The Curator of Schlock #234: A Death Wish Addendum

20 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Film, The Curator of Schlock

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Death Wish, Original, Paul Kersey, Remake, The Curator of Schlock

The Curator of Schlock #234

Kersey vs. Kersey (A Death Wish Addendum)

Here we are again. I had a request from my editor last week to compare Charles Bronson’s performance in the original Death Wish to Bruce Willis’s in the remake. My initial reaction was “Charles Bronson gave a performance in the original Death Wish?” Maybe I was being too harsh. He must have been doing something right to get us to follow that character through four sequels. For this week, we will judge both Death Wishes and determine which one is the winner. Then, I will finally put Death Wish behind me, never to mention it again (at least until Death Kiss comes out).

1. Bronson vs. Willis
Charles Bronson and Bruce Willis are playing two different characters that just happen to be named Paul Kersey. One is a rich architect living in New York City.

Kersey3

The other is a rich doctor living in Chicago. One has a full head of hair and a boss mustache. The other is clean-shaven and bald. Both suffer the loss of their wives due to a home invasion.

Kersey4

So in a way, they are the same character. But there is one key difference. After his family is attacked the original Death Wish, Paul Kersey is shown to be afraid of the city he calls home. He works up to becoming a vigilante, first by defending himself from a mugger with sock full of quarters. In the remake, it doesn’t take long for Paul Kersey to embrace vigilante mode. Even before this Kersey gets a gun, he challenges two punks that are harassing some girl on the street. Kersey gets the crap kicked out of him, but he didn’t look the other way when he saw she was in trouble. This is where Bronson has the edge. You do see the fear in his character in the beginning whereas Willis’s character acts like he as nothing left to lose. You don’t get the journey with Willis.

Winner: Death Wish (1974)

2. Score/Soundtrack

This is a tough one because we do get a decent score by Ludwig Göransson who also composed the soundtracks for Creed and Black Panther. I won’t pick on the remake’s score because it’s better than most Hollywood scores these days, but come on. Nothing will beat the original jazz score by Herbie Hancock. Bonus points for the inclusion of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” for the remake, but it’s still not enough to push it over the edge.

Winner: Death Wish (1974)

3. Kersey’s Daughter

We don’t really get to know Paul Kersey’s daughter too well in the original film. After getting attacked, Carol (Kathleen Tolan) falls into a vegetative state before being checked into an asylum run by nuns. One could argue she’s one of the most depressing characters ever. In the remake, she’s an athlete and is studying Krav Maga. Jordan (Camilia Morrone) even manages to knife one of the home invaders before getting shot. Yeah, Jordan Kersey in the remake wins this one.

Winner: Death Wish (2018)

4. Cinematography

The original Death Wish was shot in that grainy 1974 film stock that adds to the grime of the original. The remake was shot digitally in HD. It’s a personal preference, but I prefer the former. Still, high definition does lend itself well to action movies such as this. But I’m stuck in the past.

Winner: Death Wish (1974)

5. A Tale of Two Cities

There is nothing more terrifying than 1970s New York City. I know it’s popular to call Chicago the murder capital of the world, but I was in Chicago about two years ago to see a Lush concert at The Vic and the only people I encountered were hipsters. I will say the hotel I stayed at served hardboiled eggs at the free continental breakfast, but that was the only criminal activity I encountered while in Chicago.

Winner: Death Wish (1974)

Four out of five for the original Death Wish, but do check out the remake. It’s still better than Death Wish 5.

Photo by Leslie Salas

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

The Curator of Schlock #8: Death Wish 5

27 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, The Curator of Schlock

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Charles Bronson, Death Wish, Michael Parks

The Curator of Schlock #8 by Jeffrey Shuster

Death Wish 5: The Face of Death

If you haven’t figured out by now that the face of death is Charles Bronson, there’s no helping you.

I want to make something clear. When Death Wish 5 The Face of Death was released theatrically, it was under the moniker of Death Wish: V The Face of Death. It was bad enough that we got stuck with the Roman numeral V instead of just a plain old 5, but when it got released on DVD, they removed the number entirely so all we’re left with is Death Wish: The Face of Death. This is unacceptable. Removing the numeral ignores the legacy of Death Wish 2, 3, and 4. This movie is Death Wish 5. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. On to the review that isn’t a review.

September was supposed to be Death Wish Month here at The Drunken Odyssey. The trouble was I didn’t realize we were still in August when the review for the first Death Wish went up. This meant I had to review Death Wish 5, and I’ve been avoiding Death Wish 5 for many years nown. It’s the Death Wish movie that even Death Wish fans hate. But I promised myself that September would be Death Wish Month so here we go.

In Death Wish 5, we find Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) in the witness protection program. His name is now Paul Stewart, but I’ll keep on calling him Paul Kersey for the rest of this review because I’ve been calling him Paul Kersey for every other review. Anyway, Kersey is getting his life back together. He’s dating a beautiful fashion designer named Olivia Regent who also happens to have a cute little girl. And he’s posing as a professor of who-knows-what. They don’t say. They don’t really say why he’s in witness protection either. It might have something to do with those two drug cartels he wiped out in Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, though this goes unmentioned.

Anyway, Kersey’s girlfriend’s ex- is, obviously, Tommy O’Shea (Michael Parks), an Irish mobster in the Irish Mob. O’Shea’s main way of earning is going over to business owners in the New York Garment District and shaking them down for money. If they don’t comply, bodily harm is usually the result in the form of electric saws to the stomach and hands shoved into hot presses. For some reason, Kersey thinks it’s a good idea for Olivia to become an FBI informant and get Tommy O’Shea sent to jail. This results in Olivia getting her face smashed into a bathroom mirror by one of O’Shea’s goons. Undaunted, Kersey still convinces his girlfriend to testify against O’Shea, which results in her get shot in the back before falling to her death.

