VIGILANTE (1983)

A minor classic of the "NYC violence/revenge" exploitation sub-genre, VIGILANTE is a film that greatly disturbed me when it came out, so once it finally became available on DVD, I decided to revisit it after nearly thirty years and see if it could possibly still affect me in such a way after all the nasty, nasty shit I've seen in movies since I was eighteen.

My man Fred Williamson as Nick, the very definition of the well-intentioned sociopath.

With VIGILANTE, director William Lustig — he of MANIAC (1980) infamy — crafts an '80's-to-the-core take on the established DEATH WISH scenario that opens with a pre-credits introduction to a group of citizens receiving a pep talk from a stogie-chomping Nick (my man Fred Williamson), the leader of the local "neighborhood watch," a cadre of toughs who handle what the police can't (or won't). This sequence sets the tone for the film's tense and dour attitude as Nick makes plain just how fucking sick he is of seeing the city become a morass of muggings, rape, drug dealing and all that kind of mess, with his speech serving to simultaneously rouse the territorially protective sentiments of the locals and possibly put the film's audience into a like mindset. That intro swiftly segues into the story proper, which begins with a woman entering the elevator in her tenement building, only to be abducted by a knife-wielding creep who hauls her up to the roof and rapes her (which we thankfully only see the preamble to). One of the building's residents, an elderly woman who was taking out her trash, witnesses the rapist making his escape, so none of the locals cooperate with the cops during their investigation because thanks to the old lady the vigilantes are on the case...

Contrasting Nick's no-nonsense eye-for-an-eye-ism is Eddie Marino, played by Robert Forster (who was excellent in JACKIE BROWN), an average Joe who's a mellow factory worker and doting family man who's also one of Nick's co-workers. When Eddie, Nick and some of their co-workers — who are also vigilantes — stop by a bar for some after work beers, one of the neighborhood cops drops in to cryptically warn that he and his fellow cops don't take kindly to citizens taking the law into their own hands and beating the living piss out of deserving scum. This exchange leads Eddie to ask Nick what it was all about, so Nick fills Eddie in on the whole vigilante posse thing. Since he's an optimist who sees a bright future for his family, Eddie isn't down with it and even asks Nick how he knows if he's any better than the vermin he opposes. Nick tellingly responds with how that's up to the individual to decide...

Once those opposing viewpoints are established, it's only moments until Eddie's wife runs afoul of Rico (Willie Colón), the vile leader of the equally-scabrous Headhunters street gang, whom she slaps in the face for dousing a gas station attendant with fuel when the attendant objects to the punk refusing to pay for a just-pumped tankful of gas. Followed home by Rico and his gang of scurvy thugs, she immediately finds herself on the receiving end of a home invasion that results in her toddler son being blown out of the third story window by a blast from a sawed-off shotgun and her barely surviving crippling injuries thanks to a stabbing just after witnessing her son's savage murder.

Prago (Don Blakely), all smiles a moment before blowing a toddler out a third-story window with a sawed-off shotgun.

When Rico, who has a rap sheet a mile long, is hauled in as the child's killer and receives a suspended sentence of two years from the corrupt judge, Eddie goes berserk in the court room and is himself sent up the river to Riker's Island for thirty days on a contempt of court charge. The rub here is that the actual killer of the child is gang member Prago (Don Blakely), but that plot point does not get addressed until the film's final act.

Once Eddie's in the slammer, legendary cinema badass Woody Strode protects him from being raped by a dude who looks like the sepia version of the Incredible Hulk, and during his stay we are led to believe that Eddie becomes hardened enough to willingly join Nick's vigilante force in order to exact even a measure of justice for his family.

"Thanks for the save from the shower room bufu, awesome nameless old dude!"

Meanwhile, during Eddie's absence, Nick and his posse have crossed the line from merely roughing-up creeps to outright murder, even killing folks who are not directly involved in the street messes the vigilantes seek to avenge, such as a crooked politician's driver and Rico's girlfriend. So it's a case of justifiable rage escalating into the realm of irredeemable, and once his court-mandated month in the slammer is up, Eddie's right there with Nick and friends in the thick of the lethal vengeance. Eddie even goes so far as to murder Prago — whose fall from a great height results in a graphic image of his body laying on the pavement with its brains splattered out — and he also suddenly gains expertise with rigging remote-controlled explosives that he uses to assassinate the corrupt judge who sent him to jail. The film then very abruptly ends with Eddie and the rest of the vigilantes still roaming the streets, presumably to continue killing at will.

