[EXPRESSO] The Nameless Ballad (2026) | Teenage Pop Rock God

The Nameless Ballad on paper is an interesting change from Federico Zampaglione previous film, The Well (which i quite liked), as this later movie is an old fashioned ghost/haunted house story.

Sam Gallo is an upcoming musician that, when hit by writer’s block, is sent by his agent to an isolated villa in Italy, so he can focus on overcoming this creative slump, but there he starts seeing strange visions, especially after he finds a chest containing a diary of an Italian woman, a key to the villa’s piano and an unnamed, apparently unfinished composition….

The premise is decent, the main actor is solid, a couple of good jumpscares, but it becomes soon dull and slow moving (even for just 90 minutes), the more it goes on the more it basically falls apart, case and point the tragic backstory that explains more about the haunting… and almost made laugh, as it feels like accidental parody and makes the movie as a whole feel – frankly – stupid.

Even the theme of the music industry exploiting its talents is handled in such a juvenile, trite way that you’d almost want to side with the label to be contrarian…not that you will care about anyone’s fate, besides the dog, best character, i’m not even joking.

It feels like a big “Frankengum”, pieced together from chiclets found under other people’ classroom desks, masticated once more in the vain hope that if you keep chewing the flavour will come back.

There’s a difference between a deliberate old fashion approach and just being…. just dated, decrepit, reeking of that moth balls/napthalene scent you’d find when rummaging through your grandparents’ wardrobe. Kinda tragic because it’s obvious Zampaglione genuinely cares about the genre, he isn’t being cynical or anything, but nothing really works here, to my disappointment.

[EXPRESSO] Wild Horse Nine (2026) | Party In The RA.PA.NUI.

Martin McDonagh (Seven Psychopaths, Three Manifests Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Banshee Of Inesherin) is back with a black comedy spy thriller, Wild Horse Nine, which takes back to the not-so-funky ’70s, just before the 1973 Chilean coup-de-etat, with the CIA bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi) dispatching two officers, Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell), to Rapa Nui, as in, Easter Island.

The trip from Santiago there already proves hardous, as Chris seemingly suffers from some sort of alzeihmer, while also being overly candid about their motives and intentions, but among the peaceful tourist life and the gazing at the moai, many conspiracies are actually being acted on, putting Chris and Lee longtime friendship and loyalties to the test, especially as Chris befriending a local rebellious girl might sent the whole “operation” (whatever that is) to go belly up…

While the plot actually thickens and progressively reveals the real stakes at play here (or more correctly the machinations), the main crux of the film is how this affects the relationship between Chris and Lee, not only as colleagues but as genuine friends, as both events from the past and future treathen this too, especially due to dangerous cocktail of Chris’s deteriorating memory, its involvement in many secret operations and its questioning of those in his old age…

It’s honestly an amazing film, starts off a bit slow but the pay off is immense, as it manages to be incredibly funny, the comedy fairly brutal, not pulling any punch on the sensitive themes (and political period of yore) it tackles, but also able to deliver devasting emotional blows as well as many quotable lines, and everyone is on top of their game (even if Tom Waits is being progressively “Nick Nolte’d” the more he continues to appear in movies).

Highly recommended.

[EXPRESSO] Hololive Dreams iOS | Gachikoi Gambah Galore

Hololive fans assemble, because with Hololive Dreams we’re going full smarthphone global release, F2P gacha obviously because how else will the talents try to roll themselves on stream, feeding the gambling addiction loop?

Chock full of talents both active and long graduated V-Tubers (yes, there’s Gawr “Gooba” Gura in it) doing admittely not particularly crazy things in terms of events or dialogues, but again, this is obviously targeted to already converted fans of the various talents/streamers/singers/entertainting, they ain’t trying to make new fans but “preach to the choir”

They are here to be cute, do things together, like prepare streams, chill in the communal house, decorate their rooms, enjoy the lush island and perform for the fans, which is done via a fairly typical but solid rhythh game fashion, more like a touch based DJ Max or Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage than – for example – the Project Diva games or the Love Live mobile rhythm games…. actually, it plays and looks identical to Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, even if you suck at rhythm games like meself, unless you expected something more original, but sure as hell it’s far more compelling than the RPG side of things, as the quests are really just fetch quests without the fetching, and it doesn’t help how sterile and clean the story and talents are made to be, especially since most of the vtubers are known for moments that escape the “idol culture” and the corporate mentality associated with it.

And you know, also marrying gacha economy with a fanbase more vulnerable to parasocial trappings is EXTRA predatory.

Then again, that was to be expected, so i’m not really shocked or offended, and to give due credit, the game does look good and is well produced, but beware.

