Paws Of Fury: Samurai Academy PS5 [REVIEW] | Dogurai Defense

My first impression was “the fuck is this?” when stumbling upon it on Amazon.

Then i looked at the cover and a stupid memory emerged, that yes, i recognize these characters, they’re from that middling and unexplicable animated kids film remake of Mel Brook’s Blazing Saddles, The Legend Of Hank: Paws Of Fury, which i reviewed last month.

Problem is, that came out in 2022, and i’m fairly sure most people do not even know it exists or already forgot, but apparently it didn’t do nowhere as bad as one would assume in terms of box office and streaming revenue (though according to Wikipedia it didn’t even break even), yet i wonder why a tie-in videogame its coming out 3 years after the film it “tie-ing” into released?

Even more, now dropping the “Legend Of Hank” subtitle and feeling even more like a rejected Bubsy pitch?

This seems like some primo kusoge beef, if you will. It has the stank all over it.

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[EXPRESSO] The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) | Starbound and Bible Black

While i (mostly) stand by my review of the first Super Mario animated film by Illumination… i do wanna stress out i didn’t mean it was great (i even said “considering it’s from Illumination”), but i found it to be pretty fun regardless even if it was trying to basically be a big nostalgia trip and advertisment vehicle.

If nothing else, the Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a follow up that clearly knows it doesn’t have to put any effort in terms of plot, as the first movie did set up the characters and the world, so this one instead quadruples down on nostalgic Nintendo references to any of their Mario or non-Mario related franchise, including a certain starbound, Thunderbirds inspired woodland creature whose presence leaked days before release.

To be fair, the plot isn’t really that thinner than the previous movie, and adapting Galaxy’s story – with a splash of Sunshine’s via Bowser Jr. – isn’t a bad choice, but since they did establish the world in the first film, they decided to use this as an excuse to pump in even more characters and references instead of actually giving anything (like the romantic subplot) some space to breathe, beside the main focus, as in, Bowser Jr. launching a scheme to free his dad via Rosalina’s powers.

As a result it’s even more than the first movie an ensemble of things just happening, as the screenwriters just throw scenes and characters, all Mario (and non-Mario) things all into the pot, regardless… which the previous film did, but not to this degree, and the short runtime futhers exacerbates the matter.

I will admit it’s still very well animated, very cute, and the actions scenes (especially the various fights) are well done, making for a decent animated kids film. It’s okay.

Paws Of Fury: The Legend Of Hank/Blazing Samurai (2022) [REVIEW] | “You know…. morons”

While i’m no Saberspark, i feel this deserves to be spotlighted for it’s such a weird, messy and obtuse piece of animation cinema and its tale has all the juicy bits, from misguided inception, development hell rot, leeching off an already established film, Paws Of Fury: The Legend Of Hank has it all.

If nothing else because somehow a sequel/tie-in game for it was released last year and i recently found out to my complete bewilderment.

Nothing to with the Sega Genesis videogame Brutal: Paws Of Fury, they both just happened to be recycling Bubsy naming conventions for when you can’t be arsed to make jokes, just puns, and taking a martial arts-asian aesthetics, though for different reasons since The Legend Of Hank is not a ’90s film, but a product of the late 2000s-2010s, when it was still in vogue to remake foreign (often Asian) films for the “american-internation market”, in a way also a product of the same vein of racism already tapped into the 90s by most western shows and games.

For the youngins it might sound strange, but especially in the late 2000s you couldn’t blink without seeing America remake a Japanese horror film, heck, they even remade Park Chan Wook’s Old Boy, they couldn’t stand the idea of something not being western enough at the time, especially if it dared ail from a country in the Asian sphere, so to speak.

Unless Tarantino did it.

I say this because this movie was pitched in this climate, back in 2010, as Blazing Samurai, an animated remake of Mel Brook’s beloved western parody Blazing Saddles.

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[EXPRESSO] Hoppers (2026) | Mindjacking In Nature

While i skip most of Pixar’s (and Disney’s for that matter) output nowadays, i decided to give Jumpers a try even if the premise didn’t quite excite me.

The premise sees Mable, a young girl that loves animals and grew attached to a pond her grandma used to take her and relax with the sound of nature, trying to fight a local politician that is banking its campaign on expanding the highway by constructing over that very pond.

Much to Mable’s dismay, he can because the pond is actually devoid of animal life, but she finds out bringing in a beaver will make the other animals follow suite, and trying to do so, she discovers a secret university project where they use advanced robot animals and project their mind into these to infiltrate and monitor the fauna better.

She then forcefully “mind jacks” into the robot beaver using the device in an effort to make the animals swarm the pond and so demonstrate they can’t actually build over that habitat….

Gotta say, maybe Pixar isn’t completely washed up, because Jumpers is actually quite good.

First, it doesn’t take nowhere as long as expected for Mable to get into the “not Avatar” device and start journeying into the animal’s world, there is enough time spent to characterize Mable herself as a likeable young activist moved by actual love and respect for the animals, maybe a bit too much to understand some consequences, but well meaning, plus the animal world itself and its rules are actually more interesting than one would expect, harboring some genuinely surprising turns.

It’s an ecological fable that’s actually is more effective because it isn’t preachy, there are some fun designs and very cute animation quirks like the switching from realistic and “talking animals” vision of the events.

Final Verdict: Expresso

Monster Run (2020) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

While there are some old Taiwanese film i could have choose, i do like to eventually check in with some more modern film made by China, as in Mainland “Taipei is gonna be ours eventually” China, and maybe this time something that doesn’t exactly fall into the “web movie” Asylum-esque category, as in something actually meant for theathers.

Also, this bucks the general trend of these Chinese monster film being overly short, as this is almost 2 hours long… not for the best, but first, plot.

