The Punisher

 

Director: Mark Goldblatt
Year:  1989
Rating:  7.0

This film should be in the Schlocky Action Low Budget Hall of Fame. Frame for frame it has to be one of the more violent films from that period that I have seen. I would even go so far as to say this is Asian Action Good. It was produced in Australia at the tail end of the Ozploitation era when horror, violence and nudity were splashed against the screen in lurid colors. This film isn't really an official part of that as it was produced by an American company (New World Entertainment who had made a deal with Marvel) but it has the same spirit. It leaves out the horror and sex and focuses on violence. It is after all The Punisher, a character who has gained a lot more fame of late than he had back in 1989. He is out of the Marvel stable showing up first in 1974 in some of the Spider-Man comic books and later getting his own comic book in the 1980s. The original creator said he was influenced by the Executioner books. I have never read any of the comic books and only brushed up against him in the Daredevil TV show but I never got very far into that. If it had been as cheesy and fun as this one, I might have seen more.




Thankfully, this is not an origin story - one quick flashback to his family being blown up and now he is in fulltime revenge mode. One guy asks him if his need for revenge hasn't been satiated, he replies not yet and goes on to kill multiples of more bad guys. Of course, he is way past revenge as most of the people he kills had nothing to do with the death of his wife and two children - it has become a dark obsession to kill bad guys and he lives in the sewers to show just how serious he is. And who better to portray such a complex character - to bring out shades of his psyche  - the pain inside than Dolph Lundgren, master thespian of emotional discharge. Lundgren has slightly more dialogue than a mime and that is a good thing. He does his best acting in silence, eyes glaring mode. But no one comes to one of these ridiculous action fests for the acting, they come for the bang for your buck action and this film is chockful of it as well as dead bodies. Killed in a myriad of ways - broken neck, explosions, knife, sword, spear, dart, guns of course, thrown off a high place, run over by a car and probably a few ways that I have forgotten. I should not admit to finding it entertaining and occasionally saying "ouch that must have hurt". But it was entertaining for the kind of film it was trying to be.



Lady Tanaka (Kim Miyori) to a mafia gangster "We are the Yakuza. When your ancestors were still screwing sheep in Europe, we were the crime Lords of Asia" as she breaks his fingers. Lady Tanaka and her killer female employee are not people to mess with as the Mafia finds out. When they are not killing them, the Punisher is. But when the Yakuza kidnaps their children, the soft side of the Punisher shows up. He kills pretty much everyone to save them. His old cop partner (Louis Gosset Jr.) has been chasing him for five years and is still chasing him to this day I expect. The main Mafia villain is played by the ultra-smooth Jeroen Krabbe.





There are some good set pieces in the film - a restaurant where all the customers calmly eating their meals all turn out to be Yakuza or the fun house killing ground when Ninjas by the dozens zip down the slide to kill the Punisher, the bus ride where some stuntman jumps through the front window as it comes at him and the finale which is a blood bath of death and Lady Tanaka in white faced geisha mode like a woman returned from hell. It felt almost like a 1960s Ken Takakura film as he walks into the main villain's head quarters and leaves a line of dead bodies for others to collect.



The director Mark Goldblatt hasn't directed many films but he was an editor on The Terminator I and II, Rambo II, Enter the Ninja, Commando, Predator II and others - so he knows his way around an action scene.