Sky Blue (2003) [REVIEW] | Cyberpunk Rain

I was gonna do a review of the new Ghost In The Shell anime series by Science Saru, but i’m gonna reserve a full lenght dissertation for something else, and while i’m feeling the upcoming Neuromancer TV series, that is dropping in January 2027.

So instead lets give a look to something else in the cyberpunk sphere, something that’s not often talked about and not even Japanese, with Moon-saeng Kim’s Sky Blue (AKA Wonderful Days), a 2003 South Korean animated film, which i’m fairly sure won’t ring any bell.

After all, i heard about it…. by not actually hearing about it, but instead discovered it while browsing online for cheap anime UK DVDs in a pre-Brexit situation, and one i kept stashed away in one of big ass disc cases for an occasion such as this.

I must say, maybe it is 20 years of aged hindsight, but the 2000s might have been a more interesting period for animation than most care to remember, because there were directors even in South Korea interested in adult animation and experimenting with the new technology…. to mixed results.

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[EXPRESSO] Deep Water (2026) | Shark Ditching

Renny Harlin, better known as the director of the original Deep Blue Sea, Cliffhanger and Cutthroat Island, having finished early this year the new awful Strangers trilogy nobody asked for, he’s back doing what he’s best known for: sharks.

Actually, that’s kinda unfair, as Deep Water is mostly a survival film about an international flight that crashlands somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, with the surviving passenger and crew members forced to find a way to survive and escape the deadly debris of the torn plane, while also avoid being picked off by a group of shark cycling around them.

Mind you, i’m glad there are sharks in the film, frankly i would have been surprised if they weren’t, because this is such a deliberate throwback to late 90s disaster-survival films and horror b-movies of this ilk, with just a veneer of realism to avoid it killing any tension.

Do not let the fact some of the characters we’re presented before or on the plane include esports squads, grandmas saying “you’re a 5 out of 10” impropted to people, ipad kids, the attitude and cliches are done in such a retro fashion, from the characters being either rude assholes or saints, with an expecially assholish one that you know has a “shark food soon enough” label, and which you indeed look forward to see its inevitable fate come to pass, the kid character being clever yet tempting death at least twice, the heroic sacrifice by the consumate character actor that is arguably on autopilot, etc.

Deep Water is essentially a 90s styled disaster-survival-shark film, and its retro nature it’s both charming but also obviously dated…. yet in this case i think it comes off as a decent genre thrill ride of yore, and better because it’s confident in what it is.

Cyclone (1978) [REVIEW] | #thesharklist

I’ve been putting off this one for years because of one specific aspect: that they killed a real dog for it, as i’ve heard this repeated on as a truth, and honestly that alone made me push it down the priority list, which might sound weird since i’ve seen a decent amount of cannibal movies, and i have pet turtles, to boot, which made that scene really hit me hard the first time around.

And i wasn’t really gonna google how a cooked dog looked like, so yeah….

Well, turns out after a bit of research that they didn’t actually kill a dog, and in a way i should have known, since Cyclone (also known as Terror Storm) is from exploitation sleaze extraordinarie Rene Cardona Jr., and while he did actually kill real sharks for Tintorera (and also he did immediatly jump on making a film adaptation of the Jonestown Massacre, remember)… once i saw the movie it’s obviously not the case, and the supposed “skinned dog” it’s a chicken, they edit in a way to make it look “real”… but if you actually stop to look at the way it’s edited it’s obviously not real, and the blood is so obviously fake stage blood, plus he’s holding the blade against the dog on the dull part.

I wanna believe Rene Cardona Jr. couldn’t get away with killing one of man’s best friends.

Yeah, regardless, this one is not for dog lovers…. well, unless you consider them a culinary treat to buy at a certain festival in Yulin.

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Mario & Wario SFC [REVIEW] | Bucket Mario Mouse Adventure

One of the Mario titles that have been long since been an exclusive to the Super Famicom (the Japanese version of the Super Nintendo), but last October it was rereleased officially, in this case as part of the Super Nintendo Classics app/service on Switch and Switch 2.

It’s has been a long sought after title that it would be logical to assume might have gotten a rerelease on Switch 2, since it has a mouse-style control set up for the Joycons, and it wouldn’t have required much fnagling as the game was already full translated in English in its original SFC release, kinda surprising it didn’t actually get a NA or PAL release, despite there having been plans at the time.

I guess besides Mario Paint there wasn’t much interest in games that used the SNES mouse peripheral, but regardless, you can now play it on Switch 2 or even Switch 1, for the latter you will need to connect an USB mouse… which is how i played it, with the old Switch 1 docked and with a cheap random USB mouse anyway, at first anyway.

