[EXPRESSO] Terrifier 3 (2024) | A Terrifier HallowXmas

As an avid Terrifier fan that have been religiously followed the series since it debuted, i was so happy to learn Terrifier 3 was not only gonna be released in theathers here too, but also get a Halloween preview screening.

Terrifier 3 continues the story from where that delirious ending of the second film left us… not before a prologue of Art The Clown invading a house dressed as Santa to massacre them all, because its the third one, might as well also make it a killer Santa movie too.

That said, after the events of Terrifier 2 the two surviving siblings tried to move on, with the brother going to college and Sienna being released from a mental health clinic, but they both feel Art is somehow back, to the disbelief of everyone else…

It’s also the longest Terrifier film yet, reasonably so, as it does expand and explain the main lore and puts in prospective certain events from previous films, escalating even further the stakes and finding many creative ways for him and the deformed Vicky to be even more sadistic, morbid and graphic with the kills, which are even more excessive and depraved than before, running the gamut from classics like chainsaws, hammer, to animals and improptu murder gizmos.

It’s the kind of movie that should come with a barf bag, William Castle style, because it utterly unfliching, unbound and uncaring of who gets the axe (including some unexpected cameos) and how, before and after Art does his deranged mime routine and clown antics with gusto.

I would have given it the best vote i could for EXPRESSO if it was the final film in the series, would have been a perfect point to stop, but on the other hand i DO wanna see more of Art.

[EXPRESSO] Venom: The Last Dance (2024) | Knull In My Soup

Venom’s most likely uncanonical (for now anyway) adventures with his human host Eddie Brock come to an end in Venom The Last Dance, the third and final movie of the series, already prodiving something rarer than an unicorn for modern superhero films: closure.

Sure, they will most likely do some films about the Symbiotes or whatever later, but this one does actually close this storyline.

Speaking of which, we continue to follow Eddie and Venom’s escape from the authorities, now complicated by the army having captured the other Symbiotes in a hidden desert base, and especially by Knull, an imprisoned god that created the Symbiotes and is sending out monster aliens (called Xenophages) around the galaxy in order to find and retrieve the Codex, the only thing able to break him free.

That said, it’s a Venom film, meaning it’s a mess of garbage that somehow manages to work in spite of the many, many issues it has, and be entertaining enough, sporting a trashy 90s charm, and while The Last Dance’s plot feels more structured and focused (more than Let There Be Carnage), the humour is even worse (it’s funnier when it doesn’t mean to), the villain is easy to forget even exists, characters are prone to overconvenient bouts so the plot can continue, and while the new Symbiotes are cool, they don’t do much until the end.

On the flipside it’s not drawn out, it’s a film that goes by fast, maybe too fast, as it’s hard for anything of note to “sink in”, with the highlights being the Venom Horse and a hippie UFO believer than bring his family along for a road trip to Area 51, for what amounts to a somewhat generic ending to the series and about the same level of “quality” seen before.

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] Never Let Go (2024) | Always sometimes monsters

After the flood crocodile horror bout of Crawl, Alexandre Aja returns with a new horror thriller, Never Let Go, a supernatural tale with a folkish horror bent that feels a little Bird Box and a bit of The Watchers, as it tells the tale of a family of three living deep in the woods, with the mother and children leaving the safe haven of their blessed home only with a rope tying them to the house, so that “the evil can’t get them”, as the mother -often seeing monstruous creatures lurking upon them – tells her sons.

As we learn more of the daily rituals and customs the family performs in order to survive deep in the woods, we start to wonder if this is just the extreme result of the mother being mentally ill or hallucinating after a trauma, alongside the younger brother, whom once stayed outside the house ropeless and never felt or saw the “evil”.

And it would have benefitted the movie if continued the mystery or opted for a different resolution, because the drama is intriguing, you wanna see where exactly this situation can lead as it becomes clearer this is most certainly the horrible and unwanted outcome borne out of motherly love and schizophrenic degrade.. but then in the final act the script retires to the obvious and expected “countertwist” we have seen coming and wished it didn’t do, kinda writing itself into a corner where it either that or feeling like the movie is “throwing away” its entire set up.

It’s a shame because the final act basically makes Never Let Go slide from “quite good” to “quite decent”, the performances and direction are great but the final nosediving into cliched territory, with a banal ending too… it’s quite frustrating.

Still worth checking out.

Platformation Time Again #1: Ty The Tasmanian Tiger HD [PS4/STEAM]

HISTORY

After Pangaea was no more, Sony released the Playstation 2.

I did receive one for Christmas 2002, and if you also did, you will remember the original “fat” model was kind of a piece of shit, but besides that, that generation of machines would eventually become the “Twilight Of The Gods” age for the mascot platformer, which was also often the “collectathon” kind of platformer and had already peaked, especially on the Nintendo 64, where Rareware did crystalize decades of 2D platformer and collectible obsession with Banjo Kazooie, before completely quintupling down on this style with the infamous Donkey Kong 64.

While they were starting to feel like a dying trend, it must be made clear that even if they were not as rampant as on the PS1 and Nintendo 64, there were still a LOT of 3D platformers that console generation, either sequels of legacy series or new IP s, because they were still quite profitable, and – while shrunk – the market for these kind of games did exist, Nintendo aside that kept doing their thing as they have been for decades, regardless of trends or logic or many other things.

