Megalodon: The Frenzy (2023) [REVIEW] #thesharksix

Somehow, The Asylum stumbled their way into making a trilogy of films about Megalodon sharks, with the third and last entry so far being last year’s Megalodon: The Frenzy.

I say “stumbled” because i seriously doubt they planned any of this at all, but Megalodon Rising was indeed a sequel to their own 2018 Megalodon film, and this one starts with a recap to get you up to speed and confirm that the events of the previous movie happened.

…not sure entirely to what end, as the plot itself doesn’t have returning characters from either Rising or the 2018 movie, and is about how a submarine mission meant to establish a supply of clean geoenergy from an underwater volcano ends up causing a fissure in the seabed, accidentally unleashing 5 megalodons that wreak havoc.

They do eventually reference the events of Rising and the 2018 film, and the USS King, damaged after the finale of Rising comes into play, but then is now helmed by a character played by Eric Roberts… problem is he wasn’t in Rising, but since the lead characters died in the finale, i guess he was on ship and took over, whatever, who cares, now Eric Robert is manning the ship, in this “it was supposed to be filmed for the finale of the previous movie, but wasn’t” intro.

Whatever keeps him to star into A Talking Cat?! 2: Paws Of Fury, i guess.

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Seven Samurai 20XX PS2 [REVIEW] #meleemay

Technically this is a re-write, because i did review this game years and years ago in italian, but time gave me the distance needed to realize i could actually write an entirely new review from scratch for Seven Samurai 20XX still based on my experience of like 7 plus years ago, since the hatred i felt for this one never actually went away, and i guess festered on the back of my mind.

But i did replay it, and i can futher confirm that there are indeed many reasons to istinctually hate it, if nothing else for the fact it had the brass balls of being the closest to an actual videogame adaptation of Kurosawa’s seminal samurai film, as it actually had the rights by the Kurosawa production, and i wanna make it clear it also has Moebius (yes, THAT Moebius) as the character designer and music by another legend, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.

So yeah, it’s kinda impressive how Sammy (an arcade publisher that by the early 2000s fused with Sega in order to enter the home console videogame market, which i will always associate with my beloved Metal Slug clone called Dolphin Blue) got permits from the film studios, rounded up people of incredible caliber from different industries, and then managed to deliver such an obvious, steaming turd that was destined to haunt the 5 bucks bargain bins for a good decade.

So much for a product meant to celebrate the movie’s 50^th anniversary, as it did the anime series Samurai Seven, both curiously fiddling with sci-fi re-imaginings of the film but actually unrelated to each other besides both meant to attract younger audiences to Kurosawa’s story.

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[EXPRESSO] Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga (2024) | Scrotus Maximus

We’re back to the Wastelands with the long post-poned prequel/spin-off of Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa, and i’m being vague on what is is… well because it is a prequel that tells the origins of Furiosa from Fury Road, but it also not obsessed with continuity purity or that crap, understanding that these stories are not history logs, more chronicles, myths, with the inevitable variations that get told to and passed by the lore keepers and such.

As the subtitle puts eloquently, it’s a saga, it’s a legend.

The story sees a young Furiosa being kidnapped from the safe and still fertile haven she was born into by goons of a certain Dementius, only for her mother to get her back and dying while trying to protect her, with Furiosa living for years as a slave to Dementius, whom eventually grows cocky and tries to expand by taking over the territories of Immortan Joe… with middling results, but Furiosa never flinches or wavers, awaiting for a chance to exact revenge on the man that took everything away from her….

While a good chunk of the cast from Fury Road is back, Furiosa is played by Anya Taylor-Joy instead of, and honestly she’s amazing, delivering a great performance with very few lines, Chris Hemsworth is quite fun as the new douchy villain Dementius, and overall it’s great to have more Mad Max, Miller’s approach to action is still amazing, and its comic book-style post-apocalyptic desert world – and its tribalistic weird characters – is as fascinating as it always has been.

Honestly my only gripe is that it’s just not as good as Fury Road, i’d say mostly because it’s still a very good damn ride but it feels a bit too drawn out, in spite of its uber direct storytelling.

In The Aftermath (1988) [REVIEW] | Corman’s Angel Egg

As i already mentioned before, my Vita is still in the shop for repairs, meaning one of the planned reviews won’t be ready in time, but it is my birthday, and they announced a 4K remaster of Angel’s Egg supervised by Oshii himself…

So you know what it means? Time to review In The Aftermath (also known as In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep), in its Blu-Ray release from Arrow Video, of course i got this release as soon as i knew it existed.

