The Cyclops (1957) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

Really scraping the bottom of the Bert I. Gordon barrell with this one, but i did mention it twice before, and – as i said when reviewing 2008’s Cyclops – it’s not like we’re drowning in cyclops movies, at all, and this one has some of that “so bad it’s good” qualities, so for this year’s Giant Monster March’s finale it’s time to end as we begun, meaning to fall face first into a vat of Gouda, groan like a fuzzy giant toddler and “do the cyclops”.

At least it has Lon Chaney Jr. past his prime as a Universal horror star but not yet being reduced to a pathetic, drunken parody of himself (the epitome of that would be him in 1971’s Dracula VS Frankenstein, which nowadays is kind of a cursed movie as it was the undignified end of many actors careers and lives), not yet, here we have him in his post-glory phase were he did a lot of work pretty much any support roles in any kind of movie, mostly westerns, exotic adventure flicks, and horror films once in a while, mostly cheap, low budget, often indipendent productions.

The Cyclops definitely fits the bill, being a Bert I. Gordon film and what that entails, and here a plays a villanous mining expert in search of uranium, part of a posse led by the wife of a pilot that disappeared 3 years ago in the jungles of Mexico, as she still believes he’s alive despite all odds, but guess what, it’s a 50s b-movie, so the mining for radioactive material results in mutated everything, from spiders, lizards, eagles, mice and whatever animal stock footage Bert could superglue together.

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Gargantua (1998) [REVIEW] #giantmonstermarch

The very – and this case literal – enbodiment of “we have Godzilla at home”, though it’s american-flavoured Godzilla given the production and the year it came out, one year that lives in infamy for the Godzilla faithful, but wait, there’s actually more as this is also kinda E.T., guess the echoes of Nukie and Mac & Me made the idea survive till the very end of the millennium itself.

And speaking of rip-offs it’s not totally incorrect since this TV movie premiered the very same day early screening for 1998 Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla were held, so yeah, it is not a victim of circumstances or a project in production before that was hurried to “compete” (by trying to come out first in hope of fooling the less informed, as usual) with an upcoming big budget Hollywood film that happened to have a similar plot or subject matter.

Still, i think “rip-off” might be too strong a word, since it doesn’t even really tries to do emulate the Roland Emmerich movie, and it’s actually closer to Gorgo or Gappa (as there are more of the monster siblings and parents), because it does involve the “momma monster” coming of the seabed to retrieve “da baby” from an enclosure of sorts, in this case though it because underwater quakes made possible for some amphibious giant reptilian creatures to show up on the beaches of Malau, Hawaii, where a marine biologist has brought along his son for work and to hopefully process the recent loss of the mother.

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Giant Monster March is approaching the generators + Early April hiatus

It’s that time of year again where we let the MONSTERS FIGHT, even more as we have a new entry in Legendary’s Monsterverse with the collab episode of Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire hitting theathers internationally by the end of this month.

Also, i will be taking a break in April from the 1st up to the 14th of the month due to uni obligations and scholarly stuff, will be back from the 15th of April, though EXPRESSO review might still come out regardless.

Robot Holocaust (1986) [REVIEW] | Nobody expects the… Robot Holocaust?

Since newer generations of shit movie seekers might not be familiar with this one, let’s cover one of the “classics” in terms of poverty filmaking, one that indeed rivals the many horrible trashy exploitations movies we italians pumped out for the international market during the 70s and 80s, to a legendary degree. If you didn’t know, you would be forgiven in believing this was just another italian production with the usual combination of american actors and italian shooting locations.

Robot Holocaust has certainly that kind of aura to it, even more when it goes for the double whammy of having a sci fi story mixed the sword and sorcery bullshit… minus actual magic.

And i gotta say, upon revisiting it its still an impressive piece of legendary so bad its good shit, a relic from a past filled with movies like these that were so bad and poor in everything they ended up being accidentally funny, hilarious while being so bad it borders on being utright unwatchable shit.

