Centuries ago, Bull Shannon was banished from his homeland of Spain for committing sacrificial atrocities in honor of his Dark Lord, Satan. In 1981 Clint Howard summoned of all those Satanic powers to exact revenge on some harsh military school bullies. And that is the basic gist of Evilspeak. It's kind of like Carrie, only with Clint Howard instead of Sissy Spacek.
Clint Howard plays Stanley Coopersmith, an orphaned attendee of a military academy that is seemingly populated entirely by assholes and douche bags. He has two friends in this movie. And one of them is this guy . . .
He's actually a really nice guy . . .
Everyone seems to pick on poor Coopersmith for reasons ranging from his being a poor soccer player to his general Clint Howardy-ness. It's not just the bullies either. The chaplain's a prick. The German accented teacher is a prick. The secretary's a prick. But no one can touch Sarge the Janitor on the prick-scale. He's in his own league. This guy's in his own world. And that world is filled with grit, grime, alcohol, and the brimming desire to intimidate Clint Howard.
Coopersmith has been sent to help ol' Sarge clean out the basement of the ancient chapel as punishment for being Clint Howard. Sarge, the grizzled old misanthrope that he is, gets pissed immediately. I don't know if he's mad because he's being forced to hang out with Clint Howard against his will or he's just angry about everything all the time, but he comes to terms with the situation when he realizes he can lay down on his cot and drink while some ugly kid does all of his work. He kind of makes random appearances here and there throughout the course of the movie to interrogate Coopersmith about his missing crowbar. You, the viewers at home, and I know he took it. The Sarge, however, is burdened by lack of proof.
Eventually Sarge barges into Coopersmith's den of Devil worship and Satan summoning only to find . . . you guessed it . . . HIS CROWBAR! He barely questions why Clint Howard is hanging out in the basement and totally disregards the thousands of lit candles and the world's first computer, but by some divine power his attention is drawn right to that crowbar. He pushes Coopersmith aside and storms into the room and declares, "THERE'S MY FUCKIN' CROWBAR!" My words do his proclamation no justice. His delivery deserves accompanying strikes of lightning, organ music, and Oscar nominations.
"THERE'S MY FUCKIN' CROWBAR!"
Coopersmith said he didn't have it before. Now here it is. Clint Howard caught red handed with Sarge's effin' crowbar. But Sarge isn't all smiles and hugs now that he's been reunited with his precious prybar. He's crushed that Clint Howard wouldn't shoot straight with him. Clint broke the poor guy's heart. Look at the hurt on his face.
Well needless to say Sarge gets upset and attacks Coopersmith in what might have been an eventual rape attempt, though I would like to believe Sarge would never do such a thing. In my mind he was just going to rough Clint up a little bit as reprimand for pilfering his prybar. Either way, before any ill fate can befall Coopersmith, evil devil powers turn Sarge's head, literally. His neck was either horribly broken or the evil spirits just turned his shirt backwards. He comes back later as a zombie doing the evil will of the demonic tag team of Clint Howard and Richard Moll. And that's his story.
Kudos to you, Sarge. In a movie with Clint Howard on roller skates, a shirtless maternal mess hall cook, man eating pigs, a reanimated fetus, and a Satan worshipping Richard Moll, you still managed to be the weirdest thing in the movie. But it's ok. I like weird things.
Here it is, the big finale to our first ever two-part, cliffhanger episode of I LIKE THINGS! Previously I gushed of the glory that was the 1989 Punisher movie. This time I'll be skipping over 2004's The Punisher (which wasn't terrible, just kind of bland) and getting right into the nitty gritty of 2008's Punisher: War Zone.
Punisher: War Zone is the third attempt at bringing Frank Castle to the big screen. If the flaw of the 2004 movie was that the Punisher wasn't brutal or single minded enough, then this movie makes up for it in spades. Although this third incarnation of The Punisher isn't as naked-in-the-sewers-bonkers as Dolph Lundgren's from 1989, he does have a certain Jason Voorhees-like panache for creative and disgusting dispatchings of deadbeat dudes.
Something about this movie really worked for me. It was able to straddle the saddle on top of a horse made of ballistic action and dark humor (and horse meat) without letting one side overtake the other. This movie knows what it is. It doesn't take itself too seriously. And it has the feel of a late night grade school video rental, if that makes any sense or strikes a chord with anybody out there. It's prime for an edited-for-TV version that will be just as fun but for all the wrong reasons.
Justice is Served! OR Would Anybody Care For Some Just Desserts?