And yes, i started planning this earlier this month only to read some days later of Corman’s passing, so this was not meant to be a tribute…. but it now is because Roger Corman was a true fuckin cinema legend in so many ways it’s unbelievable, either if you were a fan of his B-movies production or knew how he basically kickstarted the career of so many future movie stars like Jack Nicholson and directors like James Cameron, to say the obvious.

Maybe an odd choice of movie to cover as a tribute, but the timing has been so weirdly apt i can’t ignore it, and this is indeed an interesting piece of cinema history, of when Corman indirectly met Mamoru Oshii… but didn’t know what to do with his vision, to put it politely.

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Tiger & Crane Fists AKA Savage Killers (1976) [REVIEW] | “That’s A Lot Of Nuts!”

To give us some respite from the videogame reviews dominating this #MeleeMay, i’ve figured we could check out some old fashion cinematic melee action, as in some old ass kung fu flick from Hong Kong. Which doesn’t narrow it down at all, so why not review a movie a lot of people most likely have seen… but also not actually, factually seen first hand?

I’m not talking about parroting opinions from a film Twitter account, i’m talking about Tiger & Crane Fists (also known as Savage Killers) , whom american and international audiences will have some familarity with, even if they don’t think so, because its the film used by Kung Pow – Enter The Fist and given a comedy dub job, because it was the early 2000’s, and – among other things that didn’t age well at all – parody/spoof movies actually made some sense to exist and come out in theathers, after taking off big in the 70s and 80s with the various Mel Brooks films, the Police Academy franchise, and continuining through the 90s with the Naked Gun series.

And then absolutely nothing else after.

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Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae STEAM [REVIEW ] #meleemay

Since i did already cover The Initial and the “sequel” hasn’t yet gone on sale on Steam, i feel it’s time to revisit (so yeah, it’s technically a rewrite in the sense that some of my opinions didn’t change over time, but it’s also a revision i wrote from scratch) another Oneechanbara adjacent title from the indie tier of Steam “famous” japanese hack n slash games heavy on the “school uniform cum swords” anime-derived aesthetic, the kind where you’d expect the dutch wives looking characters to randomly start fucking in a robotic, unappealing fashion, if you didn’t already know this was just a fan service-y hack n slash.

This was actually a fairly popular release, as in it was a smash hit when released during Comiketto 84 (AKA the 2013 august edition of Comic Market, that huge japanese only event) by his developer-creator Zenith Blue, and in March of 2014 PLAYISM picked it up to distribute and localize it in English for a worlwide Steam release.

It received a limited physical PS4 release via Limited Run Games and it’s also available digital on PSN and X-Box systems, FIY, but i got it in a bundle playable via Steam years ago, so i’m reviewing the Steam release alone, sold at a MSRP of 10 bucks.

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[EXPRESSO] The First Omen (2024) | Damien Begins

It may look silly (or worse) to see the review for a new Omen film pop up after i outright refused to even see The Exorcist: Believer in theathers and just skipped it, but after hearing more than a few early reviews being positive for The First Omen, i figured why not, oddly sounds about right.

And for the record i never bothered with any of the sequels, which must have been the case for many, as this new Omen film does the other trend for new entries in old or long running horror series, as in its a prequel to the original The Omen from 1976 instead of a legacy sequel or a reboot.

Which is oddly kinda refreshing, at least in the current horror climate.

The plot concerns a young american woman, sent to Rome in order to be initiated into sisterhood, as she encounters a darkness so shocking it shakes her beliefs to the very core, and has her learn about a conspiracy to birth the Antichrist.

While it too suffers from some fixations of these prequels and legacy sequels, like having to redo a scene (or more) from the original movie mostly for the hell of it, and it has to move within the limits of an already established story which limits the potential twists and surprises, but honestly i was really surprised, as not only it works out a really creepy origin story/prequel to the 1976 movie, really taking advantage of the setup for some devilish twists and most importantly, an incredibly effective, graphic and twisted tale of evil, that manages to stand out by its own merits and uses the borrowed lore to the best it can, instead of just chasing the ghost of an older, better movie.

Surprisingly very good horror prequel, recommended.

