Mammoth (2006) [REVIEW] | Meteor Mayhem

Time to unfrost a b-movie from the mid-2000’s i’ve known about for years, as friends told me of this movie where a mammoth runs around a house without being seen. Yeah, i’m pretty sure they didn’t actually watch the movie and just parroted something they red online, because, as it incredible as that would have been (and kinda fit anyway with the tone), no, a mammoth doesn’t stalk people like a slasher villain and moves around a normal household without wrecking it.

Although, with how many cheap horror flicks about dinosaurs, extinct or mythical animals are there, that movie could actually exist. I couldn’t find anything that fits the exact profile, but you never know.

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Dino Dicember #23: My Pet Dinosaur (2017)

You may argue that most of the crappy dinosaur movies featured in Dino Dicember are “puerile excuses for entertaiment” or some crap like that, so you know what, let’s actually review a dinosaur movie made for kids or intended as a “family picture”. No, not the Land Before Time series (yes, it’s a series). No, not “We’re Back! A Dinosaur Story!” No, there’s not a live-action movie adaptation of Cadillac & Dinousars.. yet, you never fuckin know with the nostalgia market.

Because i’m stupid, we’re gonna do something less known and far more recent, the austrialian My Pet Dinosaur, directed, written and produced by Matt Drummond, who previously directed Dinosaur Island (2014), and cured visual effects for TV documentaries and TV movies like Attack Of The Sabretooth.

Never heard of them either, so no harm no foul.

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[EXPRESSO] Bleed 2 PSN | They Watch The World Burn

After becoming “the world only and truest hero” in the first game (as in her fantasy videogame world), Wryn sat around playing videogames and all was well with the world. Until the usual gaggle of old rivals, new villains and alien invaders (some of them robotic) attack The City, for the usual reasons that this is a videogame and we need to shoot a lot of baddies. Not that it matters in any way, it is a videogame.

What has improved is the gameplay (graphics not so much), which was already good but has been refined, with better controls and a better control over the jump and dash manouver, and a new found emphasis on deflecting back projectiles and countering boss attack thank to the katana, already available in the fist BLEED, but now given as the standard melee weapon to compliment the usual twin pistols, making for faster, tougher and more satisfying encounters and ways to control the flow of battle.

Even the campaign levels are paced and flow better into each other, while also providing more variety, ticking all the classic arcade clichès, like riding and moving around rockets shot by the enemy airship, standing on moving cars while fighting in the highway, levating into the alien mothership, etc.

It’s still a short experience, but this one improves on replayability thank to the better gameplay, as it lends more to speed-runs or the Arcade “1 life only” run, but it also has more varied and interesting characters to unlock (including the Clawgirl from They Bleed Pixels), mutators and a mode that offers a set of 5 randomized levels. The Challenge mode is back unchanged, but at least they just outright say “it’s totally unbalanced”.

Short but quite sweet, i’d recommended getting the series bundle when it’s on sale.

Dino Dicember #19: Super Mario Bros The Movie (1993)

I could have waited until that animated Super Mario movie Nintendo commissioned Illumination (urgh) released… but sure as shit it isn’t coming out this year (not like it was gonna, it was slated for a 2022 release before the COVID-19 pandemic anyway), and i’m doing Dino Dicember… well, in Dicember, so it’s a pretty good “excuse” for me to watch and review the infamous Super Mario Bros live-action movie. And i do enjoy the challenge, it’s not like it’s this obscure adaptation nobody on the internet talked about, but let’s give the movie a fair shake with almost 2 decades of hindsight.

And yes, it totally counts, since it’s about a dinosaur dimension that originated from the meteor that hit Earth 65 millions years ago, which actually created two parallel dimensions of Earth, one inhabited by reptile people descending from dinosaurs, and ours of “human people” descending from primates. As the resources have dried up on the “dino end”, the leader of the dino-people, Koopa, sends minions in our dimension to search for a fragment of the meteor that split the dimensions to begin with, so he can unite the two and rule them under his scaly thumb.

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Dino Dicember #12: Terrordactyl / Jurassic Wars (2016)

“Pteranoperil” was too bland, i guess, but feel free to use that one, if you want.

So yeah, i got this while hunting for dinosaur flicks on Amazon, and the UK DVD copy goes under the “Jurassic Wars” title, but at least the cover promises pterodactyls… and the movie is about pterodactyls. Checks out, not always a given with these kind of movie covers that promise more than the movie can actually deliver.

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Dino Dicember #9: Carnosaur 3: Primal Species (1996)

Remember when Carnousaur 2 script couldn’t definitely decide if to consider the first movie or not, so it just gave an explanation for the dinosaurs that could kinda link the two movies together?

Well, the third one doesn’t even try to follow one of the movies or both, so it’s no wonder it was released in the UK simply as “Primal Species”, might as well use the subtitle as the alternate title, since this one wasn’t even conceived as part of the Carnosaur series, originally.

