MOVIE BUFFS: Am I missing anything by skipping over Death Wish 2 (1982)?

b/c at the present time, Netflix only offers 1, 3, & 4

oh wow I didn't even realize there was a fifth one until I tried to start this thread and got BEST DEATH WISH TRAILER (I - V) in the suggestions

I nominate Deathwish 4: The CRACKdown for local businesses with horribly formed "names" ???

I think my housemates are probably going to 'wish death' upon me if I don't switch to something with fewer gunshot noises, but fuck it, I CAN'T BACKDOWN FROM THE CRACKDOWN

okay what the fuck he has a family again suddenly? was this introduced in part 2??

lol @ 'punk' extra in video arcade scene with handcuffs on the shoulder of his leather jacket (?)

(btw my initial confusion about his romantic situation has now subsided; I blame ILX for distracting me)

Film Buffs know that Death Wish 5 is where its at!

Does Netflix offer a full compliment of Police Academy films?

Death Wish 3 with the elaborately booby-trapped tenement building is one of the finest films ever made

"anybody connected with drugs deserves to die" <-- an actual line from this movie

xp yeah my inner child ate that shit up--like a higher-stakes Home Alone

"anybody connected with drugs deserves to die" Bronson deadpans as he throws the petrol bomb thru the pharmacy window

sorry for confusion--those lines were actually spoken by the rich old weirdo who hired CB to avenge his daughter

I'm not sure what changed, besides the director, but so far part four seems waaaay more sadistic--in the past, suffering of punks & creeps was incidental, not mission-critical, and the camera rarely lingered over it (apart from maybe the teeth in #3?)

was gonna mention the teeth, which are so funny i was wondering if i'd dreamed them

point about the director probly true, dear old Michael Winner probly thought he was making a political point in the first 3

DW3 is pure LOLcity, but there's one genuinely great shot *SPOILERS* when he kills the bad guy at the end.

If you skip Death Wish 2 you'll miss the Jimmy Page soundtrack.

wait, doesn't he have a new family at one point and then THEY, too, are raped and killed?

the series definitely got more sadistic/graphic as it went on but hey so did american movies in general.

i might re-watch the first one tonight inspired by this thread. i think i've had enough of the others.

DW3 also sports a Jimmy Page score... although personally, I'm quite partial to Herbie Hancock's work on the first.

idk missing context for the Death Wish 2 segment of Negativland's Helter Stupid

Lol! When you put it THAT way...

the (SPOILER) whole double-rape/ mute-girl-falling-to-her-death-on-railings sequence is probs the most sickening scene i've watched in a 'big budget' film.
in its uncut form anyway, just revolting.

here's the Wiki description

".. the same five muggers that stole Kersey's wallet come to his house, where they break in and gang rape Rosario and wait for Kersey to arrive. When Paul arrives home with his daughter, he is beaten unconscious. Rosario tries to call the police, but Nirvana hits her with a crowbar, killing her. They kidnap Carol (for fear she will identify them) and take her with them to their hideout where Punkcut rapes her. Before Jiver can rape her next, she runs and jumps through a window, impaling herself on a railing."

weren't some of the death wish sequels on the "video nasties" list?

Watched 3 last night. It was a treat! The last 15 or so minutes are gloriously WTF. Delightful movie though. I got kind of a Warriors vibe from the punks. Bronson of course is great, but the cop friend and the villain also add a lot. It's also a treat seeing Bill (Ted's other half) as the poor man's Jeff Goldblum in 3. So many great lines: "It's my car!" "I'm the law, so you don't have any constitutional rights." "Hey man, I always win."

Makes me want to check out the other sequels... but yikes, the Mad Max-Road Warrior shift of scope from 1 to 3 makes me wonder if Michael Winner deserves a place in the vulgar auteurism canon.

Have only seen the first one, which is the very definition of a guilty pleasure for me: a well-crafted and dare I say even lucid presentation of dubious politics (Christopher Sorrentino's book on the film for the Deep Focus series does an admirable job of grappling with this while mounting a solid defence of the film on aesthetic grounds). An early moment where Bronson innocently wonders why a man sits bleeding in an emergency room swarming with doctors while his own wife lies dying in the next room is especially powerful.

