Punisher: War Zone

100 minutes

Adaptations of Marvel's heroes have been pretty solid of late. Iron Man was one of the best films of 2008, Wolverine and the X-Men has been a cut above the usual Saturday morning fare, and Wolverine Vs. Deadpool Hulk was well above average (though this may or may not have been due to certain talkative hired guns). Welcome, then, to the party, Punisher War Zone, here to act retarded, punch the host and piss on the bed where all the coats have been thrown!

The troubled history of this film is legend, with previous Punisher star Tom Jane dropping out due to severe problems with the script, director and the direction the movie was going, and the final scriptwriter demanding his name be taken off after almost all of his script, minus one or two scenes was rewritten or removed. Still, the last Punisher movie had similar problems with the script, and it was a decent, if flawed movie, so I was willing to give it a chance.

First off, they've taken a lot from the comics, specifically the Marvel MAX mature readers series. There's references everywhere, from McGinty, the Irish Rastafarian (really) to henchmen called Pittsy and Ink, barely recognisible shadows of their comic-based counterparts, to a series of slides detailing some of the crime families Frank Castle had wiped out, all taken from the various storylines in the book. Even the scene where Castle throws the soon-to-be Jigsaw into a glass recycler seemed reminiscent of some of the special executions or interrogations from the game. If you're a fan, you'll have fun spotting all these little cameos and knowing winks in your direction. Which is good, because you're going to have a hell of a hard time finding any anywhere else.

The biggest problems lie with the actors playing Jigsaw and his brother, Loony Bin Jim. They seem to be under the impression that 'movie based on a comic' means 'ham it up like you're auditioning for a part in Batman circa 1960'. It wouldn't be so bad if it was actually enjoyable - BRIAN BLESSED! can chew the scenery like nobody's business and still keep you enthralled - but they just try too hard, Jim in particular trying to be a kind of unpredictable 'wacky' killer prone to random outbursts of violence and general silliness, but winds up coming across as an irritating twat.

Then there's Ray Stevenson. I liked Tom Jane. He wasn't a dead-ringer for the character, but you got the feeling that with a better script and more polishing, the film could've been something special. Thanks to his voiceover in the game, it's his voice I hear when I read the comics. The guy loves the comics and the character, and it shows - his love of the franchise was what ultimately led to him walking from the sequel, unable to put his name to a movie that would do the character justice. By contrast, Stevenson is a pretty good likeness. He's good in action roles (see Rome or Outpost and you'll see what I mean) and he's generally a pretty good actor. Problem is, he can't do an American accent worth shit. It's nearly a third of the movie - 26 minutes, I counted - before he gets his first lines, and you can hear the English accent behind them. That's not quite so bad, he's still a decent actor. What really gets me is that the producers feel the need to humanise him by adding a 'cute little girl that reminds me of my daughter' sub-plot. The Punisher is great in the comics because he is rarely, if ever humanised: he shows up, bad people die in a variety of interesting and creative ways. That's how he works and when there is a need to remind us he's not an Italian-American Terminator, it's usually done with a little more skill than this. The plot is handled with all the finesse of a 12-year-old's attempt at fanfiction, the girl being three steps north of an author-insert: "Molly-Jane, the girl that made the Punisher smile, adopt her and give up his life of vengeance!" It's as subtle as a pyramid in a sandpit and really hurts the film by its inclusion.

If that was it, that'd be enough. But no, there's lots of other little bits that only serve to irritate you more and more: why does Jigsaw's plastic surgeon feel the need to use horse-hide in his facial reconstruction? Is that a common replacement for skin? For that matter, why does Jigsaw suddenly gain super-strength post-disfiguration, being capable of snapping a man's neck with no effort? Why does Castle have a Batcave-style basement ("the Punish 'ment"?) in the subway tunnels? For that matter, why does his partner, Micro, have motorized fold-down gun display boxes with blue neon lights that would look more at home on the underside of a pimped out car above the doorways of his decrepit mother's house? Why does Jigsaw feel the need to recruit mooks with a Patton-style speech, complete with waving Stars and Stripes in the background in one of the most painful scenes in the entire fucking movie?! Why, why why?!

