Piranha

Paced to express the mounting sense of anxiety felt by the film's lead couple, Joe Dante's Piranha starts out leisurely, bordering on sluggish, before slowly building to full-on, adrenal mania. Heather Menzies plays Maggie McKeown, a spunky skiptracer hot on the trail of two teenagers who skinny-dipped in the wrong pool. Along the way she recruits Bradford Dillman's topped-up drunk Paul to help investigate the disappearance. The pair stumble on a semi-abandoned military research tank (the kind that holds water) which they promptly, thoughtlessly, drain. Unfortunately, this bone-clogged cauldron housed a strain of super aggressive, selectively bred, piranha, able to survive in the cold, local waters.

After a couple of run-ins with the film's buzzing, agitated shoals, Maggie and Paul abandon their emerging relationship to arrive at a state of total, propulsive motion. This unceasing advance hits a peak 79 minutes into the film - editors Dante and Mark Goldblatt assemble a short, delirious sequence that mixes on-water stunt falls; a speedboat crashing through a smaller vessel (and the subsequent explosion); massing, carnivorous fish and, finally, our heroes launching themselves into space in a stolen, slow-motion police car. Dante's film may be slight in terms of storytelling - a quickly produced cash-in hoping to ride Jaws' wake - but it's assembled in a way that extracts maximum impact out of its (comparatively) meagre budget. The Piranha attacks manage to be both protracted and frenzied. The film's micro maulings communicated with churning, underwater collages that knit together images of teeth, injury and clouding, dilute blood.

The Punisher

Mark Goldblatt puts his time as Paul Verhoeven's second-unit director to good use with The Punisher, an impatient set-piece generator that combines the interlaced fuzz of RoboCop with the vulgar, home video opportunism of The Cannon Group. Dolph Lundgren plays the titular vigilante as disconnected and bereaved. The pure machinery of Marvel Comics' ruthlessly motivated exterminator is in here somewhere, massaged by a depiction that screenwriter Boaz Yakin likely hoped would register as, at-least, semi-human. Cursed with essentially the same backstory as his newsprint forebear, Lundgren's Frank Castle glooms in biker leathers, loaded down with army surplus and branded stiletto daggers.

Lundgren's chiselled, beautiful face is shaped into a glaring death mask with heavy, waxen make-up and a pencilled in beard that gifts the actor a knife-edge contouring. Lundgren's louche violence and the lovingly photographed automatic weaponry would be star-making if Goldblatt's film wasn't so thin. Lundgren is working at being iconic: he's a heavy metal Elvis gyrating with chopped and converted firearms in a piece that is happy to be simply diverting. The film's main dramatic push then concerns a back-and-forth between a legion of Anytown Mafiosa and a gang of arrogant, marauding Yakuza. Naturally the depiction of the Japanese gangsters combines every possible permutation of video shop Orientalism.

Shuriken, sexualised cruelty, white slave trading, and Kim Miyori's one-dimensional (but enjoyably vindictive) Dragon Lady boss are all pressed into service to illustrate the sub-human otherness of these invading criminals. This blunt exoticism combined with The Punisher's decision to team up with Jeroen Krabbe's heavily accessorised mob don lends Goldblatt's film the air of 1940s propaganda. American criminals are still American after all. In this sense The Punisher is not so much an adaptation of Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr and Ross Andru's craniomanic character, rather it is a stuttering live action run-through of the imagery that Frank Miller lifted out of sombre Samurai manga then transplanted into the Western comic canon via his electric Daredevil run.