The Black Scorpion 1957 [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

There are many giant monster bugs themed films from the ’50s, and if you made one back then, there’s a good chance that legendary fx maestro Willis O’Brien worked on most of them, curating the creature effects made in stop motion animation, and The Black Scorpion is indeed one of the less discussed 50s giant monster flicks, alongside the often forgotten-ignored piece of Eugenie Larie’s “dinosaur trilogy”, The Giant Behemoth, also with effects by O’Brien.

Yes, before you point it out, yes, a scorpion is not a bug per sé (and we’re gonna split hair, ants aren’t bugs either), is an arachnid, but it’s not like audiences cared about this back in ’50s, nor do they now.

Doesn’t really matter because if we can make it big, we can make a movie about it, thems the rules, and a scorpion is a really intimidating crawly for most, so why the fuck not?

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Eventually comes The Bride, more Laid Back Camp, and some very late Pokemon opinions

Soap box time, i guess, since it’s Sunday.

I really wanted to have an EXPRESSO review for The Bride! far earlier, but schedule conflicts got in the way and so – unless cinema schedules fuck me over by removing it all together – i will be able to see & review the film only next week, which is a bummer but you know, shit happens.

On more favourable – to me – news, we finally got a proper announcement for Season 4 of Yuru Camp/Laid Back Camp anime series, which will release next year, with another studio change, this time handled not by Eight Bit (the animation studio that took over C-Station for Season 3) but by Furyu Pictures, the anime production branch of the company mostly known for their figures and now also videogames.

Speaking of which, the previously announced proper Yuru Camp “camping cooking action game” by enish, the developer of the gacha mobile title, All In One, has a date and is launching in a matter of days on PC (though via Steam as a japanese language only affair for the moment) and later will hit Switch and mobile, which sounds odd since this isn’t a F2P gacha game like All In One, it isn’t, it’s an actual game you pay for once (DLC aside).

So expect a review of some sort when they either update it with english language support or it launches on Switch.

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The Food Of The Gods (1976) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

As we gotta have a Bert I. Gordon film in the rubric every year, i figured we’d might as well knock off one of his lesser known films, as in, i don’t think color when i think B.I.G., but he did work until well beyond the 50s up into the 90s, and before passing away in 2023, he did screenwriting work for 2014’s Secret Of A Psychopath.

This is from the short lived “Wells period” of his career, working with Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American International Pictures, though this isn’t the first time he adapted the Wells novella, since his 1956’s Village Of The Giants film also took the entire basic premise of a substance that makes people grow larger to join the giant humanoid trend of The Amazing Colossal Man but mostly used to make another entry in the “teensploitation” trend that was going on at the time with surf movies and shit.

This time is a less bastardized adaptation, and by that i mean it actually uses the H.G. Wells moniker and is slightly more faithful to book… at least its basic premise, since it doesn’t cover most of the more interesting chapters and its themes, it basically reduces it to another “nature revenge” plot, which indeed was all the rage after Jaws, as already discussed plenty of times.

Meaning this has more to do with the unproduced kaiju film Nezura (and -again – Jaws and the) than Food Of The Gods, since the focus here is on giant rats that have eaten the “FOTG”, in this case a substance springing from the ground in a farm in British Columbia, with the farmer, Mr. Skinner, considers it a gift from God himself, feeds it to the chickens, which grow to giant size, and so do wasps, grubs, and rats, making the island overrun by giant vermin.

Unaware of this, a professional football player and some his teammates head there for a hunting trip, but they get more than they wanted from it…

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Here Comes The (Virtual) Boy Again

So because i’m a major league doofus, i actually preorder not the 20 bucks cardboard VR thingie to play the Virtual Boy on Switch/Switch 2, but the entire fuckin replica that costed me 80 bucks, because ultimately i’m a kindred soul to the protagonist of Shangri-La Frontier, we go hunting high and low for the kusoge, for the odd, for the grime undesired depths of the videogame scene.

Of course i’ve heard of the Virtual Boy, i’ve seen the AVGN episode, i’ve seen Nintendo itself take potshots at its failure too eventually in stuff like Tomodachi Life, but i was still curious, and there were some games i wanted to play on it proper, especially since this oddity never came out in Europe, so

I’ve played modern VR games occasionally at some arcades, so i was super curious to see for myself how the Virtual Boy measured up today via a big ass replica of the console itself, even if can’t load any games by itself and it’s an accessory needed to play via Switch or Switch 2, but sure as hell that beats me bothering to collect the original console and its library, i have to draw the line somewhere.

Gotta say, i was kinda impressed.

Kinda.

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Snakes On A Plane (2006) [REVIEW] | Legal Drinking Age Snakes

I thought of reviewing Park-chan Wook’s So I’m A Cyborg But That’s Ok, since it February and we recently got his latest film, No Other Choice.

But then an Arrow Video newsletter made me aware of them doing a Blu Ray/4K UHD release of Snakes On A Plane, which i promptly preordered.

