Great White Death (1981) [REVIEW] | #thesharklist

The frenzy was immediate, the clones numerous and fast, sometimes bothering to swap the shark for some other animals, waterbound or not.

But the mid-70s were also the period for exploitation cinema blooming into grindhouse theathers and drive-ins, and among them there was also the “Mondo movie” craze… well, it was that trend of exploitation still surviving almost 2 decades after the 1962 film Mondo Cane (an italian idiom translating roughly to “Doggone World/The World’s Gone To The Dogs”).

While the cannibal craze was indeed at its peak, with good ol’ Cannibal Holocaust releasing just 1 year prior, director and producer Jean-Patrick Lebel figured you could mix the “killer shark” and “shockumentary” subgenre in one, so the world was given Great White Death.

And you know it’s gonna be a good one when they have not one but two different title “sequences” that still use the same title.

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The Mysterious Island AKA Odysseus And The Giant Polyphemus (1905) [REVIEW] | Odeon Days

You know me, i’m not one to go try and please the algorhythm, and since there’s no really much in terms of full lenght features trying to adapt the whole Odyssey itself (there is a recent UK production called Itaka: The Return, but even that is mostly focused on the titular return of Odysseus at his home in Itaka after decades, and not much else)…… you know what, we’re going REALLY back this time around.

Not to the 70s miniseries for TV, back to the 1900s, when cinema was in its “puppet stage”… actually, more aptly it’s “parlor trick era”, since today we’re talking about one of the many films (by now not even registering as short films, or shorts) by the profilic primordial magician of cinema, Georges Meliès, which i feel needs no introduction, otherwise this will turn into an introduction to the early days of cinema, but basically, he was a magician in the literal sense, a stage magician but using film as his tool, and to which we owe a LOT of early cinematic special effects, which now look primitive, but sure as hell weren’t when people weren’t used to video footage of any kind.

For the time it must have felt like real magic, to say the least.

Even more impressive, Melies had been doing these films for a decade, so in a way it’s not too surprising this 1905 adaptation isn’t more remembered than his Voyage To The Moon or The Impossible Voyage, despite not being lost or anything like that, quite the opposite, since – as far as i know – this always appeared in the catalogues of production by Melies’ company, Star Films.

Sure as hell it doesn’t help that its original title was L’ilè De Calypso, literally “Calypso’s Island”, even less when it was sold internationally as The Mysterious Island, or given the subtitle of “Ulysse et le geant Polypheme”, Ulysses And The Giant Polyphemus.

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[EXPRESSO] Milky Subway: The Galactic Limited Express Subway – The Movie (2026) | Cyborg Deliquents Of Gold

It warms my heart to see how the author of the astondishingly excellent 2022 ONA Milky Highway has now a movie streaming on Netflix, Milky Subway: The Galactic Express Gateway… which is actually a film recut-compilation, i somehow missed (or fogot) that Yohei Kamiyama made a sequel series, Milky Subway, that aired on Youtube and television.

I really don’t know how i could have missed that, but i’m making amends now by reviewing this recut that compiles the 12 short episodes into a 47 minute film, that also introduces a couple new side characters (at least so sayeth the articles and the Wikipedia page).

The premises follow Makina and Chiharu, arrested for the events of Milky Highway, and now joined by four other young delinquents, all sentenced to do community service by cleaning an old rundown space express train, but when they all set foot on the vehicle, it goes off by itself, so the group has to collaborate in order to find a way to stop the train, and along the way deal with other weird malfunctions….

It’s a compact story that actually has enough going on, and it uses the time to develop not only the returning duo from Milky Highway, but also the new deliquent youths, making for some really good charaterization and dynamics, also due to the dialogue going for a more realistic style than most anime.

THAT aside, the retro scifi aesthetic is perfect, the character designs are amazing, animation is beyond impressive, it’s unbelievable how this is a self produced work (manned by a VERY young author, too) that in less than a hour puts stuff from experienced studios to shame.

I really wanna see more of these characters, of this world, so give the series and this compilation film some love, will ya?

Platformation Time Again: Summer Dong Expandion Pak

Enough foreplay, i guess.

Or actually, a teensy bitsy more, because Nintendo did release about everything DK related on their Classic catalogues/apps leading to Bananza’s release, but despite being announced as coming to Switch eventually alongside other N64 titles, the now infamous N64 adventure of the Nintendo primate was missing.

