Tis the season again, but due to the cursed nature of time itself, this year we’ll have a small horror retrospective for the “month of Halloween”, with 8 reviews sporadically released during the month. Hope you’ll like the selection of movies, and yes, there won’t a set release pattern, but we’ll start tomorrow, so look forward to that.
More Netflix perusing, so far it’s often a 40-50 % chance of getting some good, at least in my attempts, so whatever, let’s see this new exclusive Netflix horror thriller about home invasion, simply called Intrusion, which i find to be a bit too simple and descriptive, but whatever.
Premise is also fairly straightforward, about a couple moving into their dream house only to have an attempt home invasion, leading the wife to search for answers and find out that what happened is only the beginning of more creepy things to come.
Intrusion has definitely some ambition, as it tries to nest surprises and twists into what initially seem a set up for a home invasion thriller, since the intrusion itself happens very early and the bulk of the movie is about the wife eventually learning more than she bargained about his architect husband and his secrets.
Problem is, it’s too committed to try and thwart your expectations, to avoid becoming predictable and surprise you, even going as far as trying to make an anti-climax…. problem is even that isn’t very convincing, as there’s half a hour of movie left, where the movie eventually goes into what you expected to it go from halfway through, as not to completely waste the long build up, so the script kinda sabotages itself in a quest to avoid being predictable, making the characters and the pacing worse in a transparent attempt to pull the wool over our eyes.
I feel bad because there’s definitely effort put into the movie, decent atmosphere and acting, but it focuses too much in trying to be not predictable at the expense of pretty much everything else, while ultimately being fairly easy to read and see where its going (and goes), making for a predictable, overall middling result.
Eventually anime is coming back to cinemas here as well, starting with 2020’s anime adaptation of the short story Josee, the Tiger and the Fish by Seiko Tanabe, already adapted in live action form both by japanese and corean production, here with animation curated by studio BONES.
It’s a romantic drama about Tsuneo, a university student working a part time job that one day stumbles upon an old lady carrying a big wheelchair for a girl with cerebral palsy, calling herself Josee, after the heroine of a Francois Sagan’s novel. He starts frequenting “Josee” as her attendee for hire, and as time goes by he learns more about her, etc. I don’t think i have to explain how romance 101 work, so i won’t.
So, it’s a fairly common setup for an anime romance film with actual ambitions to drama, with the girl suffering from a disability or disease of sorts, i can’t really claim this movie does anything new never seen before in any way, it’s definitely what you think it’s gonna be, so don’t expect to be “surprised”, even though people don’t see romance movies for Shaymalan style twists.
But it’s honestly fairly good, definitely good enough to have it nominated at Annecy last year, fairly well executed, good animation, decent to good characters and – yes – good romance, actually surprisingly quite funny as well. What stops it from being great is that it basically does the usual framing of “disability” as some sort of “personal extra hurdle” situation to the romance, touching upon the themes that come with it but not exactly in a nuanced way, most likely because they mean well but don’t know or want to know much, resulting in a less impactful execution.
Still, it’s worth seeing, just don’t expect A Silent Voice.
Time to crush your flimsy hopes right away: sadly we don’t have ninja fighting a giant king cobra snake (or a giant James Latta), nor we get stock footage of snakes, the movie just has a guy that names himself “Cobra”, proper christian name as thai dudes called “Chester” and “Raymond”.
Why does he want to go against the ninja (♫ he will fight the battle to win ♫) ? The ninja of course being Ninja Master – read notes – Gordon (even though Cobra is also a ninja), this time also known as the “Red Champion”, despite his jumpsuit being red AND yellow for this specific movie.
Continua a leggere “Cobra Against Ninja (1987) [REVIEW] | Thai May Cry”
So, as it’s customary and cyclical event by now, a new Nintendo Direct dropped at midnight today, and i have something to blabber on about without planning much.
Continua a leggere “Talking bout that new dang Nintendo Direct”
Let’s go Netflix diving once again, with this german horror-thriller.
First, really, you couldn’t find another title for your movie?
Then again, i don’t expect people to confuse this with the 2007 killer lion movie, or the other killer lion movie from 2016, also called just “Prey”.
Premise it’s as stock as it gets for horror, as it’s about five friends escaping from someone hunting them down with a rifle in the woods, where they came just to make an excursion and relax.
A cabin of sorts gets involved somewhere down the line, sure, but don’t expect any subversion or satire of genre diktats, and while it’s not technically a “slasher” since the murdered uses a hunting rifle, it’s just that, a technicality, and expect some answers in the end, but not a twist.
