So at various points last week, I noticed that the cable station AMC, which is supposed to stand for American Movie Classics, was running Death Wish II, starring Charles Bronson.

I'd seen this movie a long time ago on cable, and watched some of it on AMC. It's pretty much drivel...almost so bad that it's good, but not quite. From Roger Ebert's zero star review of the film:

You will have noticed that I've given a "no stars" rating for DEATH WISH II, starring Charles Bronson as an urban vigilante. A word of explanation. In my movie rating system, the most a movie can get is four stars (MY DINNER WITH ANDRE) and the least is ordinarily half a star (even THE BEAST WITHIN got a whole star). I award "no stars" only to movies that are artistically inept and morally repugnant.

Yup, that would be Death Wish II. In the first movie his daughter was kidnapped by hoodlums and gang raped, so that in this movie, she's already been horribly traumatized. So they move to LA, where another group of hoodlums kidnap and gang rape her again, but not before they gang sodomize Bronson's hispanic maid and kill her. Now AMC cuts out the vast majority of this stuff, which adds to my bewilderment in why they're showing it in the first place. If you think something's a "classic", and I'm not even sure they think this one is, why cut the hell out of it?

But better yet, why not just show To Kill a Mockingbird again?