Bringing Out The Serpents again for #snakesofjunetoo

Last June we did feature a lot of serpent based movies (often b-movies, that much is true), so we’re doing it again this year too, though on a smaller scale due to an increase of work and other personal obligations. Plus a surprisingly full summer release schedule of films coming out here (united with a nationwide promotion on ticket prices), so there will be a lot of EXPRESSO reviews…. yes, we’ll also review that one with the lead actors that keeps constantly getting arrested, because while i abhor him, i did watch and review movies where he was in before, like the theatherical cut of Justice League or the recently released (and reviewed) Dalìland, where he plays a very minor role, so much i didn’t notice he was in before watching the thing.

So yeah, it wouldn’t be quite correct of me to stop now, especially since i seriously doubt The Flash will do much in terms of box office, i mean, it’s not one of the more popular superheroes, it’s very well known and documented even between the less devoted audiences that Erza Miller is basically assaulting people on a whim at a noticeable rate, both Black Adam and Shazam 2 weren’t well regarded or even that lucrative (though i did rate Fury Of The Gods higher than most, personally), and remember, this movie also exists to completely reset the mess of the DC Extended Universe, so they can start again with Gunn at the helm.

Plus, honestly the movie looks kinda ass, and it’s undeniable this is NOT a project the studios really believes in, otherwise they wouldn’t have advertised it by dangling the return of Michael Keaton as Batman in trailers, like bait. And that’s some good bait.

Again, i don’t blame people opting out of seeing The Flash because of Erza Miller, or regardless of him, you do you. I kinda have to, to a certain degree.

Musou May and the State Of Musou as of May 2023?

As per what is now tradition, this year too we’ll have Musoy May, with a picked review of a musou/Warriors game every sunday of May.

Here’s where i usually make a general ramble about the state of the genre as of late, but…. there isn’t really much to say or even get unreasonably hyped about, as we neither got any new contender/challenger from some small or medium sized developer & publisher nor does TK really revealed, teased or announced anything.

Samurai Warriors 5 came out in 2021, but aside from a Season Pass TK didn’t either put out a XL or Empires version, Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires needed a lot of shit to be added or patched in, but again, aside a tepid Season Pass that wasn’t really worth paying (for the most part), there was no post-launch support, and since how barebones the modes on offering were… it would have needed.

Touken Ranbu Warriors was also released, but for whatever reason TK decided to launch it digital only on both Switch and PC (via Steam), and i’m gonna save the lamentations about that for its review.

Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes was almost perfect but was curiously devoid of expansion content (which is fine since it’s an already massive offering to begin with), so that’s odd.

All we got since June 2022 was simply a teaser trailer for Fate Samurai/Remnant that should release sometime this year, no actual gameplay footage or any real info aside from what could be seen in that short teaser trailer. Surprised it took them this long and actually Marvelous already did developed 2 Fate musou games, but still, it has been months devoid of any news about it or anything else Warriors or Warriors related.

Maybe TK is holding out for what was “E3 time” or for the TGS to drop the existence of Dynasty Warriors 10 (which they teased in interviews before), but at this point there’s just nothing to talk about of substance, and this behaviour kinda speaks volume for how Koei considers his musou output.

I mean, when the best news is them re-releasing WO3 Ultimate in a definitive edition package…. you can tell there’s a drought and no signs of the main gardener being interested in watering the cacti.

I mean, unless they do a 180 ° with Dynasty Warriors 10, Koei shouldn’t complain of losing even more customers, after DW 9 they deserve every critique and negativity coming their way.

Grizzly II: The Revenge/The Concert (1983-2020) [REVIEW] | Litigation Bear

Ah yes, the forbidden bear. The Clooney-Dern-Sheen triplette one.

As previously said, since Grizzly was a big success bringing lots of moolah, a sequel was kinda inevitable eventually… emphasis on the eventually, because while in 1983 Grizzly II (subtitled “The Concert”) was shot in Hungary, the movie spent the following 37 years in post-production hell, eventually premiering in 2020 at various festivals and being released on VOD (and home video) in 2021.