This isn't a bad movie that you can get drunk with friends and mock mercilessly, it's just bad. There are no interesting hooks to latch on to, no turns of phrase that you can repeat during lulls in the film for cheap laughs, something that even the 1989 movie with Dolph Lundgren managed! The only reason to watch it is for a moment when a free-runner jumps between two buildings and gets hit with a Stinger missile mid-leap. And now that I've spoiled it for you, now you don't need to watch it either. Avoid if you like action movies, swear blood vengeance against the producers if you like the comics.

Dan Abnett - Warhammer 40,000: Xenos

248 Pages

The Warhammer 40k books are a horribly guilty pleasure. There's very little real depth to them: there's lots of explosions and decapitations and people being shredded like cheap tissue paper, but no deep insight into the human soul in the Grim Darkness of the future. They're the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick - read and laugh when someone explodes after being accused of Heresy!, revel in the almost pornographic descriptions of weaponry (oh yeah, work that chainsword and call me the God-Emperor) and smile grimly when the Stirring Music kicks in and someone tells everyone else that the line must be drawn and held here. Great stuff.

Warhammer books typically fall into one of three categories: Space Marine books, which all have the same plot and no characterisation; Eldar books, based on the adventures of Space Elves, a race who haven't been interesting since their rampant fornication and hedonism caused a rip in spacetime and the birth of a god of Chaos (now that's some good fornication right there!); and everything else, which covers the Imperial Guard (regular humans forced to fight cosmic horrors on a daily basis), the commissars (the Ciaphas Cain books have been described as Col. Flashman in space) and the Inquisition. These books are generally regarded as the best of the bunch, not only because they're decently written, but because they look at the Grim Darkness from a slightly more human perspective. The Marine books are filled with superhuman soldiers, single-minded in their purpose. The Eldar are aliens, if insufferably pretty ones, and, as mentioned, dull as fuck. Inquisitors may have training above and beyond anything Batman could hope to achieve, but they see a 15-foot tall Chaos Space Marine (generally regarded as the benchmark for 'Oh shi-' in this universe) and they just about shit themselves, no matter how heavily they're armed. In a universe filled with human-shaped walls of meat and armour, cosmic terrors from the other side of space and filthy xenos of all shapes and sizes, the human aspect, and all that goes with it can be easily lost.

The story focuses on Gregor Eisenhorn, Inquisitor in the employ of the God-Emperor. Inquisitors are sent to root out Heresy! and corruption in the Imperium. And since the Imperium spans several thousand galaxies, they've got a hell of a lot of work to do. Inquisitors are a mix of diplomat, FBI/CIA special task force and Internal Affairs, charged with rooting out corruption and Heresy! wherever it lies. If you see and Inquisitor in the area, you know shit is about to go down. Gregor Eisenhorn is one such man, and as the book opens, he's chasing down a man who has evaded him for the better part of a decade. What starts off as a simple firefight-cum-clusterfuck, resulting in the deaths of several thousand cryogenically frozen nobles eventually escalates into a hunt for an artefact that could tip the balance of power in the galaxy heavily in the favour of Chaos, damning Humanity as a whole

The characters in the book are all broadly written, relying heavily on tropes and ideas you'll probably have seen a thousand times before. That's not as bad as you might think, as it lets you get a handle on the characters swiftly, letting you enjoy the carnage at a more leisurely pace. For instance, Eisnhorn is not a man to cross by any means, but, as you would expect, he still suffers from doubts about his mission as people left and right get shredded, immolated, blown up or have their very literal spirit destroyed by very literal demons. He's still focussed on his goals, but the deaths start to wear on him as the book progresses, and as this is the first part of a trilogy, you know that will have consequences by the end. Kinda helps that they spell that much out for you on the back of the collected edition as well. It's all done as well as you would hope, Dan Abnett having long since cut his teeth working for 2000AD, DC and Marvel, enjoying long stints at each publisher on some fairly popular titles.