I feel like I should at least watch the two Winner-directed sequels. Roger Ebert considered the second film one of the worst movies of all time.

auteurism is always vulgar

I chuckled

Death Wish 2 was one-third recut scenes from Death Wish, but is worth tracking down for the "garbage day" bit.

'rented' from iTunes, pressing play now... just noticed Laurence Fishburne III in the opening credits! I wonder whether he'll be playing a punk or a creep?

... I'm not even sure what to label this
http://s27.postimg.org/vu0tf14tv/fishburne.png

looks like one of future-biff's henchmen

I don't think he's done a scene yet without the shades on (including the post-rape scene where he was shirtless)

i watched the first one again and it's really hard to fathom that book by christopher sorrentino that tries to "salvage" the film from its reputation as a right-wing revenge fantasy. i mean, how hard does a film have to work to make you identify with the main character before you decide, yeah, it's a wish-fulfillment fantasy for armchair vigilantes. (maybe i'll read the book, but i am bothered by this kind of special pleading that goes on so often when authors like a film whose politics are offensive to them.)

they have the pre-emptive (and self-congratulatory) "he isn't racist!" moment in there, which shows that the filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing.

i've never seen any of this shit, just the flamethrower bit in Los Angeles Plays Itself

the explicitly/implicitly loathsome politics of action movies often get in the way of my enjoyment of them, these included

this one is particularly odious, though.

also the likely result of bronson's nighttime activities is less "wow, hey, street crime has gone way down!" (as in the film) and more "we have an incipient race war on our hands" (cf. bernie goetz).

the way the film goes out of its way to paint the character as non-racist and make sure there are just enough "good blacks" (the police office, the little old lady) is notably despicable.

oh and to be fair (?!?!?!) the "creeps" that rape bronson's daughter and kill his wife (**SPOILER ALERT**) are just sort of vaguely white ethnic-looking. incl. jeff goldblum. but like 80% of the subsequent victims of bronson's wrath are black.

the third film, to my mind, works to retroactively efface the racial tensions in the first, reframing the central struggle as one of aging pensioners vs. youth gangs (see also: the elderly black woman in the first movie fighting off her assailants with a hatpin)

I agree that the self-blinding racist ideology of the first movie is extremely problematic... if anyone has recommendations for contemporary films that address similar themes from a more progressive standpoint, I would be happy to seek them out!

you mean contemporary films that involve aging white male power/revenge fantasies that aren't racist?

yeah uh good luck with that

xp also, the denouement of the second film (when **SPOILERS** Bronson breaks into the mental institution to knock off the insanity-pleading final creep) can eat a dick

it's amazing how relevant the first death wish remains, as a document of reactionary paranoia. there's the whole "this is tucson, we're all about our guns" segment of the film. and the film kind of smartly elides much distinction between the real, contemporary West and the mythic West of Hollywood movies.

also classy how the lead character basically gets his mojo back (dead wife? comatose daughter? who cares!) after he shoots a few punks dead. if there was one scene in the film that would lend credence to the notion that the film is subverting itself, it's that one, just because the character's actions are so freakish (and his son-in-law serves to confirm that). and i suppose the final shot can be read in multiple ways. but in between there are few if any signs that we might really question our allegiance to the main character.

http://profratigan.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/brave-one-1.jpg

remember this?

(XP to the dude with the greek characters in his name)
it's more that I was not alive during the 70s and am kind of fascinated by the whole "police are no help against URBAN CRIME!!!" meme, which is painted in a much more complex & realistic(?) light by something like Detroit 9000

there are lots of black urban crime (aka blaxploitation) films that deal with these issues in often interestingly contradictory ways

fwiw i taught a week on this stuff in my class, something like law & order (& nixon) at the movies. we watched french connection and big chunks of dirty harry and foxy brown (which turns the whole law & order thing on its side and makes white folks the ones bringing crime and drugs to the ghetto) and talked about all this. i didn't really want to subject students to death wish but mentioned it a few times.

(obv french connection has a way more complicated take on this stuff, that's why i taught it. it's a more interesting film since the film does work to make the protagonist both an attractive identification figure /and/ truly corrupt and despicable.)

