Mini Review
Day 25: Revenge!
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987)
The prompt for the day is ‘Revenge’ and after starting my journey through the Death Wish sequels for last year’s Junesploitation with Death Wish II (1982), I decided to go with Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987) and watch Charles Bronson do his thing. You may wonder why I did not pick Death Wish III (1985), well that film was watched for an episode of The Tubi Tuesdays Podcast.
The film sets up that Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) is now once again working as an architect and gets caught up in a huge drug war. The daughter of his girlfriend who did not do drugs was found dying from an overdose and this uncovers the selling of the drugs to youngsters. Kersey sets out to deal with the problem but is soon pulled in to take out more than drug pushers with all the higher ups in the drug gangs.
Paul Kersey sure managed to get caught up in a lot of plots and killed a lot of people and didn’t end up behind bars for it. He once again becomes the vigilante who takes out the bad guys (maybe some collateral damage too) and these are very bad guys for what they do with pushing drugs on kids. The film focuses on the action and less on the plot, going into a Death Wish film, you kind of just want to see Charles Bronson give no cares in the world and do away with the baddies and it delivers. Whilst this had a noticeably smaller budget, it works better than the previous sequels by not being extremely sleazy and grimy. Bronson somehow managed to pull off playing the character again, with perhaps his best turn in the role since the original.
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Mini Review
Day 26: Free Space!
Zombie 4 (1989) aka After Death
Using the ‘Free Space’ prompt for a Claudio Fragrasso film may seem like a bad move, however after watching a Bruno Mattei film earlier this month it seemed only fair to have something from Claudio. Zombie 4 (1989) aka After Death may just be one of the better films by the infamous director, this is the Troll 2 (1990) of Zombie films.
On an island it appears a plague of zombies has been unleashed due to voodoo, explorers come across a voodoo Priest and are attacked by the undead, only a small girl escapes. Years later when the girl is grown up she organises her own search to seek out what happened to her parents and the undead are still lurking.
This film has voodoo and zombies, it is overly nonsensical and quite hilarious at times. The film certainly drags though, there are a lot of scenes with repeated music (you can hear the music starting again) and people walking around. Quite similar to Shocking Dark (1989) and Robowar (1988) in that way, much like those films the scenes where things happen are extremely entertaining and ridiculous. Along with Troll 2 and Night Killer (1990), this is one of the better and more enjoyable Claudio Fragrasso films.
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Reviews written by Marcella Papandrea
Please check out FThisMovie.net, with many thanks to the crew for the concept of Junesploitation and some excellent prompts for 2022!
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