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!"