[EXPRESSO] Godzilla Battle Line iOS | Army Mon’

So, you may or may not remember i tried to review this one alongside the other two mobile smartphone free-to-play Godzilla games Toho put out in 2021, the now (thankfully, as it was ugly and very, very shite) defunct Godzilla Destruction and the weird Uma Musume-ish training sim Run Godzilla.

Problem is that Battle Line didn’t work on my smarthphone, try as i might it would just crash after it booted, every single time. Almost 3 years later, with the prospect of the new Monsterverse film that will have Godzilla and Kong “collab” (and 2024 marking Godzilla’s 70^th anniversary), i went to see if it was still available to download… and yes, for some fuckin reason now it works, despite my smarthphone being fairly outdated, better late than never.

Godzilla Battle Line is actually a decent little RTS-thingie where you battle other human players by placing down what are basically toy-sized monsters, vehicles and weapons from the Godzilla franchise, all to overwhelm the other leader monster on the opposite side of the battle grid while defending yours.

Despite the cheapish production values, i do like the “playing with Godzilla toys on a diorama” aesthetic, there is some depth to it, over time it has had many updates (the latest adding Godzilla Minus One content), and despite the focus on versus matches, there’s also a single player mission-based mode.

Sure, its a gacha with a “battle pass”, some obnoxious in-game ads, i’ve heard cheaters are a thing…. hard to tell because right now the game it’s nearly unplayable, is THAT unstable, prone to crashes and costant disconnections at any time.

When it works, it’s actually a fun lil’ game, the free to play elements aren’t the worst, so if you’re into Godzilla it’s worth a punt at the very least.

Abyssal Spider AKA Mad Spider Sea (2020) [REVIEW] #giantmonstermarch

Want more spider movies? Want spiders so bad you’ll marry Rachnera Arachnera?

Well, here’s one about a fricking giant water spider from Taiwanese director Joe Chien.

No, it doesn’t involve a crew of on a ship trying to romance off the storm and the aquatic creatures, they just have to survive the weather and these mysterious things that attack them from the water, with the help of Aije, who previously survived a boat disaster where a large shadow in the abyss pulled the entire vessel into the depths….

Continua a leggere

The Cyclops (1957) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

Really scraping the bottom of the Bert I. Gordon barrell with this one, but i did mention it twice before, and – as i said when reviewing 2008’s Cyclops – it’s not like we’re drowning in cyclops movies, at all, and this one has some of that “so bad it’s good” qualities, so for this year’s Giant Monster March’s finale it’s time to end as we begun, meaning to fall face first into a vat of Gouda, groan like a fuzzy giant toddler and “do the cyclops”.

At least it has Lon Chaney Jr. past his prime as a Universal horror star but not yet being reduced to a pathetic, drunken parody of himself (the epitome of that would be him in 1971’s Dracula VS Frankenstein, which nowadays is kind of a cursed movie as it was the undignified end of many actors careers and lives), not yet, here we have him in his post-glory phase were he did a lot of work pretty much any support roles in any kind of movie, mostly westerns, exotic adventure flicks, and horror films once in a while, mostly cheap, low budget, often indipendent productions.

The Cyclops definitely fits the bill, being a Bert I. Gordon film and what that entails, and here a plays a villanous mining expert in search of uranium, part of a posse led by the wife of a pilot that disappeared 3 years ago in the jungles of Mexico, as she still believes he’s alive despite all odds, but guess what, it’s a 50s b-movie, so the mining for radioactive material results in mutated everything, from spiders, lizards, eagles, mice and whatever animal stock footage Bert could superglue together.

Continua a leggere

Cyclops (2008) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

The cyclops is one of the more unrepresented monsters, sure, it’s usually thrown in there if it there’s an adventure in ye old Greece of myth and monsters, alongside the usual suspects, in both videogames and movies, now that i think about it.

Then again, it’s ultimately just a variation of the giant archetype, but even so, the cyclops really hasn’t had much representation even in the monster movie genre and its many iterations even on overlyspecific types of killer animals.

