A*P*E (1976) [REVIEW] | Flipping Kongs

Sure, Konga wasn’t great, and earlier this year we also spotlighted another King Kong rip-off, the italo-canadian Yeti: The Giant Of The 20th Centhury, which indeed is worthy of being called “craptacular”, as in it’s really bad but also frigging hilarious and with some odd innocence for italian exploitation cinema. Even if there’s a crime thriller subplot that almost kills off Lassie.

But we can go lower down the cinema alphabet, and for theatrically released feature lenght movies about giant apes, you can hardly go lower than the american-south korean A*P*E*, quickly put out to cash-in this wave of Kongsploitation, as it released the same year of the Dino DeLaurentis backed remake, with 3D effects because if we’re gonna do this, might as well make it gimmicky.

Yeah, i’m doing this one because i feel more people are at least aware of The Mighty Peaking Man, also made to cash-in the popularity of the 1976 DeLaurentis’ King Kong remake, but far better than most Kong rip-offs, definitely far better than A*P*E*.

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Colossal (2016) [REVIEW] | Attack Of The Giant Anne Hathaway

While this is one of the more recent movies as far as giant monster movie goes, it also already slipped into semi-obscurity. Quite odd for a giant monster movie with Anne Hathaway, you’d think that would have turned more heads and be talked about, if nothing else as a curiosity, how many Korean-American monster movies are pitched as “Godzilla meets Lost In Translation”?

The plot follows an unemployed writer (Anna Hathaway), struggling with alcolism and an abusive colleague that want to control her, and how one day she unwittingly manifests a giant monster in Seoul. As it turns out, the monster directly replicates her movements and gestures, and when she realizes it, things get more complicated as her abusive colleague also becomes able to conjure a giant entity out of thin air…

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Netflix’s Way of The Husband anime, with now marginally more animation than the manga

I just woke up today to clips of the Netflix anime adaptation of Way Of The Husband (set to release this 8th of April on the streaming service), that manga about a legendary yakuza conman who gives up the criminal world to be a full time husband and support his wife, cooking, cleaning, doing chores, but with the intensity and the untentional creepyness of settling grudges, cutting fingers, plotting murder, and all the comedic misunderstandings that such a premise can spun.

It has become a fan favourite and i gladly bought it when they brough the manga volumes here in Italy some months ago, it’s pretty funny….. but what the fuck is this adaptation? I couldn’t believe it, but yes, it was posted officially by the OnNetflix Twitter Account, i did more research just to rule out me hallucinating or something. I wasn’t.

Now i feel sorry for continuining to journal the disaster that still is the EX ARM Crunchyroll’s anime adaptation, at least it’s animated and not a motion comic of the manga panels. I can’t take that away of that dumpster fire.

I don’t plan in reviewing it, what’s the point of even watching since i can just read the manga again? But clearly i’m the fool, for expecting anime to be animated, despite the word meaning exactly that. Even worse, this is no accident, it’s the producer in the charge of the series…. well, not really liking 2D animation, to put it mildly, as he literally asked to make it look like the manga. In a way, this is worst than EX-ARM, here people knew what they were doing.

For the love of god, just read the manga, Way Of The Husband is frigging great and deserves WAY better (pun not intended) than a QueenBee’s style hack job. Or watch the short live-action TV drama series they made for it!

Giant Monster March IS A GO!

As the long awaited Godzilla VS King Kong finally is set to it theathers pretty much everywhere (where theathers are open, not a given due to the pandemic), it’s time to celebrate, with a selection of giant monster movies reviews to showcase mostly lesser known titles or movies that nowadays are not as well known as they once were, despite still being remembered by genre fans.

Sorry it’s not a month of non-stop reviews this time. Enjoy!

[EXPRESSO] Prehistorik Man SNES | Accept Humanity

Played via Nintendo Switch Online’s SNES service.

So, i guess i was one of the few people mildly interested in some of the February 2012 NSO updates. Which is somehow managing to make me miss the original Virtual Console, somehow.

But i have a thing for caveman platformers, i do, so here we are.

To be fair, i didn’t expect much, especially since it comes from Titus (and if you know something about retrogaming, their name wasn’t exactly one welcomed with cheers), i wasn’t familiar with it and just figured it was gonna be a Joe & Mac clone, but this isn’t really the case. And while it’s easy to understand its existence being relegated to niche retrogaming obscurity, as the 90’s were obsessed with cavemen and dinosaurs and this one didn’t do much to stand out in the avalanche of cavemen themed movies or videogames… you might want to give this one a chance.

It’s not an unsung SNES classic by any means, no, it’s kinda generic and unremarkable, but it’s surprisingly nifty, pretty entertaining, and the while the plot see a caveman named Sam on a quest to feed his starving village, while searching for a bone graveyard so to make his tribe rich… it’s very cartoonish and fond of the usual caveman anachronism. It’s also not short, with a good variety to the levels, often putting you in control of a vehicle like a glider; and while the level design starts off fairly straighforward, more often than not it requires you to explore the levels and collect the required items, as it is still an “euro platformer”, and a pretty challenging one too.

I just wish your character’s standard attack was less crap, and the controls were a bit less slippery, but it’s a good retro platformer.