It will arrive on the N64 Nintendo Classics app (which requires the Expansion Pak tier of Nintendo’s online paid subscription) on June 3/4 (June 3 in the US, June 4 in Europe and Japan), so in a week’s time.

I was “Sun Tzu-ing” this occasion for a DK 64 review, i have the game on original hardware, bought years ago before the WIIU Virtual Console rerelease was a thing, i have finished it, and i have been itching to make a big ass PTA review/piece on it, and i do look forward to have a new fresh run and hopefully a better understanding of the game.

BUT since i have already all the schedule set and completed for June and July, and August being very short due to the usual summer break, i have elected to instead move the full lenght Platformation Time Again piece to September.

If Nintendo waited till now to release it, i really don’t feel bad in post-poning my article, i mean, the game came out in 1999, almost 30 years ago, at this point a couple of months won’t age Chunky Kong any further.

Not that you could corrobate that since he’s been M.I.A. since (or worse).

Jokes aside, i’m curious to see fresh reactions and opinions on its design, given it has become a very divisive game over the decades, in terms of platform games anyway.

The Post-Easter Food Coma Rehab Post

So, if you survive Easter, congrats, and to better digest the lamb and chocolate induced coma, i’ll soapbox about some things about upcoming reviews and the blog as a whole.

First, i would like to spend some time and then review in EXPRESSO form Arknights Endfield, i have it installed on PS5 but i wasn’t sure, despite me quite liking the original Arknights… as long as i could since i’m a F2P player that doesn’t spend money in microtransactions, period, so eventually i reach the “bottleneck” where they expect you to pay to actually get some progress done before you expire, i get bored and move on.

Still, i have been curious about it, so we’ll see.

Despite earlier planning to do Melee May in a redux fashion, it will happen, though i compromised with a rewrite.

This as i planned to slow down output in order to do some maintenance, organize the reviews proper in categories, that stuff, which i still plan to do during the usual mid-August hiatus, but i would like to do some during May, so if there are less reviews than usual, that will be the reason.

As you might have notices since we’re almost at the two digits mark, i’m committed to keep Platformation Time Again going and hopefully be somewhat costant of a featured rubric, and eventually i will expand the rubric with a specific tier/type about collections, since these are becoming more and more common, as the industry and publishers are scraping up anything that might have nostalgia value to it, heck, they even did remaster-port the Zool games.

On a closing note, One Piece Month will still happen but most likely in a redux fashion, due to how some other returning rubrics will happen, as i will explain later down the line.

Here Comes The (Virtual) Boy Again

So because i’m a major league doofus, i actually preorder not the 20 bucks cardboard VR thingie to play the Virtual Boy on Switch/Switch 2, but the entire fuckin replica that costed me 80 bucks, because ultimately i’m a kindred soul to the protagonist of Shangri-La Frontier, we go hunting high and low for the kusoge, for the odd, for the grime undesired depths of the videogame scene.

Of course i’ve heard of the Virtual Boy, i’ve seen the AVGN episode, i’ve seen Nintendo itself take potshots at its failure too eventually in stuff like Tomodachi Life, but i was still curious, and there were some games i wanted to play on it proper, especially since this oddity never came out in Europe, so

I’ve played modern VR games occasionally at some arcades, so i was super curious to see for myself how the Virtual Boy measured up today via a big ass replica of the console itself, even if can’t load any games by itself and it’s an accessory needed to play via Switch or Switch 2, but sure as hell that beats me bothering to collect the original console and its library, i have to draw the line somewhere.

Gotta say, i was kinda impressed.

Kinda.

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Platformation Time Again: Bubsy Has Somehow Returned… AGAIN

I was writing this post just to make clear i WILL tackle the entire Bubsy series now that LRG has given a release date, September 7, so pretty soon, and i will eventually (waiting for a sale) get it on Steam since i already have there the 2 new ones they did back in 2018 or something like that (there was a rerelease of Bubsy 1 and 2 on Steam already, Bubsy Two-Fur, but it wasn’t quite legal and nothing more than an SNES emulator using ROMs that anyone already could run, i forgot the details)….

and then some days ago Atari drops the trailer for Bubsy 4D.

