The Curator of Schlock #292 by Jeff Shuster

Death Kiss 

Death Wish 6: The Kiss of Death

Sadly, we lost Charles Bronson back in 2004. Hopes of a Death Wish 6 went with him. Sure, we got the Death Wish remake with Bruce Willis and that was fine, but Bruce Willis isn’t Paul Kersey, he’s John McClane. Still, we’ve got a few billion people on this planet. There’s an old saying that there’s at least one other person in the world that looks exactly like you so surely there’s at least one person in the world who looks exactly like Charles Bronson. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Robert Kovacs.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You can’t just find some random guy who looks like Charles Bronson and just make an unofficial Death Wish sequel and just call it Death Kiss.

You can if you’re director Rene Perez!

Don’t be a Negative Nancy! Robert Kovacs plays “The Stanger,” but for the purposes of this review, we’re calling him Paul Kersey. So Paul Kersey goes to this house in a shady part of some unnamed city (Washington, D.C.) and asks the man standing out front for a cheese pizza. I’m more of a pepperoni and green peppers man myself. And this request is odd, as this dump does not resemble a pizza parlor.

Oh, cheese pizza is code for…uh…okay…not good.

Kersey hogties the pimp and goes inside to find a young girl tied up on the bed, pleading, “Please not again.” A degenerate who reminds me a little of Jared the Subway guy pops of the bathroom zipping up his pants. Kersey pulls out Wildey and shoots some slugs into the pedophile. Kersey then leaves and shoots the pimp in the back. Death Wish has returned for the 21^st century!

We get more scenes of Kersey taking out the bad guys. He shoots and kills a couple of gangbangers. At an airport, he kicks a guy repeatedly in the stomach. This man is smuggling drugs into the country by ingesting little bags of them. After the repeated kicking, the man ODs right there in the airport. Between these killings are scenes of a right wing radio talk show host, Dan Forthright (Daniel Baldwin), complaining about how the news media prioritizes reporting about racism instead of child sex trafficking or how the police treat spousal abuse more seriously than the drug gangs.

In the midst of all of this chaos, Kersey is sending envelopes of money to a single mom named Ana (Eva Hamilton) whose daughter is paralyzed and bound to a wheelchair. Turns out Ana was a junkie who got her daughter caught in a crossfire when she was going to get her fix from a drug lord named Tyrell (Richard Tyson). Kersey doesn’t know if it was his bullet or Tyrell’s that paralyzed Ana’s little girl. He keeps spying on Ana until she notices him and invites him over to lunch, the least she could do after Kersey sent her so much money.

Tyrell is a nasty, sadistic drug lord. After Tyrell’s son gets sent to jail because one his new recruits didn’t have the stuff to murder a witness, he makes the recruit kill some guy wearing a burlap sack on his head. The gang hands the recruit a baseball bat and he bashes the guy until the sack goes red. Tyrell then removes the sack revealing the guy to be the recruit’s own father! Kersey eventually catches up with Tyrell and I don’t want to spoil things, but don’t be surprised if Tyrell ends up getting tied to a tree, covered in barbeque sauce, and beset by wolves.

Death Kiss can best be described as a month in the life of Paul Kersey. Not a bad way to waste away your Friday night.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.