Bujingai: Swordmaster PS2 [REVIEW] | Wuxia GACKT Action

You think you know the depths of the Playstation 2 library.

You don’t. You just don’t.

If this wasn’t the case, a title like Bujingai: Swormaster would have been covered by gaming Youtubers as a “forgotten gem” to the point it’s not forgotten at all anymore.

And yet, 99 % of you before know never knew there was a PS2 era hack n slash in the vein of Devil May Cry but where you play as sci-fi wuxia Gackt.

Again, the PS2 library is so big we still are finding more obscure titles to showcase.

Personally, i remember seeing this one a lot in bargain bin cases after a while, since it was distributed here by 505 Games/Gamestreeet (figures since they are an Italy based distributor), which back in the early 2000s were famous for mostly peddling ol’ budget games/shovelware by the bucketloads, so that didn’t help, but at least a PAL copy is fairly cheap and easy to find still today.

Can’t say the cover helped because sure as hell the general public wasn’t gonna go “is that Gackt?” after looking at the box art.

But yes, he gave right to the teams to use his likeness for the main character, Lau Wong, a wuxia hero that has to do the usual: sky surf on an ethereal cloud while doing the usual wuxia ballet-combat aerobics and eventually go back to Earth, 100 years after an apocalyptic event wiped out most of the population while giving survivors powers, to rid the planet of a demonic army that has holed up in the asian city of Bujingai.

And since it’s a martial arts inspired game, it just happens the head of the demon army is a former fellow martial arts student turned rival that has gone evil, as you do in these.

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30 Years Of ROCKET LAWNCHAIR, Kombat In The Street and The Shark Summer Parter

SNK released an official video celebrating the Metal Slug’s 30th anniversary a few days ago.

The video itself it’s nothing too special, just a thank you using footage from all mainline Metal Slug games (and Metal Slug Defense-Attack too), but it ends with a message displayed on a NEO GEO cabinet: “MISSION REBOOT”.

Obviously a teaser for a potential new mailine game in the future, i’d argue about damn time since the new Saudi prince-owned SNK had been pushing out a plethora of F2P gacha titles using the Metal Slug license, ranging from crap to ok, MS Awakening was actually ok as in it was as close as you could get to a proper MS title…. for a F2P thing, so getting an actual, proper Metal Slug game would be nice.

I mean, given the current nostalgia-driven market and how it has been almost 2 decades since the last mainline MS game, Metal Slug 7, released for the DS in 2008, then ported-expanded on PSP, Metal Slug XX came out in 2009, and that version was rereleased on modern consoles back in 2018, almost a decade ago already.

So the fans have been starved enough, and this comes alongside PlayOn rereleasing a new version of the home console version of the Neo Geo hardware, the NEO GEO AES +, which will have newly made carts for the console but also will be compatible with the old ones.

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Space Monster Wangmagwi (1967) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

Digging deep into the kaiju fishin’ hole of mid ’70s to late ’80s with this one, which i’m quite sure none of you has even heard of, Space Monster Wangmagwi.

And i can’t blame you because it was basically unheard of outside of South Korea until its 2022 international screening at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, and released on home video in 2023… for US home video, but it’s something.

Ailing from South Korea and actually being the earliest surviving South Korean giant monster movie (as the original 1962 Pulgasari is considered lost, just its script surviving as part of the Korean Film Archive), being made during the later child-friendly phase of Godzilla’s Showa era, actually the same year of the second Toho produced King Kong film, King Kong Escapes.

It’s also kinda surprisingly cheap, right away it gives off that aura as it’s a late ’60s films… in black and white and with production values that make me think Prince Of Space didn’t look that bad, though the laughable “tin can suits” the aliens (which show very human eyes through the eyehole-visor part of their suits) wear doesn’t help, as does the very cheap look of the ships dials and obvious old school phones and shower caps covered in kitchen tinfoil.

Still better than the “airplane cockpit cum shover privacy curtain” of Plan 9, but with that opening scene setting the bar for the special effects pretty low, i was expecting the scubagorilla from Robot Monster to be the kaiju the aliens would unleash…. you’d wish.

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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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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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12 Days Of Dino December # 55: The Invisible Raptor (2023)

Sadly i learned of this midway through doing last year’s batch of reviews for 12 Days Of Dino Dicember, so i wasn’t able to cover it back then, but we’re fixing that right now.

The idea is both cute and obvious as hell: a dinosaur film without the dinosaur.

More correctly, the dinosaur is there, it’s a velociraptor, but due to “science” it was made super smart AND invisible, escaping from the lab and going on a rampage, leaving it up to a disgraced paleonthologist (reduced to mascot costume shenanigans at a dino themed amusement park) to save the day from the invisible menace.

I don’t need to, but i will point out that this so obviously feels like them stumbling into a somewhat genius solution when they couldn’t afford the dinosaur in their dinosaur film.

