Welcome back to A SKIN-depth Look, and as you can see, we're now alternating ourlonger, more in-depth directors series with slightly less comprehensive topics. This week, we're diving into one of my favorite film franchises, one I've longed to write about for well over a decade, and one that grew that more ridiculous with each consecutive entry: The Death Wish Franchise.
While it went to some rather questionable lengths to prove its point, the original Death Wish was not really an over the top spectacle to the degree that the series would devolve during its time at Cannon Films. As the series progressed, its hero Paul Kersey got older, his guns got bigger, and the scope of each film became increasingly unwieldy. Kersey goes from avenging one gang each in the first two films to waging war with every gang in New York City Death Wish 3, a Los Angeles cocaine cartel in Death Wish 4, and whatever the hell Michael Parks and his gang ofItalian thugs are up to in Death Wish V.
Of course, the most troubling part of the entire series and the scenes which stick out the most in 2019 are the nude scenes because they are almost exclusively the product of an attack or assault. Sure it's fun to see a young Jeff Goldblum or Larry Fishburne turn up, but the scenes of sexual violence are every bit as graphic as the violence, but with none of the bemused detachment the elaborate death sequences contain.
These nude scenes—all but one of them in the films directed by the late Michael Winner—all reside in a very uncomfortable and often disturbing space where they absolutely cannot be enjoyed, even ironically. There's plenty of laughing and high fiving to be done with your friends while watching the Death Wish movies, but none of them involve a nude woman. Every scene that involves a nude woman ends in abhorrent tragedy.
But thankfully with Death Wish, we can take the good with the bad because there's so much to love in these films. I'll do my best to remind you of this while showing you some of the worst that humanity has to offer...
Death Wish
Proving himself a surprisingly spry 53 year old, Charles Bronson reinvented himself as an action hero in much the same way someone like Liam Neeson did in the last decade, or the way Leslie Nielsen became a comedic actor after a career spent playing villains and genre leads. As the good roles began to dry up for Bronson, he became a bankable lead again thanks in no small part to his persona, which suggested real danger. A true powderkeg of an actor who wore a lifetime's worth of experience on his face.
Michael Winner cast Bronson in the role of respected mild-mannered bleeding heart liberal architect Paul Kersey, whose world is thrown upside down when his wife (Hope Lange) and daughter (Kathleen Tolan) are assaulted, the former succumbing to her injuries and dying. During the home invasion, Kathleen Tolan gets roughed up by a guy who bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan...
This act sends Kersey on a vigilante spree that finds him hunting down and killing the men responsible for this horrific act. The film ends with the suggestion that Kersey, though he survived both his brush with the law and the thugs, isn't done cleaning up the streets.Despite the film's surprising box office success, the film's ending didn't necessarily portend a sequel on the horizon, but when the money hungry duo behind Cannon Films got their hands on the rights, a franchise was born.
Death Wish II
Eight years after the original, producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus revived both Paul Kersey and Bronson's career in one fell swoop, bringing back original director Michael Winner and relocating the action to Los Angeles. Bronson gained a new love interest in his off-screen partner Jill Ireland, though Kathleen Tolan wouldn't return as his daughter Carol, who survived the events of the first film, though not unscathed.
Robin Sherwood stepped into the role, which brought with it more misery. Carol finds herself assaulted once again, committed to an institution, and ultimately committing suicide by jumping onto a wrought iron gate. But before all of that, we have to sit through another lengthy and thoroughly off-putting assault scene. Sherwood brings the right amount of detachment to the scene which ensures no one could consider it sexy...
This isn't even the film's most horrific assault. That comes prior to this when Kersey's maid Rosario(Silvana Gallardo) finds herself at the mercy of Larry Fishburne and pals...
As if that isn't horrific enough, they murder her before absconding with Carol...
When Bronson finally, mercifully, sets about avenging these deaths, one of the thugs pulls a fast one and takes the tourist woman he was about to assault, played by Melody Santangello, and uses her as a shield from Kersey's bullets...
There is virtually no way to justify this level of gratuitous sex and violence, though Winner would constantly fall back on the "you can't look away" excuse, as if these films had any sort of artistic value beyond pure exploitation.
Death Wish 3
Then again, don't ever let anyone tell you these aren't well constructed films, because they use an age-old storytelling device known as Chekov's gun, only here it's Chekov's bazooka.Don't get me wrong, this isn't some deep and long look into the basest desires of the human condition, it's a movie where the hero blows the villain out the side of a building with a bazooka. However, it is the kind of movie that knows good and god damned well enough to establish that bazooka before it's fired.
Death Wish 3 is kind of where it all comes together. If there's one film in the franchise that is its best singular representation, it's this one. 64 year old Kersey travels, via bus, back to New York City to visit his old war buddy, but arrives shortly after he has been murdered in his home by a gang known as The Creeps. Kersey teams up with an old-timer in the building played by Martin Balsam, as well as a cop (Ed Lauter) with a proclivity for calling people "dude" to take down the gang.
While the violence is at its most outrageous in this one, the nudity is every bit as off-putting. As a horny young fan of Marina Sirtis' Counsellor Troi on TNG, I was directed toward this film and found her nude scene to be every bit as awful as the rest of the nude scenes in the franchise...
She is then taken to a second location for more violation that culminates in her being hospitalized with what is told to Kersey to be simply "a broken arm"...
The unintentionally hilarious fallout from this incident is that in time it takes Kersey and Sirtis' brother to get to the hospital, she dies. It's never explained how or why, just that she "succumbed to her injuries." During the film's climactic gang war, we also get more bare breasts from Sandy Grizzle, whose victimization is interrupted by Kersey...
Winner hung it up after this one and took the nudity with him for Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, which was directed by longtime Bronson collaborator J. Lee Thompson, who directed some of Bronson's great non-Death Wish Death Wish movies like 10 to Midnight and Murphy's Law. Nudity would come back for the franchise finale, though...
Death Wish V: The Face of Death
This franchise has a tenuous relationship with roman numerals, only using them for entries II V, not 3 or 4. Bronson, now 73, returned for one last go around as Paul Kersey, this time avenging his murdered fiancee in the world of high fashion. During the film's opening credits, there are a good deal of topless women, though all of them uncredited. The only other nudity in the film comes from Sharolyn Sparrow.
The big breasted beauty has perhaps the most wholesome topless scene in the franchise, having a nude bath with her on-screen lover, mafia assassin Freddie Flakes. We get a great look at her breasts when Bronson blows Flakes up using a remote control soccer ball...
It may not be the best franchise of all time, and the nudity and sex are all good excuses to get up and get some more to drink or use the bathroom, but the Death Wish movies are a fantastic example of what can happen when a franchise strays miles and miles from where it started.
Check Out the Other Franchises in Our SKIN-depth Look Series
A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the National Lampoon's Theatrical Features
A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Porky's Trilogy
A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Terminator Franchise
A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the James Bond Franchise
A SKIN-depth Look at 25 Years of the NC-17 Rating
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All non-nude imagesvia IMDb