The film goes out of its way to state that it's not an endorsement of vigilantism and depicts its well-meaning neighborhood patrol as every bit as savage as the scum they forcibly remove from the streets in their none-too-subtle black van and I suppose the ending was meant to be some sort of mordant commentary, but it left me deeply saddened and in need of something to cleanse my palate of the bleakness piled on during the film's running time. When I first saw VIGILANTE, I had just arrived at college and had yet to undergo the considerable corruption and jading that my college years afforded me, so I was still not as de-sensitized by the excesses of certain types of exploitation fare as I would eventually become. I love urban vengeance films, having been a fan of the genre since seeing the original DEATH WISH (1974), but VIGILANTE goes into darker areas that are rendered pitch black by the grimy exploitation-style filmmaking (which is not to say that the film is not well-made) and the result is one of the biggest downers in the sub-genre. We see Eddie go from a loving family man to being a stone-faced killer in short order — we're talking just over a month, plus however long it takes for the presumed killer to go to trial — and unlike a number of other urban vengeance films I can name, there is no sense of triumph or audience catharsis at the open-ended climax of his journey. I'm assuming that was the point, but still...

Both during my original viewing and during when I recently watched it, the thing that most turned me off about this film was the bit where Prago blows the toddler out the window with a sawed-off shotgun. It's truly horrible and while I don't think the deaths of children should be verboten in movies — especially not in films of this nature — the way it was handled here is truly horrible to a Stygian degree. It's not as gory as I remembered it being, but the blanks that the mind fills in as opposed to what is actually depicted are absolutely horrifying and it's something I really could have done without. I remembered it as being a moment where the report of the gun is heard and immediately followed by what looked like weighty, bloody hunks of meat propelled through the window and seen from the mother's point of view in the backyard, but what's actually seen is simply a gout of stage blood and no body. Nonetheless, it remains too nasty even for me.

The rest of the film is not an action flick, despite it being described as such in several online reviews, but rather a fairly serious look at vigilantism and how it can get out of hand. It's much more low key and thoughtful than a film of this ilk is supposed to be, and maybe that's why it hasn't vanished into the ether along with many other grindhouse efforts from its era. Oh, and among the film's highlights are:

• The film taking place in the cinema-verse's New York that's a veritable jungle of sociopaths, ranging from roving, fetishized multi-ethnic street gangs to appointed government officials. This is one of those New Yorks where the police exist for no real purpose other than to be completely impotent, pay lip service to investigating, and openly state that they don't condone vigilantism.
• Fred Williamson as Nick turns in what may be his very best performance.
• A moment that only people from the Tri-State Area at the time would find both true and hilarious: As Eddie pursues Prago with the intent to kill him, Prago steals a car and peels out, immediately turning the car's radio to WBLS.
• Even with the considerable amount of suspension of disbelief required for the exploitation genre in general and revenge pics in particular, proficiency with an RC toy airplane does not automatically translate to expertise with radio-controlled high explosives. Eddie's dispatching of the crooked judge would have been more believable in the context of a film like THE MECHANIC (1972).

Depressing though it may be, VIGILANTE is '80's to the core and is worth a look for vengeance cinema completists. Just don't expect to feel like life is worth living after sitting through it.

TENEMENT: GAME OF SURVIVAL (1985)

WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

Is there any better lure for an exploitation movie junkie than the promise of a film that was allegedly deemed too ultra-violent to be rated? That was certainly the case with TENEMENT: GAME OF SURVIVAL — aka SLAUGHTER IN THE SOUTH BRONX, which, if you ask me, is a better title — , a very, very nasty 1985 grindhouse classic that was legitimately awarded an X rating by the MPAA for its foul language and generous lashings of sadism, gore, and humanity-degrading brutality. I'd never heard of it until it popped up a while ago as one of three films included in a "Grindhouse Psychos" boxed set, and my interest was piqued as I read a description of its plot. I love revenge movies and films about people trapped in a location where they're pitted against psychos or monsters and there's no way out other than to become as savage as their assailants, and that's exactly what we get with this low budget, balls-out visceral mamma-jamma. (I don't know how the fuck I missed this during its theatrical run, but I'm guessing it came out during the period in my third year of college where the only movie I saw in the theater was RE-ANIMATOR.)

