[EXPRESSO] The Piper (2023) | Devil’s Trill Sonata

It is “evil Hamelin”?

Yes.

And yet people say i can’t do short reviews.

To be honest, this isn’t even that bad of a movie to deserve being summed up “evil Hamelin ghost’s revenge”…. yet it is that, it’s exactly that.

The plot sees a struggling musician strong-handed by her maestro into retrieving a music sheet from her mentor, as she was reluctant to finish the piece, a children’s concerto, even tried to get rid of it before her untimely and gruesome death.

She manages to steal the sheets to get ahead and provide for her semi-deaf daughter, but soon realizes her actions unleashed a sinister presence that starts influencing people, especially children…

It has decent-to-good production values, decent acting, it’s not completely boring, but it’s also utterly predictable, very run-of-the-mill in pretty much every aspect, from the characters, the motivations, even the lore that basically amounts to the usual reworking old folklore legends told to children in a horror context, so we have the entity as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, back for revenge… or something, you get the feeling they don’t show him too much in the movie because they didn’t actually know what to do him until the third act, and boy he does feel like a missed opportunity for a more refined antagonistic phantasm/entity.

Every now and then it has some decent or satisfying moments that avoid it slipping into sub-par slop, it helps that it’s fairly short, 90 minutes with a decent pacing, but for every positive there’s some bullshit that eventually brings it back to being incredibly average and easily forgettable/disposable, despite some effort that – again – doesn’t ultimately pays off in any significant way. The very definition of “nothing special”.

moral of the story: pay people when they do their fuckin job.

12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 28: Kingdom Of The Dinosaurs/ Dinosaur Valley (2022)

More relatively fresh dinosaur meat, because the grind never stops even for these.

And nope, this is not another Jurassic World : Dominion mockbuster…. kinda, it’s pretty much that, as it comes from prolific and fairly fresh GB-based low budget C-D grade movies supplier Jagged Edge Productions, better known for the recent Winnie The Pooh slasher film (and its sequels), many “Curse Of” movies about some random public domain-fairytale character turned slasher villain, Bunnyman rip-offs (i’m not joking), but also behind a lot of pretty obvious mockbusters, including releasing something called something called Freddy’s Fridays the very same year of the Blumhouse FNAF movie being out in theathers, so yeah, shame was never an option.

Among these and others, they also pump out dinosaur movies, like the previously featured Dinosaur Hotel, which in the meantime got a sequel and a third entry on the way. So yeah, this company is clearly set on being the new Asylum, or Full Moon Pictures, for better or worse.

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[EXPRESSO] Disquiet (2023) | A Game Of Disappearing Nurses

An unplanned trip to the Netflix content mill yield the discovery of Disquiet, which i feel can be described as the “Silent Hill haunted hospital unofficial movie”….made by people that never actually played Silent Hill.

Still, it has an undeniably strong opening that explains the premise and gets the mystery starting, with a man, Sam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), that after a car accident wakes up in a deserted hospital, deserted minus the man in the next bed that tries to strangle him, gets shanked by Sam countless times, then simply disappears. Then a nurse appears, only to also disappear, Sam being chased again by the crazed patient, and finding other people that are also trapped in this limbo-esque location..

It’s not a good movie, heck, i can understand how you could be frustrated because as a horror movie it’s really generic, derivative and honestly by the end it’s easy to forgot this is not just a supernatural thriller, that angle makes it easier to “swallow” as you’re curious than cautious about what happens, but it’s also an excuse because this is a horror film.

One ripe with characters that are trite but still enjoyable despite having no depth (aside the protagonist Sam), and plenty of various horror building blocks, like the “scarecrowy scary faces”, many flashbacks, not scary “scary parts”, leading to a fairly predictable scenario.

Regardless of you wanna slice it, i don’t hate it or think it’s atrocious, at least it’s not boring and the direction manages to keep things going nicely, it’s pretty disposable, and while it cops out by spoon feeding the ending’s meaning to the audience…. the ending could have easily been worse.

So it’s worth at least a watch to kill some time.

On Netflix, i wouldn’t bother going to the theathers for it.

[EXPRESSO] Home Education (2023) | Bone Flute Lullaby

I’ve discussed the stigma attached to modern italian horror movies before, but despite the fact there’s very little horror movies that get made and get some kind of theathrical release (or even a streaming one), despite those that manage to emerge being often pretty bad and/or confusingly disinterested in being horror movies to begin with… it’s worth giving them a shot, because sometimes you do get a movie like Home Education, written and directed by Andrea Niada.

