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The Punisher MAX: Girls in white dresses

As should be abundantly clear, here at Fightrunner HQ, we are the Punisher’s biggest fans. And although the movies in the past have generally been a bit of a let down, the comics almost always come up with the goods, especially if we are talking about Max titles. I have read a good few and most of the best ones are written by the main man Garth Ennis himself, so when I saw that this was written by another dude, I wondered to myself if this newbie had the balls to make old Frank Castle as gritty as the mad Irishman did.

“Girls in white dresses” is set in a small Mexican town where the local girls are being systematically abducted and then subsequentaly dumped a few weeks later with their eyes and lungs missing. The distraught townsfolk have heard only in folklore that there is a man from the north that will do what needs to be done and go where the police are to afraid to dare… You guessed it, Frank Castle, AKA: The Punisher. They manage to track him down and eventually convince him to help them get their loved ones back and make the bad guys pay…

Making Bad people pay is what the Punisher is all about!!!! And boy do they get it in this book. Frank beats, shoots, stabs and explodes his way up the criminal food chain in order to get to the bottom of this one. In true Punisher Max style, the violence is brutal and fairly graphic… MAGIC!!! I love nothing more than seeing the king of vigilantes chain five drug dealers ups by their feet and pound the living shit out of them until they spill the beans!

The art in this is quite stylised and it works well with the gritty realistic storyline and the general mood of the Punisher Max series. Never really come across this artist, “Laurence Campbell” but he has made an impression on me. His grainy style and sharp lights in the deep shadows really brings out the bleakness of the situations Frank finds himself in.

The Writer too is a new one to me, “Gregg Hurwitz”, but I swear to god if he had jacked a few more bizarre sex scenes in there, you would be forgiven for thinking it was Ennis Himself… In fact, Ennis is quoted on the cover saying “This is The Punisher, all right. This is how it’s done”. So with approval from the big man, how can you go wrong?

If you like your comics dark, gritty and brutal… Bobs your uncle!

VERDICT: 8.5/10

Like hitting a piñata with a grenade launcher… effective and fun!

PUNISHER: WARZONE

Well as you can all tell, everyone here at Fightrunner HQ is a HUGE fan of the Marvel comic book hero The Punisher. Since we showed you the awesomely violent trailer for his latest movie incarnation “Punisher Warzone, we have all been waiting for it with baited breath. So when i saw it was out last weekend, I nearly pissed in my pants with excitement… Only to be bitterly disappointed in the fact that my local Cinema in Aberdeen wasn’t showing it for fuck know what reason!!!!

So what did I do? Well I did the only sane thing I could do… me and Inferno saddled up our horses (Mazda 6) and headed south to the nearest cinema, approx 55 miles away… I know its sad but we just needed our violence fix, and we needed it bad!

Punisher: Warzone doesn’t exactly follow on from his last incarnation played by Thomas Jane. This time the gun toting vigilante’s boots are filled by Ray Stevenson of Rome fame.

As a mob boss celebrates his 100th birthday in style, surrounded by all his underworld crones, the Punisher sees this as a perfect opportunity to clear the cities troubles out once and for all. He kicks of the party by decapitating the 100 year old Don before stirring up a shit storm in an almighty gun fight. This battle leaves a huge gap in the underworld which is soon filled by one Billy the Bute, so old Frank Castle decides he deserves some punishment… no scratch that gunishment too. After taking his crew apart, he bungs Billy into a glass recycler (big whirley churney up machine) but soon his rampage is cut short as he relises that one of the despatched henchmen was in fact an undercover FBI agent.

Now torn with the guilt of what he has done, Frank decides to give up the Punisher game, not for long though (yeah you saw that coming didn’t you?). It would seem the whurley machine didn’t finish off Billy and now hes back in town with his face all stitched up, calling himself “Jigsaw” and stirring up trouble. Time for the Punisher to get back into action!!!!

Sorry that went on for a bit really…. I was really really looking forward to this, especially after I heard he kills over 250 people in it and 30 of them in the first 10 mins. But to be honest it didn’t quite “be all it could be”! For sure all the violence was there… I mean fuck me was it there, I would go into all the gruesome killings but it would just spoil it for you really! But the film just didn’t live up to the comics for me. It was a mishmash of all the Marvel Max (adult editions) comics written by Garth Ennis… but the script just seemed rushed. I feel if they had just kept to one of the original brilliant stories this movie really could have been the action film of 2009.

One thing I will say, this truly is more of a Punisher movie than the Thomas Jane one, who incidentally didn’t want to make this one due to the level of violence involved, I mean what the fuck??? Its the Punisher… try reading the comic dude, he doesn’t go about getting people to sign petitions or something. I loved the cheesey 80’s version staring Dolf Lungren, but still this movie has more bite and Stevenson suits the part far more than the other two. He looks more the part and his style is certainly more that of Castle himself.

For me it was still a bloody good watch, in the same way that I can enjoy mindless violence films of the 80’s, I can enjoy this. That’s all it was made for, and before you say it ladies… this film was made by a woman!!! Ha, stick that in your pipe and smoke it bitch!!!!

Verdict: 7/10

If you like guns and grousome deaths, this is the movie for you… if not you should be PUNISHED!!!