[EXPRESSO] The Piper (2023) | Devil’s Trill Sonata

It is “evil Hamelin”?

Yes.

And yet people say i can’t do short reviews.

To be honest, this isn’t even that bad of a movie to deserve being summed up “evil Hamelin ghost’s revenge”…. yet it is that, it’s exactly that.

The plot sees a struggling musician strong-handed by her maestro into retrieving a music sheet from her mentor, as she was reluctant to finish the piece, a children’s concerto, even tried to get rid of it before her untimely and gruesome death.

She manages to steal the sheets to get ahead and provide for her semi-deaf daughter, but soon realizes her actions unleashed a sinister presence that starts influencing people, especially children…

It has decent-to-good production values, decent acting, it’s not completely boring, but it’s also utterly predictable, very run-of-the-mill in pretty much every aspect, from the characters, the motivations, even the lore that basically amounts to the usual reworking old folklore legends told to children in a horror context, so we have the entity as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, back for revenge… or something, you get the feeling they don’t show him too much in the movie because they didn’t actually know what to do him until the third act, and boy he does feel like a missed opportunity for a more refined antagonistic phantasm/entity.

Every now and then it has some decent or satisfying moments that avoid it slipping into sub-par slop, it helps that it’s fairly short, 90 minutes with a decent pacing, but for every positive there’s some bullshit that eventually brings it back to being incredibly average and easily forgettable/disposable, despite some effort that – again – doesn’t ultimately pays off in any significant way. The very definition of “nothing special”.

moral of the story: pay people when they do their fuckin job.

We gotta talk about Palworld

I remember writing a quick piece when this one was presented back in 2021, laughing it off as i thing that would be shot down by Nintendo’ lawyers.

Obviously that didn’t happen (and never will, i would assume), and since it has sold 5 million copies in the span of DAYS after releasing in Early Access this 19th of January, the company behind it being shady con merchants and the fact people are actually defending a game with “bootleg Electabuzz Totoro with gatling gun” is amazing… look, we need to talk about this.

(this is not a review, FIY, just putting this out there early)

Leaving aside the fact most likely this game doesn’t use generative AI for the “‘mons”, they look just rip-offs – sometimes literally as you can some really obvious bits of both official Pokemon designs and even fandesigns – done the ye old fashion way, and the sociopathic premise of “you can kill, cook and enslave your non-Pokemon pals” (even more sociopathical how you can catch human NPCs,) to what seems like a very basic survival and crafting game that defines the “early” in Early Access title.

One that also looks very “asset flippy” as it literal looks they recycled assets from their earlier title, Craftopia, which itself tries to ape BOTW and even “borrows” enemy designs, which already tells you these people don’t give a fuck. Just don’t, and knew exactly how to use the “we pokedo what Nintendon’t” controversial energy to get every publication to talk about it.

That much they did and played it right, because i talked about it back then, and in the time between i wrote this thing it and posted, it sold 3 more million copies for a total of 8 millions, but oddly this isn’t so much about money, per se.

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One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 – Additional Episode 2: Koby’s Combat Chronicle PS4 [REVIEW]

Another episode/mini-mode, and this one too based around the new DLC characters included in the DLC character pack that released as the same time as the additional episode, this time around Coby/Koby, one of the older One Piece characters that’s also notable for its incredible glow up and comeback later in the series, and a demonstration of Oda’s amazing long game, where in most shonen mangas it would have been simply one of the first characters Luffy meets in his adventure, the kind that’s basically forgotten after it fulfills its purpose, and never, ever appears again.

As with the first one, the episode introduces the second Soul Map to further increase the characters stat beyond the previous cap, improve existing skills and unlock some new ones, which include stuff like buffing attack while your combo counter is high, or more unique ones like converting/consuming the coins you collects into health directly.

Where Yamato’s Adventure was a time attack mode that forced you to fight hard and fast so to keep the mission/adventure going and hopefully actually finishing instead of getting a time out, Koby’s Combat Chronicle is more a survival mode, where you undertake various missions as you can, with some special ones with more unique or new objectives, all on the same life bar.

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One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 – DLC Pack 5 PS4 [DLC REVIEW]

Before the final reveal in december, i honestly hoped this would have been a One Piece “Film Villains “DLC packs, but nope, the “reveal” (the silhouette gave it away since we knew of the this second Season Pass existing in trailer announcement form) of Uta was simply to indicate this was gonna be a One Piece Film Red DLC characters pack.

Which makes sense, since Film Red was beyond successful at the box office, it was arguably the goddamn best One Piece film since Film Z, and it also big a vehicle for j-pop singer Ado helped it making it the 6th grossing anime (and japanese) film of ALL TIME so far, so yeah, you bet your ass the production committees and suits were gonna push it into related One Piece products.

Still, it’s a shame because i do think a One Piece film villains DLC characters pack would have also sold really well if it picked some fan favourites like Zephyr or Shiki, but alas, this is not the case. Maybe in Pirate Warriors 5, whenever will that materialize.

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[EXPRESSO] The Beekeeper (2024) | Sleeper Cell

Let’s start the year off with the new Jason Staham movie, The Beekeeper.

One merry day, a kindly but tech “un-savvy” old lady is scammed by one of those “call this number to recover your computer” operations, resulting in them draining all her money, even the 2 millions of the pro-bono teaching fund she was tasked with.

