Few statements are more powerful than "Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus present" and this film perfectly demonstrates why.

Leaning into every wrong lesson and instinct from the first Death Wish, this new Cannon Films iteration is meaner, uglier, nastier, far more violent and rape-happy, and even more reactionary. Swapping the grungy 1970s New York streets for sunny 1980s Los Angeles means the city is different, but the punks are just as just as bloodthirsty, and just as horny—maybe even worse.…

Relentless and pervasive "film school" vibes radiating off this. Hol up, you mean to tell me two young filmmakers who met in film school made a low-budget horror film in the woods of Southern California? Say it ain't so.

The attempt to off the film-within-the-film as a piece of lost media from the 1970s is laughable at best. It hits every mark: obvious digital cinematography, bad lighting, bad sound, obvious filters to emulate grain or scratches (but no cigarette…

Sure, it's contrived and ugly and it makes very little sense relative to its predecessor and it's full of horrible fake American accents and it's a movie about the orcs that live in the Mines of Moria with worse make-up, BUT consider this: the first one isn't very good either.

Minus half a star for some of the laziest sound editing I've ever heard in my life. Using straight-up unfiltered, unprocessed animal noises from a stock library as SFX vocalizations…