I mean, we already did Tromeo & Juliet for the Valentine’s Day review, and i’m not sure we’re gonna bring back “Snake Month” this summer, might as well celebrate good ol’ Snakes On A Plane‘s 20^th anniversary.

Yep, there’s no beating the “getting old” allegations, so strap that girdle up, take your pills, we’re going back to the very primordial soup, when Sharkenado wasn’t even a thought in the Asylum deseased pipeline of bullshit we’ll call a “mind”.

Oh, mind you, the Asylum did exist and in many ways proper started realizing who they really were due to Snakes On Plane, their had their proper epiphany in no small part thanks to this film, but we’ll discuss that when reviewing Snakes On A Train, sooner or later that review had to happen.

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[EXPRESSO] Whistle (2025) | Must Have Been The Aztec Wind

I’m not bothering with the new Scream sequels, for reasons that should be obvious (including its collaboration with GenIA crap and gambling giant Kalshi), so instead i did went to see this little new-ish horror film called Whistle.

This one also isn’t breaking any new ground, being a very typical teen slasher, this time about an Aztec sacrificial whistle, said to be used in order to call upon Death itself and offer it the souls during ritual sacrifices. After causing the mysterious death of a high school basketball player, 6 months later the death whistle shows up in the locker of a newly transferred girl with a troubled past of drug abuse, and alongside some of her new classmates, she hears the hellish sound it produces, which also signifies Death itself will come for them sooner than it should….

Yeah, you’ve heard this before, and yes, this is basically another variation on/of Final Destination, just using the old “Aztec curse instrument” spin to avoid being a complete rip-off, but it likeable how it basically owns the fact is not doing anything original, it knows, so it doesn’t even bother to be mysterious, and decides it might as well have some fun and give audiences what they expect.

Unsubtle as fuck, by design, the characters also being very typical but mostly stereotypes stock as ever, especially the jocks, the plot hits very expected beat like clockwork, and while i do wish it didn’t straight up copy the finale of Countdown, Whistle does seek out to entertain more than scare, and it does manage to do that, thanks to a brisky pace, decent acting and honestly decent-to-good gore effects and grisly supernatural kills.

It’s entirely forgettable but also quite serviceable slasher interested only in being entertaining and gory more than anything else.

[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.

[EXPRESSO] Send Help (2026) | Triangle of Sodness

Sam Raimi is back to cinemas with Send Help, which tells the tale of Linda Liddle.

Linda works as strategist for her company, and has been promised a vice-president role by the late CEO and father of the current one, Bradley, but she is shunned and humiliated by him when it becomes known he will put his incompetent friend, Donovan, in charge.

He still decides to invite her to a corporate flight as a gesture before axing her, but fate has is that the plane crashes, and only Linda and Bradley survive it, finding themselves stranded on a deserted island. Linda isn’t too fazed, as she also knewn a lot of survivalist tactics and skills (enough to try her hand at competing in a survival reality show), as even back in the office she was the actual employee holding the company together with their ability to actually get shit done, much to the disgust of the nepo baby that is Bradley.

The two end up having to work together, and put together their mutual hatred in order to survive and eventually get rescued…. or not.

While the plot it’s basically a mixture of familiar beats you’ve seen before, mostly Cast Away and stuff like Triangle Of Sadness, but mashed together very well, tackling the overdone “eat the rich” angle of late (alongside the obvious themes of workplace toxicity and corporate misoginy) but with a clever and funny script, many twists and some terrific performances by Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien.

It’s also so very a Raimi movie, full of his sensibilities, which include a lot of projectile vomiting, ropes of blood shooting everywhere (to name the tamer ones), and his comedic horror sensibilites are full on display and recognizable as ever, great to have him back in full form.

Recommended!

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] Primate (2025) | Not part of the “DK Crew”

From director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, The Strangers: Prey At Night, Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City), we have a new entry in the now sparsely visited “killer ape” fringe of natural horror, simply called Primate.

The story is to the point as the title itself, since we have a familiarized chimpanzee, Ben, whom was nurtured and cared for, has been tought words and has become a family member, being bitten by a mongoose carring rabies, then contracting the virus and becoming violent, just when one of the sisters comes back to their family home in Hawaii, bringing some friends along…

So the sisters and her friends found themselves trapped with the rabid animal, and basically confined to the house’s infinity style pool, as Ben is afraid of water.

You’ve seen killer animals films before, you’ve seen killer ape films before, so there’s not really much to explain or discuss, as while Roberts still manages to make likeable enough characters, this is not a movie much about those; beside the two sisters’ bond, everyone (some more than others) are pretty much future “dead meat”, if you will.

It’s mostly about the body count and gore, which is pretty good and especially “crunchy” since it’s all done via quite practical effects.

Again, it is familiar territory, akin to a monkey version of Roberts’ shark films (or a Cujo remake, basically), it’s simple, but there’s nothing wrong with semplicity when it’s done right, and here is done very right. It’s a very well executed familiar formula that makes the best out of its few character and single location, but also knows it’s often for the better to keep these films short, clocking slightly under 90 minutes.

Honestly i don’t know what else you might want from a good killer ape film.