Don’t expect a review of Godzilla Battle Line

I planned to play and review this one like i did for the other mobile Godzilla titles Toho unleashed on us this year, as in via the EXPRESSO format, but the game just refuses to work on my iPhone, regardless if i reset the device, uninstall and reinstall it, remove other apps to make space in the phone’s memory storage, i have tried for 2 weeks by now to make this damn thing working on my device, but it ALWAYS, without fail, immediatly crashes after being launched.

Despite the app being constantly up to date and my device being compatible with it.

I have no clue why, the updates didn’t change a fuckin thing, and unless the next one magically fixes the issues (which seems to affect other uses with more advanced iPhones), i’m never gonna be able to play the damn thing, and hence i will never be able to review it. And i kinda wanted to do that, for completition’s sake if nothing else.

The review might happen, and they might just update the game to make it work immediatly after i post this, and tomorrow i will be able to play with no issues at all.

But until that happens, the review isn’t either.

Sorry, but that’s the situation, so expect other EXPRESSO reviews coming from tomorrow onwards, today is a forced review-less day.

Upcoming Attractions: Sharks und Pirates

(Source) https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/4273516?q=sharknado+

(no, a Girls Und Panzer retrospective isn’t afoot… YET)

Just a quick overview of what’s coming for the rest of the summer on the blog.

July will be Shark Month. Usually it is anyway, but this year i actually have managed to pile up enough material (despite everything), so there will be a shark movie review out each day, and maybe some EXPRESSO ones too, depending on when i can get to some releases in theathers.

August will yet again be a One Piece retrospective…. of the TV specials.

Last summer we did go over the featurettes, and it’s still too early for me to properly re-assess all the One Piece movies. Like i said before, i’d prefer some more time to pass,, in order to avoid some lazy rewrite-recycle of the old reviews i made in italian years ago.

Also, i’m gonna take a break from the 15th of August (included) until the 1st of September.

This doesn’t mean i will stop posting at all, since EXPRESSO reviews will be made and published, but any time consuming form of review or retrospective will go on hiatus.

That’s about it, so look forward to another summer of sharks and anime pirates!

Arachnid (2001) [REVIEW] | David Bowie Joke Here

Here, have more spiders, why not?

For this specific creature feature, we’re going back to very early 2000s, and also picking this randomly from recent additions to my personal DVD collection.

Sure as shit it’s not to celebrate a 20^th anniversary release of the movie, when even the director, Jack Sholder, kinda doesn’t wanna hear anything about it and would rather forget Arachnid, even when people bring it up to say it wasn’t actually that bad.

A sentiment i do echo because this isn’t as crap as you might expect, and if nothing else, it’s not exactly done by a bunch of complete nobodies, as it was produced by none other than Brian Yuzna (Re-Animator, The Guyver, Crying Freeman, Dagon, Honey I Shrunk The Kids) and the special effects were done by Steve Johnson, behind fxs for movies like Species I and II, Nightmare In Elm Street 4, An American Werewolf In London, Big Trouble In Little China, pretty good resumè.

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Attack Of The Crab Monsters (1957) [REVIEW] | ….For Massive Damage

We review a lot of B-movies here, so i figured its time to tackle some of the most famous ones, and one can hardly go more typical and emblematic than stuff like Attack Of The Crab Monsters, of course directed and produced by Roger Corman, the king of 50s b-movies himself, for a double feature release alongside Not Of This Earth, both movies written by Corman’s trusted screenwriter, Charles B. Griffith, also behind later films like A Bucket Of Blood or Little Shop Of Horrors.

And you can already tell these movies were engineered for the drive-ins and the double-feature show, because they are both very short, Attack Of The Crab Monsters being the shorter one, barely clocking in over 60 minutes.

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Camel Spiders (2011) [REVIEW] | Not camels, nor spiders

Spiders: when you can’t afford sharks or giant reptiles for your creature feature.

And because many people do find arachnids in general to be quite disgusting, so it’s no wonder they’re a constant for b-movies since forever, especially if they’re of giant size.

