The Spooktacular Eight #21: The Awful Doctor Orloff (1962)

Ah, good ol’ Jess Franco, the master of lesbian vampire action, the exploitation master from Spain that both film dozens of softcore trash but also worked with Christopher Lee as either a vampire or the old villian Fu Manchu, that deals in adaptations of Marquis De Sade but also completed the previously (and unfamously) unfinished Orson Welles version of Don Quixote.

I really can’t do him justice, but i did pick one of the films from before he really declined and put out some really atrocious stuff, like the final entries in the Fu Manchu series (the Castle Of Fu Manchu being the subject of a popular MST3K episode ), shit like Dracula VS Frankenstein, or even pseudosequels that cannibalizzed on Franco own’s Dr. Orloff series with reused stock footage to make in name only adaptations of Poe works, in particular his The Revenge in The House Of Usher, which is a mess and a half since it has 3 different cuts (often having different titles as well). 2 of which reuse even more footage from this 1962 Dr. Orloff film that started the series.

But let’s pretend we do not yet know of this, and let’s talk plot.

Which is not quite original, as it’s an amalgamation of Frankenstein and french classic Eyes Without A Face (especially the latter), as the titular Dr. Orloff attracts young women to his castle so he can harvest her skin with the help of a disfigured, blind assistant/henchman named Morpho (a Mighty Monarch approved name indeed).

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[EXPRESSO] My Hero Academia: You’Re Next (2024) | Mafia Might

Ok, that was fast, i didn’t heard any marketing for this new My Hero Academia film, but i guess its hitting theathers internationally and simultaneously this 10^th of October onwards (after its Japanese premiere in early August), so let’s go!

I wasn’t exactly too excited about this one, as this is the 4^th MHA movie, the premise screams of “taking time” until the TV series catches up, but then again the manga actually concluded and this released in Japan precisely close to the last chapter’s publication, which means this is the last MHA film, ever, and is set chronologically at the start of Season 7 of the anime.

This time we have Dark Might, an impostor italian mafioso willing to forcefully “carry on All Might’s will” by replacing him, using his mysterious powers and his Quirk enabled mafia goons to engulf anyone into his giant flying fortress, including the 1A students and a lone assassin, Giulio….

Minor villains are forgettable, and even the better of the movie’ original characters, Giulio, even he is a bundle of cliches, and while Dark Might as the main villain has some potential, the script never explores any potential themes that would naturally come with the “Dark Might” concept or character, so he ends up being… basically a less interesting Gild Tesoro from One Piece Film Gold while also doing the “villain posing as the superhero” sthick, and yet he’s not the worse of these sadly lukewarm MHA movie villains.

Animation is pretty good and more consistent than in WHM, and let’s be clear, MHA You’re Next it’s far from bad, it’s quite enjoyable, it’s not even the worst one of the films, heck, it might arguably be the second best, it’s decent overall, but its disappointing for the final film bout of the series.

The Spooktacular Eight #19: Dead Trigger (2017)

Generic zombie movie with Dolph Lungren?

What if it’s THAT and also a live action adaptation of a videogame you’ve never heard of?

YAY.

Even YAY-ier when the videogame is a generic as hell mobile free-to-play smarthphone FPS, generic but popular enough to get a sequel… and a live action film adaptation.

There is a bit of wit in the premise as yes, there’s the usual zombie apocalypse, but it leads to the government making a videogame about zombies in order to recruit the top-players for real life zombie massacring military exploits, as they need to cut through the undead hordes to reach some scientists that may have found a cure for the zombie virus.

So it’s kinda, a bit, kinda like Ender’s Game, but way stupider, and also not that original as i’m pretty sure there’s at least another movie made earlier, i think just called Hunting Grounds (my UK DVD release has it retitled as Zombie Hunters”), with the same “recruiting the gamers for fighting the supernatural menace”, though without embarassing Twitch channels.

I still have to got around to that so i can’t say for sure but then again need i recall the 2009 film called “Gamer”? Let’s just say the Dead Trigger film it’s not entirely original, regardless of how you slice it, who cares, i doubt many even knew Dead Trigger was originally a game to begin with.

And the “let’s recruit people that play VR games” angle really isn’t used in any interesting or significant way, only to get some stereotypes and random ass characters into the suicide squad in question, it becomes quickly showed aside because the movie it’s more interested in being an off brand Resident Evil wanna-be, and just incredibly generic as hell in all regards for a zombie flick.

Hordes of zombies that are not silent somehow managing to sneak up from nowhere to the back of an elite trained soldier when the script wants to kill him off (or bite him so we can have him sacrifice himself by being blown up with the zombies or some self-sacrifice shit)? Check.

