more straightforward fantasy epics. This is also probably the only sword-and-sorcery movie that ends with a blooper reel. I had a great time and was never bored.

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!"