In utter despair, she commits suicide, and her daughter, working at the FBI, initially thinks is the man whom she found in her house, but he was simply her neighbour, a quiet man that worked as a beekeeper and was beyond grateful of the kindness bestowed upon him by the old lady.

So he sets out in a quest for revenge against those responsable, because he’s a beekeeper, but also a “beekeeper”, as the codename given to highly trained assassins, one-man army agents belonging to a super-secret government project, operating outside of the system to protect the system itself in case it becomes unstable or operated by bad actors.

Some very bad actors in this case, not that will stop Jason Staham to avenge her kindly neighbour by kicking ass, eventually crushing skulls and popping caps into anything that doesn’t wanna de-escalate scamming people, when the sheer magnitude of his one liners somehow doesn’t immediately scare the life out of the douchebag thugs and their untouchable masters.

It’s a decent action romp with some nice ideas that ultimately delivers a lot of satisfying graphic violence, the plot it’s essentially nothing new but the flair (and the “bee angle”) is nice enough, the action is enjoyably cheesy, and it’s a pretty straighforward narrative that doesn’t wast time nor tries to sequel bait.

It’s definitely better than most of the other movies Staham was in last year, this is decent, and very, very entertaining indeed.

Robot Holocaust (1986) [REVIEW] | Nobody expects the… Robot Holocaust?

Since newer generations of shit movie seekers might not be familiar with this one, let’s cover one of the “classics” in terms of poverty filmaking, one that indeed rivals the many horrible trashy exploitations movies we italians pumped out for the international market during the 70s and 80s, to a legendary degree. If you didn’t know, you would be forgiven in believing this was just another italian production with the usual combination of american actors and italian shooting locations.

Robot Holocaust has certainly that kind of aura to it, even more when it goes for the double whammy of having a sci fi story mixed the sword and sorcery bullshit… minus actual magic.

And i gotta say, upon revisiting it its still an impressive piece of legendary so bad its good shit, a relic from a past filled with movies like these that were so bad and poor in everything they ended up being accidentally funny, hilarious while being so bad it borders on being utright unwatchable shit.

For many of you, this isn’t anything new, at all, as the movie it’s pretty well known among older generations of crap cinema conosseurs, it’s “basic knowledge”, but Robot Holocaust deserves its place in bad movie history, and its legend it’s worth retelling over and over, even if it doesn’t involve Andre The Giant.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember #36: A Sound Of Thunder (2005)

Since we’ve looked at a LOT of low-to-no budget dinosaur films this year (maybe even more than usual), let’s end with something that actually released in most english-speaking cinemas, had some actual movie studios and actually known industry faces attached to it, with A Sound Of Thunder.

Based on a short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury and set in the still “distant” future of 2055, it tells the story of a company, Time Safari, that offers to rich customers the possibility to travel back in time and hunt dinosaurs.

Due to the huge risks involved with the “space-time fabric and whatnot”, the company regulates the safari by hunting species of dinosaurs that would have eventually died anyway of natural causes and keeps the clients from stepping off the designated path of the safari experience.

While on a hunt, a gun malfunctions, forcing the team to scatter and flee from an Allosaurus, and even if they eventually regroup, when they come back to their time with no harm done… they soon find out their actions had consequences, like a sudden increase in global temperature and the over-night instant, abudant growth of plant life, with further trips resulting in even more messing with the space-time continuum and endangering the existence of humanity as a whole…

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember #35: Walking With Dinosaurs 3D (2013)

Figured we would eventually feature a dinosaur documentary film into Dino Dicember somewhat…. not yet, because we’re not talking about the BBC’s prolific and historically signifcant series of dinosaur documentaries, we’re talking about the movie based on those.

Which doesn’t mean much since i didn’t grow up seeing that BBC miniseries, quite odd given i was interested in dinosaurs as a boy, and you can bet by me making a recurring yearly rubric about the dinos, i still am.

Though doing some research on the BBC series made me wonder why the fuck was the point of making a movie when the series’ main appeal, one that would influence later prehistoric life documentaries, the idea of making a traditional nature documentary but using advanced state of the art CG to recreat the extinct creatures that once romped n stomped on planet Earth.

Exactly the kind of concept that really doesn’t need to have a plot attached, but i guess because any IP of some success has to have a movie, even just to remind people that the series still exist.

And to make some movie tie-in videogames, because dino moolah.

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Dino Apology

(couldn’t find a dinosaur doing the bow, so here’s a screenshot from that Gintama scene)

So today there was another 12 Days Of Dino Dicember review planned…. but due to unexpected complications in my personal life i couldn’t deliver, sorry.

So it just means we’ll catch up and close 12 Days Of Dino Dicember with the 2 reviews scheduled for the occasion, again, sorry.

12 Days Of Dino Dicember #34: Dino King: Journey To Fire Mountain (2019)

I was a bit anxious when i saw the poster for this sequel to The Dino King pushing the Lion King vibes even more obviously, let alone the very “Land Before Time”-feeling cover for the UK DVD release, implying a more kid-friendly sequel.

And my fears were kinda confirmed when i noticed the cast… as in, the first movie had a “fake cast” at the end listing the various types of dinosaurs appearing in the film, since the creatures didn’t speak and the dialogues were offered as a post-humous narration by the titular protagonist.

It was a fairly unique thing for these dinosaur movies also aimed at kids, the combo of mostly non-humanized animals that don’t actually talk like people, even with the narration acting as a compromise… which is dropped entirely by the sequel, Dino King: Journey To Fire Mountain.

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