[EXPRESSO] Inu Oh (2022) | Rock The Biwa

Masaaki Yuasa is back in cinemas after 2019’s Ride Your Wave, as in it finally hit theathers here, and this time he’s ready to bring in a tale of Heike era Japan’s Sergent Pepper Magical Mystery Tour, minus the Earth Wind And Fire collab and the quest for the musical instruments, but with fantasy elements set to blow the minds of the 14^th centhury Japan’s musical scene.

Set in ye old medieval Japan, the movie follows the friendship of a blind musician Tomona, and a physically deformed dancer that calls himself Inu Oh (“Dog King”), as they travel through the Ashigaka era, performing in an odd troupe and rising to fame to their artistical prowess, despite them being ostracized by society for their appearances and differences..

It’s a fantastic and creative take on jidai-geki narrative, posing the question of what would it be if a rock n roll revolution swept through 14^th centhury japan, with the protagonists not only expressing themselves though fame and success, but also being literal mediums of ghosts from the Heike era that just want their stories told, to be heard, even if they don’t belong in the approved history chronicles the government is redacting and enforcing for the sake of unification.

It’s a beatifully, psychedelic animation musical that pays homage to classic rock music but doesn’t just pay lip service through the surreal and stylish visuals Yuasa is known for (handled masterfully by Science Saru), the amazing musical numbers as they retell the stories of spirits that history forgot, an ode to the ones on the margin, the rejects, the exponged, and how despite everything, someone will come to give them a voice, to tell their tales through the power of art.

All in a packed yet concise 100 minutes runtime.

A masterpiece, highly recommended.

[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] 4#: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

By now it was official and expected to get a new Resident Evil film sequel every 3 years, and in like clockwork in 2010 arrived Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth one, which also brought back to directing Paul W.S. Anderson, whom passed around the director duties after the first one, but was always writing the scripts, and as we will see, he would stick around for the rest of the film series as director & writer of his wife fanfic adventures in this Resident Evil canon.

And since we passed the third entry already, i guess they felt necessary to also go the 3D route, as the entire movie was shot this way, for obvious gimmicky (and lucrative) reasons, with the obvious parts meant for 3D as easy to notice in 2D as usual.

We immediatly continue from where Extinction left off, with multiple Alice clones attacking the Tokyo Umbrella hideout as promised, wielding kunai, double uzi, double katanas, and their psionic power, so yeah, Anderson it’s so obviosly and strongly back at the wheel, for better or worse, and it’s definitely not in the mood for hotdogging, so we jump straight into the bombastic action at the beginning, we’ll do the exposition and new and returning characters later.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #3: Resident Evil Extinction (2007)

3 years after Apocalypse, we’re back with the Adventures of Alice in Resident Evil spin-off cinema land… but she wakes up as she did in the first movie, has some flashbacks, faces some traps, then dies and she’s retrieved by scientists?

Yep, considering the finale of Apocalypse and the opening act leading to a reveal of a mass grave of Alices, it’s not that surprising that we would eventually see the series go hard on the clonatron, upping the ante by explaining that Umbrella didn’t contain shit, and the epidemic spred all over the world, eventually turning the globe into a post-apocalyptic barren, withered zombie wasteland.

The Alice clone that survived/was let go now roams on a motorbike, alongside other survivors as they try to escape the zombies by moving to Alaska through the Mojave desert.

And stopping by Las Vegas, nominally for fuel, factually because its Las Vegas, where they don’t actually stay much, despite the marketing for the movie emphasizing the “Vegas trip”.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #2: Resident Evil Apocalypse (2004)

Last time we left Alice waking up in the hospital of a zombie infested Raccoon City, grabbing a shotgun and heading for the ruined streets for sequels’ sake.

So obviously this was setup to loosely mirror the plot and setting of Resident Evil 2, while keeping the Alice and Red Queen subplots, meaning you could expect Alice to wander around Raccon City and tag along canon named characters called to intervene on the pandemic situation of the city and trying to escape it when they hear of Umbrella’s plan to just nuke it all.

