While Hancock's score for the movie had a sort of jazz/funk/Latin thread running through it, Page opts for blues rock as the musical center for the second movie. The first track is the full strength versionm "Who's To Blame", with vocals by Chris Falowe and guitar and guitar synth soloing by Page.

Then there's a monster blues rock stomp instrumental in "Jam Sandwich" that could easily have been slipped into a Led Zeppelin song.

The sensitive ballad requirement is easily fulfilled by "Carole's Theme", which blends piano, strings and acoustic guitar for a lovely and serene piece.

Tense "crime" writing for strings kicks off "The Release" but is soon supplanted by Page's signature guitar playing and the rock rhythm section taking us into another rock instrumental, not so much bluesy this time but almost hinting at Iron Maiden-style guitar lines.

A woozy electric bass sound occupies the center of "Hotel Rats and Photostats", which also has some nice synth touches. This feeling of suspension in space with interesting tones and textures floating in and out continues with different colors and feels in "A Shadow in the City", with Page alternating between electric guitar harmonics and guitar synth.

"Jill's Theme" is an urgently tragic cue for one of the movie's lowest points, followed by a space rock version of a Chopin prelude for "Prelude".

Then it's time to rock again for the big and loud "Big Band, Sax, and Violence", another vocal number. Then it's another slab of intense instrumental rock for "Hypnotizing Ways (Oh Mamma)".

This expanded edition of the soundtrack also has some alternates and different arrangements as well as some extra diegetic music, such as the country rock song "Country Sandwich" as well as a beautiful multi-guitar tune called "A Mirror Sketch".

Before that could happen, he wrote his own sequel. Lacking the the imagination for a title like Death Wish 2, he called it Death Sentence.

This one finds Paul Benjamin in Chicago, not really trying to start a new life but continue his old life in a different city. He still goes out hunting for criminals to kill and he still feels fearful and nauseous, with sweaty hands, every time.

Of course Chicago offers plenty of opportunities. Once Paul's activities become news, other citizens start to arm themselves and strike back. And then there's a copy-cat vigilante, another lone gunman like Paul, operating on a parallel track. The police don't know if it's a second vigilante or one vigilante with two different guns, but Paul knows.

Garfield alternates extremely effective writing from Paul's point of view with less convincing expository sections that are presented as newspaper articles nad TV news broadcasts.

There's a love interest, a woman who works as a prosecutor for the DA's office. Also in the mix is her mentor, a retired law professor who has strong opinions about the justice system. Both of these characters allow Garfield to shoe-horn some political philosophizing into the book but the real story is violence as a kind of infectious disease with Paul as one of many carriers.

While his actions aren't portrayed as a positive example to follow, the environment itself is, as it was in the Death Wish, a hellish, hopeless jungle of near constant brutality and sadism. When Paul is tagged quite accurately as demonstrating "violent solipsism" the phrase describes a social problem as much as it describes the individual.

It's a well written and page-turning thriller, much better than the movies Garfield's work spawned.

The first line is "The guns pointed in every direction".

Death Wish has rooted itself deeply enough into our cultural consciousness that most people will be pretty confident that they know what it's about. And they'll probably mostly be right.

Brian Garfield's original novel deserves more attention than it's received, though.

Let's get some of the differences between the book and the movie out of the way first. In the book, the main character is a Jewish man named Paul Benjamin, a conventional, middle class, comfortable sort of person, liberal to the extent that he has an opinion about anything: "had never supported Zionism or the Temple of the B'nai Brith".

At his wife's funeral, the rabbi's "remarks were dutiful and innocuous". Those are the words to describe Paul as well.

His wife has been killed and his daughter traumatized to the point of being unable to return to life with other people after three young men, apparently looking for drug money, force their way into Paul's apartment. Esther and Carol don't have more than a few dollars on them and so they become human punching bags for their attackers, who you might think were enraged or desperate but are described as laughing hysterically, so perhaps high and/or insane.

One big difference between book and movie is that this happens off-page in the book. We are not an audience for this scene of brutality. Another big difference is that in the book there isn't anything sexual about what happens. It's explicitly stated that nothing like rape occurs, just beating. It's just inhuman and senseless violence that apparently means nothing to its perpetrators.

The senselessness of it makes it especially horrific to everyone affected. In the movie, of course, the assault is right there for everyone to see and it includes sexual assault, in a sharp departure from the book. And while the three assailants are described in the book as Peurto Rican and/or black—like all of Paul Benjamin's eventual targets—the movie gives us three Caucasian attackers, of whom one is Jeff Goldblum.