If there's any real problem with the book, it's two-fold. First, there's the pacing. The story has at least three or four places where it could end comfortably, but it just keeps going and going. It results in a lumpy narrative that has you ready for the climactic battle... only to remind you that you've still got a hundred or so pages left. And that happens at least twice. Then there's the final confrontation between Eisenhorn and the man he's been seeing in his dreams, which can be summed up thusly:

"Give me the McGuffin or you all die!"

"No."

*crunch*

"Oh. Well... okay then."

*leaps off bridge*

Seriously, that's the entirety of the final confrontation. Leaves you a little underwhelmed to say the least. Though it is balanced out by a very nice bit near the beginning, where one of Eisenhorn's entourage is killed by the man he's spent the last ten years hunting. He swears vengeance and promises to kill him if it's the last thing he does... which he then promptly does less than 30 pages later, slamming his gun in his quarry's mouth and blowing the back of his head off. It's a small thing, but it's nice to see something like this dealt with quickly, rather than extending it artificially for an entire book.

Xenos is a fun read, deep as a Twilight fan, but a whole lot smarter about it. There's a few bumps along the way, but it's perfect for reading on the bus or on the can. It's hopelessly unoriginal, but done so well, it doesn't really matter. Read it and try not to imagine Pete Postlethwate as Eisenhorn and Ben Browder as Midas Betancore. You really can't do it.

Chaos;Head

12 30-minute Episodes

Based on the visual novel of the same name, Chaos;Head is a confused series. Not a confusing one, but a confused one, since it doesn't exactly know what it wants to be. The story centres around Takumi Nishijo, a shut-in otaku with a shaky grip on reality who frequently proclaims that he has no need for the "3D World". He spends all his time in a fantasy, playing his favourite MMO, Empire Sweeper, often imagining his favourite anime character beside him, encouraging him to stay away from people. After stumbling across a gruesome crime scene, a series of young ladies suddenly enter his life, as he tries to work out what's going on, where everyone's getting these translucent swords from and why people keep encouraging him to 'wake up'.

I went into this expecting something dark, and in fairness, the first couple of episodes did not disappoint, but not entirely in the way I was expecting. The main character is an anime and MMO obsessive, and his routine is depicted in a fair amount of detail. The scenes with him imagining Seira-tan, his favourite anime character, loudly proclaiming her to be his 'waifu', and that with her, he has no need for 3D girls make for uncomfortable viewing. His delusions, imagining several encounters with the female cast to be similar to a hentai game are similarly squirm-inducing. (it's also worth noting that this show started airing when the first calls were made to allow hardened fans to marry 2D characters) On the one hand, it makes you glad you (hopefully) have a more solid grip on reality, but on the other, it does make you question the depths of your own obsessions. After all, we've all seen some piece of merch that we've drooled over, possibly even bought. Sure, we're not as pathetic as Takumi, but on some level, we're exactly the same, and it's hard not to think that the producers are laughing at you for it. Hideki Anno would be proud.

(for the record, I've only ever had hallucinations of this nature once: I was 13, playing Super Metroid and I'd been up for about 30 hours straight by this point. I was convinced that the noises the enemies in the crashed ship area made when shot with the ice beam were telling me how the ship crashed. I wish my delusions involved big breasted cuties telling me they're all I need)

Similarly, the one or two scenes of violence are surprisingly effective. The first, involving a man skewered by countless cross-shaped stakes is surprising, but nothing out of the ordinary. The second, in the penultimate episode is far more unsettling, involving a melonballer and an exposed brain, and actually managed to surprise me, so kudos. Unfortunately, the rest of the show is pretty toothless. Most of the damage is done offscreen or to backpacks (it makes sense in context) with the only other blood occurring when the token shy-but-cheerful girl falls and bangs her knee. I'm not the kind of person who demands all-dismemberment all the time, but it seems weird that they show someone being mutilated with pointy objects in the very first episode, then immediately tone everything down thereafter.