The Gang: these guys make the droogs in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE look like choir boys by comparison. And is it just me, or does the guy with the red sash have a kind of Shabadoo Quinones thing going on?

The plot of TENEMENT is a study in exploitation movie simplicity: a bunch of totally '80's multi-racial thugs/gang members of the type common to films like VIGILANTE, SAVAGE STREETS and the sublime DEATH WISH 3 are hanging around in the basement of some South Bronx shithole tenement building — located in an area so desolate that it's nearly as surreal as the myth-ready wasteland in THE ROAD WARRIOR — snorting Angel Dust off of switchblades (no, really) and apparently eating rats (no, really) while making feeble attempts at break dancing, but otherwise not bothering anybody. The building's drunken Hispanic busybody of a superintendent calls the cops and has the gang busted, but the gang hears the approaching cops and has time to rid themselves of their stash and hide their weapons before their trip to the local precinct. The super mocks them to their faces as they're led away and the building's residents immediately throw a party to celebrate, secure in the knowledge that the gang is gone for good. Seeing as we're only about eight minutes into the movie at that point, it's no surprise to viewers when the gang is released a few hours later due to lack of evidence. Once freed, the gang scores some primo Angel Dust, gets staggeringly high (their leader has crazed, blood-filled visions), and embarks on a vicious mission of payback that sees them make their way up the tenement floor by floor, raping, killing and mercilessly torturing as they go.

That's pretty much it as far as the basic plot goes, so the bulk of the film is taken up with the building's residents being horribly slaughtered and finally banding together once they've had enough. As is par for the course with the urban terror genre, the tenement's residents are a corny collection of ethnic/religious stereotypes straight from Central Casting:

• an unwed, very pregnant Hispanic girl
• her "Ay-yi-yi"-accented mother
• the bitter black handyman who becomes the de facto leader of the residents.
• a tough-as-nails Jewish old lady from "the old country"
• a loving middle-aged black couple, of which the wife is a broad-beamed complainer who would be right at home in a Baptist revival meeting
• the savvy black single mother who fantasizes about moving to a Park Avenue apartment where she can raise her daughter in safety while drinking champagne all day
• a blind Hispanic man and his companion dog
• a number of cute kids for instant audience sympathy
• the once-well-off white girl who's become a whore in order to pay for her boyfriend's raging heroin habit

There's little attempt at characterization, but that's beside the point since we're given all we need to know in brief bits of character shorthand since the real point of the movie is the carnage and the fighting back in response to it. And what carnage it is! I haven't seen so much red paint used in lieu of stage blood since the LONE WOLF AND CUB movies or one of Chang Cheh's Shaw Brothers flicks, and every now and then random bits of ripped out (and hard to identify) internal organs are on display. We're even treated to a bit where the head creep, Chaco (Enrique Sandino), and the gang's sole female member get it on beside the corpse of one of their fallen comrades (who was ingeniously killed when he shot up what he thought was heroin but was instead rat poison) and his gut-stabbed victim, engaging in some blood-smeared foreplay that made me laugh out loud at how fucking sick it was.

The only way this bit could have been more repulsive is if Chaco had wanked off between her blood-anointed tits.

The film is certainly not shy in the violence department and its "X" was earned due to that and relentless uses of "motherfucker" in the dialogue. According to director Roberta Findlay's commentary, there was actually a point when multiple uses of the F-bomb, especially when used in a maternally incestuous context, would ensure an X-rating, which would explain why RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT (1979) went out unrated. Then again, John Waters' A DIRTY SHAME (2004) reportedly earned its NC-17 for dialogue involving frank sexuality and concepts related to various kinky acts, so I guess things haven't really changed at all...

But the one sequence that really gained TENEMENT its X is one of the nastiest rape scenes ever committed to celluloid, and it's even more amazing/horrifying because it has such hideous impact without showing one bit of nudity. It's often been said that what the viewer can come up with in his or her imagination is far worse than anything a director can show directly onscreen, and that's proven true by this scene. The rapee is hauled into her bedroom by about four gang members and has her wrists tied as the assault begins, but a pair of sewing shears is within reach on her nightstand and she swiftly grabs them and plunges them through the eye and into the brain of her rapist, killing him stone dead. That was shocking enough, but then the remaining gang scum proceed to pummel her senseless before hitting upon the unsavory idea of killing her by unceremoniously shoving a broom handle into a place where such household items were in no way intended to go... This landmark in cinematic good taste occurs while the woman's five-year-old daughter hides in the closet, eventually coming out once the gang has taken their leave, there to discover her mother's horribly violated corpse.

