8-Bit Agonies: Death Wish 3
Gangs. Horrible, nasty gangs. They won't be happy till they've raped and burned and killed us all (while covering our nicer buildings in graffiti). They are evil (just for the sake of it). They are also (as 70s cinema has taught me) implausibly heterogeneous. A dizzying mix of ethnicities united by a mutual desire to utterly destroy society. Members are fond of (yuk!) leather waistcoats over (ugh!) bare chests. Also, bandannas. And fingerless leather gloves. And switch-blade knives. Is there one good man among us who has the guts and gumption to stand up, step up and stop them?
Well, Charles Bronson – obviously. And the Aryan beefcake, vigilante heroes of side-scrolling, 1980s beat-em-up games. Men (both fleshy and pixellated) who've had enough. Men who refuse (unlike faggy liberal peaceniks) to merely talk and to think and to legislate.1 Men who oil up their pecs, grab the nearest rocket-launcher and start (Yeaaah!) blowing shit to fucking pieces.2
One of the more notorious articulations of such ass-whupping reactionary fantasising was Michael Winner's Death Wish 3 (1985). A "wipe the scum from the dirty streets" wank-fest it may well have been, but at least there was some pretence at narrative. Some context (gang members killed Bronson's best pal, or his auntie, or something). The C64/Amstrad/Speccy adaptations just plonked our virtual Bronson in a poorly-rendered cityscape and issued him with a stark and simple command.
The pre-game screens showed nervous old dears tottering along ravaged streets as shameless and wanton hussies hiked up their skirts.
The city, we were encouraged to infer, was fucked. An open sewer. Morally wrecked 'n' ruined by the excesses of a permissive society. Time to call forth the righteous fury of pixellated little Chuck.
Trouble was (as the above picture grimly demonstrates) it was almost impossible to blow away the gang baddies without the massed ranks of shuffling grannies getting in the way. Caught in the cross-fire, and shot with a revolver, they would fly backwards (see above) before crumpling into a piteous attitude of deadness. Here's a close-up…
She's still hanging on to her handbag. And the pension and boiled sweets within. It's horrible!
Though not as horrible as what happens when Chuck whips out his bazooka. Granny approaches…
Kablamoh!
Smoke clears to reveal…a pulped and scorched mass of dessicated granny-flesh lying oozing at Chuck's feet…
At this point, white-coated paramedics would sprint on, squat over the remains, and drag them slowly and hideously off-screen (where, presumably, they'd be reprocessed into yummy soylent green: foodstuff of choice for all urban dystopias).
Classic late-70s/early-80s stuff. Back when popular entertainments cheerily indulged the wannabe vigilante (or psychotic misogynist) in every 13-year-old boy (while shamelessly claiming a spurious moral high ground).
- It's Your Country, Your Call motherfucker! [back]
- The kind of men, in other words, who give weedy Daily Mail readers raging erections. [back]
April 25, 2010
3 responses to 8-Bit Agonies: Death Wish 3
Chuck looks oddly Elvis-like in that turquoise get-up.
Except Elvis never shot elderly women in their faces with a rocket launcher. Unless it’s in the out-takes of the comeback special…
Speaking of Elvis, I recently rewatched Flaming Star and he’s absolutely amazing in it. He could act. He really could. So could Chuck Bronson…back in the Great Escape, Once Upon a Time in the West days.
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