In the 80’s, the Reagan Administration issued a decree to all potential drug users: Just Say No to Drugs. This fourth film in the Death Wish franchise is Charles Bronson’s retort: Just Say Yes to Blowing Away Drug Dealers.

God bless Charles Bronson.

Normally I don’t like movies with a “message” but when the message is don’t deal drugs or Charles Bronson will blow you away, I’m all for it.

This time out, Chuckasaurus Rex starts blowing away drug dealers after his girlfriend’s (Kay Lenz) daughter OD’s on drugs. He gets help from a reclusive millionaire (John P. Ryan) who bankrolls Bronson’s Death Wish by providing him with the names of the leading drug pushers (who smuggle cocaine inside of fish and sell it out of a video store) in the city, along with the guns and ammo necessary to put them all six feet under. Bronson also takes a page from A Fistful of Dollars and plays the major dealers against each other, which culminates in a climatic showdown at an oil field. In the “twist” ending we learn that Ryan really was the Mr. Big Drug Pusher and he comes after Bronson by gunning down his girlfriend (who had virtually disappeared for 2/3 of the movie). Bronson retaliates by shooting him at point blank range with a grenade launcher.

Even though it pales in comparison next to the classic that is Death Wish 3, there’s still a lot of entertainment to be had from this installment. It maybe the weakest of all the Death Wish movies (thanks to a gratuitous abundance of “plot), but I still like it a lot.

In this one Chuck electrocutes a guy on top of some bumper cars, mows down dozens of extras with an Uzi, throws a dude out of a thirty story window, and blows up some drug dealers with an exploding wine bottle!!! The film also features the best roller rink shootout since Switchblade Sisters, so it’s got that going for it too.

The film looks slicker than any of the previous installments, but director J. Lee Thompson, who did an impressive NINE movies with Chuck, just kinda goes through the motions (his big camera move is a slow push-in on the actor’s faces during a dramatic scene) and lacks the kick of the Michael Winner directed films in the series.

Chuck does fine work as usual, and he’s given a lot more dialogue and “dramatic” material to do. He gets the movie’s best line: “It’s not your fault Erica died. IT’S THOSE DAMN DRUGS!”, and is given fine support by an impressive supporting cast that includes a young Danny (Machete) Trejo, Soon (Missing in Action 2) Tek-Oh, Irwin (House of 1000 Corpses) Keyes, Dana (National Lampoon’s Vacation) Barron, and Mitch (Shocker) Pileggi. It took seven more years for Bronson to return for his swan song in the series, Death Wish 5: The Face of Death, but it was well worth the wait.

Well in the first Death Wish, a gang of thugs killed Charles Bronson’s wife and raped his daughter which caused him to go on a vengeful killing spree. In Death Wish 2, another gang of thugs raped his daughter AGAIN and murdered her, but they also raped and killed his MAID too, leaving Chuck with a broken heart and a dirty home, so he had to go out and murder even more punks. In Death Wish 3, it takes about 6 minutes for a new bunch of gangbangers to murder his old army buddy, which again sets Chuck into kill anything with a gang color mode.

Before Chuck can do anything though, he’s thrown in jail by an asshole cop (Ed Lauter) who doesn’t really mind that Bronson is blowing away scumbags in his district, he just wants Chuck to keep him INFORMED on who he’s blowing away, just so the paperwork doesn’t pile up I suppose.

This gang is lead by the devious Fraker played by Gavan (Superman 3) O’Herlihy, who wears an intimidating skunk hairdo. (How a pasty face Irish lad like him ever became a leader to a multiethnic gang of hooligans remains unclear, but he does have some crazy looking eyes and that’s always a sign of a good villain.) Chuck has a run-in with Fraker in a holding cell where they exchange steely eyed glances and you just know that ol’ Chuck is gonna mop the floor with him by the end of the picture.

Chuck moves into his buddy’s apartment building which is populated mostly by old people who’ve long given up the hope of fighting off the menacing street punks. First things first once Chuck gets settled down: He sends away for his “friend” Wildey, which turns out to be an enormous pistol sized elephant gun that leaves holes in muggers the size of Cleveland. Next, he rigs up Home Alone style traps to keep his neighbors safe at night. (One springboard trap even knocks a burglar’s two front teeth out.) Slowly but surely, the neighbors start screaming “We’re not gonna take it anymore!” and decide to follow Saint Chuck’s example and start blowing away scumbags their own self.