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Dino Dicember #8: Carnosaur 2 (1995)

2 years later, following the rise of a new dino-human hybrid race… Wait, this is that type of sequel, just slap another number on the name of the previous movie, and do whatever the fuck you want with it, as long its about the same general theme and/or subject. Continuity, thy name is Corman.

This time we have a group of scientist that go a nuclear mining facility in Yucca Mountains (just missing an atomic Tor Johnson followed by gray, dull narration) to investigate a potential meltdown, but instead find dino eggs in one of the caves. Not, not radioactive dinosaurs, that would have been kinda fun, just the boring old cloned type of mutant dinosaurs. You can guess the rest.

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Dino December #4: Jurassic Galaxy (2018)

So, either someone really liked Dino Crisis 3, or more likely was “inspired” by the Godzilla animated trilogy, which i feel it’s really underrated and often quite maligned just because the 3D CG looks kinda ass…which it does, but the script by Gen Urobuchi is quite good, so much it makes the trilogy worthy of being seen, i’d say.

While it isn’t the case, i find it hard to not think of it, since the premise still see the main crew of interstellar explorers landing on a planet full of dinosaurs, but it lacks the whole patriotic drive of “conquering back the motherplanet Earth” (this isn’t Earth), or the social tensions forming between the different groups and races on board of the ship. Still, space dinosaurs is still quite the proposition that could do for some good b-movie entertaiment, and isn’t exactly a sub-genre….yet, this isn’t even the only “dinosaur sci-fi in space” flick released in 2018.

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[EXPRESSO] Super Star Path NSWDDL | Match-3 Shooter Mess

After quite enjoying Bot Vice, i decided to check out the others games the spanish DYA Games had on the Switch eShop, and this one got my attention, especially because of the concept, a mixture of puzzle game and 2D spaceship shooter.

And it was on sale for 1 buck.

Basically, it plays like a standard 2D spaceship shooter (down to the vertical scrolling), but the aliens and obstacles are placed in a still grid like they’re puzzle pieces, so shooting a row of aliens of the same color triggers a chain reaction, making nearby aliens of different colors crystalize into unbreakable blocks. Defeated aliens also leave behind gems, emeralds (3 for stage to collect) and upgrades, which can be used to buy more spaceships and upgrade their stats.

This… until you reach the level’s boss, then the pace speeds up considerably, the puzzle elements are thrown away all together, and you can use autofire. You’ll need it, since the bosses are fast and hit hard even at the beginning, throwing bullet hell style projectile patterns, quite jarring, even when you know it’s coming and you bought/upgraded better ships…it just feels like a different game, and i feel it’s done to just pad the longevity out a bit, as you have only 6 levels, each longer and featuring some specific obstacle/damage.

Problem is arriving to the bosses themselves it’s more a matter of luck than anything else, due to badly randomized level layouts, which result in many runs where you simply can’t do anything to avoid dying, trapped by the enemies patterns to be crushed by the scrolling in a way or another.

Shame, because the idea is nice, but for how short lived this game is, it’s mostly a frustrating, unbalanced pile of aggravation more than anything else. Disappointing.

P.S.: Also, don’t bother tackling the final mission unless you have ALL the emeralds, because even if you manage to kill the boss… you will die anyway if you don’t already have all the emeralds. No, the game doesn’t make it clear you NEED to get them all to even finish the game, it just says that you need to get them all, implying they’re important to the story and in general to the game, in the How To Play section.

Fuck you too, Super Star Path.

Please never pull shit like this again. Just don’t.

[EXPRESSO] Creators – The Past (2019) | Star Odissey Barbarian Italian Gods Of Space Magick

You might be wondering what the hell is this.

I did too, until i remembered the name from 2019’s edition of the Lucca Comic & Games convention in Italy, but i never “investigated” and i….completely forgot about it.

Then again, they didn’t market it AT ALL, despite being an italian production with William Shatner and Gérard Depardieu, alongside a cast mostly made by americans, italian actors at their first role and italian musician Angelo Minoli.

The year is 2012, and an extraordinary planetary aligment is about to happen. The eight members of the Galactic Council (each governing their own planet as a “Creator”) meet to discuss of the coming events, but following an incident they lose an essential artifact, and task a human girl to retrieve it before the planets disalign.

This is the basic gist… the movie itself it’s INSANE, it really lives up to the “colossal” monicker, as they basically threw together 3-4 movies. And – as you would expect – it gets confusing, as the sub-plots splinter into smaller sub-plots, each of the Creators has their hidden agenda, and the movie just keep throwing things at the viewer, like Jesus Christ, aliens abductions, conspiracies, sword and sorcery bits with scorpion-men, the very specifically italian “battle of the oranges”, etc.

And YES, all these things are connected together. The drawback is that with that many subplots and a runtime under 2 hours, some are abruptly resolved in seconds. Often because the movie just makes up new bullshit rules to do so. It’s anything but boring or stale, it’s visually intriguing, there is definitely dedication and ambition here, alongside a lot of money for an italian production of this type.

It tries to set-up sequels.

… I really wouldn’t mind, at all, but i “feel” they ain’t gonna happen.