Death Wish II
Vigilantism comes to the streets of LA. This is much less downright fascist, it’s less ideological, most plot decisions are done for Doylist reasons.
Just like the last time, the trigger is a completely insane random act of violence. As our protagonist buys some ice cream, his wallet is stolen, but he can’t take it back, a guy even pulls a switchblade on him.
The use the information on his documents, track down his house, then savagely rape and murder the poor Mexican housekeeper, spring a trap for him where he is knocked out and his catatonic daughter is snatched. On their hideout she is eventually brutally raped (again!), so this time she jumps off a window and commits suicide.
After this, our protagonist gets a gun and pretends to be a hobo, when looking for the killer rapists. He just shrugs the cops completely, they are a joke.
One by one, he keeps running into the guys and just murders them in cold blood. They are usually committing other crimes in the meantime. There’s a lot of T&A involved in the crimes too.
Alas, the cops aren’t so dumb, and word eventually reaches the old New York detective. He breaks into his girlfriend’s house and straight up says the dude murdered nine people in New York, and he’s doing it again.
Since she’s a news person, she is very sceptical, so ask the protagonist straight away. He fully reaches villainy and lies, spinning some tale about the detective being a crazy person and shit. He still knows what he is doing is wrong, it seems.
In the last big shootout, where actively wanted criminals casually harass a nurse on the bus on their way to buying a MAC-10 and some assault rifles, the New York cop joins on the side of the protagonist and gets killed.
Only one guy remains, but he is caught and sent to psych ward, since he was high on PCP, a schedule II substance. During the Reagan years, War on Drugs raging, and there is leniency for random junkies, what a crock of shit.
Anyway, this requires more finesse, he’s in the clink already. Our protagonist leverages his girlfriend to visit the hospital, casing the joint. He steals some ID, replaces it with his picture, and eventually gets a face-to-face meeting with the guy. It’s very simple, he draws the pistol and shoots him, but this is a very strong dude that dodges, throws chairs and tables, and they struggle for a while. He is finally electrocuted and dies, but our protagonist is a bit banged up.
Since the nurse guarding the place is a secret fascist too, he lets him go. Alas, the girlfriend discovers evidence our protagonist is murderer and dumps him right away, since he lied about not having murdered dozens of humans. They were even engaged to marry in Mexico.
Just like last time, there’s a future star in a minor role of a bandit: Laurence Fishburne has a stylish costume and everything, for a rapist killer.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.