[EXPRESSO] Anaconda (2025) | Thunder Of The Gigantic Tropic Serpent

Yes, the Anaconda serie is back…kinda.

You might have heard of this reboot being in the works for a while, and it being as a quasi-January release here definitely did not feed any hype, not that there was any in the first place, gotta admit.

In case you didn’t, Sony decided to reboot the Anaconda franchise as a Tropic Thunder sort of dealio, not a bad idea in itself even though it already felt kinda masturbatory and “lazy” since Jack Black was already in Tropic Thunder.

This film sees some friends that meet up together and decide to actually follow up on their childhood dream of being proper directors, instead of being relegated to menial cinema-adjacent jobs like making video wedding invitations or playing tertiary one-line characters on TV shows, when one of them propose the project of rebooting Anaconda, one of their favorites.

This means not only writing the script, getting some funding, but also going to the Amazon river and hire a snake expert so they can “shoot the shit” there. But things gets messier when they find themselves involved with smugglers and actually stalked by a giant anaconda…

To be honest, this is noticeably better than i would expect it to be, it’s actually quite ok.

It would be better if it was able to be more original instead of doing again Tropic Thunder via Be Kind Rewind and if it was a bit less of a compromise between a more edgy and satirical take on meta-cinema and being also “safe for kids”, to say nothing about how it is fairly safe in the “self-poking humour” department.

But i will admit it has some surprises and it’s actually funnier than i expected, it’s decent and knows it’s for the best to keep runtime on the short side.

Jack Frost: The Amytiville [MANWHA REVIEW] | The Teen Hellsing Years

This has been on my bucketlist for a while because it was such a transparent case to me.

As in, sometimes you have comics more or less explicit in showing their inspiration, their model to copy and emulate, happens a lot in shonen manga but it’s not always what one would assume

Sometimes it can be just a conflation of this kind of comics being very iterative and built (like most books and movies, for that matter) on clichès, on proven formats, time-tested formula, so similarities are often more coincidence than deliberate emulation of a specific series among the sea of many similar ones, expecially when in turn they influence each other as they go, and in time are themselves taken as examplse to follow.

But once i laid eyes on this manwha (a “korean manga”) by Ko Jin-Ho, Jack Frost: The Amityville, aimed at basically the same demographic of an edgy Shonen Jump series, then red the first volume, i was kinda happy in how immediatly obvious it was to me what this wanted to be.

As in, a more shonen take on Hellsing, the renowed pulp classic by Kohta Hirano about vampires, guns bigger than people, religious freaks with knives that double as lances and undead nazi cyborg monsters.

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[EXPRESSO] Mercy (2026) | One Amazon Ring To Judge Them All

I’ll give director Timur Bekmambetov this: he does not lack tenacity, kickstarting the “screenlife” type of films with Unfriended back in 2015 and sticking to it to this day.

After the “so bad it’s good” Amazon commercial-crapfest that was his 2025 War Of The Worlds, we now have Mercy, a sci-fi thriller set in a distopic future where, to curb the criminality rates skyrocketing, the government and police concocted a new system to dole out justice: an IA program, Mercy, which basically acts a judge, jury and executioner.

One day a veteran police officer wakes up to find himself strapped to a chair and being a subject of the Mercy program, accused of killing his wife, with the IA giving him access to various databases, telephone records, private social media accounts, to try and defend himself from the accusation, by lowering a “guilty” probability rate via proving his arguments, all in 90 minutes, before he gets executed via sonic blast when time runs out.

It’s basically an attempt at a modern take on Minority Report in screenlife fashion, and it’s actually kinda okay? For once, it manages to not entirely take place via holograms and sci-fi screens from where a bound Chris Pratt has to investigate remotely, it’s kinda compelling and unlike War Of The Worlds 2025, it’s actually competent enough to engage the viewer and entertain enough, despite it also being fairly mediocre,

It’s also not really well written and the more you think about the plot points the more shaky they become, plus it’s also gross propaganda, given it’s a sci-fi film allegedly warning about the danger of leaving the judicial system to IA and algorhythms, but also promoting as the only solution a survellaince state (no qualms about the ethics of zero privacy), an Amazon sponsored one.

