Sudden Death

I know that this is an old and campy movie, but the message as a whole rings true even today...if someone gets raped, they want revenge and boy is it sweet when you get it. Look at Sally Fields in "An Eye for an Eye" ----You want it, You get it, You love it!

The film is full of sex and violence and reinforces what George Gerbner and his associates at the University of Pennsylvania claim about fictionalized TV and film violence leading us into a "Mean World Syndrome" perception of reality. New York City comes off looking pretty terrible and the males who inhabit it even worse. They are all thugs and sex-starved beasts who live only to drink and attack women. It's not a pretty place to be. The plot is a mirror image of the Bronson "Death Wish" films, but with a female vigilante who goes out to exact revenge on her rapist attackers. It also parallels "Sudden Impact" very strongly. Hence the title "Sudden Death." Poor acting and uninspired editing, but the film accomplishes its mission: to make us angry and retaliatory and vindictive. It is full of action and punks whom we are happy to see extinguished. Recommended to those who love vigilante movies and can suspend disbelief in many instances during this 90 minute get-even flick.

The descriptions of writer / director Sig Shore's harsh, exploitative revenge outing "Sudden Death" being the female version of "Death Wish" and especially "Death Wish 2" is pretty accurate, but in the way it doesn't make it any better. I was somewhat disappointed in this one. I didn't find it to be all that powerful and edgy in conveying the character's torment and the attack scenes less effective because of the protagonist's careless actions of the situations she puts herself into and its choice of music throughout was off putting. Other than the first demoralizing opening attack on the protagonist that transforms her, the rest (involving our victim searching for payback on her attackers, but stumbling across other thugs) felt silly and made the sequences rather cheesy in the execution. Especially the use of slow-motion, but definitely the tacky soundtrack choices. The exercise at times feels unwieldy, but what is has going for it is the use of actual New York locations giving the dreary atmosphere some dirt and grit. It's a grungy look that works. However its grim nature seems to lose out when its came down to the final chase sequence that falls into a generic climatic action cliff-hanger. The performances are one-note. Denise Coward holds her own, but I didn't find her character to be all that well written and there was real disconnect there. The predictable plot is very run-of- the-mill and the unconvincing cop (A brooding Frank Runyeon)/ victim relationship felt like nothing more than filler to the overall picture. It's somewhat unfocused, but it didn't pretend to be anything else then what it set out to be and nor did it shy away from its ugly side.

I saw this film under the title "Dirty Harriet", which of course is completely wrong: the heroine is not a cop, but a vigilante (a more appropriate title would have been "Pauline Kersey"!). Anyway, "Sudden Death" is also pretty accurate, as that's exactly what most people who make the mistake of attacking her get in the second half of the film. The script is poor in several ways (the heroine becomes a cold-blooded killer too easily, even her first killing doesn't seem to shake her at all; her targets are also spotted too easily, it's like there is a sex maniac around every NYC street corner; the investigation of a male detective that she befriends feels a lot like padding), and the direction is strictly-by-the-numbers. Former Miss Australia Denise Coward (what an unfortunate name!) is not bad in the lead, but the film is nothing special. *1/2 out of 4.

Personally, I like it a lot when filmmakers (or their marketers…) include witty and tongue-in-cheek references towards other films in their own tag line, script or dialogs. There's one small but logical condition, though, and that is that the witty reference has to make sense and hints at a suitable title! The mastermind marketers behind this "Sudden Death" clearly weren't so smart… The tag line juicily states "don't mess with this Dirty Harriet!" which obviously refers to Clint Eastwood's character and milestone thriller classic "Dirty Harry", but he was a cop! Admittedly an unorthodox and trigger-happy cop, but a cop that is still on the right side of the law. Lead actress Denise Coward – what a terrible choice of artist name, by the way – depicts a traumatized victim of an unsolved crime who turns into a violent vigilante, so instead they could easily have referred to "Death Wish" by nicknaming the character Paula Kersey or – ha! - Charlene Bronson.

Right… apart from this pretty pointless intro rant, I actually haven't got much to say about this "Sudden Death". It's a very derivative, unmemorable and insipid vigilante thriller, like there were far too many of them during the first half of the eighties. It's not even remarkable that the avenging angel is a woman, since there is also Abel Ferrara's phenomenal "Ms. 45". Former miss Australia Denise Coward stars as a hard-working career woman who takes a taxi late one night in order to join her fiancé at a restaurant. Little does she know that the cab was just carjacked by a duo of sneering thugs that promptly rape the poor girl and leave her behind beaten half dead. During a slow recovery at the hospital, her fiancé encourages her to "forget" what happened while the tender macho copper Lowery informs her that the case most likely won't be solved. So what's a poor & frustrated girl to? She buys a Walther- 32, prepares a whole set of dumdum bullets and goes out to roam the streets in search of pervert, rapist pigs. She doesn't have to search very hard or long, although admittedly she poses a bit too flamboyantly as a prostitute to lure her victims. In spite of the vile subject matter, "Sudden Death" is intolerably tedious and slow- paced. The film literally drags itself from one violent execution sequence to the next with only dullness and irritating synthesizer music in between.