Based on the comic book Corrective Measures by Grant Chastain, this movie was directed and written by Sean O’Reilly, who is the owner and operator of the comic book company Arcana Studio.

The majority of filming took place in Vancouver, Canada.– except for a day of shooting in Atlanta, GA with Bruce Willis, who plays the not-in-general population criminal Julius “The Lobe” Loeb.

San Tiburon is a super prison — literally, for supervillains — created in the wake of an accident caused by a company that now, ever so conveniently, runs the prison. Diego Diaz (Brennan Mejia) is the new inmate who gets in over his head when he protects Loeb from the vigilante Payback (Dan Payne, who was Dollar Bill in Watchmen) and earns the ire of Overseer Devlin (Michael Rooker, chewing scenery and not caring in between convention appearances).

Tom Cavanagh, from Ed and the Reverse Flash from the TV show, is the best part of this movie, playing The Conductor, an inmate who shows the empathic Diego how to survive. Daniel Cudmore, who was Colossus in the Brya Singer-era X-Men movies is in this as Diamond Jim, while Kat Ruston, Kevin Zegers and Hayley Sales make up the support staff of the not-unlike Belle Reve prison.

I really wanted to like this. I understand that Willis was limited and therefore, his performance comes off as weary instead of Hannibal Lecter, guiding the riot from solitary confinement. This movie also pulls a The Astrologer by having its wildest idea — a Phantom Zone that takes the Christian idea of Limbo and applies it to solitary confinement — be dashed off and forgotten just like the window to the galaxy that Craig Marcus Alexander shows off to his accountant. It does, however, have the best way to handle Willis. When taken off into solitary at the end, wearing a power negating helmet that looks like Xorn from the X-Men, they cover his face — it’s probably not even him and the body double used in some shots — they just ADR his voice over a mouth that doesn’t move. The Italian exploitation industry would be proud.

You can watch this on Tubi.

What if you combined a superhero movie with Saw? Well, this would be it.

Directed, written and produced by Jason Trost, who made The FP and also stars in this movie as Charge, this movie finds him, Cutthroat (Lucas Till, who was Havok in X-Men: First Class and MacGyver in the reboot of the series), The Wall (Lee Valmassy) and Shadow (Sophie Merkley) waking up in an abandoned town, their powers gone and facing their arch foe Rickshaw (James Remar, always amazing) in the kind of death trap Arcade used to put the X-Men through.

This is probably as close as we’ll get to a Brat Pack movie. I kind of liked way more than most reviews I’ve seen, as I liked the end of the superteam dynamics of the film, the way we learn about the heroes dynamics and origins through the actions and how Charge must continually make tough choices.

Did you read stuff like Grips and Aircel comics in the 90s? Or the post-Image grim and gritty comics made by comics fans that did one comic and never another one again? Do you like Stephen Platt? Then you’re going to like this way more than the average filmgoer.

There’s also a sequel, All Superheroes Must Die 2: The Last Superhero, that I need to find.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Take a look at that title and you may think, “Well, if Marvel isn’t going to make a Punisher theatrical movie, someone should.”

Oh man, you’re the audience for this movie.

Wolfgang (Robert Amstler, doing an Arnold impression or it’s maybe just because he’s from Austria and was in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) is an international mercenary called to Redding, CA where a wealthy woman to get revenge. While there, he meets an orphan who could die at any moment from an undisclosed chronic disease. He decides to be her father figure — he still has not had enough of fighting crime — and hires Lisa (Nicole Stark) to be their tour guide.

This movie is astounding because it promises that’s going to be a Frank Castle movie, then makes you think it’s going to be a direct-to-streaming Leon the Professional and then becomes a travel infomercial for Redding with a scene where Lisa fires off all the things to do in town, like Turtle Bay Exploration Park, Shasta State Historic Park and WaterWorks Park. I’m shocked she didn’t tell them about the steaks at Jack’s Bar and Grill, the Huli Meatball Pizza at C.R. Gibbs American Grille or the Organic Chicken Jerusalem at Moonstone Bistro. Then, we follow the characters to these places in-between Wolfgang shooting people, sometimes in first-person action.

It’s incredible because you really have no idea what kind of movie this is. Good work, tourism PR team of Redding! You did it!

