12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 28: Kingdom Of The Dinosaurs/ Dinosaur Valley (2022)

More relatively fresh dinosaur meat, because the grind never stops even for these.

And nope, this is not another Jurassic World : Dominion mockbuster…. kinda, it’s pretty much that, as it comes from prolific and fairly fresh GB-based low budget C-D grade movies supplier Jagged Edge Productions, better known for the recent Winnie The Pooh slasher film (and its sequels), many “Curse Of” movies about some random public domain-fairytale character turned slasher villain, Bunnyman rip-offs (i’m not joking), but also behind a lot of pretty obvious mockbusters, including releasing something called something called Freddy’s Fridays the very same year of the Blumhouse FNAF movie being out in theathers, so yeah, shame was never an option.

Among these and others, they also pump out dinosaur movies, like the previously featured Dinosaur Hotel, which in the meantime got a sequel and a third entry on the way. So yeah, this company is clearly set on being the new Asylum, or Full Moon Pictures, for better or worse.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 25: Wolf Tracer’s Dinosaur Island (2004)

Yes, i did get to know this was ever a thing thanks to SaberSpark’s Youtube channel, i decided to eventually dig into the matter myself and do my own research, though it’s kinda hard not to step on each other’s feet, so to speak, when this one is connected to another infamous “target” for contents creators on Youtube, as in this is also by Colin Slater, better known for the christmas trashfire of Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe In Santa, featuring the meme gold of “Grandma speaking APYR”.

Because this is how internet legends are born, kids, though it helps when comparisons of your movie to Foodfight that make that mess look like a TRIGGER studio masterpiece.. ain’t wrong.

But does Promare have Mark Hamill in it? Didn’t think so.

Welcome to the super amateur hour, where shit that could barely pass as a college boy first draft for an animation in the late 90s is put out as an officially finished product, though both projects, Rapsittie Street Kids and today’s Dinosaur Island, both made by Colin Slater’s Wolftracer Studios, were considered lost media. despite Rapsittie Street Kids actually airing on tv. Even if just once.

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[EXPRESSO] Wish (2023) | “Feel the power of my MAAAGICKK!”

I was gonna skip this entirely, but since this is the animated film Disney chose to celebrate the company 100^th anniversary, i feel bound to cover it.

And it’s a special movie, but for the all the wrong reasons, as it’s a perfect crystalization of the company’s modern status, where the movie you’d rather see is the one lost in the original drafts, not the final product apparently assembled by focus groups and marketing than imagined by creatives.

The plot is about a guy named Magnifico that learned magic and created an ideal city, Rosas, on a island somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, where he rules and fulfills the wishes his citizens entrust him.

But not all wishes can be granted, as her apprentice-to-be Asha founds out when the wish of his 100 yo granpa is still unfulfilled, then she accidentally summons a real star, making Magnifico paranoid enough to use a book of forbidden magic…

It’s a very arrogant movie that isn’t interested in pleasing its viewers, too busy up its own arse pulling a disgusting amount of Disney references and stuck wallowing in nostalgia to the detriment of everything else, while also exhibiting all the negative-cliched traits associated with Disney animated films, like overuse of musical segments, the talking animals, etc.

Plus it’s just plain uninspired, derivative, boring, the characters are utterly uninteresting and istantly forgettable, and while there was some potential, it’s all brought down by a senseless “magic system” that’s at the center of the story, even diegetically makes little to no sense and renders the final message moot.

The animation is good (even if the style reminds one of a 3DCG Netflix anime) and it’s a short sit, but this is just utter, recycled, cynical mediocrity that’s almost insulting coming from Disney, even modern Disney.

[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #6: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

“Funny” story: this is actually the second RE movie i watched, and the only one i ever watched in theathers. I wasn’t that interested at the time in the film series, so i just picked up on DVD years later the first Resident Evil movie, but didn’t bother with the sequels.

