Death Wish II - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Death Wish II or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Death Wish II

[terry]

Producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus wanted Shaft (1971) music composer Isaac Hayes to compose the music. Director Michael Winner refused and brought in Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who at the time was his next-door neighbor.

[kristina]

Michael Winner said the film was "the same, but different," to the original. "That's what sequels are - Rocky II (1979), Rocky III (1982) - you don't see Sylvester Stallone move to the Congo and become a nurse. Here the look of Los Angeles is what's different. Besides - rape doesn't date!"

[willard]

Origianlly Natalie Wood would have starred in this movie and Menahem Golan was planned to direct, beginning principal photography mid-Jan 1981 in San Francisco, CA. However, Wood does not appear in the film, and Golan fulfilled the role of producer when Michael Winner joined the project as director.

[fred]

Paul Kersey's driver's license shows his date of birth as October 4, 1935, and his age as 45. In real life Charles Bronson was born on November 3rd 1921 and was 59 years old at the time of filming.

[ruby]

The film has since earned further money at home and abroad through release for the video market. A poll for HBO noted it to be higher in demand by paying viewers than Chariots of Fire (1981).

[chad]

David Engelbach admitted that he was "somewhat appalled" by the final film and how it differed from his original script. He felt that the rape scenes were added so that Michael Winner could "get his rocks off".

[claude]

Michael Winner tried to keep the mood on the set lighthearted. "Just because a film is terrifying, that doesn't mean the people making it have to be grim," he said.

[janice]

In West Germany, this movie set a record for the number of video-cassette units sold. There, ten thousand tape sales of the home video were sold in two months thereby producing royalties of over $ 0.5 million in its first year on video-tape.

[oscar]

Eager for brisk sales at foreign film markets, Cannon touted that the budget of the film was "Close to 10 million dollars" but actual production insiders said it was close to 2 million dollars.

[norma]

This is one of few films that Roger Ebert gave zero stars to, a rating that he famously reserved for films he found "artistically inept and morally repugnant". Ebert especially disliked Death Wish II for being "just a series of dumb killings, [..] underwritten and desperately underplotted, so that its witless action scenes alternate with lobotomized dialogue passages".

[eli]

In "Death Wish" Bronson ends up in Chicago. Here he's changed to Los Angeles. The move is explained in one line given by Vincent Gardenia.

[kyle]

Screenwriter David Engelbach argued the film raised "serious issues - namely, the deteriorating state of our criminal justice system. The actions of the Bronson character are dictated by the inability of the police to prevent crime, the preoccupation of the courts with technical rather than real justice, and the cancerous climate of fear in which we find ourselves today. Paul Kersey is no hero. In his pursuit of vengeance he loses the only emotional relationship of his life and by story's end has become as much a victim of crime as the thugs he leaves dead in his wake."

[gabriel]

This was the first film that both star Charles Bronson and director Michael Winner made with The Cannon Group, Inc. and producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. The two would make numerous movies with them throughout the 1980s, including one more together, Death Wish 3 (1985).