Death Wish (1974)
Bekkah:
This movie was a roller coaster. Jeff showed up in a grocery store with his weird-ass Jughead cap and two his hooligan buddies and then minutes later killed a woman and raped her (adult) daughter in a pretty horrible scene. That was it for our boy Jeff. This is his first movie ever, and what a doozy. The dead woman’s husband reacted to this scene by not understanding his traumatized daughter (along with her useless husband) and then going to Tucson where he learned he had the taste for killing people. So he became a vigilante, as one does. The first half of the movie where the useless men are useless (and murdery) was actually a pretty good movie. Not a great movie. Not a movie I wanted to see again. But pretty good. But then it suddenly became a cop movie, which was pretty bad/weird/sketchy and I did not like it. Pre-cop movie, this was 7/10. Post cop-movie, 3/10. I was kind of hoping that Jeff would reappear, only to get murdered, but alas NYC is a huge city chock-full of sketchy muggers for our hero(????) to murder, so no more Jeff. The vigilante eventually gets caught, but instead of prosecuting him, the cops just tell him to leave the city. So he goes to Chicago to murder again. As is too common, the women in this movie deserved more. The last time we saw the daughter, she was drugged up and sent to a mental hospital because her stupid father and husband didn’t want to learn how to support someone who experienced trauma.
Danya:
This is Jeff’s first movie! Good job, Jeff! If you were trying to be a rapey elongated scare crow, you very much succeeded. His character is kinda muppety, but in a swastika-jughead-sociopath way. But still, definitely a sexual violence content warning for the first 15 minutes of this movie. After that, the father who admits to be a “bleeding heart for those less fortunate” forgets all of that, and starts just murdering “greasy” guys, because, you know, theft should be punishable by murder. It goes downhill for me when the police get into it. Who cares if people of color get murdered, as long as muggings go down! An old granny fought off muggers with a hat pin, so definitely this seems morally right. The acting is stilted, the message sucks, but man, the hats in the 70s were epic.
5/10 Boldglums
A New York City architect becomes a one-man vigilante squad after his wife is murdered by street punks in which he randomly goes out and kills would-be muggers on the mean streets after dark.
Director: Michael Winner
Writers: Brian Garfield (novel), Wendell Mayes (screenplay)
Stars: Charles Bronson, Hope Lange, Vincent Gardenia