And you would assume correctly, though it’s made a bit confusing as she’s instead joined by Jill Valentine and Carlos Olivera, the protagonists of RE 3, and they’re followed by the Nemesis mutant of RE 3 as well, which is even odder when you remember RE 3 is basically taking place at the same time of RE 2, let alone that RE 3 was originally conceived as a spin-off entry.

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[EXPRESSO] El Conde (2023) | Pinochet The Dirty Old Man

Pablo Larrain, after years of historical biopic dramas about his home country of Chile, he finally tackles Pinochet…. by reinventing him as a vampire that has lived on since the French Revolution, faked his death many times, and most famously established a dictatorial bloody regime.

But after 250 plus years of undeath, he just wants to die, and this causes the vultures to come, in the form of Pinochet’s mortal sons, hungry for more blood money to inherit, and an exorcist nun is also sent in by the Church to kill the monster… and see if he drops some fat cash, too.

We’ve seen the vampire comedy format used to tackle various themes, and there’s definitely potential in making Pinochet a literal horror monster to comment on his legacy and the political troubles of modern Chilean society, in how the past keeps repeating and evil finds a way, and indeed the satire is relentless… but the comedy is surprisingly scarce, mostly stemming from excess cruelty via dialogue more than graphic content (gore is far from missing, btw).

Even that feels like breadcrumbs, for a 2 hours runtime with a geriatric pacing, fitting, perhaps, but it’s really not that funny, the narration is ironically lacking proper bite, and the elements of horror, history and humour do not so much gel together as are just placed there, neglected of proper growth more than balanced against each other.

The black and white photography it’s excellent, acting it’s good, it has some great golden age horror atmosphere at times, but El Conde ultimately just feels stuffy, too slow and bloated for its own good, and despite all the pretense, there’s not much under the gothic capery to gawk at.

Interesting experiment, but a disappointing one that’s also hard to sit through, to my dismay.

One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 – Additional Episode 1 “Yamato’s Adventure” PS4 [DLC REVIEW]

I initially misread that Namco/Koei planned to release all the 3 episodes in the pack by the end of September 2023…. but it’s actually September 2024, so instead of reviewing all the episodes packs at once, i will do mini-reviews for each of them as most likely they’re gonna accompany the release of the other 2 DLC Character Packs.

I will also release a “review addendum” after the Character Pass 2 and all the additional episodes release, because as Namco made a new bundle for the game and all (available and announced) DLC called “Ultimate Edition”, so it’s fairly logical to guess they don’t plan to do more with Pirate Warriors 4, for better or worse.

Regardless, these episodes are surprisingly cheap, with the Yamato one here costing 3 bucks on its own, and the complete pack of 3 episodes going for 7 bucks.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #1: Resident Evil (2002)

Its 2002. The latest mainline Resident Evil games are RE Zero and Code Veronica (plus Gun Survivor 2 released the previous year), and the remake of the first RE game was coming a week later, but something else related debuts, and it’s the first feature lenght, live action film adaptation of the franchise, produced by Constantin Films via Sony’s Screen Gems label, with direction and script by Paul W.S. Anderson, previously known for the 1995 live action Mortal Kombat movie, and cult sci fi horror film Event Horizon.

So he already dabbled in the early wave of videogames films for the big screen, and fittingly enough the Resident Evil live action film would be his legacy, for the most part anyway, enough that eventually Capcom would collaborate with him again to make another film based on one of their IP, in this case one that started as a niche title but launched the popularity of “hunting games” and eventually became one of their biggest franchises, Monster Hunter.

But back to the zombies with what is now the first of the Resident Evil live action film series, and not even the only RE film series, as we looked upon the CG animated one some years ago.