Dumbass, stupid and flavorless characters? The inevitable, seen coming from miles away double-cross at the hand of the evil CEO of the multicorporation set on betraying everyone and sell the potential cure for the virus? A super-mutant fruit of the very same company’s experiments?

For a bonus round, there’s also a priest that believes the undead are a punishment from God, just to completely fill the cliches bingo card, the cornucopia of stock conflicts, betrayals and predictable plot twist that you can easily all imagine and easily guess with a high rate of success.

Acting is mediocre, with even the top named actors in it just doing the bare average, at best, the other ones not so much, but at times the special effects, even some of the gore is quite decent, honestly it’s not a bad production but most of the time it’s hard to forget you’re watching basically a lesser version in every regard of Paul. W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil live action films.

those weren’t really good movies either, but this is the bootleg version, the one with less money, lesser actors, lesser anything, really, making Dead Trigger the subpar movie you’d expect it to be, just subpar, not atrocious but one i would skip still, since it’s so tiresome in its predictability too.

Hilariosly though it ends with a cliffhanger ending, like yeah, mate, it’s a miracle this one got made, Dead Trigger 2 with Jason Statham isn’t gonna happen, not unless you get a lot more money on the project or if by the time it happens Staham won’t be senile, bored and/or strapped for cash enough.

[EXPRESSO] Never Let Go (2024) | Always sometimes monsters

After the flood crocodile horror bout of Crawl, Alexandre Aja returns with a new horror thriller, Never Let Go, a supernatural tale with a folkish horror bent that feels a little Bird Box and a bit of The Watchers, as it tells the tale of a family of three living deep in the woods, with the mother and children leaving the safe haven of their blessed home only with a rope tying them to the house, so that “the evil can’t get them”, as the mother -often seeing monstruous creatures lurking upon them – tells her sons.

As we learn more of the daily rituals and customs the family performs in order to survive deep in the woods, we start to wonder if this is just the extreme result of the mother being mentally ill or hallucinating after a trauma, alongside the younger brother, whom once stayed outside the house ropeless and never felt or saw the “evil”.

And it would have benefitted the movie if continued the mystery or opted for a different resolution, because the drama is intriguing, you wanna see where exactly this situation can lead as it becomes clearer this is most certainly the horrible and unwanted outcome borne out of motherly love and schizophrenic degrade.. but then in the final act the script retires to the obvious and expected “countertwist” we have seen coming and wished it didn’t do, kinda writing itself into a corner where it either that or feeling like the movie is “throwing away” its entire set up.

It’s a shame because the final act basically makes Never Let Go slide from “quite good” to “quite decent”, the performances and direction are great but the final nosediving into cliched territory, with a banal ending too… it’s quite frustrating.

Still worth checking out.

[EXPRESSO] Joker: Foliè A Deux (2024) | Pierrot Le Bore

Cards on the table: i didn’t like the first Joker, but it was influential, and more importantly, it made money, also i guess Todd Phillips was still bummed about people calling his (mostly) garbage comedies antiquated garbage, so Joker 2 it is.

Though i will admit that, on paper, the idea of a Joker sequel taking into account the reception of the first movie, as it basically became an unintentional big budget “incel manifesto”, deliberately not giving the audience what it wants, in order to do a character assassination of the Arthur/Joker persona.. it’s quite the interesting idea.

Problem is, it does so over a grueling 2 hours and 20 minutes of Todd Philipps exposing the thesis/message that should have been obvious in the first Joker, overexplaining it over and over, now wih musical numbers that are made to be loathed by musical fans and haters alike, so overabundant and pointless are these song inserts with lyrics either too vague or on the nose.

Just to make the whole thing feel even more of a punishment, not only for the people that saw the first movie as an endorsement of Joker’s actions, as Foliè Au Deux doesn’t have anything else of substance to add or say to compensate for what it purposefully sets out to deny… probably because it would have contrasted with the need to make people hate the film (and by extension the Joker persona) on purpose.

Which it does accomplish greatly.

I almost wanna like it for its unflinching committment to its unpopolar vision, but there’s still no amount of “post-irony” that changes the fact this is a boring overly long slog, too content to having “outplayed” its audience, too happy to wallow in its own smugness on having “made a point” to care about being entertaining.

The Spooktacular Eight #18: The Dunwich Horror (1970)

We cover surprisingly little Lovecraft content, so let’s rectify that a bit with one of the earliest film adaptation of a popular tale of Mr. Racist, The Dunwich Horror, arguably one of the most well known stories of his and hence one of the most adapted alongside The Color Out Of Space, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Herbert West- Reanimator, and obviously The Call Of Cthulu.