But not all is sunshine and roses. Since this IS a Death Wish movie, that means a lot of Chuck’s nearest and dearest end up in the meat wagon. When Chuck’s friend, a pre-Star Trek Marina Sirtis breaks her arm after being brutally raped (by the way Counselor Troi, nice rack!), she’s quickly rushed to the hospital. Shortly thereafter the doctors gravely inform Chuck and her husband that she died of complications from the broken arm, and you can tell that Chuck is about a half a second away from going on ANOTHER Death Wish by shooting every single doctor, nurse and orderly with poor bedside manners. But Chuck knows that he’s only allowed ONE Death Wish per movie, so he lets it go. (How anyone could die from complications from a broken arm is besides the point, but never mind.)

Chuck also starts a little fling with a cute public defender (Deborah Raffin) but you know what happens to most of the women Chuck ends up bedding down with in these movies, right? Of course, she gets murdered by the thugs so fast that her pussy juice hadn’t even dried on Chuck’s cock yet. Not only does the gang murder his tang train, but they also blow up his car in the process and that gets Chuck STEAMED. By the time the punks throw his OTHER old geezer pal (Martin Balsam) out the window, Chuck’s list of scores to settle really starts to pile up. And you know what that means: Total Ghetto Enema Via Semi-Automatic Weapons Time.

By the time Chuck’s blown away his fortieth hoodlum, back-up arrives in the form of Counselor Troi’s grieving hubby (who basically just carries Bronson’s bullets), police chief Lauter (who kinda forgot about the whole “keep me informed” thing), and every other septuagenarian tenant with a firearm and an itchy trigger finger. Things get so bad that Fraker has to call in the Hell’s Angels, the Crips AND the Bloods, some extras from The Warriors and every punk Starsky and Hutch ever arrested for the final 25 minute guns-a-blazing showdown.

In the end Chuck goes toe to toe with Fraker, and when Fraker gets the jump on him, Ol’ Chuck retaliates by shooting him point blank in the chest with a rocket launcher, leaving Fraker in tiny ashy pieces so small that they wouldn’t even fill a thimble.

In short, this is why cinema was invented.

Death Wish 3 is the Goldfinger of the Death Wish series. It perfectly captures everything that’s right with the series, but somehow is more than a sum of it’s parts, making it the best of the five films. (Though Death Wish V: The Face of Death is closely nipping at it’s heels.) It’s also probably the best film Chuck ever made, and certainly the finest 90 minutes Cannon Films ever bankrolled.

The film was directed by Michael Winner, who had done parts 1 & 2 with Chuck, and it was to be his swan song for the series. You can tell that Winner somehow sensed this and crammed everything but the kitchen sink into the movie; and it works. The great cheesy score was by none other than Jimmy Page (!) who basically just sampled his music from Part 2 and hit the play button. Bronson returned two years later with Death Wish 4: The Crackdown.

“No judge, no jury, no appeals, no deals!”

Seeing this in a theater (yes I saw this in a THEATER, nowadays something like this has direct-to-DVD written all over it, but I digress) was one of the highlights of my moviegoing days as a teenager. I had zero expectations going into it, having only seen bits and pieces of all the other Death Wish movies, and I was totally blown away by the cheesy dialogue, creative death scenes, and of course the inimitable Charles Bronson. Looking back on it now, Death Wish 5 still remains one of the best Death Wish movies ever made and is without a doubt one of the cheesiest, zaniest, most entertaining action movies of the 90’s.

Once again Bronson is Paul Kersey architect by day, vigilante by night. He’s engaged to a top fashion designer Olivia (Lesley-Anne Down), whose ex-husband happens to be the Irish mobster Tommy O’Shea. As played by Michael Parks, O’Shea is one sleazy, sadistic, degenerate, nutty as a squirrel turd, son of a bitch in this movie. He band saws a fat guy’s stomach, slices some dude’s face, bitch slaps his whore after he can’t get it up for her and says things like “If you don’t say shit you’ll lose 90% of your vocabulary.” It’s easy to see why Quentin Tarantino keeps putting him in all his movies because he’s so fucking great. (When I first saw From Dusk Till Dawn I hollered “Holy shit that’s that dude from Death Wish 5!” when Parks came on the screen.) O’Shea wants to launder money out of her fashion business and when she doesn’t cooperate, he sends the crazed dandruff obsessed transvestite hitman Freddie Flakes (Robert Joy from Land of the Dead) to smash up her face. The doctor’s take one look at her face and conclude, “Her face will never be the same!” Paul uncharacteristically lets the law handle it, but when Tommy has Olivia murdered and takes custody of their daughter, he becomes the Paul Kersey that we all know and love.