The premise centers about a weird family living in the middle of the woods, with the father passing down/indoctrinating his family in his esoteric cultish beliefs, so much that when he dies, the daughter and mother preserve his body and perform a series of obscure rituals (including the daughter using a bone flute to search for her father’s soul) as they think that in doing so and believing, REALLY believing in them, the father will come back from the world of the dead.

The mother especially pushes these beliefs on her daughter, whom she home schools, but the friendship with a young metal head boy will make the daughter question everything that she was taught, proving to be a potential obstacle for the resurrection ritual….

It’s a creepy and far from banal premise that does not go where you’d think it will, it manages to feel constantly creepy, with a great atmosphere, some solid and stylized effects that “give away” this having some financial baking, as it’s well presented but actually manages to make the most out of a limited number of characters, few locations, that limited but “effective if used right” deal, which the movie nails, making you on edge and guessing up until the great ending.

A really damn good surprise, one worth watching if/when it gets distributed outside of Italy.

[EXPRESSO] Thanksgiving (2023) | Grum Not Included

It’s taken a lot of time, but even more of those “fake trailers for exploitation movies that don’t exist” shown on the Grindhouse are now a reality. 16 years later (12 after Hobo With A Shotgun actual feature film) Eli Roth has come back to make the “slasher Thanksgiving” film reality.

Makes sense, since there are no real notable “Thanksgiving” horror films that are slashers AND actually about Thanksgiving. again, Blood Rage doesn’t count, and i’d rather forget about Thankskilling, the movie unbothered to imply killer turkey cunnilingus. So let’s.

In a way, Thanksgiving it’s nothing special in itself, as in it’s a holiday slasher that starts on a fateful Thanksgiving day in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a bunch of crazed holiday shoppers go mental while waiting for a Black Friday nighttime opening sale, ultimately smashing into the place, causing damages, many wounded and even some dead.

1 year later the protagonist teens that were on the scene (among others) get tagged on social media by a mysterious individual setting up a dinner table with their names on it, and eventually people are being killed by a mysterious murderer donning a pilgrim get-up and one of the many John Carver masks the city hands out by the bucketloads for the holiday.

There’s plenty of that…. “peculiar” Eli Roth style of dialogues and characterizations, but it fits the grindhouse tone, it definitely lives up to the gore you expect from an exploitation horror flick (no nudity though, oddly enough), the retro yet modern style it goes for it’s actually well crafted, embracing the absurd and stupid overall concept (death by black friday stampede is what sets the massacre off, after all), i honestly think it pretty much does everything it could with it.

Some primo dumb but hugely entertaining holiday slasher romp.

[EXPRESSO] Saw X (2023) | Getting Jiggy With

(sorry for the late delivery of this review)

You know what, despite the conceptual defeat that Lionsgate is just giving up and bringing back Tobin Bell for a new Saw entry…. i’m ok with this, as i’m glad to have both the original Jigsaw character and Amanda back, since this one plays – as it is in style at the now – as a legacy sequel set between Saw and Saw II, after a very crappy “sequel” and a decent but ultimately not that convicing or different reboot/stand alone entry of Spiral.

So i don’t mind falling back to the better elements of the franchise, ignoring the whole mess the post-Saw III chapters were (though we have Kevin Greutert, the longtime series’ editor that also directed Saw VI and The Final Chapter), so we can have Tobin Bell’s character again, this time going to Mexico in order to try a risky experimental medical procure to have its cancer cured.

Once he realizes it’s a scam, he proceeds to kidnap those responsable and subject them to his trademark series of retributional death traps and their gruesome rules

At worst, it’s at least conforting to have a proper entry with Tobin Bell in it… or so i was gonna say, but i was pleasantly surprised because Saw it’s not only a return to form for the series, it’s also a return to good form, playing to all the positives of the franchise and it’s indeed the best one since the original, with great characters (both returning and even the new faces), deviously contrived traps that don’t feel like “overkill”, and a surprisingly strong script.

Definitely the better Saw film in a long time, to the point you can even argue it makes for a better Saw II than the actual Saw II.

[EXPRESSO] Five Nights At Freddy’s (2023) | Children Of Chuck E. Cheese

I kinda didn’t want to review this one for various reasons, but i did review The Flash movie after all, so let’s get this over with, shall we?