One Piece Pirate Warriors 4: DLC Pack 8: Special Selection PS4 [REVIEW]

Gotta admit, i kinda expected this one to release in early February, but nope, that “Early 2026” turned out to be indeed very early, as in, this DLC Pack just released January 22^th, as in, 3 days ago.

I guess why not since it was also the pack that revealed earlier who was gonna be in it, after all, people were eager to see who alongside Enel (which was indeed as obvious a prediction as it could have been) made the cut from the OP character popolarity survey polls’ results, with DLC Pack 8 being the “Legends” one, so to speak, more than the previous Egghead Pack.

(probably is also due to TK demands since the Dynasty Warriors Origins extensive DLC/expansion Visions Of Four Heroes came out the same day, and alongside the Switch 2 release)

I’m not even gonna try and say once again that this might be the last DLC pack for Pirate Warriors 4 as a whole, only to have to rectify that months later, especially now, as i will explain.

As most of you already know, this specific DLC character pack is a fan favourite heavy selection, and while Enel and King were the easily predictable guesses everyone thought, i was pleasantly surprised to see Zephyr/Z from One Piece Film Z made the cut, as i said before, very happy about that, can’t deny i’m a big fan of him and that film as a whole.

No Kaku playable, but i’ll take “Mr Z.” gladly, guess japanese fans do love him more than most expected, and how these polls are often made to be skewed towards the new popular characters seen in the anime.

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[EXPRESSO] Return To Silent Hill (2026) | Pyramid Ass

Okay, i’ll confess i haven’t really played proper the mainline Silent Hill games, as ironic it might sound given my obsession with horror in general, and while deserving the tar & feathering, i will say i do know at least the premise of Silent Hill 2 and some surface stuff about the plot and characters via cultural osmosis.

I say this because Return To Silent Hill is sold as a faithful adaptation of Silent Hill 2, not a sequel of the first Silent Hill film from 2006, apparently, i never bothered with the SH movies either.

That said, the premise is what you’d expect for a Silent Hill 2 film adaptation: James Sunderland is devastated after being separated from his love, Mary, receives a mysterious letter that leads him back to the sleepy town of Silent Hill, where he hopes to find Mary.

Upon entering town, though, he realizes Silent Hill has changed drastically, as he fears something malevolent is haunting it, and while struggling to discern reality from allucinations, he ventures hoping he’ll be strong enough to find and rescue Mary…

the director of 2006’s Silent Hill film, Cristophe Gans, is back here, but (as explained above) that doesn’t mean anything to me as of now nor stops this from being a honestly aggressively bad film.

Sorry, it’s just not good, at all, every way you slice it, production values are high and acting is decent, but it feels more a 2000’s high budget amusement park ride adaptation of Silent Hill 2, with the script triple-explaining everything in case you got a lobotomy after entering the cinema, it’s almost a parody so veemently the scripts fights any attempt at vagueness, let alone mystery.

Still, i’ve seen far worse horror films, at least it’s not boring and goes by fairly quickly.

Iced (1989) [REVIEW] | Ski Slash

Last year’s review of the original Until Dawn on PS4 did left me with a peckish for icy, wintery slasher flicks, i did mention this in the review itself, so instead of The Chill Factor, we’re doing Iced, a forgotten slasher that i’m surprised doesn’t have an Arrow Video rerelease.

That’s because Vinegar Syndrome did release this one on Blu Ray (via their sub-label Degausser Video) last January, though i wouldn’t mind an import friendlier option later down the line.

Iced definitely doesn’t wanna reinvent the “slasher wheel”, as its premise it’s indeed pretty typical.

A group of friends are mysteriously invited to a ski resort, only to be systematically stalked and killed by a masked serial killer.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with how one of their friends, Jeff, died 4 years ago in a nightime skiing accident after being dumped by his fiancèe.

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The Day The Anthem Died

So, as of today, Anthem’ official servers are being pulled, so the game – unless some fans do resurrect it via fan hosted servers, which some are working on – is officially dead know.

Hence now it’s the perfect time to plug back my review for the thing, as it’s indeed a “funeral-dirge” piece, why not, it’s also a very slow week and i won’t be having much if any EXPRESSO reviews (maybe i’ll do one tomorrow) out due to some unfavourable schedule issues (let’s put it that way) and most relevant films coming out on the 15th.