Speaking of official adaptation, at the very least, and even so this is just the second oldest film adaptation, as Roger Corman (whom also was an executive producer here) did a loose but credited adaptation in 1963’s The Haunted Palace, part of his Edgar Allan Poe series but in this case just borrowing the name from a poem later tied to Poe’s Fall Of The House Of Usher, in reality adapting The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward.

And loose adaptation of Lovecraft’ works was the name of the game at the time, which was when his work finally started gathering popularity and beginning his revival to a staple of horror and science fiction that is today.

So since this is the first properly marketed wide spread film adaptation, i’m willing to cut it some slack as the “first (proper) try” of adapting material that struggles to be adapted in audiovisual form, we’re already had the “cosmic horror is difficult to make on film” talk before (when talking of 2001’s Dagon by Brian Yuzna, if not mistaken), i’m not gonna repeat myself this time.

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The Spooktacular Eight #17: Anthrophophagus (1980)

Somehow, we live in a world where not only Joe “Aristide Massaccesi” D’Amato’s Anthrophophagus has been remade but also received a “sequel” (after his “spiritual sequel”, Absurd). How lucky are we?

Yep, indeed, the infamous gore flick that had George Eastman as an amphibious cannibal going around a deserted and isolated Greek island, in this occasion stumbling upon a pregnant women, his equivalent of a double combo fast food menù, but after all, it’s called Anthrophophagus, the latin term for “cannibal”… unless it’s the theatherical US release, called Savage Island.

Or the very cut down UK home video release as “The Grim Reaper”, which also contains a different score, using music from Kingdom Of The Spiders.

I’d recommend looking for the Severin Blu-Ray release of the film, as it has a lot of extras, it’s a 2K restoration that improves the video quality from previous releases notably, a previously unseen deleted scenes, if you can/want.

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Resident Evil: Death Island (2023) [REVIEW] | Code Vendetta X

Since it’s still summer-ish and we won’t have time for it this october, i feel it’s time for me to complete (until a new one comes out) my coverage of the Resident Evil CG films, after tackling the Netflix CG series and then doing a retrospective on the previous CG animated films.

From the title i’d assume its either based on Code Veronica or RE Revelations 2, but nope, there are echoes of that, but this is actually a direct sequel of the last, Resident Evil: Vendetta.

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[EXPRESSO] Speak No Evil (2024) | Discord The Demon Not

Sadly i was not able to see the 2022 Danish original before this one arrived in theathres, figures we don’t get that but the Blumhouse produced american remake , and with a trailer that basically gave everything away. So due to my circumstances, i will have to judge the movie on its own, assuming the original was most likely better. At least i paid less than 4 bucks for the ticket.

(seriously, we still doing these fucking American remakes of foreign horror films?)

The premise see a London dwelling American family vacationing in Italy bond with a british one (also with a kid that has problems), later accepting the british family invitation at their house for a weekend in the English countryside.

Things… are what they seem, trailer aside, you can tell there’s something weird with these people, with red flags more and more blatant, as the movie deliberately stretches credibility hard, of how stupid can these people get in spite of so many “heavy hints”.

All obviously to comment on how we bend ourselves to avoid conflict, about the overimportance given to manners over values. which is ironic because when the mask falls off and the british family goes full blown psycho, it makes like all the charade before kinda pointless, because it led exactly to what you’d expect, to something like The Strangers, but without having any twist, not doing anything clever with it, nor doing anything graphic at all, and overexplaining itself too many times.

There’s basically no scares because of these, but thanks to some strong performances, especially James McAvoy’s that basically salvages the whole thing, and a competent direction by James Watkins (The Lady In Black, Eden Lake),.it’s somehow just mediocre, if it didn’t have those it would crumble in complete subpar, untintentionally hilarious farce.

Parasite Dolls (2003) [REVIEW] | Bubblegum Boomers

Wanted to get around to this for years, as i distinctly remember its cover displaying in the anime section of pretty much any video stores here in “Da Boot” back in the 2000s, and also being pretty featured or sold online. The power of anime cyberpunk and early CG.

Curiously, i’m not really familiar with the series this being a spin-off for, Bubblegum Crisis, which may sound sacrilegious to many, but i never saw as it was distributed on VHS at the time here too, but it was never pushed as much as others, at least as far i remember, i was a more casual anime fan back then and i would have been busy catching localized broadcasts of Dragon Ball, Hokuto No Ken/Fist Of The North Star and -especially – Ranma ½ anyway.

Parasite Dolls does feel immediatly like a product of the late 90s early 2000s, as in it’s not a feature film per sè, not a compilation film of 3-4 episodes, but an anthology/mini series of 3 stories set after the events of the original Bubblegum Crisis OAV series.

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