646f9e108c Top detective Lou Torrey is transferred to Los Angeles and uncovers a plot by a Sicilian mafioso to use Vietnam War veterans to murder all his enemies in a rerun of the &quot;Sicilian Vespers&quot; when the previous generation of Sicilian mafiosi were all killed on a single day. Torrey gets various clues that something big is about to happen, but will he discover what is planned before the big day? A top New York detective is sent to Los Angeles where he must solve a case involving an old Sicilian Mafia family feud. A rare Bronson movie that is not entertaining or good. Stone Killer(1973) is dull when compared to superior Bronson/Winner fare like The Mechanic(1972) and Death Wish(1974). The action scenes are slow and the story is unremarkable. The only good scene in the entire film is the massacre of the mafia Dons. Stone Killer(1973) is a horrible film that doesn&#39;t have the great action set piece or excitement of a first rate Charles Bronson picture. Am I an optimist? Do I try to find something good in even the worst of movies? Is Michael Winner the most incompetent film maker in the Western Hemisphere? <br/><br/>Yes. Sometimes. Close, real close.<br/><br/>The Stone Killer, a hackneyed Charles Bronson/Michael Winner policer, based on the John Gardener novel &quot;A Complete State of Death,&quot; is so perfectly awful that I have kept a copy of it in my comedy section of videos (subsection, &quot;Not Meant to Be a . . . &quot;).<br/><br/>I don&#39;t even know where to start with this mess. The Stone Killer insults everyone it splashes up against. Cops are uniformly (sorry) lazy, bigoted, and excessively violent. Vietnam vets are all trained psychopaths. Mafioso have accents learned from the Acme Sicilian Accent Company of Walla Walla, Washington. Future cast members of The Waltons (Ralph Waite and John Ritter–it&#39;s embarrassing that I know John Ritter was in The Waltons because it shows that I actually watched that stupid drama from time to time) are so incompetent at their jobs that Charles Bronson at one point sneers at Ritter, &quot;You couldn&#39;t catch your breath!&quot; Winner ladles on the heavy meanings and messages with tough-guy quips and philosophizing, big, overly theatrical music, and reaction shots that scream, &quot;Wow, that was deep!&quot; <br/><br/>The sound recording isusual with a Winner film, tinny and overly looped. The clichés overwhelm any originality (and there is some here; the crimes at the start do in fact lead Bronson to a much greater and more dangerous conspiracy without being totally obvious right out of the gate). Finally, Winner&#39;s trademarks abound: Foot and car chases that catch people having sex (&quot;Get the Hell out of here!&quot;) and pervo-partiers bouncing and flouncing about to contrast the grim, disciplined determination of the good guys.<br/><br/>It&#39;s all so drab and predictable and offensive. Yet, I have tried to think of anything good to say about The Stone Killer and this is all I can come up with.<br/><br/>Bronson.<br/><br/>He&#39;s has such animal magnetism, he&#39;s so watchable that I can almost tolerate this garbage.<br/><br/>Almost.
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