[EXPRESSO] Civil War (2024) | FraKctured

I was disappointed by Garland’s previous (and winner for “most on the nose possible horror title”) film, MEN, and the trailer for Civil War really was so generic i could almost believe it was promoting a live action adaptation of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division 2’s, or whatever a big budget version of a “January 6 Simulator” without a Trump phrophecy orb would have looked like.

(then again, this is an issue A24 seems to have recently, see the trailer for The Zone Of Interest)

That aside, when i actually got to see the film in theathers, i was pleasantly surprised Garland didn’t “lost it”, so to speak, at all, as Civil War definitely deserves the critical “praise nugget” of punch packing and delivering, as you would with the subject matter.

The plot follows a couple of war journalists that, after surviving a suicide bombing attack while reporting in New York, they decide to accompany a mentor of theirs and a young girl that idolizes their work while travelling through an America torn apart by (yep) a civil war, as many states have split and factions formed, with the goal of interviewing the president, as he holes up in a contended Washington, and his forces slowly losing steam to the “Western Forces”…

It’s a bleak depiction of a fairly realistical future scenario where the many contraddictions and divisions in the American social stratum broke out from social media mudflinging into actual, literal, civil war, but the movie avoids any easy weaponizing and name calling by putting focus instead in the day-to-day ground reality and the routine atrocities witnessed and perpetrated.

And it’s an uncompromised vision because it denies itself comforting platitudes or hypothetical, naive resolutions, while sporting a stellar cast and being constantly engaging and entertaining on an immediate level.

[EXPRESSO] Monkey Man (2024) | Ramayana Revengeance

Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man is a violent action thriller that it’s being sold as “indian John Wick”, which is both true as it does explain succintly the kind of movie you’re gonna see, but it’s not quite that.

Sure, it even acknlowedge John Wick is a film that exists diegetically, and there are some surface elements that are there almost to do a wink and a nod (a dog is involved at one point, for example), it’s pretty violent and graphic, but its more grounded and more akin to The Raid – as other have pointed out– which it’s also pretty good.

The plot sees the protagonist, Kid (played by Dev Patel), an anonymous man, becoming an avatar of justice and vengeance by donning a mask of Hanuman, a mythological monkey-man from the sacred indian epic, the Ramayana, after years of losing in a underground fight club, as he finds a way to avenge all the abuse he received and punish the corrupt men that were also behind the massacre of his family.

Aside from the protagonist actually having a more proper motivation and not starting out as an already legendary murder machine (so he does have to learn shit and plan out things more than which weapons to pick from a super armory), it also taps into Hindu mithology not just for the hell of it, but because the film is ultimately more about religious intolerance, the wide spread (and intertwined) corruption of police and religion in India, about literal, actual social justice.

Action it’s still a cathartic, bloody affair that feels quite visceral and fastifying, acting it’s excellent, you will barely feel its 2 hours runtime, so indeed, it’s a pretty damn good action thriller that’s inspired but not a copy of Keanu Reeves’ assassin extraordinarie.

[EXPRESSO] The Zone Of Interest (2023) | Heil Honey I’m Home

Jonathan Glazer’s film about the Holocaust won the Oscar for best screenplay, that much is true, but given El Conde received a similar nomination at last year’s Venice Film Festival, i wasn’t really sold on the movie because of that, but regardless i finally managed to catch a screening.

And this honestly surpassed my expectations.

Loosely based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis (itself based partially on real events), The Zone Of Interest is about the life of Auschwitz SS commander Rudolf Hoss and his family, as they live in a home in the titular “zone of interest” that places them meters away from the concentration camp itself, so close that you can see prisoners go in and out the camp to do chores, and hear the many atrocities committed there.

The plot focuses on the Hoss family life and the drama that Rudolf having to move to another outpost causes them, while they fully believe the Nazi creed through and through, all to further enunciate the abhorrent reality of the concentration camps and the Nazi war machine while we never even move outside of their house, let alone enter Auschwitz.

And this slice of life apporeach it’s indeed perfect to fully expose the “banality of evil” at the heart of it, it’s a glacial remind there’s no need to shock people when its far worse to remind us the Holocaust wasn’t run by a small gaggle of evil demon warlords alone, but was also accepted by regular people, and reminded that it was also run by capitalism as everything else, with architects calmly discussing with Rudolf Hoss the plans of how to costruct the more efficient, cost-saving method of massacre, while his wife idly chats over tea with her friends in another room.

Noteworthy indeed.