Desert Punk Volume 4 - Desert Dung   Starring (voice): Chihiro Suzuki, Tomoko Kotani, Chiwa Saito and Jiro Saito MVM RRP: £15.99 MVD2252 Certificate: 15 Available 03 August 2009

When Desert Punk's life is saved by an honest man, he is taught a valuable lesson in decency; a lesson he quickly forgets. But decency has no part in his next job, which is easily his crappiest task yet... literally... and Kosuna learns that it's not the size of your gun that's important...

Desert Punk (Sunabōzuis) is based on Usune Masatoshi's manga series. Volume 4 features episodes 13-16 of the 24-episode series and is directed by Takayuki Inagaki (Black Cat), with character designs by Takahiro Yoshimatsu (Ninja Scroll; Slayers; Trigun).

In today's politically correct society Desert Punk is either a breath of fresh air or a relic of the past depending on your point of view. Relying heavily on Benny Hill style innuendo, mainly centring around Desert Punk's obsession with large breasted women, the series is a bombastically comic celebration of juvenilia, filled as it is with sarcastic put-downs, explosive action and plenty of lechery and lewdness.

Ideals and Reality: Desert Punk and Kosuna stumble across two small children in the desert. They are dying of thirst, but Desert Punk (who is lost and running out of water himself) ignores them. When a few miles later he accidentally finds a village, he replenishes his provisions and then heads back to the children - not to save them but to sell them to the highest bidder. When he gets there a young man has also found them, but he has passed out from thirst. This young man is Stryker, and he's not who he seems to be.

Kosuna and Full-Auto: Kosuna fantasises about being a power babe, but after she is attacked and her gun fails to kill her assailant, she asks Desert Punk for a more powerful weapon.

Sibling and Childhood Friend: Desert Punk and the Machine Gun Brothers are hired to protect a large truck full of fertiliser. The money is good and Desert Punk soon realises that the truck is carrying more than human waste.

Faeces and Urine: Still protecting the fertiliser truck, Desert Punk is surprised when Rain Spider and his gang attempt to take control of the truck. Desert Punk finally gets to the bottom of the mystery of their real cargo.

Extras include Tokyo Animator College (8 min, 57 sec in which the director goes back to the animation college he graduated from for a Q&A with the current students); As Seen on TV (24 min, 15 sec look at the original TV broadcast edit of an episode of the show which bleeps out the swearing); Textless opening and closing titles (however these are for the old title sequences that ran on volumes 1-4. For volume five there are a new set of titles which aren't shown here); and trailers for other shows.

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Darren Rea