But since it was gonna be the final installment, i was a bit curious, so i went to see at one of my local cinemas, and turns out it wouldn’t have really mattered much if you saw all the sequels or none at all, because The Final Chapter will forever remain in my head as one of the most embarassing final bouts for a film series, or movies that somehow end up being distributed to big cinema chains.

An istance where i could realistically see people asking for their money back at the end of the movie, where i would agree with their anger and supplement them with rotten vegetables, so they could aim for the distributors and anyone involved outside of the poor employees, because it’s not their fault, so instead of littering the floors, give them a rotten leek so we can all stick it up Sony’s picture (via their Screen Gems’ hole, specifically), or throw a tomato at the HQ of Costantine Films.

Jesting aside, i’d be embarassed to release a movie like this, personally, even if – truth to be told – it’s not as bad as i remember it being, not “if your eyes could puke” bad, it’s still incredibly badly edited, so choppy that it’s a miracle you can actually tell what’s going on in almost half of the action scenes that involve melee fights (and some others too), where you can barely see things happening, mostly thanks to some occasional slow mo, but still, it’s almost a “blink and you missed it” type of deal, so badly edited is more than a good 40 % of the action scenes.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] 4#: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

By now it was official and expected to get a new Resident Evil film sequel every 3 years, and in like clockwork in 2010 arrived Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth one, which also brought back to directing Paul W.S. Anderson, whom passed around the director duties after the first one, but was always writing the scripts, and as we will see, he would stick around for the rest of the film series as director & writer of his wife fanfic adventures in this Resident Evil canon.

And since we passed the third entry already, i guess they felt necessary to also go the 3D route, as the entire movie was shot this way, for obvious gimmicky (and lucrative) reasons, with the obvious parts meant for 3D as easy to notice in 2D as usual.

We immediatly continue from where Extinction left off, with multiple Alice clones attacking the Tokyo Umbrella hideout as promised, wielding kunai, double uzi, double katanas, and their psionic power, so yeah, Anderson it’s so obviosly and strongly back at the wheel, for better or worse, and it’s definitely not in the mood for hotdogging, so we jump straight into the bombastic action at the beginning, we’ll do the exposition and new and returning characters later.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #3: Resident Evil Extinction (2007)

3 years after Apocalypse, we’re back with the Adventures of Alice in Resident Evil spin-off cinema land… but she wakes up as she did in the first movie, has some flashbacks, faces some traps, then dies and she’s retrieved by scientists?

Yep, considering the finale of Apocalypse and the opening act leading to a reveal of a mass grave of Alices, it’s not that surprising that we would eventually see the series go hard on the clonatron, upping the ante by explaining that Umbrella didn’t contain shit, and the epidemic spred all over the world, eventually turning the globe into a post-apocalyptic barren, withered zombie wasteland.

The Alice clone that survived/was let go now roams on a motorbike, alongside other survivors as they try to escape the zombies by moving to Alaska through the Mojave desert.

And stopping by Las Vegas, nominally for fuel, factually because its Las Vegas, where they don’t actually stay much, despite the marketing for the movie emphasizing the “Vegas trip”.

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Pinocchi-O-Rama #9: The Adventures Of Buratino (1975)

For this month’s issue of Pinocchi-O-Rama, we’re going back to a “combo mix” of sorts.

We’ve seen live action adaptations, we’ve seen adaptations of the russian version of the novel, The Adventures Of Buratino/The Golden Key, we’ve seen musical adaptations.

So yeah, time to squish them all together for this 1975’s forgotten cult classic Soviet live action children musical TV movie adaptation of Buratino/Pinocchio shenanigans, made by Belarusfilm and released as a 2-parter, because media trends are cyclical after all.

Thankfully there’s no waiting for the climax as it’s almost a 50 yo adaptation, a fairly obscure one that thankfully can be found with hardcoded english subtitles on Youtube (fittingly spit in 2 parts, as well), and at the time of posting still is.