For many of you, this isn’t anything new, at all, as the movie it’s pretty well known among older generations of crap cinema conosseurs, it’s “basic knowledge”, but Robot Holocaust deserves its place in bad movie history, and its legend it’s worth retelling over and over, even if it doesn’t involve Andre The Giant.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 29: Jurassic Hunt (2021)

I don’t know what it is about dinosaur movies with “Hunt” in the title that makes them suck, but it seems like a recurring theme…… wait, not really, Triassic Hunt was one of the better ones spat out by The Asylum, and to honest this one actually reminds me a little more of Jurassic Attack/Rise Of The Dinosaurs, due the outdoors locations being at the forefront, the mercenary squad sent out with a mission and the cheapo-depo levels of production, being one of those Dazzler Entertaiment distributed titles that immediatly scream “we filmed this in a national park or something”.

the plots sees the cast of Shock Troopers (or more accurately, its Data East knock-off) fighting dinosaurs into a hunting area designed exactly to be a secretive location where the game is jurassic, while “megane Regina from Dino Crisis” tags along and can’t stop giving away that she isn’t there for the actual dino hunt and that she’s basically working undercover to document the whole thing.

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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] Godzilla Minus One (2023) | WW Zilla

I was kinda apprehensive going into the new Godzilla movie (which is getting limited weeklong screenings everywhere outside of Japan), weirdly enough, due to some disappointed early feedback, so i decided to ignore most coverage after that and just go see it.

And i will address that indeed, after Shin Godzilla, going back to a period piece story set during WW II feels like a convenient move to avoid tackling modern political issues… but i will say that Godzilla Minus One does earn your attention and investment, thanks to one of the closest attempts at recapturing the spirit of the original Godzilla, to the point it’s almost a remake-prequel, and a great damn one that focuses on the human characters with great drama, punctuated by action scenes involving Godzilla (not the other way around), while also making Big G itself menacing again.

The premise follows Koichi, a man designed as a kamikaze pilot that, during the final years of WW II, fakes a malfunction of his airplane, and lands on the small island of Odo . There he is one of the few that survives the encounter with a giant dinosaur the locals call “Godzilla”, and with great shame, he comes back to the bombed ruins of his parent house, takes in a homeless woman and her foster daughter. In time the reconstruction begins, Koichi is on the verge of finally putting his nightmares of war to rest, but then Godzilla shows up again….

Honestly, even if not trying to push new boundaries, at all, Godzilla Minus One it’s a greatly compelling story with good characters, a solid period war drama at its core, and while the monster is CG, they pulled off a miracle with the effects looking so good for the tiny budget of 15 millions.

Highly recommended.

[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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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #6: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

“Funny” story: this is actually the second RE movie i watched, and the only one i ever watched in theathers. I wasn’t that interested at the time in the film series, so i just picked up on DVD years later the first Resident Evil movie, but didn’t bother with the sequels.

But since it was gonna be the final installment, i was a bit curious, so i went to see at one of my local cinemas, and turns out it wouldn’t have really mattered much if you saw all the sequels or none at all, because The Final Chapter will forever remain in my head as one of the most embarassing final bouts for a film series, or movies that somehow end up being distributed to big cinema chains.

An istance where i could realistically see people asking for their money back at the end of the movie, where i would agree with their anger and supplement them with rotten vegetables, so they could aim for the distributors and anyone involved outside of the poor employees, because it’s not their fault, so instead of littering the floors, give them a rotten leek so we can all stick it up Sony’s picture (via their Screen Gems’ hole, specifically), or throw a tomato at the HQ of Costantine Films.

Jesting aside, i’d be embarassed to release a movie like this, personally, even if – truth to be told – it’s not as bad as i remember it being, not “if your eyes could puke” bad, it’s still incredibly badly edited, so choppy that it’s a miracle you can actually tell what’s going on in almost half of the action scenes that involve melee fights (and some others too), where you can barely see things happening, mostly thanks to some occasional slow mo, but still, it’s almost a “blink and you missed it” type of deal, so badly edited is more than a good 40 % of the action scenes.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #5: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Not even waiting the 3 years between sequels anymore, as the well is running dry and instead of filling it with blood of the scribe, we’re making these even faster as we approach the penultimate chapter, with Retribution following upon the twist reveal at the end of Afterlife, with the Arcadia surrounded by a lot of black Umbrella helicopters that captures the original Alice and brings her to a remote underwater location in the Extreme North section of Russia, used for testing the T-Virus, from where she has to escape alongside both old and new faces, including many other characters from the videogames that Paul W.S. Anderson couldn’t cram in the previous script, like the fan favourites Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong and Barry Burton.

So, if the keyword of Afterlife was “clonatron and mind control robo-scarabs taken from RE 5”, Retribution also adds to the vocabulary salad “simulation” and “diorama”, showing off obvious inspiration from Westworld with Umbrella creating sets and clones to populate it before they die in it, because fuck any attempt of constructing more setpieces when we can literally redo the previous ones like it’s a rematch of previously beaten bosses in an older Zelda game.

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