'You believe in Jesus?... Well, you're gonna meet him.' (Death Wish II (DVD))

Member Name: adambrown400

Product:	Death Wish II (DVD)
Date:	07/10/09 (58 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great violence

Disadvantages: Over-long rape scene

'First His Wife. Now His Daughter. It's Time To Even The Score!'

Death Wish 2 moves the action from New York City to LA for this sequel. Paul Kersey is an architect who went on a one-man killing spree in the original film after his wife and daughter were viciously attacked and raped in his own home. A move to the filth-ridden streets of LA doesn't seem like a good idea then. After a spat in the park with a local gang, their ring leader works out where Kersey lives and bursts in on an unsuspecting housemaid. There she is viciously raped and Kersey's mentally deranged daughter is kidnapped and after further rape, dies after falling from a window onto a spike.

Kersey vows revenge and hires out a seedy room on skid row and intends to hunt down each punk responsible for the death of his daughter. But will the police get to him, before he wastes the scuzz of the streets?

Death Wish 2 has a really bad reputation and was critically panned even before its release. 80's exploitation masters Golan Globus (Missing in Action, Superman 4 etc) bought the rights to the franchise and started to make new and ever more gruesome additions to the series right up until 1994.

Director of the original, Michael Winner, here returns to the director's chair. Winner does violence best and here it comes in the bucketload - lots more than the original film.

Bronson's Kersey is a man on a mission, but here he seems less bothered by his family's deaths than he did in part one. He really displays very little emotion when carrying out the killings which is a little annoying when you realise why he's doing these things. However, the guys playing the street hoodlums are pretty vicious and thoroughly deserved the pain that was brought down upon them.

Some of the violence is totally absurd and unintentionally hilarious. A very young Laurence Fishbourne's death is brilliant - Bronson shoots him while he holds a ghetto blaster to his face. The blaster cracks into two pieces whilst Fishbourne's face implodes. I expect Winner was after the shock value while making this film and he certainly got the desired effect.

The rape scene is particularly hard to watch and overlong. It could have been a lot more subtle, but Winner goes the whole hog and really makes a meal of it. If you're a little squeamish it can be a hard slog. I suppose though that this needed to be shown so that the revenge could be ever the more sweeter.

Also being a big Led Zeppelin fan I was intrigued to hear Jimmy Page's score for Death Wish 2. Jimmy Page's involvement was initially pooh-poohed
By producers Golan / Globus, but the results are effective and dramatic and a lot more synthy than you might expect with plenty of off-kilter sound effects that work well along with the myriad of shooting and stabbings.

In all, Death Wish 2 is a good piece of exploitative entertainment that pushes the boundaries of acceptability to new depths. If you like your revenge movies with plenty of bite, then Death Wish 2 is a good bet. Bring on Death Wish 3, again directed by Winner but was actually filmed in England.

Summary: Brutality at its finest