Aesthetically, War Zone is really cool. Every scene has a particular and limited color scheme. The emphasis is on the visuals and the action plays out very well before our eyes. Bullets, knives, and even the occasional fist break through skin and bone with sprays of blood. This version of the Punisher is a real A-hole and he systematically takes out the trash. And the trash in this particular case happens to be a bunch of random bad guys who very easily burst or explode! What would movies like this be without warehouses full of faceless bullet magnets? It is 1980s one-man-army logic and I will always accept it with open arms. In the first scene he kills a middle aged woman sitting at a dinner table. Granted she was in the mafia and pulls a gun and he also kills about three thousand other people in next twenty seconds, but still. Way to go, movie!
The main villain is Jigsaw, a horribly scarred mob boss. He wasn't always this way though. In fact he was quite obsessively vain about his looks in the early scenes, prior to his deformation at the hands of the Punisher. Therefore his hideous visage is all the more tragic! Cruel irony! The character is cartoonishly gangstery and hammy. But in a good way. He has a crazy brother, Loony Bin Jim, and together they play bad action movie bad guys. When the time comes to "raise their armies" for the big finale with Mr. P, they practically have a two man parade as they strut and saunter from turf to turf to recruit gangs. It's pretty funny. The movie knows it and it doesn't care. It's ham with a side of bacon. And don't forget the cheese.
If over the top action with a bloody tongue tucked in its cheek is your thing, then you should probably check out Punisher: War Zone. If I can't convince you, then maybe this clip can:
And if that didn't convince you then I'm pretty sure you're not going to like it. So watch something else.
Before I go, I really wanted to point out how much I like one particular part in this movie. It happens during the shootout in the house. Jigsaw is on the stairs and bullets are flying everywhere. You see his mouth move. He clearly yells, "SHIT!" but there is no sound. Slightly delayed behind the lip movement you hear, "FUCK!" It's way too weird to be unintentional, right? They couldn't have been that sloppy by accident. Right? Obviously someone making this movie knew I was going to laugh and press rewind and laugh again. I hope.
I'm not a comic book guy. My only real exposure to the character of The Punisher in the world of comics came from my cousin who would show me the occasional panel of bloody brutality from one of the issues he was reading. He also showed me a great story that had The Punisher, Wolverine, and Ghost Rider fighting the devil. I knew these guys from cartoons and toys, but not from the source, not from the comic books. In other words, I knew who they were, but some guy at New England comics would most likely ridicule my preteen, non-canonical assessments of the characters. To me Ghost Rider was a rad biker skeleton who was always on fire, Wolverine was the most popular and coolest super hero at the time because he had knives on his hands, and The Punisher was the vigilante whose comics were deemed "mature" and had to be hidden from my cousin's parents. That was the extent of my comic book knowledge.
My only other knowledge of The Punisher came one Friday night at 8pm. I was probably ten or eleven years old and I remember repeatedly asking my mom what time it was while we were picking up Chinese food from Ocean Kai. I really wanted to be home before 8 o'clock because I saw a commercial for The Punisher movie the day before. Those were the days before fancy pants cable, DVRs, or even programmable VCRs as far as my family was concerned. Anyway, my mom had previously balked at renting the R rated movie for me because on the back of the box someone had a gun crammed in his mouth. This is the lady who let me watch Jaws everyday as a kid. No amount of televised gunplay will ever change the fact that I will forever be far more afraid of sharks than guns. But now The Punisher was going to be on regular TV. And if TV said it was ok for me to watch then she no longer had any recourse!
Needless to say the movie delivers everything a little action hungry kid would want: gun fights, Ivan Drago, an abandoned amusement park hideout, ninjas, Louis Gossett Jr . . . it had it all! I remember that my main complaint as a kid was that he didn't wear his skull shirt and that he lived in the sewer and never came across the Ninja Turtles. I pined for that crossover movie for the ensuing weeks after seeing this.
Many people crap on this movie, but it is borderline perfect for what it is. It's just that the sentiment of that previous sentence hinges entirely on what one is expecting this movie to be. I'm sure comic book purists have their gripes with it, but as I said before, I know next to nothing about the comics so I can't really make those arguments. But folks who grabbed a video cassette with Dolph Lundgren strapped to the gills with firearms in front of a motorcycle from a video store shelf in 1989 probably weren't disappointed. They knew what they were getting into.