[EXPRESSO] All My Friends Are Dead! (2020) | Party Harder

Thank you newsletter for remembering me i do have Netflix, let’s review a recent polish black comedy that launched as a Netflix Original, one with the title that suggests a horror movie, even if it isn’t advertised as such, because… it just isn’t.

At a New Year’s party, a group of friends witness an avalanche of weird events, revelations, heartbreaks, including a murder, all spiralling into further chaos. There, done, this is the plot, and it actually delivers what it promises, as it starts showing the graphic aftermath of it all, then goes in full flashback mode to see how the party starts kinda normal before it completely degenerates into the expected debauchery of teen movies, only to get completely out of hand and culminate into an absolute clusterfuck of an accidental new year’s massacre.

It takes its time to accomodate you with the varied ensemble of teen stereotypes, from the mormon kid (who hallucinates and argues with Jesus), the douchy rapper-wanna-be, the desperate virgins, the gigolò, the mismatched couple of guy with milf, the slutty drunken duo ready to fuckin anything moving, and so on. But the wait it’s worthy it, as the comedy is pretty good and goes pretty well with the occasional semi-serious moments of straight up (and often brutal) drama, often to flesh out and make you care a bit more about the otherwise bi-dimensional – but funny – teen stereotypes.

But of course, not too much, as you still want people to enjoy seeing stupid teens do the usual teen crap they do in movies, and see them die in ridiculous over-the-top ways because of it. The ending is quite good, with a strong last bout of black comedy brutality to balance out the drama and any potentially saccharine way to look about it.

Recommended.

Life After Beth (2014) [REVIEW] | Getting Over It (feat. John C. Reilly)

Celebrating Valentine Day’s as you do, with one of the most notable movies in the “zombie romance” subgenre that isn’t Warm Bodies.

(BTW, yes, i knew about Vlad Love, i’m gonna cover it in some way, but it finally started airing just today, so i would have never had a review for it ready by now)

You might be led to think this is a rip-off of that, as in the roles happen to be switched (the girl is the zombie one), but… don’t, because the 2010’s didn’t invent zombie romance (there was a musical-romcom about zombies in 2007, called “Zombie Love”), heck, we had Teenage Zombies back in 1959… but then again that movie was fuckin terrible and didn’t actually feature teenage zombies, so at the very least these modern romantic comedies about zombies got that.

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Princess Connect RE: Dive iOS [EXPRESSO] | Idle Moe Mediocrity

Now that “Priconne” has gone global, let’s give it a look.

Ok, story. You start in the usual “media res battle you lose”, then wake up as your generic male fantasy anime protagonist, now amnesiac but apparently a prince-knight known by everyone else in the world, so alongside your girl retainer and various battle princesses you go on a quest to scale Sol Tower and get a wish granted.

At least it’s not an isekai (?).

Combat is automated with interaction restricted to activate special skills when charged up… that’s it. There’s no complicated system to power up characters, so it’s not confusing but it’s also lacking any real depth, it just a matter of upgrading enough the characters and choosing the party composition, especially the latter i can see being important when you’re in deep with the harder levels.

Not that i will be reaching that point, but still, i don’t consider “the game really playing itself” a plus, even in a game like this where gameplay is vestigial to the “idle waifu collecting” activities.

One filled with lots of just….incredibly generic fantasy anime moe designs. There are some exceptions like the Alpaca Princess, but not many interesting or good designs. This is to make the rarer characters more desirable and con you into buying premium currency for the gacha.

While the F2P elements aren’t abrasive, the game is relatively generous in giving out gems/crystals and doesn’t gate features with insane grinding… it’s manipulative generousity, there’s always a catch.

The games uses clips from the anime series (which look good), production values are high, it’s harmless, inoffensive, but i just find Priconne to be very disposable and uninteresting, if i didn’t force myself to do some decent progress before writing this review i would have dropped it on day 2.

Yeti: The Giant Of The 20th Centhury (1977) [REVIEW] | Italo Disco King Of The Kong

It’s still january, it’s still cold as hell (proper Dante Alighieri hell), so it’s time to shovel up and unearth a yeti movie from the motherland, with the forgotten Yeti: Il Gigante Del 20° Secolo from director Gianfranco Parolini (credited as Frank Kramer), often called just “Yeti”, “Big Foot” (yeah, that helps a lot, thanks) or with a direct – and accurate – translation of the title in english, as Yeti: The Giant Of The 20th Centhury,

Italian-canadian kaiju yeti-xploitation, can’t go wrong with that!

Yeah, digging this gem out to also celebrate the new trailer for Godzilla VS King Kong !

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Mammoth (2006) [REVIEW] | Meteor Mayhem

Time to unfrost a b-movie from the mid-2000’s i’ve known about for years, as friends told me of this movie where a mammoth runs around a house without being seen. Yeah, i’m pretty sure they didn’t actually watch the movie and just parroted something they red online, because, as it incredible as that would have been (and kinda fit anyway with the tone), no, a mammoth doesn’t stalk people like a slasher villain and moves around a normal household without wrecking it.

Although, with how many cheap horror flicks about dinosaurs, extinct or mythical animals are there, that movie could actually exist. I couldn’t find anything that fits the exact profile, but you never know.

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