Director Nussbaum's grim, frequently mean-spirited revenge drama certainly starts out as it means to go on with an aggressively nasty, seemingly arbitrary assault on a young courting couple innocently parked on an isolated stretch of beach. Once done with their foulness, the two asinine, preppie-looking skells callously drive over her boyfriend before tearing off in their ostentatious Mercedes, thereby leaving the justifiably distraught, Judy (Lisa London) to dazedly pick up the pieces, ultimately given very little support from a bureaucratic, slow-moving system that frequently demonizes the victims and awards shockingly lenient sentences to the perpetrators of these unspeakable crimes!
While sleazy and exploitative, 'Death Blow' is certainly not without a creditable social conscience, having a remarkably weighty cast of B-Movie titans including, Frank Stallone as slimy DA Taggart, the ubiquitously grotty, Buck Flowers playing the especially disgusting, curb-crawling creepozoid, Willard, and the estimable, Martin Landau as the inflexible, somewhat Draconian Judge Shaw whose decidedly more progressive, pragmatic-minded daughter, Helen (Donna Denton) takes a much harder line against those monsters who commit violent crimes against women, featuring a horrifically lurid turn by, Don Swayze as the stone cold, pure nightmare sleaze-merchant, Andy with his altogether reprehensible penchant for frequently abusing chloroform to satiate his vile, unconscionable proclivities!
It would be fair to state that 'Death Blow' is an uneasy B-Movie melange of rabble rousing 'message movie of the week' polemics and sordid, greasy-fingered, frequently exploitative grindhouse fare, which most certainly still provides some substantially grist-worthy food for thought. Surely it is long overdue for some bright spark to rescue this vivid, VHS-era oddity from its current obscurity, as its powerful message remains disturbingly relevant. And, again, it cannot be overstated how uncommonly despicable, Swayze and Flowers are here, looking as though they were in training for 'They Call Her One Eye'! 'Death Blow' is a melodramatic, highly charged 80s vigilante movie with a social conscience; these women didn't simply wait to be ignored by a corrupt, patriarchal justice system they unflinchingly administered the hard line sentences these serial abusers deserved. No Appeal! No Remorse!... No Chance!
