DEATH WISHY-WASHY 3

DEATH WISH III
dir: Michael Winner

DEATH WISHY-WASHY 3
Cracked #220, July 1986
a: Bob Fingerman

At this point Death Wish became a franchise. There were five movies in this series and there was a reboot. What I liked about the first film was that it was actually shot in the streets of New York. I always like seeing NYC and LA locations that I recognize, that aren't just sets or a stand-in location like this.

Paul Keresy (Charles Bronson) comes to the East New York section of Brooklyn to visit an old war buddy. The moment he gets there a gang of street punks, the kind that only exists in movies, breaks into his friend's apartment and kills him, and Paul is wrongfully arrested for the murder. While in jail, he gets into a fight with everyone there, including the leader of the gang (Gavan O'Herlihy) who we meet more of later. The police chief (Ed Lauter) knows he is the vigilante from the first two movies and lets him out on the condition that he clean up the neighborhood so they can take credit. He returns to his friend's building and meets the landlord Bennett (Martin Balsam) who appreciates that someone is finally cleaning up the neighborhood and will let him stay there.

Keresy scouts the area so he can plan his battles, and meets his neighbors. Like the parody points out, there's little plot in this, just non-stop carnage as he and the gang fight back and forth. His neighbors learn self defense and he takes out The Giggler (Kirk Taylor), called that because he giggles as he commits crimes.

Keresy is arrested again for being too out of control, but escapes and then teams up with the sergeant to take out the rest of the bad guys.

There's a subplot where Paul Keresy starts dating a public defender which only seems to be there because Screenwriting 101 mandates a romantic interest somewhere.

Everybody is killed and the police chief tells Paul Keresy to get out of town, which he does. Nothing gets wrapped up. It's just “show's over, everybody go home now”.

The censorship stamp gimmick is borrowed from a MAD article called Book! Movie! from #13, July 1954, showing how sanitized a movie version of a book is, illustrated by the great Jack Davis. This was before television became the sanitized version of the movie. Now that most TV has no restrictions, I wonder what the current cleaned-up version of something would be.