10 Movie Openings That Wanted To Piss You Off

The entire Death Wish franchise is built on the idea of pissing the audience off in the opening scene, which then gives vigilante protagonist Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) apparently free license to mow down every violent criminal in his radius, all while the audience cheers the carnage guilt-free.

The series never did it better than in the original movie, long before the formula ran dry and became an outright parody of itself.

The first film opens with Kersey's wife and daughter being attacked by a trio of thugs in their Manhattan apartment - one of whom is played by a young Jeff Goldblum, in fact.

Kersey's wife is brutally beaten while his daughter is raped, and when he rushes to the hospital after learning of this, he's told that his wife died from her injuries.

Regardless of the series' increasingly icky politics, the initial assault itself is horrifyingly cruel, director Michael Winner refusing to cut away from the sexual indignities inflicted upon Kersey's daughter, who herself dies in Death Wish II.

Again, the anger is precisely the point: the business model of this film and its sequels was to weaponise the audience's rage, such that they'd find tremendous joy in watching Charlie Bronson wipe the floor with an endless fleet of goons and creeps for the runtime's remainder.

The sequels took this to comical levels impossible to take seriously - especially the brilliantly campy Death Wish 3 - but the original at least fully produced the desired enraging result.