By TravisJohnson
The mooted remake of 1974’s vigilante exploitation shocker, Death Wish, has been simmering on MGM/Paramount’s back burner for a while now, but it’s starting to bubble again with the news that horror director Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Green Inferno) has signed on to helm the film.
Roth takes over from Israeli directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, whose horror/comedy, Big Bad Wolves, was widely praised – Quentin Tarantino called it the best movie of 2013. It’s interesting that MGM/Paramount seem to be courting horror directors for this one – perhaps this will be a much gorier and disturbing take on the source material.
Not that the original isn’t violent and disturbing in its own right. Adapted from the the novel by Brian Garfield (he hated the resulting movie with the fire of a thousand suns), Michael Winner’s Death Wish saw leathery everyman Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, a liberal architect who starts hunting criminals after a brutal attack on his wife and daughter. Interestingly, one of the murderous punks who attacks Kersey’s family is a young Jeff Goldblum:
They should definitely get him in for a cameo in the redux.
Death Wish spawned four increasingly ludicrous sequels,but the original is a powerful, ugly, discomfiting look at urban decay and middle class paranoia that tapped into the primal fears of mid-’70s America. A canny filmmaker should be able to do the same in these troubled times, and Roth certainly has chops. If Bruce Willis, who is stepping into Bronson’s shoes, actually engages with the material (never a safe bet these days) this could be really something.
