-My girlfriend after she woke up to find me watching this this morning
Part four of a franchise that lasted five films in total, "Death Wish 4: The Crackdown" was directed by long-time Charles Bronson director J. Lee Thompson and came out in 1987. Thompson and Bronson did 9 movies together, including one of my favorite Bronson movies, "10 To Midnight," which I saw, for some reason, a LOT as a kid. I think it was one of the few tapes we had.
Anyway, the movie follows Bronson (whose character is clearly hated by God because everybody he loves gets murdered or beaten at the start of these movies) after the death of his girlfriend's daughter. Then he gets recruited to murder some drug dealers, which he does with FULL FORCE (he was 65 when he filmed this, by the way), before he's double-crossed and then some other stuff happens and then it ends. But not before Bronson VAPORIZES an old dude bad guy by using a rocket launcher on his gold-chain-wearing ass from about 20 feet away. Check it:
"Death Wish 4" has some cool '80s sets like an arcade, a roller rink, and a VHS rental store! It also has cameos by that bald guy who was Mulder's boss on "The X-Files," the girl who played Audrey in the very first "Vacation" movie, the guy who played a black Vulcan on Star Trek: Voyager, that tall bro who was in charge of the odd street gang in Return of the Living Dead 3, and Danny Trejo. Trejo gets blown up by a bomb hidden in a wine bottle. It's nuts.
Here's the trailer:
And here's a clip of JUST the murders that Bronson has a hand in:
My copy of the VHS tape has a lot of wear, but the cassette played just fine. I picked it up at a used section in our local Barnes & Noble, which is an odd thing for a Barnes & Noble to have, I think. It was originally $3, then became $1.50, and then I bought it at $.60! Here's the box:
I'm really itching to watch the other 4 now. I remember catching a bit of part one waaaaay back and it scared the living pee out of me.
