The Spooktacular Eight #24: Mother Joan Of The Angels (1961)

Let’s conclude this year’s Spooktacular Eight by reviewing the 1960 Polish classic Mother Joan Of The Angels, also known as The Devil And The Nun.

Based on the real, documented case of demonic possession (or mass hysteria, let’s be real) that affected the nuns and took place in 1634 at a convent in Loudlun, France… well, indirectly, as it actually based on a novel of the same name by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (which would later by adapted by Kent Russell for the infamous The Devils), itself loosely based on the aforementioned Loudlun possessions.

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The Spooktacular Eight #23: Mutant Girls Squad (2010)

I planned to review Blood Friends for this year’s Spooktacular Eight, after finally seeing and reviewing Vlad Love earlier this year, but since i can’t manage to find some actual english subtitles for the thing and time is a-ticking, instead of a Mamoru Oshii film we’ll feature a Noburo Iguchi one, with Mutant Girls Squad.

Which is also co-directed by fellow gore-tastic filmmaker Yoshihiro Noshimura (Tokyo Gore Police, Helldriver, Vampire Girl VS Frankenstein Girl) but also Tak Sakaguchi, better known as an actor in many films, like Versus, Godzilla Final Wars, the Azumi films, and even some of the aforementioned Iguchi-Noshimura gore flicks, but he also directed a live action Otokojuku film adaptation and Yoroi: Samurai Zombie.

Here they direct a chapter of the three the movie is divided in, and you can tell which one did, definitely if you have previous experience with their works.

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The Callisto Protocol PS4 [REVIEW] | Ape Espace

When a beloved new IP is run into the ground and compromised by EA, that tried to squeeze Call Of Duty money out of a horror franchise and even had microtransactions inserted in the last mainline title…. seeing the publisher basically give up and do nothing with it for years is frustrating, even more so when the finale was followed up by a DLC retconning the ending.

And the inevitable homicide by EA of Visceral Games, after the routine danse macabre of shuffling them into developing completely different games of a completely different genre, lamenting how the star shaped peg doesn’t fit into the durian shaped hole, was the cherry on the corpse sundae.

So of course this leaves a specific hole in the market for “spiritual sequels” to fill, and mind you, this was announced before EA announced their own remake of the first Dead Space.

And on paper, The Callisto Protocol sounded exactly what fans of the series like me wanted, a “fuck you” to the vampiric publisher that wasn’t serving an audience starved for that action-horror sci fi dish, done outside of their control, with even some of the original creators of the series involved.

This is the kind of underdog story that we wanna see, as apparently everyone hates EA, and only EA for some stupid reasons, but alas this is not quite what actually happened.

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[EXPRESSO] Halloween: Match Made In Horror iOS | Realtor Squallor

One day, i get an email of recommended apps from the Apple algorhythm… and among the endless anime gacha games, i saw his face. Or his mask, in this case, as the app icon for something called Halloween: Match Made In Horror.

I shouldn’t be surprised, since we even got a match-3 puzzle game to promote Godzilla 2014 and there’s even shit like WWE Champions, but still, i was stunned by the creative entropy on display, ensnared by the utter audacity of it all i did end up downloading, playing it more than necessary and making this review, because if i have to know this is a thing, now you have too.

And no, it’s was not meant to advertise the David Gordon Green legacy sequel to Halloween (which would become a pointless trilogy), it’s just based around the first movie, and beyond the Halloween licensed skin, it’s just another match-3 puzzle game, a shitty free-to-play one too, with the semblance of progression provided by spending the stars collected by finishing levels on renovating the various houses seen in the film, like the Stroude house, because when i think Michael Myers i think of the cut-throat world of real estate.

Just the more barebones generic and non-descript viable product you can squeeze out of your bumcheeks, with some of the more desperate window dressing i’ve ever seen, and it look like ass in very conceivable way, even still images of the franchise characters look like they were sculpted out of expired bootleg butter, and the “animated” cutscenes that either are too brief to make any sense, try to recreate various shots from the 1975 film, or some weird meta shit like the one where we get the POV of someone playing this very game and then briefly sees Michael Myers.

Technical Difficulties

Having a lot of issues with the PC i can’t no longer ignore because i can barely use it.

I’ll try to fix in a matter of days or see if i can post via the smartphone WordPress app, even though i lack stuff i can only access on PC. Maybe i’ll post some of the EXPRESSO reviews i have been holding on in the meantime.

Hope to fix it soon. we’ll see.

[EXPRESSO] Smile 2 (2024) | Aphex Twin

Smile was a surprise release in many regards, but i guess we couldn’t leave it alone as a single good horror film, hence there’s a “sequel”, quotations because after seeing the trailer i figured this was more of a loose continuation than anything else.

While is true that the plot basically doesn’t really require to have seen Smile to be followed, it does actually pick up after its ending, with a police officer trying to pass on the curse on a couple of criminals, somehow managing that only to try escaping and getting torn apart by a car that smashes over him. Later on, in NY, we follow popstar Skye Riley preparing her comeback tour, after struggling with drug abuse and surviving a car crash that killed her boyfriend, a famous actor.

