10 to Midnight (1983)

Wow!  I never thought it would be possible for a movie to a scummier pile of garbage than Death Wish II, but here we are.  I only hope that we’ve reached the basement, I do not want to imagine when lies at the depths lower than this.  This is weird little exploitation bit devoid of humanity about a filthy killer who hunts down and murders innocent young women while the camera leers over the rape and murder like a pornographer trying to get the “good stuff.”

This movie is yet another step down for Charles Bronson whose work lately has been retreads of his Death Wish vigilante.  He carries a big gun, stalks the streets looking for the worst filth that human kind has to offer, blows them away and then puts in a bid that this is somehow law and order.  This time he plays an L.A. cop named Kessler who investigates the murder of a young woman who was killed by a co-worker.  The killer is Warren Stacey, who just followed the girl into the woods, caught her having sex with her boyfriend, and then proceeded to stab both parties to death.

The M.O. is that he Stacey a kink.  He makes dirty calls to his victims and then when he has them nice and scared, he invades their homes, removes his clothes and chases them down with a butcher knife.  I didn’t actually believe that there could be an audience for this movie, but the two dozen folks leaving the theater where it was playing the other night have something to answer for.  I can only hope that they were as revulsed as I was, particularly the moment when the killer corners a naked woman and then stabs her to death in the shower.

I really can’t go any further because the back half of this movie makes no logical sense.  The killer target’s Bronson’s daughter, kills her roommates and then is chased all over creation by Bronson until the final confrontation.  As I say, it makes no logical sense but logic is not really what audiences would be expecting from this.  If you see this movie then you’re expecting the same kind of street justice nonsense that Bronson dished out in the Death Wish movies.  I guess you kind of get that but you have to wade through a lot of sick stuff to get there.  The killer stabs naked women to death.  I don’t want to know who that was made for.