Sure, there’s Dr Cyclops, but that’s just the stupid title given to basically the forerunner of the “shrinking people” trend of the ’40-50s, not that Bert I. Gordon’s The Cyclops from 1957 is any better, as they basically had the same guy of his War Of The Colossal Beast as the “cyclops”, quotiations marks because the monster’s face (or the actor’s make up/mask) is supposed to be melted off on due to radiation shit, so he has basically a “flesh bang” and only eye still visible, here’s your “cyclops”, looks like he fell face first into a barrel of radioactive cheese but didn’t get signed up by Troma for a series, so he slums into his own film alongside a disgraced Lon Chaney Jr.

Continua a leggere

[EXPRESSO] Dune Part 2 (2024) | …The Punishment Due

After being delayed, the second part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune is finally in theathers, and again, i’m putting out there i didn’t read the novel, and oddly didn’t even saw the Lynch take on Herbert’s book, so take that into account, if you want.

After the fall of the Atreides castle and slaughtering of most of his family and friends by the rival house of the Harkonnen, Paul Atreides survives by escaping and entering the ranks of the Fremens, the sand-dwelling bluey eyed natives of the planet Arakkis, learning their ways, while waiting for a chance at revenge, and tormented by horrendous visions of a future holy war and a prophecy that points to him as the likely messiah the Fremens had been waiting for, while the Emperor and the mystical order of priestesses plot more political upheaval and prepare for conflict….

Like the first part, it’s a lot of stylish and inspired visuals (to the point i’d kinda wish i went for an IMAX screening, instead of a regular one), great characters, amazing spectacle, enthralling narrative.. let’s cut the crap, it’s amazing stuff, maybe even better than part 1, and a great pay-off that will make the almost 3 hours runtime go by swimmingly, as it’s packed but not just “dense”.

While the ending teases as this just being the beginning (fitting as the original Dune book series counted six books by his creator-writer Frank Herbert,) and i do want to see more, it actually does provide an incredible conclusion to this story, so you get closure but also one hell of a scenario to close on that will make you want to see how things will continue forwards after such a powerful, really epic finale.

Terrific stuff, some of the best sci-fi cinema in a while.

Gargantua (1998) [REVIEW] #giantmonstermarch

The very – and this case literal – enbodiment of “we have Godzilla at home”, though it’s american-flavoured Godzilla given the production and the year it came out, one year that lives in infamy for the Godzilla faithful, but wait, there’s actually more as this is also kinda E.T., guess the echoes of Nukie and Mac & Me made the idea survive till the very end of the millennium itself.

And speaking of rip-offs it’s not totally incorrect since this TV movie premiered the very same day early screening for 1998 Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla were held, so yeah, it is not a victim of circumstances or a project in production before that was hurried to “compete” (by trying to come out first in hope of fooling the less informed, as usual) with an upcoming big budget Hollywood film that happened to have a similar plot or subject matter.

Still, i think “rip-off” might be too strong a word, since it doesn’t even really tries to do emulate the Roland Emmerich movie, and it’s actually closer to Gorgo or Gappa (as there are more of the monster siblings and parents), because it does involve the “momma monster” coming of the seabed to retrieve “da baby” from an enclosure of sorts, in this case though it because underwater quakes made possible for some amphibious giant reptilian creatures to show up on the beaches of Malau, Hawaii, where a marine biologist has brought along his son for work and to hopefully process the recent loss of the mother.

Continua a leggere

Giant Monster March is approaching the generators + Early April hiatus

It’s that time of year again where we let the MONSTERS FIGHT, even more as we have a new entry in Legendary’s Monsterverse with the collab episode of Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire hitting theathers internationally by the end of this month.

Also, i will be taking a break in April from the 1st up to the 14th of the month due to uni obligations and scholarly stuff, will be back from the 15th of April, though EXPRESSO review might still come out regardless.

[EXPRESSO] Madame Web (2024) | Spider Vision

The new entry in Sony’s Spider Man Universe side of Marvel offerings, tackling the titural and lesser known – to mainstream audiences – figure of Madame Web, AKA Cassandra Web (Dakota Johnson), a woman working as a paramedic that awakens her powers of clairvoyance after a tragic incident, and will have to confront her mysterious past to help three young women unaware of being hunted down by a menacing “spider person”.

