As a wise woman once said, “All movies are lies and anyone who watches them is a sinner.” OK, she wasn’t so much “wise” as she was “living in an old boat in the woods behind my house,” but it was said by someone and you can’t prove otherwise.
Her spittle-firing maxim is certainly lent credence by the trailer for the film Death Kiss. This upcoming, supposedly budget-having action flick boasts a plot eerily similar to that of 1974’s Death Wish, a documentary about an elderly vigilante who, after his wife was murdered and his daughter raped, found a way to singlehandedly curb the crime rate in New York City by shooting it. Also eerie is the resemblance of Death Kiss’ lead actor to Death Wish’s subject, the very-much-dead Paul Kersey. The makers of this film would like you to believe that actor Robert Bronzi simply looks like the late Kersey — that it’s just coincidence.
Forgive the use of vulgar language, but that’s a load of hooey.
An anonymous but still totally very real source has submitted evidence that leads us to believe Robert Bronzi isn’t merely a dead ringer for Kersey — he is, in fact, Kersey. Evidently some deranged lunatic has developed the technology necessary to reanimate human tissue long after death. In fact, after digging into some historical documents, it is quite clear that this madman has been engaging in this necromancy for quite some time. Not only has Kersey been reanimated, but over the years several of his victims have similarly been granted unnatural passage back to this mortal coil. Below is a list of those formerly deceased victims, and just to reiterate, we used historical documents to provide our evidence. We did not use movies because movies lie.
Name: Cutter
Date of Death: 1982
Historical Document: Death Wish II
One of the members of a violent gang that raped Paul Kersey’s daughter — who was already traumatized from the previous time she was attacked by a gang of young men — Cutter was subsequently confronted by Kersey who made darned certain that he faced the music. That sounds like a pun, and it is, but it’s also quite accurate. Kersey fired a shot from his inordinately enormous handgun and the bullet managed to travel through a boom box on its way to Cutter’s cranium. For those of you who don’t recall, a boom box was like a really big Spotify receptacle.
Make no mistake, Cutter was cut down. And yet many years later, he was spotted breathing as the leader of a cult of cyber punk karate-doers. These techno-kickers would babble on incessantly about how reality isn’t real and machines were using humanity as batteries. You know, pretty much on par with what you’d hear that lady in the boat shrieking while I’m trying to sleep.
The post-mortem rebranding as a machine-averse leather priest seemed appropriate for a man whose abrupt finale occurred when a machine from the ‘80s failed to protect him from an old man’s .44 caliber fury.
Name: Hermosa
Date of Death: 1985
Historical Document: Death Wish 3
In 1985, Paul Kersey graduated from lovable sexagenarian vigilante to one-man merc army who stumbles his way through leveling entire neighborhoods. It became almost a bizarre form of urban renewal. Imagine Flip This House, except instead of flipping a home from dilapidated to desirable, entire city blocks are flipped from dilapidated to debris with the aid of a rocket launcher. This move was possibly Kersey’s biggest misstep, because while he did eradicate/murder the overwhelming criminal element in that neighborhood, he also inadvertently gentrified all the residents out of their homes as several all-too-expensive condos were erected on the rubble.
One such criminal who felt the cold steel of rocket-propelled vengeance was a bemulleted punk with a penchant for hitching a ride on the windshields of his terrified victims. He’s like one of those Garfields or Baby-On-Board signs if those kitschy car décor items could scream at you and demand your wallet. His name was Hermosa, and though it wasn’t Kersey who killed him, he did corrupt a police detective into making sure Hermosa, like many of the local shops in the area, went down in flames. Seriously, the neighbor battle scene was so intense that an elderly version of Matt Damon still thinks about it and demands we tell him that he’s led a good life.
But again, the curse of death has been broken as Hermosa was also resurrected. How do we know this? A well-placed source happened to be attending the strangely public live performances of one high school history class’s end-of-the-year projects in San Dimas, Calif. To his credit, Zombie Hermosa, now assuming the name Bill S. Preston, Esq., delivered a spectacular project with his friend Ted “Theodore” Logan that featured several real figures from throughout time. So obviously whatever maniac is behind this mass reanimating of Kersey victims was somehow also allowing the victims to reanimate anyone else they saw fit.
Who is this villain? Did he devise this technology himself or did he acquire it from another source? It would have to be an incredibly advanced source, perhaps even extraterrestrial in nature. How would he obtain alien technology? And why is he sharing it with weirdo cult leaders and high school slackers?
Name: Art Sanella
Date of Death: 1987
Historical Document: Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
Ah yes, The Crackdown. In which Paul Kersey has had it up to here and is cracking down on anyone who is breathing but isn’t Paul Kersey. In one particular campaign of his one-man war against cocaine (a tall order in the late ‘80s, to be certain), Kersey visits a Los Angeles bar posing as a sommelier. He never says the word “sommelier” apparently for fear that it would reduce his tough guy hit points and make his mustache fall off. He proceeds to sit down at a table with a trio of shady characters all with well-established ties to narcotics, in that they are all definitely connected to narcotics and it is well-established that they are wearing ties.
Kersey approaches under the guise of wanting to sell them a bottle of wine from his Napa Valley-based winery. Turns out, that bottle of wine is a homemade grenade that promptly incinerates Art and his associates. Was it a sauvignon bang? A syrahhhh? Or a destroy-the-whole-house red? We can’t be certain, so we won’t even ask.
Yet despite that obvious exploding in 1987, we have uncovered two different historical documents indicating that Art Sanella is once again alive and living in Texas and Mexico under the ridiculous pseudonym Machete. This underworld folk hero has garnered a reputation for cutting down bad guys and leaving plenty of severed limbs and painfully visible plot problems in his wake. It would seem that Art has, in his second turn at life, taken up Paul Kersey’s mission of cracking down on scumbags.
Is that this mysterious puppet-master’s game? To bring back to life those despicable criminals vigilanted by Paul Kersey and offer them a fresh start? I mean sure, Morpheus is strange and buys much of his wardrobe from Hot Topic, but he seems to have gathered a following of people who feel he has shown them the real world. And while it is true that Bill S. Preston, Esq. struggled to pass high school history, he’s also apparently a lawyer, so that’s good. And while Machete murders so many people as to make Kersey look lazy, he too seems to focus his homicidal efforts on bad guys. Is that the connection?
UPDATE: We have identified the man responsible for this rash of resurrections.
The culprit is an MIT graduate and former satellite technician named David Levinson. You will remember David from that time he thwarted the extinction of humanity at the hands of invading aliens. You don’t remember that? With the White House exploding and the literally universal Apple software? It was all over the news. It even happened a second time in a crisis that, admittedly, very few people saw.
Our hunch has proven correct. Levinson was using acquired extraterrestrial tech to “pull a Lazarus” on all these Kersey victims and is likely responsible for the return of Kersey himself. But why do it? Why secretly reanimate to rehabilitate? Yes, it would make a very catch slogan for T-shirts or trucker hats, but what is your real motivation, David?
David.
Hang on a minute, wasn’t there another reel of footage? Older footage of a younger David…
Oh god, it’s him.
David was one of the young punks who attacked Paul Kersey’s family in the first documentary!
He was never caught, nor did Kersey find him and grant him a .44 caliber delivery to his maker. David must have been racked with guilt, shaken off his violent youth, and focused on his education; rising to a level of technical mastery that uniquely positioned him to so morbidly make amends.
Checkmate.
