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If You Gave 11-Year-Old Boys Red Bull, Porn And History Channel Documentaries, You'd Get Sucker Punch

By Miscellaneous | Videos | March 21, 2011 |

By Miscellaneous | Videos | March 21, 2011 |


I have no idea whether Sucker Punch is going to be any good. I suspect that with so much going on between the Orcs and Nazis and teenagers in fetishwear and corpse soldiers and knights and (sigh) dragons and high-end prostitution and zeppelins and general what-the-fuckery, the best we can hope for is the kind of glorious mess that keeps everything moving so fast that the audience can’t notice just how stupid it all is. There’s enough story here for at least three movies, if not one one good one.

That said, the supporting materials kick all sorts of ass. Now, it’s probably a bad sign when your movie needs animated shorts to help the audience figure out just what the hell is going on, but at least the shorts by Swiss director Ben Hibon are pulsing with energy, excitement and horror.

The first, The Trenches, highlights the story of one unfortunate German soldier turned into a mechanized abomination to continue fighting for a desperate army running low on cannon fodder. I might be the only guy around here who finds zombies by turns disgusting and stupid, and cyborg zombies really creep me out (as a young geek, the only comic book villain I ever found truly unsettling was the cyborg Reavers in Uncanny X-Men) but it’s impossible not to empathize with our nameless German forced to carry out the paranoid fantasies of a raving lunatic.

The second short, Dragon, is, to me, less arresting. It tells the story of how the Black Knights, Orcs and (sigh) dragons all came to be at war. How and why you’d have knights, orcs and (sigh) dragons in World War I will, I assume, be explained at some point in the film itself. (Yes, yes. I know it’s all happening in the mind of an institutionalized teenage girl. Please shut up.)

I don’t understand how it’s all supposed to work together, but hey. Hot chicks in short skirts. Nothing wrong with that.

Jason Harris is very happy the corpse soldiers aren’t wearing short skirts.