Then there's the plot itself. Oh dear lord. It starts off as a psychological drama, then contracts Tenchi Syndrome, having the main character be a magnet for numerous girls despite the fact he's clearly retarded, before mutating into Mai-Hime as all the female characters start running around with awesome but impractical swords. Halfway through, the dark-haired stoic gives the main character, and by proxy the audience, a massive technobabble-filled infodump that kinda explains everything, but doesn't. It suggests that the main character's hallucinations are being put there by someone else, except they're not, and they're also kinda real, but oh my God, I've gone crosseyed. It's like they're trying to ape The Matrix, but they aimed wrong and got Reloaded by mistake. And still did it badly. And then at the end GIANT FUCKING ANTI-MATTER SNAKE OUT OF NOWHERE! which doesn't even really make sense in context except as a vaguely interesting way to put down the Big Bad Evil Guy. And one of the potentially most interesting fights (involving Seira-tan) isn't even shown which is, in a word, criminal!

If all this makes it sound like I hated this show, then I apologise. Its a decent enough series with some nice character designs and some interesting concepts. The problem is, they never let the concepts flow naturally, instead telling you exactly what's going on in a very ham-handed way, rather than making you come to your own conclusions. Had they gone with more subtlety, leaving the viewer to question what actually happened, we could've had something special: a Serial Experiments Lain (still the benchmark test for mindfucks) for the new millennium. What we ended up with was a nice, but shallow show with occasional flashes of what could've been. Watch it, but don't expect it to change your life.

Orochuban Ebichu

24 12-minute episodes (really 12 30-minute episodes)

It would be entirely possible to have this review consist entirely of the words "chu, "manko" and "wrong" and still have it be 100% accurate, since the first two are used liberally throughout the series and the last one applies to pretty much every scene in the show. Ebichu is about the daily adventures of the titular hamster, housecleaner and occasional superhero. She's owned and occasionally beaten up by a woman who works in an office (known as the Office Lady) and her deadbeat promiscuous boyfriend, Kaishounashi (lit. useless bum).

Don't let the cute exterior fool you, Ebichu is absolutely filthy, from Ebichu's frequent misunderstandings (that Japanese love of wordplay at work once again), to her accidental outbursts of her owner's sexual adventures, Ebichu's naivete and utter lack of social graces provide much of the comedy here. You'll find yourself groaning and wincing as you laugh. And that's before you get to Maa-kun, owner of probably the single worst moment in the entire show (some things just shouldn't have rip-away panels, that's all I'm saying!)

Orochuban Ebichu is crude, cruel and absolutely hilarious. Just don't watch it with anyone easily offended. Or anyone from PETA. In fact, just watch it alone, it's probably safer.

Dhomochevsky Static Presents - Deadpool: The Motion Picture

We open on a slow pan across a large library/reading room. As we move about, that one bit of Vivaldi's Four Seasons that everyone knows (Spring? I forget) plays while the first few opening credits run. All very classy, all very dignified.

You know it's not going to last long.

A familiar figure sits in a large leather chair. He wears a large smoking jacket, a dignified Hugh Hefner-style thing, tiger paw slippers on his feet. At his side, a large, girly-looking cocktail in place of a glass of brandy, sparklers and parasols everywhere. His mask is pulled up halfway up his face to let him drink, a large red leatherbound book in his lap. As the camera swings over to him, he looks up.

DEADPOOL: Oh, hello! Didn't see you there. The name's Wade Wilson - Deadpool to my friends, 'hey you in the bushes' to the security guards at Hannah Montanna's mansion. And welcome to my humble abode. This is where I like to sit and meditate on the important matters of the day: who am I? Where am I going? How many hollowpoints would it take to drop the writers of that Wolverine flick because pee-yew!

