Review – Death Wish 5: The Face of Death

It’s a good thing the cross-dressing psycho hit man decides to carve up the love interest’s face instead of her posterior; I can only imagine the marketing nightmares associated with a movie sub-titled “The Ass of Death.” Still, in many ways such a sobriquet would have been more fitting. For starters, this is the ass-end of the Death Wish series, released two decades after the first one hit theaters. But even more, the whole thing has a distinctly fecal odor about it. Though as of this writing I’ve never seen any of the other movies in the set, it isn’t hard to recognize the presence of a stiff, formulaic approach to plot and character. The first half of the production builds hatred for the bad guys, and then Charles Bronson steps in and spends the back half inflicting fanatical vengeance on them. After 20 years they seem to have run out of clever villain-offing techniques, leaving our hero with self-parodying modi operandi such as a poisoned pastry and an exploding, remote-control soccer ball. In the end the final, prevailing justice is the absence of a Death Wish 6. Mildly amusing