The affection for Cannon Films in the land down under gives international viewers a region free two-disc special edition of DEATH WISH II and DEATH WISH 3 from Umbrella Entertainment.

Having moved to his business to Los Angeles after the murder of his wife and escaping capture for the vigilante killings that followed, architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson, VIOLENT CITY) has settled into a new life with his traumatized daughter Carol (Robin Sherwood, TOURIST TRAP) undergoing treatment in a nearby mental hospital and a new love interest in Geri Nichols (Jill Ireland, HARD TIMES), a reporter for the radio station for which Paul is designing a new building. When his wallet is stolen by a street gang, he gives chase and beats up Jiver (Stuart K. Robinson, ROCKY II) who does not have his wallet but wants revenge for the humiliation. While Paul and Carol are on the water with his pal Elliott (Michael Prince, THE ANDERSON TAPES), Jiver and the other gang members – Nirvana (Thomas F. Duffy, THE ABYSS), Stomper (Kevyn Major Howard, SUDDEN IMPACT), Cutter (Laurence Fishburne, THE MATRIX), and Punkcut (E. Lamont Johnson, FOXES) – lie in wait to ambush him at his apartment after raping housekeeper Rosario (Silvana Gallardo, WINDWALKER). When Paul and Carol return, they knock him out, kill Rosario when she tries to call the police, and kidnap Carol. No sooner do the police start investigating than Paul is called in to identify the Carol's brutalized body. Rather than helping Inspector Mankiewicz (Ben Frank, DON'T ANSWER THE PHONE) try to identify his attackers, Paul checks into a downtown motel under an assumed name, arms himself with his trusty automatic, and starts hunting down his daughter's killers. Fearing bad publicity and a public panic after declaring his own war on crime, Police Commissioner Herman Baldwin (Anthony Franciosa, TENEBRAE) wants this vigilante off the streets before the press gets wind of him and sends word to New York to learn how they stopped their own vigilante killer. Fearing that he will be blamed for not prosecuting Kersey if he is caught, the New York D.A. sends the original case's Detective Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia, MOONSTRUCK) to Los Angeles to misdirect the investigation so that he might silence Kersey himself.

Michael Winner's original hit DEATH WISH – based on the novel by Brian Garfield who hated the film because he felt it glorified the vigilante violence the book ultimately condemned – was quite an extreme work for 1974 that it was hard to imagine how a Golan-Globus venture could up the exploitation ante beyond their usual standards. Transcend it they did with Winner reveling in the film's two rape scenes ostensibly to paint the villains as particularly evil and deserving of Kersey's brand of justice. Although the film throws in some additional complications, it is just an eighties retread of the original with the screenplay of David Engelbach (AMERICA 3000) much reworked by himself (as explained in the extras) and then reworked by Winner himself, basically paying lip service to the idea of rehabilitation – an element possibly retained only to give Bronson's wife Ireland something to do in the film – and doing nothing with prominently-billed Franciosa and thanklessly carrying over Gardenia to mark time up until the ending (which does at least spring ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13's Charles Cyphers on us in the last ten minutes). The film's sexualized violence repels but it really may be all that distinguishes his film from a glut of DIRTY HARRY and Chuck Norris revenge films since the original film since the villains are ultimately too cartoonish and picked off too easily by a sleepwalking Bronson to deliver a visceral thrill. Attributing the film's scoring solely to guitarist Jimmy Page is a bit of a cheat since the film's arrangements were done by David Whitaker (SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN) and the more dramatic moments feature some orchestral music that sounds nothing like the main themes dominated by Page's acoustic twang. The same can be said for DEATH WISH 3 in which Page gets credit for composition and performing on guitars and synthesizers while the arrangements and additional synthesizer performance is credited to Mike Moran (TIME BANDITS).

Kersey returns to the Big Apple (or a reasonable facsimile of it) in DEATH WISH 3, having turned professional vigilante in the aftermath of the second film but arriving too late in response to an urgent letter from friend Charley (Francis Drake, HAUNTED HONEYMOON) whose beaten body he discovers moments before the police arrive and arrest him. Kersey gives up nothing under brutal police interrogation but he is recognized by police Chief Shriker (Ed Lauter, BREAKHEART PASS) who was on the vigilante squad a decade ago. He throws Kersey into the cooling tank without any charges where he is nearly killed by psychopath Fraker (Gavan O'Herlihy, WILLOW) who vows to kill him the next time he sees him. With the crime rate in the Belmont and Sutter neighborhood where Charley lived rising and the police getting flak from the press, Shriker decides to let Kersey loose on the area provided that he answers to him and throws some busts his way. Taking residence in Charley's old apartment, he befriends Charley's WWII buddy Bennett (Martin Balsam, PSYCHO) who reveals that Charley and the other elderly residents in the building are having their Social Security checks and having their belongings burgled by Fraker's gang who are also shaking down the local businesses for protection money. After baiting the gang and gunning down some of them – taking down The Giggler (Kirk Taylor, FULL METAL JACKET) with a special handgun that takes ammunition meant for big game-hunting – he becomes the neighborhood hero but also brings the gang's wrath down on the neighborhood and turns a riot into an all-out war.