Don’t expect much of an eulogy about Anthem itself from me, since i never touched it again after the review, and what i played of it… hasn’t me weeping over it, to put it nicely.

[EXPRESSO] No Other Choice (2025) | Canis Canem Edit

After Decision To Leave, Park Chan-Wook is back with a satirical black comedy, No Other Choice.

Based on the novel The Ax By Donald Westlake, the film sees Man-su, a paper industry expert with a 25 years sterling career, paper being his profession but also providing for his family wealth and being part of his identity…. being laid off without notice.

As his life falls apart and the sudden firing theathens to kill off not only his hobby greenhouse, but his family’s passions, even their future career (with the daughter being a budding violin master to be), as they have to even send away their two dogs to make due, Man-su decides to start killing off his competition in the hope he well get his job in the industry back and maintain his way of life.

Man-su also isn’t particularly cut off to be a killer, but is desperate enough to try and do anything it takes, which often involves being caught in odd or embarassing situations, or worse, being very understanding of other fellows in the paper industry biz it’s trying to kill as he’s got (like many characters say in the film itself) “no other choice”.

As expected of Park Chan-Wook, it’s a very brutal, humane yet relentless film, this time picturing a normal man who is chewed up and then spat out by the corporation that gave him a fairly wealthy lifestyle, and then takes extreme measures as his status quo falls apart, ready to do anything to win the corpo rat race, feeling more than pressured to be what he wants and wants other to think he is, as comformity and optics are king.

Very clever and also pretty damn funny, honestly might be one of Park Chan Wook’ bests, maybe even a masterpiece, it’s excellent.

12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 60: Grunt! (1983)

Back in the mid 60 and 70s cavemen films had come back, going initially for an adventure feel, alongside other dinosaur or prehistoric themed films (most already covered here), but it became clear soon that what made One Million Years B. C. a success wasn’t the stopmotion dinosaur effects by Ray Harryhausen, but Rachel Welch in cavegirl garments, and hence these film began more focusing on the cave girls and the “historical” excuse for pseudo-nudity.

In Italy we had a tradition of sexy comedies budding in the late 60s, so in the 70s some filmakers hopped onto the bandwagon and made sexy cavemen comedies like When Women Had Tails, while others latched unto the more extreme trend of the cannibal films.

It was a fad, in the grand scheme of things, but the genre survived into the early ’80s with stuff like the alredy reviewed Caveman, the one with Ringo Starr, which i assume was the catalyst for director Andy Luotto to try his hand at a caveman slapstick comedy, with Grunt!, indeed one of the more apt titles ever for a caveman comedy, sporting the tagline “La Clava E’ Uguale Per Tutti” (lit. “The Club Is Equal For All”), also used as a subtitle for the kinda modern DVD rerelease it got and which i’m using for review.

You can find the entire movie on Youtube, but you might need to find some subs unless you understand italian, as yes, it’s a dialogue-less film…. BUT there’s also a voice over narration by the director, Andy Luotto (also in the film as the caveman that looks like a Squawkabilly) talking bollocks that intervenes here and there.

Then again, it’s not like it makes the thing have more sense (it’s mostly bollocks, including random homophobic shit and shit tier cabaret jokes), but maybe there are some german dubs around, or maybe french, as far as i know there are no official english dubs for the film.

Which makes sense since there’s just so little voiceover to dub, and no spoken dialogue per sé.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 59: Area 407/Tape 407 (2012)

In our quest to maybe eventually one day review all the dinosaur films ever made, i had to wonder if we missed something.

We features dinosaur comedies, dinosaur battle royales, virtual dinosaurs of the future, some really decrepit pieces of dinosaur media, and an over excess of soldiers fighting raptors.

Heck, we even did see attempts at mixing the dinosaurs with a found footage film in the very decent and mostly realized The Lost Dinosaurs, and today we found him a play-date of sorts with something i never heard once about, and i had to stumble upon by combing upon lists of dinosaur films.

and i mean “stumble” because you wouldn’t guess a movie called Area 407/Tape 407 would be abotu dinosaurs, which i guess should count as a spoiler. I suppose?

Let’s be real, it’s not that much of a spoiler when you have the poster art for the film sport the recognizable “triple clawed scratchmark” that might as well spell “Velociraptors”, or a Garfield creepypasta abomination, i suppose.

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