While she is helped by her mother, manager and assistant, Riley sneak out to buy vicodin for her crippling back pain from a dealer that begins to sport a vicious smile, and then kills himself before her, passing on the curse…

The first Smile worked so well in spite of everything sounding like it shouldn’t, committing to the idea and making for quite the good film that managed to walk the fine line between the silly and the freaky, and this one is arguably another surprise, as it does know the novelty factor of the “Richard D. James” face is gone, so it upstages the first in gore, jumpscares, plot, spectacle, freaky visuals, special effects, arguably even in terms of main character, with Naomi Scott being great as the manic, guilt ridden popstar with everything to lose from even the smallest fuck up on her way to reclaim her career.

It’s a rare case of a sequel being on par with the first good entry, arguably even better.

The Spooktacular Eight #22: Wendigo (2001)

At the turn of the millennium, found footage horror was born and while it’s often a very divisive subgenre nowadays (as big budget companies co-opted it since it lowered the already low costs for horror films), it can’t be denied The Blair Witch resparked interest in urban legends, the lore of the suburbs or previously forgotten folklore myths, which affected even films not made in what now we call “found footage” or “mockumentary”.

This is i guess was the overall unspoken mood of the era, even though in this case director and writer Larry Ferdessen (1997’s Habit, the Until Dawn videogames, The Last Winter, Depraved) set out more to channel the 30s classic horror monster films (which the director himself confirmed are a great influence on his works) but in modern arthouse fashion, with a psychological horror thriller named after the mythical monster figure of Native American/First Nation folklore (Algonquian one, to be precise), of the titular Wendigo.

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[EXPRESSO] Megalopolis (2024) | Golden Experience Requiem

Megalopolis it’s Francis Ford Coppola doing a more modern take on Metropolis, basically, just with the city of the future being a New York-Imperial Rome hybrid, and the framing of “a fable by Francis Ford Coppola” setting the angle right… but that won’t really soften the blow.

The plot sees New Rome, a city split between tradition, embodied by the city mayor Cicero, and innovation, represented by Catalina, a genius architect willing to seek a new better way, with the crux of the conflict incarnated by Cicero’s daugher, Julia, whom falls in love with Catalina.

Aside from the opening really making you feel like you tuned into the movie 1 hour in (which is a costant all throughout, btw), and the implication of Adam Driver’s character having a time-stopping Stand power of sorts…the movie is a mess, it’s a long, sprawling, unwieldy mess of scattered plotlines (some never resolved by the end), trippy imagery, pretense of being profound when its all so utterly blunt it’s almost comical, and even when you do where the hell is going, it’s hard to care, with too many characters (though that would imply “characterization”), the starfilled cast having no chemistry, bad dialogues, and the direction that makes it all feel like they’re rehearsing for when they gonna actually shoot the scene… doesn’t help.

It’s not boring, at the very least, but it’s an hilarious damning moment when the best scene of a Francis Ford Coppola film is John Voight as an old gajillionaire shooting Shia Labeuf in the ass with a bow. Twice.

It’s a weird, messy, disjointed vision that becomes outright bizzarre with these Hollywood high production values and quality cinematography, so in a way, it’s a fascinating bad movie from a legendary director, the kind that don’t come around so often anymore.

Pygmalion (manga) [REVIEW] | Ore Wa Cyprus Ou Ni Naru!

It’s not exactly encouraging to see the boxset for a 3 volume horror manga called “Pygmalion”… having on the back cover a pig amusement park mascotte drenched in blood.

(yeah, i bought this on a whim without doing any research while visiting my local comic book shop)

Not random per sé, as the story IS about a rampage by mascottes during the National Mascotte Festival in Japan, after a series of weird announcements that trigger the suited creatures to go on a massacre, and Keigo is separated in the following chaos from his younger brother Makoto…

Still, i feel a refresher about the myth of Pygmalion is needed, just in case.

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The Spooktacular Eight #21: The Awful Doctor Orloff (1962)

Ah, good ol’ Jess Franco, the master of lesbian vampire action, the exploitation master from Spain that both film dozens of softcore trash but also worked with Christopher Lee as either a vampire or the old villian Fu Manchu, that deals in adaptations of Marquis De Sade but also completed the previously (and unfamously) unfinished Orson Welles version of Don Quixote.

I really can’t do him justice, but i did pick one of the films from before he really declined and put out some really atrocious stuff, like the final entries in the Fu Manchu series (the Castle Of Fu Manchu being the subject of a popular MST3K episode ), shit like Dracula VS Frankenstein, or even pseudosequels that cannibalizzed on Franco own’s Dr. Orloff series with reused stock footage to make in name only adaptations of Poe works, in particular his The Revenge in The House Of Usher, which is a mess and a half since it has 3 different cuts (often having different titles as well). 2 of which reuse even more footage from this 1962 Dr. Orloff film that started the series.

But let’s pretend we do not yet know of this, and let’s talk plot.

Which is not quite original, as it’s an amalgamation of Frankenstein and french classic Eyes Without A Face (especially the latter), as the titular Dr. Orloff attracts young women to his castle so he can harvest her skin with the help of a disfigured, blind assistant/henchman named Morpho (a Mighty Monarch approved name indeed).

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