He takes a drink from the cocktail with some difficulty. Parasols keep spearing him in the nose.

DEADPOOL: So, I'm sure some of you are unfamiliar with my exploits, my modus operandi. My 'bag' if you will. You've coughed up your money for the tickets, indulged in overpriced carbonated beverages and sawdust-flavoured pork products, and you sit down and suddenly realise 'wait - I don't know a thing about this guy! I only came here because Entertainment Tonight said it was good!' Shame on you! Don't you know fair-weather fans are the worst kind of fan out there?

He sighs and shakes his head.

DEADPOOL: You're missing out, man! Just think: all this time you could've been watching me kick Captain America in the jimmies -

A little yellow caption box pops up in the corner of the screen with *ping* noise

BOX: Deadpool Vol.1 #25

DEADPOOL: - saved Manhattan from a bunch of symbiote-powered dinosaurs -

BOX: *ping* Cable and Deadpool #50

DEADPOOL: - and had to save Sue Storm, Emma Frost, X-23 and a host of Nubile X-Teens from the insidious clutches of the nefarious Dr. Jelloniususeses' Dungeon of Erotic Spankings.

He looks down at the box, refusing to change.

DEADPOOL: We had a deal, Yellow Box!

BOX: *ping* Screw you, I'm famous now! I'm off to star in a Scarlet Johansen/Shia Le Bouf action-comedy adventure!

The box swiftly scarpers off the side of the screen

DEADPOOL: There will come a reckoning, Yellow Box. Don't think there won't...

He turns to face the camera, immediately cheering up as he does.

DEADPOOL: Anyway, normally, that would piss me off, but, well, we've got your money now, unless you downloaded this off the internet, in which case, we'll be round your house to staple your lips to your ass in the morning -

BOX: *ping* This ad paid for by the MPAA

DEADPOOL- so it all works out in the end. Now, I want to get serious for a moment. I know some of you who've been following my antics for years have had a few unkind words to say about this motion picture: that I've 'sold out' or that I'm not 'cool' anymore, and that a live action Deadpool would be 'teh suck'. Well, contrary to popular belief, I've actually had a long and fruitful career in the motion picture industry!

He holds up the book he's been holding. The cover is based on the Encyclopaedia Deadpoolica one-shot from years past. He opens the book, revealing stills from various Marvel movies - dramatic moments one and all - with his face (badly) pasted in. The best of the bunch would be the one from Blade Trinity: the pic used would be a shot of Hannibal King talking to Blade. The image of Deadpool's mask would be stapled on (with actual staples) to Wesley Snipes' head. As he turns the pages, soothing music plays in the background

DEADPOOL: Ah... golden moments one and all. And most of those films didn't stink! Provided your movie wasn't made by-

A blatantly obvious voiceover, possibly in the voice of James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman, butts in

VOICEOVER: - A talented rival studio we respect very much-

DEADPOOL: - because their movies -

VOICEOVER: - are every bit as valid and wonderful as those made by ourselves.

We cut back to a very nervous-looking Deadpool, looking up at the ceiling.

DEADPOOL: ...God? ...is that you?

He continues to look up for a few more seconds, before turning back to face the camera, giving a quick nervous glance back up.

DEADPOOL: Anyway, I've talked too long, and the underage kids in the third row from the back are getting twitchy. So, on with the show, and enjoy.

The music plays again, as the camera pulls back slowly. Wade picks up his girly cocktail, swirls it then takes a drink, sparklers still going. As we go through a pair of doors that swing shut smoothly, he stabs himself in the eye with a sparkler, letting out an almighty scream.

Opening credits proper consist of a load of animated crayon drawings signed "By Wade 'Awesomesauce' Wilson" and consist of him running around punching and shooting superheroes, both Marvel's and obvious knock-offs of characters from other companies. Annotations along the lines of "THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED!" while grabbing Iron Man by his feet and hitting the Hulk over the head with him show up every now and then.