Never seen French Connection or Foxy Brown; Dirty Harry I think I saw once but it's been a long time. Thanks for the recommendations!

idk if French Connection really gets at it, apart from having a cop protagonist whose obviously a corrupt, racist jerk. there's no vigilantiism in it. amateurist is right that this is more common in blaxploitation, where the hero is often trying to liberate his/her community (or at least themselves) from the blatantly corrupt and often commingled power structures of cops+organized crime.

on the documentary tip, 80 Blocks From Tiffanys covers how black and puerto rican gangs basically ran their neighborhoods in the 70s in NY, as the cops were either uninterested or actively antagonistic to their communities.

the relevance of french connection is that you have a cop who in many ways acts like a vigilante: a key part of popeye doyle's character (what made him attractive to many folks) is that he's willing to bend (or defy) the rules, break a few heads, to get the information or people he wants. he's a decisive law-and-order guy, but the film eventually raises the possibility that his mania is not only responsible for killing another cop, but in part for fucking up the whole case. he doesn't "go rogue" in the same way as dirty harry, but i think the films def. belong to the same moment and reflect each other in interesting ways. also, i wanted to teach them a little about the psuedo-documentary new-hollywood style of the 1970s and french connection is a much better example of that than the more classically styled dirty harry.

Death Wish 2 was one-third recut scenes from Death Wish, but is worth tracking down for the "garbage day" bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gIpuIVE3k

?

Silent Night Deadly Night =/= Death Wish

btw I'm watching that "80 Blocks" documentary on youtube right now & it's fascinating, if frustrating

magnum force possibly worth a mention here.

a group of rogue young officers in the San Francisco Police Force systematically exterminate the city's worst criminals, conveying the idea that there are even worse rogue cops than Dirty Harry.[3] Clint Eastwood specifically wanted the story to show that despite the 1971 film's perceived view of Inspector Callahan, Harry was not a complete vigilante.

there's a lot of early 80s bronx porn in 1990: The Bronx warriors

feel like there's a related subgenre in the "aggro teacher takes control of crime-ridden school" - the Principal, etc.

if anyone has recommendations for contemporary films that address similar themes from a more progressive standpoint, I would be happy to seek them out!

I wouldn't say it's progressive, and tbh I dunno if the ideological jujitsu required to make a 'progressive' crime/revenge movie is even possible, but Harry Brown sprang to mind.

maybe I Spit On Your Grave

xp to Biz Gazz: I was using "contemporary" there to mean "1970s" rather than "today"... but Harry Brown looks interesting & I may check it out.

anyone think Gran Torino's worth a watch?

Harry Brown has actively vile politics, definitely closer to Death Wish than anything else (even Death Sentence which was based on a book written by the author of the original Death Wish novel)

When I finally watched Death Wish and Dirty Harry I felt like I suddenly understood way more about the American psyche in the 1970s, New York politics and history, class and race issues, everything that led to the Giuliani/Broken Windows policing era, etc. And I imagine that those movies not only reflected but helped to shape public perception on a lot of those issues.

yeah that's pretty OTM with regard to my experience (hence also my search for 'opposing views' to fill out the context--but perhaps I'm making a mistake by seeking them within the realm of film...)

Silent Night Deadly Night =/= Death Wish

Yeah I know, but that's the only "garbage day" I'm familiar with.

Watching right now. This exchange is priceless:

"He asked me not to kill muggers."
"He told me that."
"Yes, that's true."
"That you killed muggers?"
"No, that he asked me not to."
"Why would he ask you not to if you weren't doing it in the first place?"

http://www.citypages.com/news/north-minneapolis-woman-says-she-has-to-wear-level-3a-body-armor-to-leave-her-house/501634262

If you skip Death Wish 2 you'll miss the Jimmy Page soundtrack.

Which is worth hearing because it is so hilariously inept and awful. This was on last night and is dire in every single department, just a terrible terrible film, LOL @ Bronson being the most murderous architect since Albert Speer.

I have never seen any of these Death Wishes, does he have a genie who grants his death wishes, y/n

a leprechaun iirc