Intriguingly, this didn’t stop people from getting a hold of Grizzly II, as bootleg copies of the unfinished workprint were made and in 2007 the VHS were ripped online, eventually leading (among others things) to Brad Jones covering the title on his “Cinema Snob” webseries, and then being hit with treats of legal action by the movie co-producer, the aptly named Suzanne C. Nagy.

As unofficial as the workprint copies circulating were, they also corroborated how badly the production was handled, not only with the movie being shot in Hungary because it was/is cheaper (a common low budget film ploy, as we learned) that way, the principal producer leaving after the first day of shooting and the lack of funding to continue, forcing Suzanne C. Nagy, the co-producer, to procure an investor so they cold finish the main photography, managing to do such… only to learn the original producer, Joseph Ford Proctor, was arrested for a unrelated case of tax fraud.

Peeking through the workprint also showed that the movie was not THAT incomplete, as in there was clearly post-production to do, especially having to shoot the scenes where the bear is attacking and retool the finale. Clearly it was an unfinished product, and it was never officially released (plus all the licensed music present in the workprint pretty much guaranteed it would never release in that state), so there’s a limit to what can be said, since – again – it was a bootleg of the work print.

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Happy Easter

Time to give this classic another watch.

Attack On Titan: Wings Of Freedom PS4 [REVIEW] | Nape Snape The Giants

As the Final Season of the Attack On Titan anime is somehow still going on (i’m not even talking about the many parts it has been split into), might as well revisit the videogames good ol’ Omega Force did, under the technically distinct (the best kind of distinct) title of “AOT” (yep, for legal reasons they couldn’t localize it as “Attack On Titan”, same issue as the My Hero Academia games, i think), starting with the first one, AOT: Wings Of Freedom, and then the direct sequel, AOT 2, in its complete form that also include the Final Battle expansion.

I would have loved to also cover the 3DS game, Shingeki No Kyoujin: Humanity In Chains, which is actually the first videogame based on Attack On Titan, but the localized english release has been pulled from the 3DS eShop years ago, i didn’t buy it before, so i’ll have to skip it as to get around these issues will take too much effort and – mostly – too much time, which is scarce at the moment.

I also want to cover AOT 2 in it’s complete form, will do that when they will release the second part of the part 3 of season 4 (if i got it right) somewhere in late 2023.

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Giant Monster March Lives Again

It’s March, so you know what that means, some select picks from the monster movie genre, as we try to not do the obvious ones but search deeper within the evergrowing sands of time, pulling out some familiar names as well as some of the more obscure entries, without completely forgoing more recent releases.

It’s not gonna be the more extensive year of the rubric, but i think the picks for this year’s Monster March are some of the better ones so far.

We’ll be starting on the 6th with some vintage rear projected cheese, after some EXPRESSO reviews of some recent releases i couldn’t get to before, see ya!

Babylon’s Fall PS4 [REVIEW-FUNERAL] | Enuma Eloss

After previously touching upon the demo, and especially when the inevitable news of the sunset period before the servers would be shot down, i knew i had get Babylon’s fall, for cheap (which wasn’t an issue), actually play and finish before lights were out.

Other times i’ve put out these “funerary reviews” slightly before a game kicked the bucket, just in case, as both a courtesy and a way to let people that might be interested in the game itself, for whatever reason, so they could – potentially – try it or play it, i mean, Jump Force can still be played as second hand copies are still around.

But Babylon’s Fall didn’t even deserve that, so we’re talking about it the very same days its servers will close forever, 28^th of February 2023, not even 1 year after the game launched on the 3^rd of March 2022, couldn’t even held out for 3 days more, in such a hurry to kill to it Square Enix were.

Then again, that in itself it’s nothing special, the company does this to countless mobile free to play spinoffs of it’s own series, it’s like clockwork for many people to learn through these “end of service announcement” that many mobile games based on franchises owned by Squeenix…. even existed.