And FIY, i barely known anything about the games, i’ve seen some gameplay but i don’t know anything about this weird lore the series supposedly has running through, just the basic premise of the games, as in, it’s about a person employed as a night guard for an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese styled pizza place-kids entertaiment center, where the animatronics mysteriously still walk around its grounds and attack anyone they find in their roamings….

Kinda surprised it took so long for the series that basically invented the “mascot horror” subgenre to have its feature lenght film out, so long that a horror version of the Banana Splits came along, and we even had Nicolas Cage join into the mascot massacre fun with Willy Wonderland.

And honestly, in itself, it’s not very good… though i don’t think it’s very bad either.

Production value are fairly high, the animatronics look good and have a substantial presence on screen, though it takes a while for the movie to show and have the animatronics move about and do something of substance, as it spends a lot more screentime establishing its lore and okayish characters than in actually trying to be scary or gruesome.

Which itself it’s a non issue since this movie it’s clearly targeted at a children audience (even though most fans that grew up on the games are most likely in their 20s now) and relies on jumpscares, which maybe fitting, feels like a missed opportunity, since it’s really not scary…. but it’s also not deliberately trying to be child-friendly or goofy, kinda feels stuck in between, for whatever reason.

Still, not quite awful.

Pinocchi-O-Rama #10: Pinocchio’s Revenge AKA Bad Pinocchio (1996)

This is one i KNEW would have to be featured on Pinocchiorama from the very start, because it’s both peculiar but also really easy to see why it keeps slipping back into obscurity regardless.

After all, you gotta love the more common name this movie (also known as Bad Pinocchio) goes by, Pinocchio’s Revenge, which really tells you the kind of shit you’re about to see.

It’s that kind of stupid title that already confuses you, as in, who the hell could be Pinocchio be taking revengeance on? The Cat and Fox either get arrested, punished or get actually miserable endings regardless of what version or adaption of the story, Lampwick dies of being worked to death as a donkey, so to whom he has to break the rules of nature?

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #7: Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City (2021)

When the first trailer for this reboot of the Resident Evil film series was revealed, the reception was kinda split, and i guess it was in part because over time people learned to enjoy the crappy Paul W.S . Anderson films for what they were, liked their brand of cinematic cheese and overall embraced their “so bad they’re charming” nature.

And i do agree that there’s something comforting, especially in retrospective, about them, for all the flaws and plots that had barely anything to do with the ones in the Resident Evil videogames themselves, they did manage to faithfully recapture the B-movie feel of the games (itself borrowed from many zombie B-movies) in their own way, while hindsight confirm they were products of their time indeed, in this case from an era where film adaptations of videogames had a bad reputation about them, quite different from today’s perception, with an Uncharted movie released and a Gran Turismo film that at the time of writing is just a month away from hitting theathers.

Times have indeed changed, so it’s not that much of a surprise to see Capcom (itself a different company from the confused and “appeal to the west” driven mess of back when the Milla Jovovich led film series was still going) opt for a reboot film instead of trying to follow up from a film that indeed was called Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and indeed served as closure. Kinda.

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[EXPRESSO] Talk To Me (2022) | Ghost Hand Overdose

Curiosly, this one being distributed by A24 in the US is just that, a casual happenstance, because this is a South Australian production more in the vein of a Blumhouse joint, apparently by people that had some fame as Youtubers/content creators, can’t say i did know of twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou output on the “Tube”, but this pivoting to a theathrical full lenght horror feature is fairly impressive for a big screen film debut, there’s a reason it has “done the rounds”.

Talk To Me is basically an updated, modern take on the “possession” subgenre, feeling a lot like The Evil Dead but really not when the plot is described, as it deals with a group of teen friends that start doing these rumored seances with a cursed hand, speaking to the dead and letting the spirits possess them for a short while.

After all, everyone is doing it and they get addicted to these “controlled possessions” like the ghosts are laced with nicotine (at best), everyone instinctually records these episodes with their phone and shares them on social media, so eventually the younger brother of one of the girls want to try, things go awry as the possession gets out of control, so our flawed but likeable teen characters will have to scramble and find a way to save the boy from the spirits…

The premise is far from new, and some of the themes are not fully explored, but i’d be lying if i wasn’t surprised by how good the scares were, to say nothing of the excellent gore and extra-solid practical effects, it’s reliance on long sequences that build on each other and aren’t just leading to jumpscare climaxes, making the most of the 90 minutes runtime and culminating in a great final twist. Recommended.