Later, O’Shea beats up Kersey and steals his little girl back. O’Shea’s man in the FBI reveals that Paul Kersey is the vigilante killer from years back. For once, the criminals in these movies grow a brain and start taking precautions against Kersey. Of course, these precautions do no good. Whether it be poisoned cannolis or exploding soccer balls, O’Shea’s men die one by one. One even gets juiced by an electrified fence because what would a Death Wish movie be without a degenerate getting electrocuted to death. The movie ends with Paul Kersey knocking Tommy OShea into an acid bath where we get to see him dissolve in excruciating detail.

Death Wish 5 came out in 1994, which might account for its lameness. The Death Wish movies of the 80s were an exercise in excess. Every nightmare scenario from street thugs taking over the world to drug dealers killing our children was played out in those schlock masterpieces. Looking at them now, one wonders how anyone ever took them seriously. But the 90s were a new decade and those kinds of excesses were no longer welcome. Death Wish 5 demands us to take it seriously and falls flat as a result. And thus this series fades away when it should have burned out.

Oh well. At least we got to see “the most brutal hit and run in film history.”

___________

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47) is an MFA candidate and instructor at the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #4: Death Wish

30 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, The Curator of Schlock

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Charles Bronson, Death Wish, Herbie Hancock, The Curator of Schlock

The Curator of Schlock #4 by Jeffrey Shuster

Death Wish (Fill Your Hand)

AMC had a Death Wish marathon a few weeks back. I don’t know if the movies AMC airs these days are true classics or what classic even means these days when it comes to cinema. Maybe it’s the influence a movie has over the larger culture that makes it classic and Death Wish certainly had influence. The movie helped give rise to the vigilante genre for better or for worse. Mostly worse.

In Death Wish, Charles Bronson plays Paul Kersey, a “bleeding heart liberal” that sympathizes with the underprivileged. What Paul Kersey doesn’t know is that the underprivileged HATE bleeding heart liberals, especially wealthy architects like him. A gang of these underprivileged (led, obviously, by a young Jeff Goldblum) decide to break into Kersey’s apartment where they beat his wife and rape his daughter. The assault leaves his wife dead and his daughter a mental vegetable. The police seem to have better things to do than to catch the men responsible.

While visiting Tuscon on business, Kersey learns that Arizonians just shoot and kill the underprivileged. When he arrives back in New York City, Kersey discovers that one of his Arizona friends snuck a gun in his suitcase. Kersey decides to start taking midnight strolls in dangerous parts of the city and when one of the underprivileged tries to mug him-BAM! He’s dead! Kersey makes front-page news every time. Apparently, the police don’t like this “vigilante activity” as they call it and when the lead detective catches up to Kersey, they request that he leave New York.

I honestly don’t understand the police in this movie. In an earlier scene, the lead detective of the vigilante case has a meeting with the police commissioner and the district attorney. While sharing in bowl of hard candy, they discuss what do about their prime suspect, Paul Kersey. The commissioner and district attorney state how new statistics show that muggings have decreased significantly since the vigilante started killing muggers. They don’t want this statistic getting out because they fear the streets will be filled with vigilantes killing muggers as opposed to the streets being filled with muggers killing decent citizens. The lead detective offers to arrest Paul Kersey, but the district attorney doesn’t want to turn Kersey into a martyr. So we see that that the NYPD has no interest in lowering the crime rates or upholding the law. I’m sure this all meant to be topical, to show the audience how our institutions are failing us, but it makes no sense. They would either let Kersey continue his vigilante activities unabated or they would arrest him and make an example out him.

What’s the character arc here? We see Kersey start out as a pacifist, a man who hates guns because his father was killed in a hunting accident, a conscientious objector who served in a medical unit during the Korean War. Yet, he switches over to killer vigilante as soon as he unwraps that gun his Tuscon friend gave him. Maybe he’s tired of being afraid. Maybe he thinks he’s a modern day cowboy. I can’t tell. Kersey still acts the same around friends and colleagues, still comes off as the same nice guy, bleeding heart liberal. It’s that persona that makes us love Paul Kersey. This is a man we’d invite over for dinner. Or maybe we just want to invite Charles Bronson over for dinner because he’s just so damn pleasant. There’s no creep factor like there is with real world vigilantes such as Bernhard Goetz or George Zimmerman.

Death Wish is well made. There’s no denying that. We may have lost Technicolor beauty in the 1970s, but the cheap film stock adds much to the ugly mood of the picture. Director Michael Winner shows us a decaying New York that audiences first got a glimpse of in Midnight Cowboy. The musical score by jazz musician Herbie Hancock complements the action on screen. The fusion of traditional instruments and electronic synthesizers creates a haunting atmosphere that lingers long after the credits have stopped rolling.

The final scene in the movie has Paul Kersey landing in Chicago. As he walks through the airport, he sees a multi-racial gang harassing a woman, knocking her luggage out of her hands. Kersey goes over to help her, the gang making obscene gestures in his general direction. Kersey forms his hand into a pretend gun and fires.

We wouldn’t get a sequel to Death Wish until 1982, but the wait would prove to be well worth it. The Death Wish sequels are the epitome of schlock, but that’s a subject for another day.