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One Piece Pirate Warriors 4: DLC Pack 4 PS4 [REVIEW]

Here we are with the first round of the new character DLC packs for Pirate Warriors 4, as heavily promised before.

The 4^th Character Pack is titled “Battle Of Onigashima”, and it features 2 “Onigashima variants/versions” of characters already available in the base game, with Battle Of Onigashima Luffy, Battle of Onigashima Kaido, and more interestingly, Yamato, the offspring of Kaido that has proclaimed to carry on the will of the late Oden in a very direct manner.

As for why now, well, it’s not real surprise that the Pirate Warriors games’ storyline are also made in a way to avoid accidental spoilers for the One Piece anime audience, so yeah, it makes sense they had to wait until the Gear 5 episode to introduce this powered up version of Luffy, after all that’s the reason Pirate Warriors 4 has an original story for the Land Of Wa arc, and Pirate Warriors 3 invented a new scenario for the Dressarosa stages as well.

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Pikmin 4 NSWITCH [REVIEW] | Enter The Dogbus

10 years after the last mainline game, the beloved Nintendo series about floral strategy and cutesy war PTSD is back with Pikmin 4 for Nintendo Switch, and i was even more eager to get my mittens on it after replaying for review & funsies Pikmin 3 in its Deluxe edition-port on Switch.

Who am i kidding, after devouring the demo, i was ravenous to get into the full game ASAP.

Story is fairly typical Pikmin, as in, you know the deal by now: people keep crashlanding on this damn planet. And by people i mean poor Olimar, that crashlanded on the planet, sent out a SOS call, but then the rescue team itself had troubles with the ship, so its up to you, as the new recruit of the Rescue Corps (an intergalactic rescue organization) and one of its few “non-scattered around” remaining members to get the whole crew back together, then find and save Olimar, whom also sent them various pages of its journal.

Someone seem confused in terms of when it happens, even confusing it for a reboot/remake of the first game’s story (i guess since Olimar here too used Pikmins to get back the scattered pieces of its rundown but beloved ship, the Dolphin)… dunno why, but yep, since Olimar and Louie are involved too, and we get the new group of cute potato aliens also discuss of Koppai, the planet from where the expedition group of Pikmin 3 came from to avoid famine, heck, even an inhabitant from that planet later becomes an important plot point.

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[EXPRESSO] Gamera: Rebirth (2023) | Stand By My Gamera

Lil G is back after 15 years of official silence… and it’s a Netflix animated series by the co-director of the Godzilla anime film trilogy, with similar 3D CG animation, despite being handled by ENGI (Kemono Michi, Uzaki-chan Wants To Hang Out) and not Polygon Pictures.

We’re not starting on the right foot, but it’s not like Gamera fans can be picky, this is the first official anything since 2006’s Gamera The Brave, though the premise gave me ‘Nam flashbacks of Gamera Super Monster, since it has my boy face off against 5 old foes, including his arch nemesis Gyaos, over the course of 40 minutes long 6 episodes.

The series is set in the summer of 1989′ Japan, with a group of young boys (six-graders) that have their savings stolen by a bully nicknamed “Brody”, the son of an American army commander, confront him, then a giant monster, Gyaos, attacks Tokyo, but the children are saved by another giant monster, dubbed Gamera.

It’s basically a kaiju gauntlet of sorts, with the human side of the story feeling very Stand By Me-ish but also fitting in theme of Gamera being linked to children, proposing a reinvention of the character and franchise that mixes elements from the old Showa era films with the beloved Heisei trilogy, meaning it’s not actually intended for kids at all, as the plot unfolds more in the ways of conspiracies and dark secrets.

And both the plot and characters are surprisingly compelling, making for a good series in spite of studio ENGI trying to emulate Godzilla Singularity Point’s animation as well… but with lesser results of awkard, stiff looking animated 3D CG humans, when the monsters do look good, sport some great redesigns, and their fights – even if often brief – are indeed quite good.