The film knows everyone would have sussed that out immediatly, so it plays as a horror-black comedy that’s basically a spoof of all things Spielberg… well, mostly a flood of references mushed in together, with protagonist being Dr. Grant Walker, an appropriately named fusion of Indiana Jones with Dr. Grant and i suppose Chuck Norris’ character from Walker Texas Ranger, maybe?) as he teams up with an hapless security guard in trying to stop the invisible dinosaur, while everyone obviously doesn’t believe his story until it’s too late, Jaws style.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 54: Jurassic Island (2022)

If you are gonna make a low budget dinosaur film, i can’t nor will stop you.

Obviously, how else i’m gonna keep doing this rubric otherwise?

Still, consider this a courtesy more than a request: please call it anything else than “Jurassic Island”. There are simply way too many films titled as such.

I understand wanting to keep the “Jurassic” in as it helps shows up in searches (and fooling someone into renting this, believing it’s one of the big budget Jurassic Park/World films), just fucking choose another noun.

Plus it is makes it sound like it’s a kids film… which is very rarely the case.

Might as well ask since it’s not like i have much to say about the plot.

So much i would be tempted to just outright skip it.

I mean, what do you think the plot for a movie called “Jurassic Island” is?

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[EXPRESSO] Avatar: Fire And Ash (2025) | Cigarette Butts

Here we are again.

Somehow “disappointed”.

Sound silly, i know, the second one was admittedly a bit better than i expected and had some surprises in there… this one having a new Nav’i tribe of brutal savages (just short of being cannibals) isn’t enough to stave off boredom, but then again plot comes third or fourth more than usual this time around, taking a backset for just repeating almost verbatim the same plot beats of Way Of The Water, with some extra piles of new stuff that conveniently happens just because the script needs to -once again – free from capture these dumbass characters.

It’s pointless to be angry about an Avatar movie being another pile of shallow, utter nonsense, but this time around is even more boring dull nonsense that goes for a 3 hours equivalent of jiggling keys to infants, and it has framerate issues, which i don’t remember being a thing when i watched Way Of The Water in theathers just 3 years ago.

Maybe i got lucky back then, but regardless of how it looks that way, it’s distracting since it often fluctuates from looking like a big budget cutscene of a videogame, looking like we’re a HD camera feed from the set, looking actually cinematic, and so on.

It’s just insanely distracting and the added motion smoothing almost gave me a headache, and mind you, this was for a 2D screening.

I was reminded of something actually borderline unwatchable, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, but the sentiment is there, as i wonder why Cameron keeps making tech demo movies for proven tech (or telling a worthwhile plot with this astounding technological prowess), or he just doesn’t go make videogames instead.

Not that anything of this matters, as people will go see this on droves anyway.

[EXPRESSO] Lupin The IIIrd The Movie: The Immortal Bloodline (2025) | Mystery Of Monkey

So, i did decide to just go see this new Lupin The 3^rd film for funsies, i mean, i sure do love me some Lupin (and it’s a freakin institution here in Italy, so it’s already screening here), and is directed by Takeshi Koike, of Redline fame, i am in.

Problem is, i haven’t really kept up with Lupin many anime iterations, i’m more of a casual enjoyer, and this is meant as the conclusion of Koike’s “Lupin the IIIrd” subseries, maybe a send off for the character of Lupin itself, as it also takes story elements from the very first Lupin The 3^rd movie, The Mistery Of Mamo.

Not that you needed this digest as the movie does a handy recap, which also makes it obvious this isn’t a random Lupin movie at all, but for what concerns this film, is about Lupin & the gang being lured into an uncharted island by someone that knows them very well, and forced to face not only the island venomous mists, but an apparently immortal being known as “Muom”….

I don’t know if this will actually be the last Lupin III film ever, doubt it, but it’s the first one in 30 frigging years made in traditional animation, and it sure as hell looks great, even with the occasional 3D CG bits for the monsters, it’s very stilish, the action is great, but it’s also lacking on plot and character development, despite the very strong start the pacing also suffers as soon as the story does, so it ends up being “almost good” but nothing feels properly developed, more focused on being stylish old school pulp action (more serious in tone than “classic Lupin”), which it is still fun, but the film does ultimately suffer from it.

Decent, but kinda disappointing.

The Crawling Eye AKA The Trollenberg Terror (1958) [REVIEW] | Nightmare In Alps Land

Since in recent years i found it was “HD remastered” on DVD by the Italian distributor Sinister Film (hence it was cheap and something i didn’t need to pay extra to import), i’ve been curious to check this out. Even if this italian re-release is under the “I Mostri Delle Rocce Atomiche”(lit “The Atomic Rock Monsters”) title, somehow an even worse title than the more common one its known in the US and worlwide, The Crawling Eye, which fuckins spoils how the monsters look.

But oh well, who cares, since the movie had quite the legacy, which included being the inspiration for the latter John Carpenter’s The Fog and being spoofed during the early days of MST3K.

Kinda funny how despite the DVD title the movie itself still shows the original title, The Trollenberg Terror…. i kinda understand why it was changed for international releases, honestly.

It’s not incorrect, thought, as the plot starts off with mountaineers being mysteriously decapitated on the slopes of the Swiss mountain known as the Trollenberg, scientists with a mountain observatory for catching cosmic rays finding there’s an odd cloud that simply sits upon the mountainside, never moving, while emanating a clear radioactive trace.

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