This time we have Camel Spiders, one of the many late 2000s/early 2010s Roger Corman productions (sporting the “Roger Corman Presents” label on DVD releases), this one directed by Jym Wynorski… credited as Jay Andrews as usual.

For consistency’s sake, i guess.

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Queen Crab (2015) [REVIEW] | Crab Budget Z

It has been a while since we dabbled into the territory of modern Z-grade movies about killer animals, so it’s time to descend into the muk of the ultra cheap features, so cheap that they are barely discernable from freshman cinema assignments shot during the summer break of the past.

An advice for fellow collectors living in Europe: you don’t need to get the german version, there’s a cheaper UK DVD release under the title “Claws”, it’s the same movie, don’t be fooled by the wrong synopsis on the back of the box (and most likely on the Amazon item page as well), clearly written by people that didn’t actually see the damn movie, there are no “space meteor crabs” in Queen Crab.

It’s obvious from the first minute this is indeed a monster movie shot on a microbudget using cheap digital video equipment, but i was interested in it because it promised the giant crab done in stop-motion animation, indeed a tasty promise and a rare sight regardless of budget to any cinephile.

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Arachnoquake (2012) [REVIEW] | Phantom Uses Rollout

In a sense, i’m way overdue for reviewing this, not that i was getting emails about it, but because i realize i should have seen and reviewed this before Lavalantula and the sequel, 2 Lava 2 Lantula, especially the first one, who in hindsight sound a lot like a parody of that one, but featuring the bus driver as lead instead of the washed up celebrity played by Steve Guttenberg (and yes, that movie realized the irony in that casting), just taking place in New Orleans instead of California and this time the spiders are coming out due to an earthquake caused by fracking, instead of being long lost cousins of Phantom incased in magma for millions of years that woke up and started the eruption.

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Anaconda (1997) [REVIEW] | Snek of Darkness

As following decades raised the bar for ridiculousness (quality not so much) in B-movies, newer generations of genre cinema might look back at late 90s/early 2000s killer animals movie and wonder how could people be satisfied with just regular animals like snakes and sharks, why the anaconda doesn’t summon galestorms and unites with other anaconda to become a giant monster bigger than a japanese city… or its “ready to be rampaged on” scale model.

What does get passed for sure is how crappy the effects are, and i can’t honestly sit here and lament the lack of a modern Anaconda reboot (though it’s apparently in the works), as its sequels aren’t exactly.. remembered or discussed as of today, and most of the series’ legacy i feel is the terrible CGI of Anaconda 3… and it eventually crossing over with the Lake Placid franchise, so all in all it did manage to carve its own place in the killer snakes movie niche.

But i’m not here to look at the franchise as a whole, we will eventually get to all the follow-ups, today we’re giving a look at the original Anaconda movie from 1997, directed by Luis Llosa, and see why it’s has become a cult classic b-movie of sorts in time.

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Komodo (1999) [REVIEW] | Dragon Park

Let’s clarify this right away: this has nothing to do with the Jym Wynorski “Komodo duology”, not only because this movie pre-dates both movies, but because this one has actual dignity and quality.

It’s fairly common for special effects artists to also become directors, especially if we’re talking B-movies and creature features about giant monsters or dinosaurs of some kind, but it’s still kinda odd that a movie like this can legit claim on the cover, poster and promotional material “it’s from the FX artist behind the effects of Jurassic Park”… and also the writer of the first Anaconda, Jack Bauer.

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Alligator II – The Mutation (1991) [REVIEW] | Back To The Sewers

Another chapter in the accidental saga of Jaws rip-offs and their often interesting tales of genre producers basically kicking a young James Cameron out of the director’s chair, of people making movies about barracudas that actually just used them to trojan horse a completely different thriller plot, of alligators becoming giant in Chicago’s sewer system due to pharmaceutical experiments on dogs, and producers pestering poor Joe Dante into directing rip-offs of his own movies…

Once again we wander in the territory of “we wanna make another one and trick people into thinking it’s a sequel by slapping a number 2 and a subtitle on the title”, but i struggle to even justify this one’s existence. Sure, the first one ended with another baby gator being flushed down the same sewer, but usually you’d want to cash-in into a movie like this right away…. not 11 years later.

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