Friday night, kicking back on the couch, and I was in the mood for some Eighties Charles Bronson. Even if the movies are beneath Bronson’s resolute, granite-like presence, they are still compelling to me even if they go through the Death Wish motions. The Evil That Men Do (1984) again reunites Bronson with director J. Lee Thompson – though this one wasn’t made for Cannon Pictures. When the pre-title image was black-and-white slow-mo of Bronson throwing a knife at an unseen foe, I was in a good mood. Then there’s an utterly sweaty, ugly nightmarish sequence where a fiendish doctor who specialises in torture (played by Joseph Maher, who I usually associate with playing a snooty British guy in comedies and sitcoms) electrocutes a naked journalist to death through his testicles (oh yeah, this film is very unpleasant). Then we cut to Bronson as a retired assassin on a picturesque island saying hello to his pet fish in the ocean: the POV shot of Bronson’s face from the fish’s underwater perspective is a thing of beauty. Jose Ferrer arrives with a mission: find and kill this torture doctor to avenge your journalist buddy and for the good of humanity. Bronson declines, then thinks about it, and says, okay, let’s kill some sadists. From there, it is a slow-paced quest for vengeance in Mexico as Bronson hunts the doctor with the journalist’s widow (Theresa Saldana) and eventually starts picking off the doctor’s entourage of henchmen. The most memorable scene is when Bronson incapacitates a gigantic creep in a bar by grabbing his trouser snake and twisting it until the guy has passed out. Speaking of creeps, the great John Glover (from Gremlins 2: The New Batch and 52 Pick-Up) shows up as an untrustworthy American ambassador (naturally) with CIA ties and Glover plays him to a tee! This is as scuzzy and sleazy as any of the other Bronson Eighties movies but this also feels more like a Peckinpah pseudo-western in the second half and I enjoyed it a lot more than say the pseudo-slasher, 10 To Midnight. This will definitely not be for everyone but Bronson gets the job done. I streamed a HD copy for free from YouTube. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 