But it’s Babylon’s Fall we’re talking about, a game that indeed will live on infamy as a golden grease stain on Platinum Games’ record, when they had the bright idea to work alongside the company that once every 2 year lamented every non-japanese big franchise they owned and handled sold “below expectations”, the company of FF VII NFTs, that also later sold all its western-centric studios and properties for a pittance, all to drown more cash into the latest internet money scam.

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Asterix & Obelix XXL: Romastered PS4 [REVIEW] | For Toutatis!

Oddly, this was the last of the Asterix XXL series to get the remaster treament, the first being XXL 2 in 2018, then we had the brand new XXL 3 in 2019, then the “romastered” version of the first game in 2020, the one we’re talking about today, to celebrate the release of a new Asterix & Obelix movie in theathers.

One of the live-action ones, but still, it’s new Asterix & Obelix material!

Originally developed for PS2, Gamecube and PC (with a GBA version that’s basically another game entirely) by defunct french studio Etranges Libellules and published by Atari Europe, this remaster was instead published by Microids (which pretty much took the place Infogrames had back then) and developed by the quite non-defunct (at the time of writing, anyway) french Osome Studios.

The plot sees the titular duo wander off of their little Gaul village to the ol’ boar hunt only to come back and find out Ceasar (yes, Julius Caius Ceasar from Caligula, exactly) has somehow managed to storm the village, capturing most people and sending them off to various distant ends of the Roman empire in order to have locked out sight and mind, hopefully for good.

But with the help of a fired roman spy, you find out that most of the imprisoned gauls most likely managed to get a piece of the map indicating their location, as Ceasar took the extra step – just in case – of ripping the map in pieces and scattering them in various locations.

Good enough as an excuse in terms of videogame logic to have Asterix & Obelix travel to various places like Egypt, Normandy, Greece and Helvetia, freeing their fellow gaul citizens and getting more pieces of the map along the way.

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Pinocchi-O-Rama: the 2022 “Pinocchio frenzy” and celebrating the 140th Anniversary of Collodi’s classic

No review today, sorry, but we’re doing something a bit special.

If you remember, last year was surprisingly full of Pinocchio adaptations, from the resurfacing of Guillermo Del Toro’s project, that cheap russian retelling/reworking with the infamous Paulie Shorie english dub (called Pinocchio – A True Story, FIY), and Disney continuining with their crusade of shitty live-action remakes of their classic animated films.

And italian audiences were also treated with a live-action Pinocchio movie in 2019, directed by acclaimed italian director Matteo Garrone (Dogman, The Tale Of Tales), and starring beloved italian actor Roberto Benigni, which already was world famous for playing the titular character in the 2002 Pinocchio movie.

If you’re like me, as in italian and pretty much hailing from Tuscany, living nearby Florence, hence more than familiar with the original book by Luigi Collodi, you’d be wondering why now, as it seemed random to see a resurgence of Pinocchio adaptations out of the blue. I mean, the book was already in the public domain in the U.S. since 1940, so i wondered if there was some anniversary relating some of the more famous adaptations…. but nothing that made sense.

As in, the original book was first published (in full, after it was published in a weekly children’s magazine starting 1881, then stopped and eventually resumed with the second part) in 1883, so the following year would mark the 140th anniversary, notable but not the kind of number that publisher choose to publicize some new edition of a popular book.

Doesn’t have quite that ring, but somehow 2022 was the “Year Of Pinocchio” regardless, so irked by this i’m gonna do “sumethin about it” and actually spotlight a noteworthy or overlooked Pinocchio adaptation or “heavily inspired by ” work each month of 2023, with special reviews, starting with a post/review at the very end of January.

There will be no precise release windows for each piece, just each a month for the entirety of 2023.

Taking the post-Christmas break now instead of never

Since i couldn’t take the break post-12 Days Of Dino Dicember as usual (due to some releases i wanted to cover before they could be “forgotten” or whatever), i’m… taking it now before the chance slips aways entirely.

From today until (and including) the 20th of January , the blog will take a complete break, with even EXPRESSO going on a hiatus in the meantime.