In terms of what “Resident Evil 2002” it plucks from the games…. let’s consider the first one for reference, and it clearly a case where people from Capcom had a list of things that had to be in the movie to make it Resident Evil”, but never specified how and why these things should exist in this new continuity, because Paul W.S. Anderson clearly had little interest in making faithful adaptations of the games’ plot, and did its own thing, playing fairly loose with the videogame canon, which was reviled as it’s often now but was less lamented upon, at least compared to modern standards of backlash, “outrage” and rampant reactions from the internets.

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

Here we are with the first round of the new character DLC packs for Pirate Warriors 4, as heavily promised before.

The 4^th Character Pack is titled “Battle Of Onigashima”, and it features 2 “Onigashima variants/versions” of characters already available in the base game, with Battle Of Onigashima Luffy, Battle of Onigashima Kaido, and more interestingly, Yamato, the offspring of Kaido that has proclaimed to carry on the will of the late Oden in a very direct manner.

As for why now, well, it’s not real surprise that the Pirate Warriors games’ storyline are also made in a way to avoid accidental spoilers for the One Piece anime audience, so yeah, it makes sense they had to wait until the Gear 5 episode to introduce this powered up version of Luffy, after all that’s the reason Pirate Warriors 4 has an original story for the Land Of Wa arc, and Pirate Warriors 3 invented a new scenario for the Dressarosa stages as well.

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[EXPRESSO] The Nun II/2 (2023) | Valak Has Somehow Returned

No joke intro or sequel title mockery, The Nun 2 doesn’t need nor deserve it.

Really, one for the textbooks in terms of obvious franchise milking that exists only because of money, which is always the case, but while you’re hooking the demon nun to the device, you might as well crank out a better movie, try to pretend you care at the very least.

In reality, we get a sequel to another mediocre spin-off of the Conjuring films, one that really wasn’t needed nor adds anything of value to the overall mythos. Valak is back due to the magic of asspull writing, so we learn that she copied notes from Soul Eater’s Medusa, so it actually survived by possessing a guy working as a janitor in a French all girls catholic school, because is searching for (check notes) a holy artifact, maybe because Valak was a fallen angel, or something, the lore dispenser guy-christian librarian-priest is most likely making this shit up on the fly.

To stop it the Vatican hires back half the team from the first movie, because the priest guy conveniently died of colera offscreen in the meantime (the actor most likely is fine), so it’s up to the young nun and her sassy black nun friend to find and stop Valak once and for all… in a stupid fashion.

In a way, it’s intriguing how at least this one also manages to not be completely tosh thanks to some scenes (the baphomet does give it points), decent casting and budget… just meaning it’s another pile of strikingly efficient mediocre, despite being a pointless, unrequired cobbled together mass of horror styrofoam that’s also borderline boring and struggles to justify its own existence as a sequel.

Kinda amazing how many shades of monstrous mediocrity can actually exist.

Pikmin 4 NSWITCH [REVIEW] | Enter The Dogbus

10 years after the last mainline game, the beloved Nintendo series about floral strategy and cutesy war PTSD is back with Pikmin 4 for Nintendo Switch, and i was even more eager to get my mittens on it after replaying for review & funsies Pikmin 3 in its Deluxe edition-port on Switch.

Who am i kidding, after devouring the demo, i was ravenous to get into the full game ASAP.

Story is fairly typical Pikmin, as in, you know the deal by now: people keep crashlanding on this damn planet. And by people i mean poor Olimar, that crashlanded on the planet, sent out a SOS call, but then the rescue team itself had troubles with the ship, so its up to you, as the new recruit of the Rescue Corps (an intergalactic rescue organization) and one of its few “non-scattered around” remaining members to get the whole crew back together, then find and save Olimar, whom also sent them various pages of its journal.

Someone seem confused in terms of when it happens, even confusing it for a reboot/remake of the first game’s story (i guess since Olimar here too used Pikmins to get back the scattered pieces of its rundown but beloved ship, the Dolphin)… dunno why, but yep, since Olimar and Louie are involved too, and we get the new group of cute potato aliens also discuss of Koppai, the planet from where the expedition group of Pikmin 3 came from to avoid famine, heck, even an inhabitant from that planet later becomes an important plot point.

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