I honestly feel that this movie can stand toe to toe and possibly head and shoulders above most direct to video action titles of the late 80s. That surge of low budget action that came from the eighties into the early nineties had so much going for it: video stores were abundant and had shelf space, there was no internet to speak of so there was the thrill of the hunt to find a good movie to rent, and bullets, body counts, ninjas and samurai swords were all in vogue. There is a certain feel to this kind of movie that I have trouble classifying. I always wonder how these types of movies play to different age groups and how much of my fondness is rooted in childhood nostalgia. There will always be something about wet asphalt and rusty garbage cans under the street lights at night that makes me want to see denim-clad thugs meet their well deserved demise at the hands of some vigilante or renegade cop.
Ok, you might say, at present we have three different versions of The Punisher in movies. What makes the two you like so special, Tommy?And what's wrong with the one you didn't like, you picky asshole? In the end it's all going to be a matter of personal tastes. People like what they like. In the 1989 Punisher, I like the previously mentioned 80s-action atmosphere, I like the cheesy multi-colored shattering glass opening credits, I like the frayed friendship with Louis Gossett Jr, and I like that they didn't try to make you feel too bad for The Punisher. In this movie The Punisher spends his spare time in the sewer sitting naked while debating with God about justice. He's clearly off his rocker. I think that is something a character like this needs. Someone who murders hundreds of people, for whatever reason, should usually be portrayed as crazy.
The Punisher has been waging war on organized crime for a few years and getting his personal bodycount into the triple digits while his old friend, from his old life, Louis Gossett Jr is tracking him down. Gossett plays Jake, Frank's old partner. All he wants is to help his friend, to somehow pull him from the murky depths of vengeful insanity. Unfortunately for him, vengeful insanity is the deepest and murkiest of all insanities!
The Punisher isn't completely without morals though. When the Yakuza decide to kidnap all of the mafia bosses' kids, it's up to The Punisher to get them back! No more innocents are going to get hurt on his watch! And to prove he's still crazy, The Punisher has to be slightly coaxed into this quest by a bum who rhymes everything he says. I don't know if this Shakespearean wino is a character from the comics or not, but he kind of sticks out like sore thumb in this movie. And I wouldn't have it any other way. He trades criminal underworld secrets to disturbed vigilantes for RC cars carrying payloads of brown-bagged hooch. Trust me, that sentence makes sense.
This movie delivers in the action department. Bullet shells fly, things blow up, bad guys drop dead left and right. There are cool locations for this carnage to take place like the empty fun house and the Japanese style Yakuza lair. But what ties it all together is Dolph Lundgren. He's pale and greasy and mumbly and you can believe he's been in the sewers for years talking to himself and only coming out when it's time to murder bad dudes. And I'm not sure if it was intentional, but the combination of Dolph's sickly pale face, sunken sleepless eyes, and black greasepaint facial stubble occasionally creates the iconic Punisher skull that was missing from his shirt. I think they knew what they were doing.
Not that these kinds of movies need or strive to be emotional roller coasters, but I want to give "mad props", as the kids say, to Louis Gossett Jr. I know there are deleted scenes on youtube and elsewhere that you can watch to see the background story develop between Frank and Jake. But those are deleted scenes and therefore not in the movie. So Gossett only has limited screen time to get his character across and he does a really good job. For every hour Frank Castle has spent fighting his one man war, Jake has been searching for him so he could save him, help him, and redeem him. When the Punisher is finally apprehended, the two men meet again in a jail cell. Jake tries pouring his heart out and all he gets is a stone faced stare and smart ass answers. So he flips his shit. Louis Gossett Jr does a stellar job in this scene. You can see it here at about three and a half minutes into this clip. And check out how Dolph Lundgren doesn't even flich when Gossett jumps out of his chair and grabs his shirt. He's a pro.
Excellent Stunt at 0:29 Excellent Scene at 3:15
This clip also features my favorite stunt from the movie. The Punisher crashes a bus into a van. Standard action movie shenanigans. But there just so happened to be a guy on the hood of that van firing his machine gun into that bus full of kids. He goes flying into the bus through the windshield. It's awesome. Then he gets right up and attacks again, only to be launched off the bus like that mugger in the "pinkie toe" story Kramer told on an episode of Seinfeld.
That about wraps it up for the 1989 Dolph Lundgren version of The Punisher. If you like low budget 80s action, it's right up your alley. I want to give honorable mention ribbons to Kim Miyori who played a very good villain as Lady Tanaka and to Jeroen Krabbe for rocking that denim jacket during the final shootout and for pronouncing "Thomas" phonetically.
Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of "I LIKE 2 OUT OF 3 PUNISHER MOVIES!"
