TheFearmakers

The final Cannon production starring Charles Bronson couldn't be more of an exploitation flick (surpassing even DEATH WISH 2), spending more time on the underage victims of a sleazy pimp than Bronson and detective partner Perry Lopez are trying to figure things out...

In the strangely titled KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SECRETS that initially/ironically involves a sex-obsessed Japanese father whose daughter (Kumiko Hayakawa) winds up one the youngest, most vulnerable victims of an underground sex-slave market...

Opening with blonde starlet Nicole Eggert as the most experienced, the actual leading young-lady's Amy Hathaway, even blonder, cuter and who just so happens to be Bronson's daughter, on the verge of the neon-noir-inspired criminal web led by CROCODILE DUNDEE II villain Juan Fernández...

Perhaps one of the sleaziest villains in Bronson cinema... providing the usual gun-blasting DEATH WISH-style vengeance that happens far too late to matter: overall making KINJITE more glossy expose than edgy crime-thriller.

What on earth does President Donald Trump have to do with the life and films of Charles Bronson? Well, this is Hollywood, and they can only concentrate on one thing at a time...

Bronson's star-making turn in Death Wish is hardly centered on being there's so much hate for the movie, saying how controversial it was, how violent, and then cutting to Donald Trump... just insane, amazing... Bronson died fifteen-years before Trump even went into politics and lost all his left-wing buddies...

That said... This documentary, narrated by a woman who sounds like she never saw a Bronson flick, also gets several things wrong... He was an architect in Death Wish, not an accountant... And he was not a police chief in The Stone Killer... In fact, two police chiefs (New York and LA) detest his lone wolf character...

The beginning of the documentary, centering on his salad days of playing gruff and amazingly talkative character types is pretty good... However, throughout this the narrator repeats "but stardom alluded him again" as if that were the only reason he acted...

The bridge between character work and semi-stardom overseas is pretty good, but rushed... Also, certain things keep getting repeated, and again, we get to hear how "he almost became a star..."

Which is a mantra that a lot of online journalists repeat again and again about actors who aren't John Wayne or Tom Cruise... It's annoying... And of course they have to criticize the heck out of Cannon Films, which is a great low-budget studio (and this movie automatically played right after a Bronson/Cannon picture)...

Highlights are seeing actual interviews with the man himself... Also, learning about how difficult he was was intriguing... Including straight from Michael Winner, who co-created many of his best roles...

Like Death Wish, one of the great movies of all time now being blamed on Donald Trump... It's just amazing how Hollywood is forced to praise such movie-stars as Charles Bronson... I'm sure they'd like spending more time on John Cusack and George Clooney...

This narrator's stern voice would probably lighten up, and not be so negatively-inclined: like 60% of what could have been an otherwise decent little doc.

Bart Braverman's Binzer has a face made for radio, making for the perfect goofy, comic-relief partner for the tall and perfect-looking Vegas private-eye stud Robert Urich...

So the trope of the ugly goof falling for a blind girl (who can't see him, used famously later in MASK) has the lovely Elyssa Davalos playing Kim, who we only experience a few times before she's shot and killed by Leslie Nielson in one of his ultra-serious roles before becoming a goofball himself on the big and small screen...

Braverman must have told Aaron Spelling that he wanted to stop being second banana and so Binzer goes from buffoon to Bronson, learning how to shoot a gun while Urich's Dan Tanna tries constantly talking him out of it...

Also featuring Louise Sorrel and veteran starlet Anne Jeffries (looking great), it's a good episode, but Elyssa needed more scenes as she's more an expository pawn than actual character.