While Charlie B. may take an inordinate amount of time to start blowing away scumbags (he doesn’t kill anybody until the movie’s almost halfway over), once he starts killing people, it’s more than worth the wait, as he dispatches his enemies in some of the goofiest ways ever seen on the silver screen.

If O’Shea is sick and twisted, then Kersey is twice as demented.

First he kills a slimeball via a cyanide laced cannoli, then he blows up Freddie with a dynamite filled remote control soccer ball (!?!?!). “I’m gonna take care of your dandruff problem for ya!” O’Shea then sends his goons (one of whom has a voice exactly like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget) after Kersey and they match wits in Olivia’s abandoned garment factory. (That just so happens to have it’s very own acid bath.) To throw the bad guys off guard, Kersey puts a mannequin behind the wheel of a forklift (which somehow is able to make sharp right hand turns) which causes a big explosion. Kersey then blows away the dude with the Dr. Claw voice and electrocutes another before using a shrink wrap machine to seal a gangster’s fate, literally. Then he dumps O’Shea’s right hand man into an industrial meat grinder, before getting his hands on O’Shea. He pleads and begs for his life and Kersey responds, “I don’t need anything, but you… you need a bath!” and tosses O’Shea into the vat of acid. (You knew that thing would come in handy didn’t you?) The film ends with Kersey walking off into the sunset and saying to the ineffective cop, “If you need any help give me a call.”

Unfortunately this was the last call to arms for Charles Bronson in the Death Wish series. While he later went on to the Family of Cops TV movies before passing away in 2003, he never got to make another Death Wish film, and it’s a shame too, because this one is every bit as good as Part 3. Bronson, at 72 still makes for a kickass action hero, with his stoic steely glare and tight one-liners, even though a lot of the action calls for his enemies to miss him with a submachine gun from point blank range. At any rate, don’t miss your chance to see Bronson in this (or any of the Death Wish movies, they’re all great), doing what he does best, blowing away the scum of the earth. RIP Chuck.

Journeyman actor Charles Bronson became a screen legend when he starred in this action hit as Paul Kersey, a left wing “bleeding heart liberal” whose wife (Hope Lang) and daughter get attacked by a trio of thugs led by Jeff (“Rich cunts! I kill rich cunts!”) Goldblum in his screen debut. When his wife dies and his daughter becomes a vegetable, Bronson deals with his grief the only way Bronson knows how and that’s to gun down every mugger in New York City. This flick spawned several sequels, but looks pretty tame compared to their increasingly outlandish over the top violence. The only debit the original has in comparison to the sequels is that there’s way too much dramatic stuff in the beginning and not enough of Bronson gunning down muggers. But once Bronson whips out his gun (about halfway through the movie) it’s no holds barred fun. Director Michael Winner later went on to direct the next two installments of the franchise, which upped the body counts considerably. Vincent Gardenia co-stars as the police inspector on Bronson’s trail.

Charles Bronson returns as Paul Kersey, the vigilante architect who blows away the punks who raped his maid and murdered his daughter. Laurence Fishburne plays one of the main gangbangers. Bronson shoots him through a boombox right into his face! Vincent Gardenia reprises his role from the first film as a cop who helps Bronson. In the film’s best scene, Ol’ Chuck disguises himself as a doctor to whack a thug in a psych ward. Jill Ireland, Bronson’s real life wife at the time, co-stars as his concerned girlfriend. This sequel is basically in the Rocky 2 mode, where all the characters do all the same stuff they did in the original film, but you don’t really care. The series would eventually become more violent and cartoonish (not a bad thing). Also with Ben Frank and Charles Cyphers and featuring a great cheesy score (later recycled in Part 3) by none other than Jimmy Page! Director Michael Winner also directed Parts 1 and 3.