Far East becomes Old West. John Sturges remakes Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI as a western, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. Katanas become guns, samurai become gunslingers, Far East becomes Old West. A small Mexican farming village, tired of being ransacked annually by a marauder and his henchmen, hire seven gunslingers to repel them. Soon enough, the villagers realize meeting violence with violence … Read More
The Face of Retirement. Charles Bronson once acted alongside Clint Eastwood in 1965, in an episode of Clint’s TV series RAWHIDE. Two young men at the dawn of their toughguy careers. Bronson has been chasing Eastwood ever since. Certainly not consciously, and I’m sure they’d be the last to cop to the unspoken rivalry, but it was there all right … Read More
Cleanup on Aisle Dirty. Classic! Explosive, action-packed, funny and filthy, THE DIRTY DOZEN is the best Boy’s Movie of the millennium! If you’re between 14 and 24, you will be inspired by this movie; it was the HALO 3 of its day. In World War II, twelve American military convicts, each a different flavor of crazy, are snatched from the … Read More
From duds to merely dull. DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN surprises us by actually getting close to a plot! After two sequels written by babies and directed like tweens measuring their dicks, this third sequel to DEATH WISH (1974) has actual pacing, quarter-decent acting and a halfway compelling plot that includes a couple of good twists. It helps that it’s … Read More
The Ambiguously Gay Gangland Mardi Gras Killings. The funniest thing about DEATH WISH 3 is not its sincere attempt at storyline, nor its childish attempts at action-movie dynamism – it’s the street thugs who look like extras from a Pat Benatar video. Director Michael Winner (after his slamming take on vigilantism in the original DEATH WISH, 1974), seems to have … Read More
Stick ’em up – or just stick ’em! The Old West meets the Rigid East on a collision course with wackiness! Is it a Samurai Western or a Western Samurai movie? RED SUN: a unique action-adventure that is all six-shooters and sushi. Across the American western landscape, outlaw gunslinger Link (man’s man Charles Bronson) and samurai Kuroda (Japan’s Man, the … Read More
Wish it wasn’t. Charles Bronson returns as vigilante Paul Kersey in DEATH WISH II. And we wish he hadn’t. We got the point in DEATH WISH (1974): True justice is revenge. And people like it that way – just too pigeon-scared to admit it in “civilized” society. So now we get another film saying the same thing – only with … Read More
Bronson’s HARRY. After the raunchy success of DIRTY HARRY (1971), it was inevitable some other cinema tough guy would be recruited to carry the torch that Clint Eastwood lit. Enter Charles Bronson. Whereas DIRTY HARRY was labeled a vigilante treatise, but was actually more layered than the knee-jerk American public could discern, DEATH WISH is written (by novelist Brian Garfield, … Read More
Corn-y Apache. APACHE: yet another grandiose insult to the Native American people, pretending in its own racist way to be a tribute. To watch the original trailer for APACHE, one would think it is about Apache Massai (Burt Lancaster) waging war on the White Eyes against their snide peace treaties to the Native Americans. It fails to mention how White … Read More