Do I need to tell you I don't recommend this one as a date movie?

Following that bit of business and several other heinous atrocities, the tenants take the fight to the gang in earnest, resorting to blunt instruments, scalding water, a swiftly MacGyvered electrified fence, and other defenses before the day is eventually won by a handful of survivors.

Lesson learned: an old Jewish broad with a grip-taped baseball bat is a dangerous thing.

TENEMENT is a down-and-dirty, relentlessly vicious story that appeals to those who can handle it because it's simply impossible not to put yourself in the place of the besieged tenants. Made in the years before cell phones and during the days when a cut phone line meant no way of contacting help, this is an urban horror story that brings one back to the bygone time when New York City could still (almost) believably be depicted as an earthly manifestation of Hell itself. It's kind of a campfire horror story transplanted from the deep woods into the concrete jungle and as such it's very effective, provided one can stomach its excesses. I know I could, and stories about people resorting to savagery when backed against a wall have for some reason always spoken to some dark place deep within me, so if you also understand the appeal of that primal, on-the-defensive animal urge, by all means give TENEMENT: GAME OF SURVIVAL a look. It ain't great cinema by any means, but you can certainly do worse with a Netflix choice.

YOKOHAMA UNDERWORLD: MACHINE GUN DRAGON (1978)

Two words: Caveat emptor.

While most martial arts movie buffs favor Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, my ass-kicker of choice is my man Sonny Chiba, so when a four-film set of Chiba flicks I had not seen hit the video store shelves, how could I pass it up? I'll review all four films as I watch them, and the first one up is 1978's YOKOHAMA UNDERWORLD: MACHINE GUN DRAGON, a film starring not Chiba, but instead Bunta Sugawara, an actor renowned for playing assorted yakuza toughs and criminals in flicks like the BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR OR HUMANITY series.

Poster from the Japanese release of YOKOHAMA UNDERGROUND: MACHINE GUN DRAGON, featuring Bunta Sugawara in fetching pimp attire and opera cape. Note the conspicuous absence of Sonny Chiba anywhere on the poster.

The flick is typical of the yakuza pictures of its era and tells the story of a criminal who, with the aid of his equally criminal (and apparently incestuously-inclined) mom, steals a valuable shipment of drugs (about enough to fit into a medium-sized backpack) from a local crime syndicate. The pair stash the drugs in a wall deep within a sewer and lay low, hopefully until the media attention and mob interest dies down, but their identity is sussed out when a newspaper picture of the heist's aftermath clearly shows the machine gun used to mow down the drug mules. Automatic weapons are hard to come by in Japan, so the ripped-off crime lord sends his men to find out who sold the particular weapon, thereby learning the thief's identity in the process, and from there the mother and son duo must contend with corrupt cops, the irritated local yakuza boss, and his equally-pissed-off American mafia partners. It all gets off to an entertaining enough start, but once the film reaches the halfway mark it just coasts along in a very much by the numbers manner before reaching its "who cares?" conclusion, a climax marked with the over-wrought melodrama and would-be "moving" theme song common to the genre.

You'll notice that I make no mention of my man Sonny Chiba, and there's good reason for that. Chiba plays a bearded purveyor of illegal passports, and he shows up for all of maybe — maybe — two minutes of screen time right near the movie's final fifteen minutes. He sells passports for the hero, his girlfriend and a fellow escaped prison inmate (don't ask) who turns out to be a planted yakuza agent, and once the passport salesman recognizes the plant, he kicks the living shit out of the guy in the signature Chiba way. It's the most one-sided fight I've ever seen; it's Chiba against a vastly weaker opponent, a guy so hopeless that I could envision my 22-years dead grandmother beating the piss out of the poor bastard. Once that non-fight is over, so is Chiba's part. That's it. He just fucks off to god knows where, and all we're left with is Sugawara's uninvolving attempt to flee to Korea by means of a fishing boat. The whole mess ends with Sugawara getting into a machine gun battle against encroaching yakuza and mafia thugs (right after a black mafia enforcer slashes Sugawara's character-void girlfriend's throat with a straight razor), by which point I had long since ceased to be interested.

I'm hoping the remaining films in the set are better than YOKOHAMA UNDERWORLD: MACHINE GUN DRAGON, but the Japanese action films of the period are a famously mixed bag, so I'll go into the next three with zero expectations.