We ain’t getting Crash Bandicoot 5 or a new Spyro, but we are getting a new full 3D platformer with Bubsy, now basically a 30 going 40 dude that wants to relate to the kids and to stay positive despite still having PSTD from Bubsy 3D…. so already an improvement over being an annoying teenage edgelord personality-wise, and the game looks honestly decent, might even be the first good Bubsy game ever made.

So, i’m gonna clutch my pearls and wring them in hope of a Jumping Flash collection, why not?

Though with my usual luck we would get a Awesome Possum Kicks Doctor Machino’s Butt remaster instead.

Regardless, look for an eventual full coverage of Bubsy… sometime in the future.

Kangadawa Jet Girls [ANIME+OVA REVIEW] | There Is More To Racing Than Tits

There are many of these niche multimedia projects in the “anime sphere”, and sometimes they do get fairly big and well known even if they are still dedicated to relatively fringe, very specific audiences, like Girls Und Panzer, but most often than not these are fanservice heavy, borderline soft porn-adjacent… and while some of you might have thought of Valkyrie Drive (we’ll get to that, eventually), yes, i can see why, but this is NOT that Marvelous project.

This is the one with the jetskis anime girls, again a Marvelous co-produced multimedia affair, and unsurprisingly Senran Kagura’s producer (well, ex-Senran Kagura producer, nowadays) Kenichiro Taniguchi, is involved with Kandagawa Jet Girls too, there are anime boobs involved, after all.

I planned to review both the anime series (with its OVA) and the PC & console videogame, but due to schedule woes, we’ll have to tackle the game at later date, maybe next year.

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Daimaijin (1966) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

Told you we were gonna talk about Daimajin sooner or later!

Nevermind it tooks at least 4 years, but we’re at least giving sense to the old announcement wish i did about reviewing Arrow Video releases, because they did release the entire Daimajin trilogy in a cool boxset some years ago, and i highly recommend it, but for time constraints and to make space for other entries this Giant Monster March, today we’re just gonna look at the original 1966 film, simply called Daimajin, which translates to “Great Demon God”.

Back before they went bankrupt and death-farted themselves out of business with the final Gamera film, Daiei Films did compete with Toho in the “big frigging monsters” market and were pretty aggressive/active, as they pretty much commissioned and filmed all three Daimajin films back to back and released them in the span of mere months in 1966, which is impressive.

But also probably why they did eventually go bankrupt, to some extent, since they were pumping out tokusatsu features and Gamera films like there was no tomorrow… which eventually got them there, but hindsight makes everyone sounds wiser, so whatever, but the Daimajin did start out as the first foe to battle Gamera, inspired by 1936 Le Golem, but obviously that idea didn’t pan out.

While the crew was the same for all 3 films, the directors were not, and also due to this insane schedule, it’s not surprising they have similar plots involving the titular kaiju, the Daimajin, this kabuto clad stone golem demon god, to whom people come praying he saves their village by some invading warlords or something along these lines.

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Ye Old Remaster Wsihslsti (for Saint Nick)

A bonus round, meant for the previous “draught”, but it still isn’t Christmas, as Mr. Wright would point out, so enjoy!

Since the industry is experiencing the inevitable resource creep and is eventually forced right now to reap what they sow, as the new consoles “have no games” because mainstream big budget videogames have pigeonholed themselves into a situation where is too expensive and takes too long to even make one of these (emulating the big budget cinema industry they wanted so much to be to a tee), remasters have been the way too go.

Old crap with new paint or fixes to the rope itself takes still less than making a new game from scratch, is easy as you can cater to the evergrowing nostalgia market (due to the gaming populace aging because natural entropy is a thing and your flesh will fail you, eventually) longing for ages long gone, be it the Atari early days or the mascote platformer craze of the 90s, you can safely bet on an already established name, and the market is big enough that even obscure shit like Felix The Cat videogames of yore and Bubsy can get a collection with improvements, quality of feature, and shady publishers like Piko Interactive can publish in 2022 (on Steam at the moment, with console releases coming) a somehow buggier, worse looking version of Glover than when it launched on Nintendo 64. In 1998.

Be it collections of enhanced ports or remasters that just update the graphical side of things, the public craves and buys these for a variety of reasons, publishers are more than happy as it cheaper all together, so in the spirit of the time i will be dotting down my own wishlist of remasters/ports/re-releases that i would like to see.

Order is casual, btw.

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