Wednesday, November 23, 2011

bad/awesome flixxx review: Death Wish II (1982)




"You believe in Jesus?...Well, you're gonna meet him." - Paul Kersey

"I read about that... I'll give you three minutes before I sound the alarm... You're wasting time." - Orderly

"He saved our lives dammit! Where were you, giving out parking tickets?" - Rescued citizen

He's back. With a vengeance. Paul Kersey is living in Los Angeles five years after being run out of New York City when it was discovered he'd been conducting business as a badass vigilante. He wasn't prosecuted because the DA of NYC considered what he did a good thing. But sometimes bad things just keep on happening to good people. Paul Kersey is just about the unluckiest sonofabitch there ever was. with a cameo by a young Lawrence Fishburne (similar to the cameo of Jeff Goldblum in the original) its back to business as usual in DEATH WISH II!!!!





So this time Paul Kersey is hanging out with this reporter chick in Los Angeles. His daughter has been receiving some successful rehabilitation here and she is managing to request food for the first time in five years. Kersey still thinks that this is little progress, but is happy to have his little girl back as she is released into his custody in the beginning of the flick. Paul, his daughter and his girl go to a carnival. Paul goes to get the girls some ice cream but is mugged by 5 gang dudes. He chases one down and demands his wallet, but the guy doesn't have it. He lies to the girls and says he forgot his wallet, but his girl knows he's full of shit. He just didn't want to upset his daughter.



So the reporter girl goes to interview the governor or something about the death penalty, and Paul and his daughter take a boat ride. The gang members get his address from his wallet and go to rob his house. They gang rape his housekeeper and when he comes home, they knock him out, kill the maid, and kidnap his daughter. One of the gang dudes rapes his daughter and when he gets up, she jumps up, runs past them all, jumps out of a window and falls to her death becoming impaled on a sharp fence down below. HEINOUS!! Its one of those moments where you yell out, "OH SHIT!!" or "FUCKIN SHIT!!" or something like that. The cops tell Paul about his daughter but he says it'll be no use. He turns down one of the cops offers to come down and try to identify some perps, feigning super bummedoutness (to which he may actually be). He digs his pistol out of his closet and there's where we know shit is about to get good.



After the funeral he rents an apartment downtown under a false name. He then hunts down and spots one of the muggers going to a drug deal. He kills a guy, tells the others to split and then cold murders the guy "Stomper". No idea how he really just runs up on this dude. I guess is a bit lucky after all. Then miraculously the next day when he's out and about patrolling the city, he hears some dudes fucking with a lady. He kills 2 of the 4 and wounds another which is the guy he chased after for his wallet that day. Then he chases them to a warehouse and kills that guy too. The cops start to suspect they have a vigilante on their hands. They reach out to other cities that have had similar problems because some guy trying to get reelected wants the citizens to feel safe. So they call up old Lt Frank from the first movie to go in and look for Kersey, almost blackmailing him into doing the work. They do that because they don't want him to reveal that he'd already been caught and let go by NYC years before cuz that would look bad on them. So Frank has to go in.



Frank breaks into Paul's girl's pad and spills the beans on him. Paul discounts all of it, and says Frank is crazy. Paul spots the last 3 muggers in the park. Frank follows him. Paul is about to kill them, but then is almost killed. Frank shouts out to help and is gunned down by the muggers. Paul kills 2 of them but one gets away, and then he kills some other gun runner dude. He asks Frank why he helped him, and he says better you than them. He then makes Paul promise to kill the son of a bitch and then he croaks. Paul splits, badly injured Fishburne rats out the mugger who looks like John C. Reilly. Paul's girlfriend tells him that the cops are about to go get the JCReilly lookalike and mentions the location. He goes to try to get him first but is unsuccessful. The dude goes all Lou Ferigano on them and I joke and say he's on PCP, and it ends up that I was right. He's just lifting pigs off the ground left and right. NUTS! He is sent to a psycho tank, and Paul's girl goes to interview him, she's denied but Paul is able to steal a doctor's ID. He asks the chick to marry him, and then goes to kill the last guy. He goes in, fights and is stabbed a shitload of times, but in the end, JCReilly lookalike punches a shock treatment machine and Kersey turns up the juice electrocuting him. He's then busted, but the orderly "gives him three steps" before he ringing the alarm. Unluckily for him (or an easy way out, no telling what he really wanted) his old lady sees a scanned copy of the ID and hears a radio bulletin about the murder of the inmate. She leaves the engagement ring and splits. A few months later his boss invites him to a party or something after work asking if he can come, to which he replies, "what else would I be doing?" Same big smile. I think this was a pretty great sequel, seeing as how it took them 8 years to make it. Might have been better without the HUGE break in between, but still pretty good.

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