I tried that but i guess my USB mouse was too shit, since i later tried the mouse mode on a Switch 2 joycon (both in docked and handheld mode), and that was actually WAY better, like usual an actual proper modern mouse, even with the game mouse speed set to low, so i stuck to that for the rest of my experience.

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[EXPRESSO] Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition (2026) | 50 Years Of Eddie

To celebrate their 50^th anniversary, Iron Maiden released this new film biopic thingie, Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition, in theathers, i mean, why the fuck not?

This being an anniversary milestone film, it does do what you’d expect from most music biopics or docs, as in, we get a chronological recollection of the band history over it’s 50 years history, from the humble beginnings, the rise to fame, them being on top of the world, the falls from graces, etc.

Burning Ambition i will admit does give the formula a little neat twist by letting the fans chime in themselves and not just as disembodied audio, with the band members instead providing voiceover commentary and narration over archive footage without appearing themselves, and we get fans from all kinds of backgrounds, be other rock-metal celebrities like Lars Ulrich, actor Javier Bardem (no kidding), or – more interestingly – Polish fans that in the 80s got to see the band despite the Soviet regime rule, or survivors of the conflicts in Lebanon connect with their music.

While the “fan focus” is a nice thing, it makes the whole thing come off as less sincere, basically using them to validate opinions they already wanted/expected to hear, plus there isn’t much we haven’t seen before, the pacing is kinda weird, with the narration skimping over some of the less “glorious” periods like the 90s or most of the less flattering details, and while obviously fans already know the songs by heart, i feel the music itself could have been given a bit more space.

Overall, Burning Ambition it’s a bit too “domesticated” all things considered, more interested in being a nostalgic trip down memory lane to promote their new upcoming tour, yet it’s perfectly watchable and entertaining, a decent time for Iron Maiden fans.

Mortal Kombat (2021) [REVIEW] | Kombat Set-Up

Preface: i never saw the old MK movies, i really never cared about Mortal Kombat back in the day , but i do like gore, the old theme song, known the basic premise of the series, and some stuff i’ve absorbed by cultural osmosis, so why not?

Helps this is also a reboot of the MK film series.

The premise centers about mystical deathmatch tournament between the Outworld and The Earthrealm, as the chosen fighters of each factions engage in the titular “mortal combat”. As the Outworld has won nine of the previous tournaments and it’s set that the Earthrealm will be conquered by the Outworld if they lose the 10^th tournament as well, but there’s a prophecy about a new generation of Earthrealm fighters that will be united by the “blood of Hanzo Hasashi”.

So both sides try to locate the new chosen fighters for Earthrealm (recognizable by the dragon marking on their skin) to either eliminate or assist them before they can enter the tournament.

This “united by the blood of Hanzo” is an excuse to start off the movie in 17^th centhury Japan with a flashback about chinese assassin Bi-Han (aka Subzero) killing Hanzo and his family.

Its a strong opening, but after that we’re in a modern day America, following this Cole Young fellow, a now washed up MMA fighter, whose life gets even worse as he too is targeted by Bi Han/Subzero, now working for Outworld’s mystic sorcerer Shang Tsung, as he sending his underlings to preemptively kill all the Earthrealm champions so the next Mortal Kombat tournament won’t even be taken, and Cole indeed sports the dragon marking, unaware of his heritage and thrown into this when he just wants to protect his family…

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Jo Jo’s Bizarre Adventure: Eyes Of Heaven PS4 [REVIEW] | OVER HEAVEN

For the first time in ever, i’m actually all caught up with Jo Jo as a whole (currently enjoying reading the print volumes of The Jojolands as they get released here), the Steel Ball Run anime finally started airing/streaming on Netflix this March, so i knew i had to cover some Jo Jo related stuff, and i had this sitting in my backlog for years, waiting for an occasion such as this.

A little game called Jo Jo Bizarre Adventure: Eyes Of Heaven.

I remember this being pretty much whipped by critics and fans alike at the time… which was almost 10 years ago, fuck. But on the upside, there’s definitely enough distance now for revalution.

Developed by Cyberconnect 2, better known for the Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm series and Asura’s Wrath, but also behind the good Jo Jo Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle, which they released 3 years prior as a PS3 exclusive, Eyes Of Heaven is definitely a non-canon adventure.

While i’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, some are unavoidable since the game sure as hell expect you to know all the main events and ending of basically all 9 series, even with them presenting a digest premise during the story, more as a memory jog exercise, don’t play this if you aren’t familiar with all JoJo series… well, aside Jojolion, which at the time of release of the game wasn’t concluded yet, not that it matters much, given the nature of the plot, but you won’t get much spoiled about that series since it doesn’t have much representation, direct or not.

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