You know why "Death Wish" Is Great?

Because it looks real. Actually, hold on a second,

I was going to do a "So I Was Watching The Super Bowl And A Few Things Occured To Me..." type of post on Sunday night or some time on Monday but I got busy and now the Super Bowl in general is completely moot, so i'm gonna pass on that idea.




I will say this about it though, there were way too many penalties called against the Cardinals and I think they may have gotten jerked out of that game by the referee's, also the commercials were all wack except for the Conan O'Brien one and the one with Alec Baldwin.

So anyway, after the Super Bowl ended I noticed that AMC was playing Death Wish, Death Wish 2 and Death Wish 3, marathon style, so I locked into that and realized that Death Wish is one of my favorite franchises of all time to me.

Being from New York and being raised by people who let me watch whatever I wanted to watch on TV or the movies, the bleak, hyper violent imagery of New York City in the first film resonated with me strongly.
I was 5 years old and I remember thinking that I was watching a documentary, seriously.
I can remember over hearing horror stories from my family and the television news about how dangerous the subway and streets were and then here was a film showing the New York streets as the most violent place you could imagine and that confirmed my thoughts of what the subways and streets were like late at night.
Even though I was watching it almost 10 years after it came out and New York was much safer by then, i subscribed to the theory that if you were out late at night people would rob, rape, stab and shoot you for no reason and nobody was going to do anything about it so stay the fuck out the street and subway at night.
Actually, I don't even know what a documentary is at 5 years old and most of the movie is filmed on West 75th street, less than a mile and a half from where I lived, so it never crossed my mind that it wasn't real.

The story of Death Wish, original released in 1974 as an adaptation of a novel by Brian Garfield, follows Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, an architech whose wife is murdered and daughter rapped by a gang of criminals with no motive other than the thrill of being crazy and violent.
Kersey then goes to Tucson, AZ and learns to shoot a gun, he returns to New York with a nickle plated revolver and runs around shooting the shit out of criminals in the streets and the trains and alleys and wherever else.
And it's not like he hunts them down, he just walks around and people keep fucking with him!
It's not a very stylized movie, and Kersey doesn't really have any personality or witty dialogue, again adding to the realistic tone (or my 5 year old perception of reality at least) and theres a general vibe that Kersey's doing a heroic thing.
He's sneaking around at night, taking out "bad guys" with no real motive other than wanting to do somthing he thought was right and he doesn't want any reward or recognition. He never even gets revenge on the actual criminals who sparked his whole vigilante career off. He's like BatMan, and that appealed to my passion for comic books and superheroes so I was into it.
The film went on to have 4 sequels, the 2nd was ok, the 3rd was good but they all followed the same formula: "Paul Kersey, mild mannered architech is minding his business and someone close to him gets ethered by criminals and here comes the body count", and eventually all the movies started to feel like paint-by-numbers revenge flick stuff.
Still, the general heroic story line, the Herbie Hancock produced soundtrack and genuine mid 70's New York City backdrop makes this a cult classic to many and one of my personal favorites.

If you havn't seen it, it's a pretty solid movie, even though today it doesn't look real at all. I can't say I recommend the sequels so much but if you enjoy the first and 2nd you'll probably get into the other movies anyway as you'll become hooked on the foolishness.

So check it out.

Bonus, the original Death Wish Trailer: