Posts Tagged ‘Punisher’

Stalking the Undertaker

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Hey Scott,
I was wondering if you and your viewers could help me out. This year will mark the Undertaker's twenty solid years in the WWE as an active wrestler.  Think about it he's been in the company from Hulkamania to the New Generation to the Attitude Era to the Brand Split to the modern era. From what I can tell he's wrestled in 48 states (minus Wyoming and Montana), all the Canadian provinces (except for maybe Prince Edward Island I'm not sure), all populated continents and over 50 countries.
In honor of his 20 years, I'm looking for where everywhere he's wrestled. www.thehistoryofwwe.com has been a godsend for me. Thanks to them, I found nearly every match he wrestled in WWE. (Right now he's ranked as having the second most matches from 1980-2010 only behind Bret Hart.
I need your help in his pre-WWE years. I'm looking to find as many matches and different cities and countries he wrestled in WCW (as Mean Mark Callous), CWA/USWA (as Master of Pain and the Punisher), World Class {Texas Red), Central Illinois Wresling (The Commando), and New Japan (Punisher Dice Morgan)
When I've found as many as I can I hope to make an online map with all the cities.

 

Good luck.

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Posted in Rants | 33 Comments »

The SmarK DVD Rant – Action Comics

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

The SmarK DVD Rant - Action Comics!

- OK, this one is probably a bit of a stretch, but bear with me.

My eternal quest to string together somewhat-related DVD reviews brings us this time around to a pair of comedic-slanted action movies, one of which is much better than the other. I'll leave it to the reader to guess which one I liked more. See if you can figure it out by the end of the review!

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Posted in Rants | 21 Comments »

Punisher

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

Via Facebook...

Subject: Punisher?
Scott,
Any intention of seeing the new Punisher movie?  I'd recommend it, if only on a comic book study basis.  The violence is awesome and so ridiculously over-the-top that you can't help but enjoy it.  I thought Stevenson was a great Castle, and far more believable as the grizzled war vet out for revenge than Janey was (and I actually sort of enjoyed Janey's performance).  Also, if you get around to seeing it...see if you notice the same thing I did:  that Dominic West plays Jigsaw almost as an homage to Nicholson's Joker, switching from sadistic to slapstick in the blink of an eye.  It's not an offensive performance, but it's also not really who Jigsaw was.  That said, outside of Stevenson's performance, the acting is pretty fucking terrible, but the violence is so satisfying that you don't really care.  Besides, since when has the Punisher been about dialogue?  Just curious on your thoughts.
-Donnie

 

Saw it tonight, in fact, and I thought it was pretty awesome for what it was -- an over the top stupid and violent tribute to 80s action hero movies.  I think once you're in on the joke it becomes a lot more entertaining than someone going in expecting a slick movie like the 2004 version, because really you need a certain sense of humor to appreciate Punisher punching someone THROUGH the face and blowing someone's head off with a shotgun as a punchline.  Julie Benz gets sucked into yet another helpless female role (her new specialty when she's not showing her goods on Dexter) and appears to be the only one not having fun with it.  I actually enjoyed Loony Bin Jim as a villain more than Jigsaw (who went from Mafia caricature to goofy Dick Tracy villain way too easily) and found the climactic battle the most disappointing thing about the movie.  Plus all the squishy sound effects got a little silly and tiresome after a while. 

But really, if you can find a better and more hilarious death scene than the idiotic Irish parkour guys and their run-in with Frank Castle's big gun,  please feel free to share.

I still liked the Tom Jane version better because I'm not a slave to the comics and found it more charming and witty than this brainless gorefest, but I enjoyed the brainless gorefest quite a lot on its own merits, too.  The theatre was maybe 10% full, if that, though, so look for another bomb in the franchise.

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Posted in Rants | 5 Comments »

RAMBO!

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Oh.  My.  God. 

Now I really wish I had seen this one in the theaters, because if ever there's a movie perfect for a packed house on a Friday night filled with rowdy males 18-34, it's RAMBO.  Here's why this movie was the most awesome thing in the history of cinema:

1)  In an era of people over-reacting to what "messages" that movies convey to the youth of America, this was unapologetically violent and gory and brutal, and yet served a valuable message in itself:  War is violent and gory and brutal and ugly, and it's not always just the bad people who get hurt.  The sequence with the village getting slaughtered would have had Jodi hiding under the couch in fear, but from then on you just KNEW that someone was gonna get gutted by John Rambo in retribution. 

2)  You thought 300 was manly?  This movie is so testosterone-filled that at one point the sissy-boy bleeding heart liberal doctor actually picks up a rock and bashes another man's skull in with it.  FUCK YEAH.  Now that's character development I can get behind.

3)  It's only 80 minutes long. No bullshit plot development, extra characters, surprise twists, pointless denouements or romances.  Some people come to Burma to help the helpless, get captured by bad people, and Rambo goes in and fucks their shit up. 

4)  Overkill and the best death scenes I've seen since Punisher.  At one point Rambo kills a guy by shooting him through the FACE with an arrow, and the body lands on a mine previously left there by him and blows up.  See, that's how you do irony, baby.  And why settle for killing a group of bad guys with one mine when you can attach it to a World War II Tallboy Bomb and obliterate an entire chunk of the FOREST? 

Basically it's a remake of Predator with Burmese soliders instead of aliens, but Predator was a fucking awesome movie so I have no problem with that.  If this is what Stallone wants to do with the Rambo franchise from now on, then here's hoping for another 5 of them.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

Arrested Development 2 and 3

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

The SmarK DVD Rant for Arrested Development - The Second and Third Seasons

It's a two-fer this time around, as I was ready to do the third season of the show, but then realized that I hadn't done the second one yet, which triggered a huge AD marathon reviewing session for me over the past couple of weeks. That's a lot of Mitch Hurwitz, man.

Now, I'm sure by now you know the story. AD bursts onto the Fox schedule, immediately wins the Best Comedy Emmy in its first year, and subsequently gets ignored and buried by the network, as they reduce the order, move it around the schedule, and do everything but cancel it to make sure it gets canceled. And yet through it all, Hurwitz and the writers maintain a brilliant vision of what a sitcom should be, redefining the genre and basically rendering the traditional "four camera" sitcom form a dead issue in many people's minds.

The show's true brilliance came in the form of the endless running jokes and callbacks it presented, however. Whereas most shows would do a running gag that lasted for one show, AD would present a gag that lasted for a whole SERIES. And much of the humor was derived from fans paying attention to stuff that happened in previous episodes, which would then come back to be paid off in later episodes.

There were two distinct types of running jokes featured, as well -- individual and universal. The individual jokes were things like Gob's endless parade of failed magic tricks, or Michael's inability to formulate a plan that works, or George-Michael's crush on his cousin Maeby. The universal jokes were lines like "I've made a huge mistake!" or "Well, that one was a freebie," which could be said by different characters, in totally different contexts, on any show.
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Posted in Rants | 22 Comments »