The execution it’s not totally stock since it relies on atmosphere and tension, the mystery of why they are being hunted, and while on paper i do like the concept of not relying on obvious answers and trying to make the raw execution of a simple idea work without trick or convenient cliches… the execution here gives way to mostly boredom and not much to go on or look forward, with some substories and some drama just there to add something to the movie.
While there are some moments of decent tension, the acting is decent and it’s not completely boring or worthless (it’s not), it feels way longer than it is for a movie barely under 90 minutes, and it’s definitely not the kind of movie you wanna fire up if you’re already feeling sleepy or doozy, this isn’t made to “wake you up” to begin with, but it being fairly dull doesn’t help.
Mediocre and forgettable, you decide if it’s worth watching even once.
While CD Projeckt Red (look out to not be sued by Robert Fripp) it’s still trying to patch up the comatose corpse release of Cyberpunk 2077, let’s go back in time when cyberpunk was…. actually not that far since i actually played this last year while quarantined and cleanin some of my backlog, and the game actually came out in 2012, almost ten years ago.
It just feels odd to discuss a game like this now, with the scenario of a society that basically taps directly into the “Wired” (not actually called that, but you get it), so you can connect to the internets with a chip installed in your brain, with more than half of the world populace having it, and using it to – among other things like downloading porn and Doom 2 WADS, i guess – align with one of the megacorporations that have become more important than nations themselves. The megacorps of course compete for dominance by also upping their terror and spy tactics by using prized killers, like the protagonist, Kilo (yes, with a “i”), as corporate espionage is basically a full on war.
Continua a leggere “Syndicate PS3 [REVIEW] | Cyberbooting EA Nonsense”
As we already saw with previous reviews of Godfrey Ho ninja flicks, anything goes with ninjas, he could splice them and stitch them to any kind of foreign, unfinished and often obscure asian movie he could get his hands on.
Even so, it still comes as a surprise that he would also splice his brand of multicolored, bandana wearing, self-adverting ninja in a rape revenge movie. WHY?
I love how the italian dvd release has a sword with diamons on the cover, it’s extra hilarious considering how it implies that diamonds are important to the plot…. they fuckin aren’t, the sword is way, WAY more relevant.
It’s just that the rapists happen to be diamond smugglers, it doesn’t really matter what they smuggle, AT ALL, they could sell bootleg boglins and nothing would really change, and even the movie barely remembers at the last minute that yes, this should somehow tie together the new storyline and “ninja footage” with the existing footage, this time taken from the 1985 corean rape-revenge movie known as “Poisonous Rose Stripping the Night”, directed by Kim Si-hyun.
Continua a leggere “Ninja Champion (1986) [REVIEW] | Grindhouse Ninjas”
The international localized title, The Swarm (the original being “La Nueè”, which can be directly translated as “The Plume”), threw me a bit off, as it’s the same one for the older 1978 movie with Michael Caine, but this recent Netflix exclusive movie it’s not about killer bees, it’s about locusts.
Ok, more Locusts: The 8Th Plague. Or The Exorcist II: The Heretic, i guess.
Plot it’s a little less hockey than one would assume, as it’s about a single mother that raises locusts for a living, but just isn’t able to make them breed, until she discovers that the animals react well to human blood…
Obviously, this happens as an accident, and you can tell this isn’t an american b-movie because it’s not actually just about killer locusts, but the drama of a single mother desperately trying to make ends meet, ready to do many sacrifices for her family.
Still, it’s a bit unelegant the way in which the locusts acquire this bloodlust, or how the narrative it’s both too slow moving and forced in various points, because you were kinda promised a swarm of killer locusts rampaging, so here’s a character doing an obviously stupid thing for the sake of setting that up. Except… not really.
And even so, there’s no real pay-off or much in the way of horror until the last 15 minutes, most of the movie it’s spent with these…. kinda detestable and unlikeable characters, not much happens in general, so it’s really drawn out and when something does happen it’s way too brief, often feels forced or done more out of obligation than anything else.
There are worse movies, but this is so disinterested about its subject material and such a slow moving, boring pile of pointless that i would simply suggest skipping it.
So, we’re yet again having that conversation on social media, about the sanctity of seeing movies in theathers and how it’s the only true way to see them?
Ok, let’s indulge in some fruitless arguing, as the issues are decades old and the industry won’t actually do anything about fixing them, because they won’t until there’s a distinct financial incentive to provide good movie watching experiences.
And this is just indulging, let’s be honest.
Because most people don’t care, won’t really care, ever.
Continua a leggere “The Cinema Show Experience Debate Cycle”
Wise Cafe (International) 