Which one would assume it’s like the starting chapter of Bleach but swapping the genders of Ichigo and Rukia, since Letterboxed’s synopsis is worded in a way that you’d assume this was based on a shonen manga of sorts, but nope, it’s actually about a girl, Ji Mo, an outcast due to her ability to see things no other people can. Not ghosts or spirits, but monsters, which of course made others think she’s just a psycho and for which she has been sent to the looney bin once before.

Her life changes when she meets a monster hunter, and discovers she has an important role to play in adverting a coming disaster…

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[EXPRESSO] Scarlet (2025) | “Why Don’t You Ramlet?”

After debutting at 2025’s Venice Film Festival, Hosoda’s latest film, Scarlet, is releasing in theathers worlwide.

And to be honest i was ready to be disappointed, but you know, even Belle with its flaws was quite interesting, but Scarlet instead surpassed my expectations for the worse, and it pains me to say that it is, without a doubt, the worse Hosoda film ever, however you slice it.

The premise is not necessarily bad, at all, basically doing a genderbend version of Hamlet, but when the heroine Scarlet, fails to avenge her father’s death at the hands of her evil uncle Claudius, she finds herself in a limbo where souls gather after death, regardless of era or nation.

There is she informed by a strange shaman woman that her uncle Claudius is here too, and is amassing an army to stop others going to the “Infinite Lands” beyond the mountains, so she continues her quest for vengeance, helped by Hijiri, a pacifist paramedic from modern day Japan.

Scarlet it is the worse written Hosoda film ever, with a story that even by its own fantasy sci fi logic makes little sense, a super basic Hamlet deconstruction that has nothing to say and doesn’t proper explore anything, just throws in the air the usual waffling about the “futility of vengeance” and “the necessity of violence”, features incredibly dull, uninteresting characters and ends with one of the stupidest “optimistic” endings i’ve ever seen.

To make matters worse, it’s not even pretty, starting off strong with good 2D animation in the prologue but then it’s a constantly inconsistent flip-flopping between 2D and 3D CG animation, all looking astoningly cheap for a feature film by Hosoda’s Studio Chizu, with musical scenes meant to wow audiences being downright laughable and featuring generic, unispired music to boot.

I.K.U. (2000) [REVIEW] | LGBT Robosexual Runner

While i most likely won’t be reviewing the new Wuthering Heights film adaptation, to prove my platonical love for you, the audience, i will review this film i found on DVD in a flea market, and no, it wasn’t on the porn section.

I know i had to get it, it was like, 5 bucks at max, and with a title that screams “CINEMA” as IKU gets a IGN certified “10 out of 10” just for reference-pun combo that is the subtitle “I, Robosex” added in the Italian DVD release.

Sometimes i get to find import DVD copies of weird state sponsored video art when i go thrifting, sometimes i pick up fully localized and officially distributed “technically not porn” like this.

So, the hell is this?

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[EXPRESSO] Avatar: Fire And Ash (2025) | Cigarette Butts

Here we are again.

Somehow “disappointed”.

Sound silly, i know, the second one was admittedly a bit better than i expected and had some surprises in there… this one having a new Nav’i tribe of brutal savages (just short of being cannibals) isn’t enough to stave off boredom, but then again plot comes third or fourth more than usual this time around, taking a backset for just repeating almost verbatim the same plot beats of Way Of The Water, with some extra piles of new stuff that conveniently happens just because the script needs to -once again – free from capture these dumbass characters.

It’s pointless to be angry about an Avatar movie being another pile of shallow, utter nonsense, but this time around is even more boring dull nonsense that goes for a 3 hours equivalent of jiggling keys to infants, and it has framerate issues, which i don’t remember being a thing when i watched Way Of The Water in theathers just 3 years ago.

Maybe i got lucky back then, but regardless of how it looks that way, it’s distracting since it often fluctuates from looking like a big budget cutscene of a videogame, looking like we’re a HD camera feed from the set, looking actually cinematic, and so on.

It’s just insanely distracting and the added motion smoothing almost gave me a headache, and mind you, this was for a 2D screening.

I was reminded of something actually borderline unwatchable, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, but the sentiment is there, as i wonder why Cameron keeps making tech demo movies for proven tech (or telling a worthwhile plot with this astounding technological prowess), or he just doesn’t go make videogames instead.

Not that anything of this matters, as people will go see this on droves anyway.

[EXPRESSO] Zootopia 2 (2025) | We Will Survive

I’ve been skipping most of Disney output of lately, Wish did reinforce this habit, but since i did like the first Zootopia and thought it was one of the best modern Disney films, i was planning on watching the sequel. So i did.

After a brief recap of the final twist and ending of the first movie (which is roughly “one child old” by now), Zootopia 2 follows up Nick and Judy’s unit, which is jeopardized due to them fumbling an operation and causing destruction in the wake of the city centennial, for which a book pivotal for the very foundation of Zootopia itself will be shown to the public.

But despite this, Judy finds proof of a reptile entire the city, which hasn’t happened in a centhury, and she investigates, her and Nick find themselves involved in another conspiracy, get framed and have to escape and get to the bottom of this mistery.

While it’s yet another conspiracy plot, we do get some solid worldbuilding, new characters and a solid villain, and we get to see more of this animal world and how it works beyond the big metropolis, as the sequel builds on the themes of racism, prejudice and discrimination with gentrification and (more) classism now, here done with the “reptile problem” and a political scheme about expanding biomes made for specific types of animals at the expense of others.

It does some of the typical Disney quirks plotwise, but it’s more the benign ones, these are not as bad as they could be, the new characters are fun, there is some sensibile development of the unusual cop buddy duo of Judy and Nick, there are some fun, quick references/nods for the older crowds, and overall it’s honestly a great sequel and a pretty good animated children film,

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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