Winner' second sequel to DEATH WISH has its share of female brutalization but is ultimately a more gentrified entry, with its plot reminiscent of an old episode of ADAM-12 about elderly business owners getting shaken down by street thugs with the likes of Balsam's grizzled army vet, elderly Jewish and Russian couples, a sassy black woman (Birdie M. Hale, COMING TO AMERICA) who boxes the ears of a mugger, and a Latino couple (STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION's Marina Sirtis and Joe Gonzalez who would later work behind the scenes on shows like LAW & ORDER and BOSCH) as potential victims. While the substitution of London for a New York suburb is fairly convincing thanks to the production design of the PINK PANTHER series' Peter Mullins, it is not the heavy post-dubbing of secondary characters that is to blame for the lack of menace in the gang from O'Herlihy's sadist or his punk girlfriend (HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II's Barbie Wilde) to a number of black and Latino actors who were bound to be day players on various crime show throughout the eighties (with BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE's Alex Winter being the least convincing Cuban as "Hermosa"). The violence directed at the innocent victims feels dulled compared to the previous entry, but the explosive climax generates some suspense and excitement even though Kersey's picking off hundreds of gang members with a WWII machine gun and missile launcher feels more like a video game. Although Bronson and the character Kersey would become pretty much synonymous in the eighties, his eighties ventures with director J. Lee Thompson for Cannon like 10 TO MIDNIGHT, MESSENGER OF DEATH, and KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS – along with THE EVIL THAT MEN DO for ITC – were not only more entertaining but could be equally grisly than his works with Winner (whose non-Bronson works for Cannon were rather toothless).

Released theatrically by Filmways, DEATH WISH was shorn of three minutes of thrusting, groping, beating, and bloodshed for an R-rating, with the unrated version showing up overseas, most notably a Greek VHS that also had some additional bits of dialogue and scene extensions that Winner had removed from his director's cut. The R-rated version prevailed on DVD from MGM in a fullscreen transfer and TGG Direct in a widescreen two-disc double feature as well as international territories where MGM owned the film while territories in which Sony owned it got the unrated version. MGM's barebones Blu-ray edition of the film – a three-disc set with DEATH WISH 3 and DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN – was also the R-rated version, but Shout! Factory followed it up with a single-disc edition that featured both the R-rated and unrated versions, the latter with an audio commentary by BRONSON'S LOOSE author Paul Talbot. DEATH WISH 3 managed to scrape through with an R-rating and was distributed theatrically by Cannon with a home video release by MGM. As with the second film, MGM's DVD was fullscreen while the TGG reissue was anamorphic widescreen, but MGM's Blu-ray has not as yet received a special edition upgrade domestically.

Umbrella Entertainent's Blu-ray double feature utilizes the same masters for their 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen encodes with a midrange bitrate to accommodate the five-and-a-half hours of content on a BD50. The compression is workable for the most part in motion with some distortion in high frequency detail rarely calling attention to itself (the patterns on the kimonos worn at the Chinese restaurant late in the second film are most noticeable). The disc was originally issued with lossy Dolby Digital audio tracks but has been corrected with DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono on the DEATH WISH II and DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono on DEATH WISH 3. The dialogue, music, and effects are well-served by the digital tracks – clean enough that post-dubbed dialogue is apparent, particularly in the third film – while the optional English subtitles have one or two proofing errors and an error or two that suggest the transcriber was unfamiliar with the California setting (with Geri telling Paul she was going to spends some time with friends in "Carmella" instead of Carmel).

The Talbot commentary from the Shout! Factory disc has not been carried over but the unrated version is preceded by text screens by Talbot detailing the material while a dual-layer, region free NTSC bonus DVD features the film's R-rated cut (89:48) in anamorphic widescreen – the windowboxing of the presentation suggests that it is derived from the earlier SD master rather than the HD master of the R-rated version that appeared on the US discs but it is doubtful viewers will be watching it in full and fans probably already bought either the MGM Blu-ray or the Shout! already – the aforementioned Greek VHS cut (94:33) in fullscreen and poor quality, and the film's television cut (93:57) which cuts and substitutes violence and nudity but also features a few brief scenes and extensions not included in the R-rated, theatrical, or Greek cuts of the film. The TV version is also fullscreen but the master was in better condition visually. The sound on both the Greek and television cuts is lower and a bit buzzy. Talbot also contributes liner notes preceding all three versions, noting the differences and also positing that the Greek VHS cut might have come from a workprint video that somehow wound up with the Greek video company. An optional English subtitle track shows up intermittently on the TV cut noting differences.

The Blu-ray side of the package also includes a collection of extended interviews from Mark Hartley's documentary ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS with three pertaining to DEATH WISH II. In the first with writer Engelbach (12:54), he recalls being approached by the first film's producers Hal Landers (DAMNATION ALLEY) and Bobby Roberts (MONTE WALSH) to write the sequel under the impression that they had the rights and that Bronson was signed on – as well as the condition that Ireland would not be involved – only to then have to rewrite it when he learned that they did not have the rights and Bronson was not involved, and then to rewrite it again when it was a go with Bronson. He describes how different his script was before Winner became involved and has nothing good to say about the man, outright calling him a misogynist who dwelled on the rape scenes – it was rumored that the original crew quit after shooting the rape of the housekeeper which reportedly took six days to film – and also disparages Bronson's performance. In the interview with Roberts' son Todd (35:07), he recalls Golan and Globus as the movers behind the sequel and the hiring of Engelbach who wanted to direct film and was likely promised it, but also recalls that it was Engelbach's delivery of the script to Bronson's residence that offended the actor who pulled out only to show interest months later. He suggests that his father was not offended by the vigilante violence but felt that the sexual violence went too far and that was the reason why he was not involved in any of the subsequent sequels. In her interview, actress Sherwood (26:05) provides somewhat kinder recollections of Golan and Globus as well as the "fiery" Winner while revealing that she knew her role would be uncomfortable from the start but reasoned that it would be dramatically justified. The disc also includes the film's trailer (1:57) and two TV spots (0:28 and 0:23).