This was directed by Rene Perez, who keeps winning my cheap movie heart by making movies like a Death Wish movie so complete — Death Kiss — that he found a Bronson clone named Robert Bronzi in Eastern Europe.

This also ends — spoiler warning — with the bad guy getting BBQ sauce — did it come from Niu Hawaiian, Arnold’s or Fat Daddy’s? — poured all over himself and left to be dinner for a bear. Astounding.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Ray Stevenson has done a great job of playing two of my favorite characters — The Punisher and Firefly — in two not-so-good movies, which is kind of sad. At least Marvel threw him something of a bone by having him play Volstagg in the Thor movies. But hey — he’s done well for himself. I just wish they’d made a better Punisher movie for him to be in.

Neither director Jonathan Hensleigh or star Thomas Jane — who said “What I won’t do is spend months of my life sweating over a movie that I just don’t believe in. I’ve always loved the Marvel guys, and wish them well. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to search for a film that one day might stand with all those films that the fans have asked me to watch.” — would return for this film. I mean, at one point, Walter Hill was going to be involved, but lack of a good script was one of the main reasons why Jane — who would come back to play Castle in a short called The Punisher: Dirty Laundry — walked away.

Director Lexi Alexander, a former soccer hooligan, World Karate Association world champion and United States Marine Corps close combat trainer, tried. She had famous battles with Lionsgate, who produced the film in the days before Marvel making all of their own films. She’d later say, “Marvel was an equal partner, but unfortunately when there were creative decision conflicts, Marvel would let Lionsgate be the tie breaker. I always regretted that I made a Marvel movie this way, because 99% of their notes were much better than the studios and I was more in tune with them.” There were rumors that she was taken off the film, which she denies, but she didn’t get final cut.

Roger Ebert referred to the film by saying “The Punisher: War Zone is one of the best-made bad movies I’ve seen” and it’s been reeavluated since its release, but this is the lowest grossing Marvel film — I don’t know if they count the earlier Captain America — making even less than Elektra and Howard the Duck.

I mean, I love Jigsaw. I love the Punisher. This feels like it wants to be something other than a story from the comics and when those flipping acrobats show up? Yeah, I’m good. Not every bad movie can be reclaimed.

Ah, 2004, a time when fascist racists had not yet taken the skull of the Punisher and used it to show us who they were or deify fake heroes who had bragged about killing numerous civilians in the name of service to their country. Yes, the Punisher skull, owned by Disney, a company that sues mom and pop daycares for daring to bootleg their mouse on their walls somehow allows white supremacy and the over militarization of the police state to run wild and take over their IP.

Anyways, you still here?

Taking most of the Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon stories and putting them up on the screen, the second take on The Punisher realizes that if you want to do it right, he needs that skull and he needs to just tear through human beings.

Director Jonathan Hensleigh wrote Die Hard with a Vengeance and Jumanji. This was produced by his wife, Gale Anne Hurd, and written with Michael France, who wrote movies for Marvel characters before the MCU like The Hulk and Fantastic Four. Hensleigh said, “The underlying events that give rise to Frank Castle’s vigilantism are not from the comic. I invented a lot of that. I made it a lot worse.”

Yes, the era when the comics were not good enough. This is why the MCU works. But at this point, comics were — and probably still are — looked at as junk and always loosely adapted.

So instead of being just home from Vietnam and seeing his family for the first time before they’re all killed, Frank Castle is an undercover cop who gets exposed and his entire family killed at a reunion.

Yeah, it’s more death, but it doesn’t hit as hard.

Then again, you do get Roy Scheider as the Punisher’s dad.

And Kevin Nash as the Russian.

But as good as Thomas Jane is, you also get John Travolta as Howard Saint. And that’s kind of the issue with the Punisher. His villains, outside of Jigsaw and Barracuda, never seem to live all that long. Then again, the movies miss the fact that Punisher is a serial killer, a villain worse than the criminals he murders, a man who has long since gotten revenge over those who rubbed out his family and now is endlessly just killing and killing because he has nothing left.

To close, I love the Punisher. I had a poster — the Mike Zeck cover to issue #1 of the 1986 mini-series — on my dorm wall forever. I just wish that people understood what the character really stands for and that someone would finally make a good movie with the character.