So, it’s not good, at all, i didn’t hate it or was let down, it’s at least inoffensive, as in, it’s hard to feel anything much from a movie that feels directed and acted in autopilot, the cast it’s good but the characters are shallow as hell and the movie’s overall light tone (fine in itself ) kinda backfires in making it hard to care about anything that happens.

Ignoring the fact its about a character intrisically linked to Spider Man, has “evil Spiderman” for its boring ass villain, yet it can’t/won’t even mention the Man-O’-Spiders, Madame Web is just a very unispired origin story that coasts on doing the bare minimum, one it could have been cut to 90 minutes, since it’s fairly repetitive, unengaging, looks cheap, and feels more like a set up for other films than anything, a movie set in 2003 that also perfectly feels like the kind of bad/subpar cinecomic that would have come out back then.

I was inclined on trying to “defend” it due to how harsh it’s being reviewed….. but sorry, this one IS pretty bad and lacks the trashy fun factor of the Venon movies or Morbius, with very little to like, feeling extremely throaway to boot, just “product” that makes futile even feeling angry about it.

Maybe the Kraven The Hunter movie coming out this summer will be better?

Killer Condom AKA Kondom Der Grauens (1996) [REVIEW] | Squeeze Me Mackaroni

We’ve been a little too classy on here, so to balance things out and offer a tribute to Aphrodite by tackling one hell of horror schlock from the “i can’t actually believe it’s real” department.

One that goes straight for the… crotchular, i guess, though the novelty factor might be less impressive to younger generations, used to a plethora of “joke films” that honestly were better off as jokes than the actual movies that were made in the end (a lot involving sharks, obviously), but still, for the decade it was made it was pretty much conceptually absurd to even conceive, and would actually at best amounted to a joke made in early internet boards, maybe with a fake synapsis if the shitposter was feeling frisky and wanted to sell the joke proper.

But then again the Germans were always something else, and unbelievably this is also based on a book…. okay, it’s based on a couple of comic book by Ralph Konig, whom also wrote the screenplay for this film adaptation, directed by Martin Walz and released in the States by Troma, obviously they were gonna carry it in the US, and promote it with a giant fanged condom.

Also, has the killer condom special effects done by good ol’ Jorg Buttgeireit of Nekromantik and Der Todesking fame, just thid tidbit would have been enough to get me curious, honestly.

That, and how many comedy horror b-movies have the actual H. R. Giger as a creative consultant?

Continua a leggere

We gotta talk about Palworld

I remember writing a quick piece when this one was presented back in 2021, laughing it off as i thing that would be shot down by Nintendo’ lawyers.

Obviously that didn’t happen (and never will, i would assume), and since it has sold 5 million copies in the span of DAYS after releasing in Early Access this 19th of January, the company behind it being shady con merchants and the fact people are actually defending a game with “bootleg Electabuzz Totoro with gatling gun” is amazing… look, we need to talk about this.

(this is not a review, FIY, just putting this out there early)

Leaving aside the fact most likely this game doesn’t use generative AI for the “‘mons”, they look just rip-offs – sometimes literally as you can some really obvious bits of both official Pokemon designs and even fandesigns – done the ye old fashion way, and the sociopathic premise of “you can kill, cook and enslave your non-Pokemon pals” (even more sociopathical how you can catch human NPCs,) to what seems like a very basic survival and crafting game that defines the “early” in Early Access title.

One that also looks very “asset flippy” as it literal looks they recycled assets from their earlier title, Craftopia, which itself tries to ape BOTW and even “borrows” enemy designs, which already tells you these people don’t give a fuck. Just don’t, and knew exactly how to use the “we pokedo what Nintendon’t” controversial energy to get every publication to talk about it.

That much they did and played it right, because i talked about it back then, and in the time between i wrote this thing it and posted, it sold 3 more million copies for a total of 8 millions, but oddly this isn’t so much about money, per se.

Continua a leggere