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.
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?
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 “Killer Condom AKA Kondom Der Grauens (1996) [REVIEW] | Squeeze Me Mackaroni”
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 “We gotta talk about Palworld”
Let’s start the year off with the new Jason Staham movie, The Beekeeper.
One merry day, a kindly but tech “un-savvy” old lady is scammed by one of those “call this number to recover your computer” operations, resulting in them draining all her money, even the 2 millions of the pro-bono teaching fund she was tasked with.
In utter despair, she commits suicide, and her daughter, working at the FBI, initially thinks is the man whom she found in her house, but he was simply her neighbour, a quiet man that worked as a beekeeper and was beyond grateful of the kindness bestowed upon him by the old lady.
So he sets out in a quest for revenge against those responsable, because he’s a beekeeper, but also a “beekeeper”, as the codename given to highly trained assassins, one-man army agents belonging to a super-secret government project, operating outside of the system to protect the system itself in case it becomes unstable or operated by bad actors.
Some very bad actors in this case, not that will stop Jason Staham to avenge her kindly neighbour by kicking ass, eventually crushing skulls and popping caps into anything that doesn’t wanna de-escalate scamming people, when the sheer magnitude of his one liners somehow doesn’t immediately scare the life out of the douchebag thugs and their untouchable masters.
It’s a decent action romp with some nice ideas that ultimately delivers a lot of satisfying graphic violence, the plot it’s essentially nothing new but the flair (and the “bee angle”) is nice enough, the action is enjoyably cheesy, and it’s a pretty straighforward narrative that doesn’t wast time nor tries to sequel bait.
It’s definitely better than most of the other movies Staham was in last year, this is decent, and very, very entertaining indeed.
Since we’ve looked at a LOT of low-to-no budget dinosaur films this year (maybe even more than usual), let’s end with something that actually released in most english-speaking cinemas, had some actual movie studios and actually known industry faces attached to it, with A Sound Of Thunder.
Based on a short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury and set in the still “distant” future of 2055, it tells the story of a company, Time Safari, that offers to rich customers the possibility to travel back in time and hunt dinosaurs.
Due to the huge risks involved with the “space-time fabric and whatnot”, the company regulates the safari by hunting species of dinosaurs that would have eventually died anyway of natural causes and keeps the clients from stepping off the designated path of the safari experience.
While on a hunt, a gun malfunctions, forcing the team to scatter and flee from an Allosaurus, and even if they eventually regroup, when they come back to their time with no harm done… they soon find out their actions had consequences, like a sudden increase in global temperature and the over-night instant, abudant growth of plant life, with further trips resulting in even more messing with the space-time continuum and endangering the existence of humanity as a whole…
Continua a leggere “12 Days Of Dino Dicember #36: A Sound Of Thunder (2005)”
Figured we would eventually feature a dinosaur documentary film into Dino Dicember somewhat…. not yet, because we’re not talking about the BBC’s prolific and historically signifcant series of dinosaur documentaries, we’re talking about the movie based on those.
Which doesn’t mean much since i didn’t grow up seeing that BBC miniseries, quite odd given i was interested in dinosaurs as a boy, and you can bet by me making a recurring yearly rubric about the dinos, i still am.
Though doing some research on the BBC series made me wonder why the fuck was the point of making a movie when the series’ main appeal, one that would influence later prehistoric life documentaries, the idea of making a traditional nature documentary but using advanced state of the art CG to recreat the extinct creatures that once romped n stomped on planet Earth.
Exactly the kind of concept that really doesn’t need to have a plot attached, but i guess because any IP of some success has to have a movie, even just to remind people that the series still exist.
And to make some movie tie-in videogames, because dino moolah.
Continua a leggere “12 Days Of Dino Dicember #35: Walking With Dinosaurs 3D (2013)”
I was a bit anxious when i saw the poster for this sequel to The Dino King pushing the Lion King vibes even more obviously, let alone the very “Land Before Time”-feeling cover for the UK DVD release, implying a more kid-friendly sequel.
And my fears were kinda confirmed when i noticed the cast… as in, the first movie had a “fake cast” at the end listing the various types of dinosaurs appearing in the film, since the creatures didn’t speak and the dialogues were offered as a post-humous narration by the titular protagonist.
It was a fairly unique thing for these dinosaur movies also aimed at kids, the combo of mostly non-humanized animals that don’t actually talk like people, even with the narration acting as a compromise… which is dropped entirely by the sequel, Dino King: Journey To Fire Mountain.
Continua a leggere “12 Days Of Dino Dicember #34: Dino King: Journey To Fire Mountain (2019)”
There’s no more Carnosaur movies for me to review, and while this isn’t directly related to that series, nor comes from one of his companies, it’s directed by another prolific director versed in both cult classics and huge big box blockbuster successes, Mark L. Lester, here clearly in his “TV B-movies” phase, decades after his adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter , Roller Boogie, good ol’ Commando or Class of 1984.
As one could simply guess, this is indeed a dinosaur TV movie made for the Sci Fi Channel, produced by Lester’s American World Pictures, and apparently was the highest rated tv movie of this type commissioned by and for “SiFy”. At least according to Mark L. Lester’s bio on IMDB.
The plot it’s that pterodactyls have survived and thrived to the present day, nesting into a dormant volcano within the forest of Turkey, preying on whoever and whatever they come across.
So of course that’s exactly where a group of teenagers are led for a science expedition by Professor Lovecraft (pretty much all the characters are named after science fiction and fantasy writers, that’s cute), but worry not, there are also US commandos led by Captain Berge (played by Coolio) hunting Russian terrorists that supposedly are hiding inside the nearby dormant volcano.
Continua a leggere “12 Days Of Dino Dicember# 33: Pterodactyl (2005)”
It was either this or Picha’s The Missing Link, this won out due to snags in the schedule, either way we’re gonna talk about banging and dinosaurs, not the two together because no thanks, not this year anyway, not feeling it.
Decided to review this one hoping for a modern throwback to old cavemen/dinosaurs movies like The Wild Women Of Wongo, heck, even the similarly titled but not actually related soft porn spoof/parody Bikini Girls On Dinosaur Planet, but this is not the case.
We’ve entered the “Polonia-sphere” equivalent of such ideas, as in it dresses itself in all the post-modern meta self-deprecating facade of disinterestinly using the Star Wars text crawl to vaguely explain but actually not the premise, just so we can cut to a very Turkish Star Wars levels of production sequence of the three protagonists fighting rebels, as in if Star Wars was made with some of the cheapest effects free video software from the early 2000s could afford and was basically an e-girls with Logitech flight controllers vs Sith streamers standoff of DIY cockpits.
All rendered with the computer graphics of a mid 90’s console game 3D cutscene, and that is being generous, since the Wing Commander series existed.
Continua a leggere “12 Days Of Dino Dicember #32: Bikini Girls VS Dinosaurs (2014)”