What i mean by this is that while Naughty Dog continued their platform games legacy with the Jak Daxter series, other studios threw their hat in the ring with new mascot platformer, hoping one day to see them playing golf, tennis or racing each other, and the Australian Krome Studios were certaintly one of those studios that did such a thing, with Ty The Tasmanian Tiger, published by EA Games and released in 2002 on PS2, X-Box and Gamecube.

Makes more sense than having Polish people making games about kangaroos, i guess.

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Suicide Squad Isekai (2024) [REVIEW] | Through The Unlooking Glass

Why i am reviewing this, you may be asking yourself.

Just for the trash factor? Just because its seems like “easy prey”?

Not quite, it’s more due to how since its debut (and even then, i learn this was gonna be through the collaboration with V-tuber and singer Mori Calliope, as she composed the ending theme) i never heard a single peep online about it, not even to shit on it, which worried me even more.

Also i learned after searching that it was being streamed in my region via a sub-channel on Amazon Prime Video, absolutely zero marketing had been spent to even make people know it was legally available on a commonly used streaming platform (FIY, there’s no HBO Max or Hulu here).

But still, this looked and sounded like like the kind of trash Twitter (not calling it X) loves to shit on weekly, just for the hell of it, but the only thing i saw on there was someone else befuddled by how the internet decided to skip having any discourse on it all together, that it was likely not even worth that kind of engagement, as nobody bothered, not even for the finale…..if anyone knew this series was a thing to begin with, that is. No one using the new Joker and Harley designs for their profile pictures, it was THAT much ignored or just never actually marketed properly after its announcement.

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Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey 2 (2024) [REVIEW] | Farewell To The Flush

I was gonna delay this review… but i really don’t wanna have to put this one on The Spooktacular Eight (never gonna happen) this year or having to deal with it in 2025, so might as well catch up to the “Twisted Childhood Universe” and see how the story continues.

And i do genuinely mean “continues” because the first one didn’t so much ended as simply stopped, so half-assed was even in sequel-baiting itself, i guess because there was no more money to make it 90 minutes long, those mask really ate into the budget, or maybe not.

So yeah, in a stupid way there was even more reason to continue a story they didn’t finish telling properly (as if they didn’t planned like this, but whatever), so Blood and Honey 2 – i’m gonna use this short-hand from now – continues the merry tale that someone had make into a slasher, with Christopher Robin surviving and coming back to civilization to tell everyone of what happened…. with the expected and logical result of anyone – aside from some of its close friends and family – believing that he has gone cuckoo and maybe even murdered those girls himself.

Regardless, the incident is eventually dubbed as the “Hundred Acre Massacre” and they even make an horror film adaptation out of it, ruining Christopher Robin’s medical career and reputation even worse, basically making him a reject, a “pooh pariah” if you will.

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Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey (2023) [REVIEW] | Public Domain Expansion

I knew of this one, and that i eventually will have to feature it here, and i guess the moment arrived for me to actually see the damn thing when they – almost to my surprise – localized it for Halloween 2023, and put it as an Amazon Prime Video streaming exclusive.

Which does remind one of the state of the service itself, but whatever, it’s basically free, not beholden to another paid subscription within Prime Video, they bothered to even dub it, let’s not post-pone the inevitable any further.

“Inevitable” since this movie’s only reason for existing is the original Winnie The Pooh’s book falling into public domain in the US in January 2022.

So let’s be honest, sooner or later someone was simply gonna do this movie, i mean, the public domain slide is why we have so many unrelated Amytiville movies, for example.

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[EXPRESSO] Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) | Like Deets, Like That

I was a bit wary, given the current fever for having legacy sequels of every conceivable IP (fuck, even Twister got one), but i was pleasantly surprised with a sequel that (mostly) is Burton in peak form and demonstrates these kind of follow-ups can actually be done quite well.

The plot sees the Deets family return to their old home in the city of Winter River, after Lydia, while recording an episode of her supernatural TV talk show, sees the ghost of Betelgeuse in the audience (that caused trouble for them 36 years ago) and to hold the funeral for her father, Charles.

Lydia brings along her estranged daughter, Astrid, whom stumbles upon the diorama in the attic and eventually evokes Betelgeuse, also in need of help as he’s now being chased by his psycho undead ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci)….

And here actually lies the biggest issue in the film, it’ s as if they feared there were never gonna make Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, so they crammed one or two or three too many subplots in there without elating the runtime, meaning some feel (and are) a bit undercooked, like the entire one about Betelgeuse’s ex-undead wife feels like it should receive more screentime, but doesn’t.

Despite the slightly messy plot, it’s actually pretty fun, the style is immaculate Burton (still using excellent practical effects and stopmotion animation, too), they even go a bit wilder with the graphic jokes since they now can, the tone and humour perfectly match the original and are still strong, even if more retrò, more quaint than actually edgy by now (which was kind to be expected, to be blunt), and the cast it’s great, for both returning and new characters, especially Keaton that seems to have never left the set of the 1988 film.

[One Piece: Side Pieces | Retrospective] Cross Epoch (manga) [REVIEW]

To close off this little retrospective, there was no other choice, given the recent passing of Akira Toriyama, the author of Doctor Slump & Arale (and nothing else), may he rest in peace.

We’re also going back in time more than with the previous spin-offs (Monsters aside), as Cross Epoch was a 20 pages one-shot manga done by both Oda and Toriyama in 2006, apparently because they wanted to… actually yeah, that’s about the extent on the “why” this came to be.

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