[EXPRESSO] They Will Kill You (2026) | Viscerae Satanae

There’s something to say about modern efficiently descriptive titles, as indeed you can get more direct of a title for a horror film than “They Will Kill You”, and it’s indeed pretty on the money, as the plot sees a young woman get recruit as a cleaning lady for the renowed high class hotel Virgil, but soon discover she was actually chosen as a offering to Satan himself, as the Virgil is basically a temple dedicated to him and his (mostly rich assholes) followers.

Little do these cultists know that their chosen sacrifice has undergone a Shaman King styled training arc while in prison, so she’s not stopping at anything on her quest for familiar revenge, especially now that she has been released, and has packed enough tools to do the deed, even if the Virgil has more supernatural shit going on than anyone could ever imagine.

It’s a action horror comedy romp of grindhouse style and proportions,with lots of graphic, deliberately over the top violence and lots of splattering of organs and blood all over the place, very reminescent of Tarantino’s style (down to the breaking down in chapters for twists and character backstories, plus some feet licking early on) and his emulation of the old grindhouse exploitation films, but the supernatural angle helps this stand out, basically making this a sort of revenge battle royale against satanic cultists that are almost as deadly as the ones in Blood.

It’s really fun, and even though the structure might feel a little repetitive, the short runtime helps the action flow fast & hard, plus even if you more or less figured out where it’s gonna go, there’s still plenty of unexpected and weird, over the top but also incredibly entertaining shit to keep the splatterworks and fun factor very high.

Final Verdict: Expresso

[EXPRESSO] The Bride! (2026) | Mary Shelley’s Frankenmess

This was a film i did look forward to see, obviously, being a peculiar take on Bride Of Frankenstein, with the trailers showing off The Creature (the Frankenstein monster) and The Bride in a Bonny & Clyde, Syd & Nancy style dynamic as they travel a 30’s America of gangsters and trenched detectives.

The premise sees the ghost/spirit of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein herself, meta narrate about her “sequel” about the “Bride” of Frankenstein, in this case the corpse of a prostitute working undercover to gather info about a particularly violent mob boss, which is dug up after the Creature travels to America and seeks the help of Dr. Ephronious to make him a companion in order to soothe his unique loneliness.

The experiment is successful and so the Bride is borne, but it becomes difficult for the two monsters to go unnoticed, not only due to the police and the mob befuddled by a presumed dead woman showing up on the newspapers’ headlines, but also because Mary Shelley herself occasionally possesses the Bride’s body…..

the idea of a feminist take on Bride Of Frankenstein makes perfect sense, i do believe so, even if discordant by design, as it’s not only a horror-crime duet of deranged protagonists complementing each other’s delirium, but it’s also a gothic romance that often dips into comedy and even musical sequence that seems to tribute-spoof Frankenstein Junior.

It’s ambitious and – again- by design tries to combine together pieces that don’t really naturally fit, which is indeed “very Frankenstein”, but the execution honestly feels like a really hot mess of intentions, even more stitched together and messier than intended, downright clunky.

I do respect its ambition, even if the final result is indeed quite flawed, but also proper interesting and never quite boring.

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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Tromeo & Juliet (1996) [REVIEW] | Troma Shaped Box

While i was adamant about never reviewing a Troma film again due to them defending Harry Knownles some time ago, after seeing the new Toxic Avenger reboot/remake i realized there’s no point as the company died years ago, the soul of it, anyway, and it’s sad that i somehow longed for when they were trash but punk for real, instead of pretending as they are today.

Plus, at this point, they have so little relevance left regardless, so whatever, as they have a right to keep trying to remake their old shlock classics (or do new installments on their old series like Class Of Nuke ‘Em High), so have i to review Tromeo & Juliet for a lark if i want (and so have you on this decision of mine, obviously), and because it’s that time of the year .

I was gonna say basically the same thing for the SGT Kabukiman review i planned last year, but that i had to delay, so i’ll refer back to this one for clarification in the future, instead of redoing the spiel everytime.

And i guess at one point i’ll have to do a full essay on Kaufman and Troma as a whole, because in a way it deserves more discussion that i’m giving it here, but let’s not get carried away, it’s time to revisit a Troma classic, their shlock loose retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with an obvious but also obviously catchy punny name, Tromeo & Juliet (still makes more sense than Gnomeo & Juliet).

Time to shit on Shakespeare, because why not?

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[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] 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) | Charity Zombies

Second part of the 28 Years Later trilogy, The Bone Temple follows up the honestly incredible ending of 28 Years Later, which revealed the “Jimmy” name written on corpses and houses as the namesake for – basically – a posse of cultish killers, like if the droogs from Clockwork Orange were based on reviled UK media personality Jimmy Saville.

This sequel follows up on them, but it’s also quite focused about the character of Dr. Kelso, which makes sense since he was the best part of previous film, as he tries to experiment on a specific “alpha zombie” he dubs Samson, while Spike is forced to enter the “Jimmies”…

it’s an interesting sequel, in the sense it does capitalize on the more interesting and unique parts of the previous films, Kelso’s “bone temple” and the “Jimmy gang”, as director Nia DaCosta (Candyman 2021, The Marvels) leans further with the juggling of different tones, with a scene that borders on being a Rob Zombie-esque delirium, and almost feels “out of place” , even if conceptually on the same vibe of “smoking a morphine joint with my zombie broski”.

This comes at the cost of somewhat downplaying the zombies, in a way, and a film that somehow feels a bit safer than the previous one, even though it arguably has a better pacing and could be argued it’s better than 28 Years Later.

It also feels like what it indeed is, the second part of 28 Years Later “part 1”, as the two films do indeed complete each other, making me wonder if the third and final entry (with a returning character appearing here at the end) will indeed feel as such.

Regardless, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple it’s still quite good, even with some questionable choices, i absolutely recommend it.

12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 53: Primitive War (2025)

I wasn’t aware of Primitive War until a friend recommended looking up the trailer some time ago, and indeed it looked promising and actually kinda cool, like an actual effort and not just the usual low budget dinosaur drivel that we get nowadays.

I mean, if going for the Vietnam route worked for King Kong, it can work for a dinosaur film as well, why not? It’s at least something to shake up the formula.

And it also released earlier this year, so i didn’t have to dust this off from the crypt or something.

in 1968, during the Vietnam war, a Green Beret platoon goes missing during an operation, so a search & rescue team, named Vulture Squad, is tasked with a recon mission to locate the missing platoon, only for them to be attacked by dinosaurs.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember #52: Baby: Secret Of The Lost Legend (1985)

Unlike the other 1985 film review for Dino Dicember this year, this one is indeed a proper dinosaur film, and one that does know the target demographic its going for, not that a title like “Baby The Lost Legend” would led to people assuming the opposite.

It’s also another dinosaur themed by Disney, this time under the Touchstone Films/Pictures label

like One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, thought thankfully no “Yellow Peril” age chinese stereotypes, we’re moving to Africa as the movie premises involves a couple of archeologists trying to track down the local legendary monster known as mokele mobembe, whom happens to share many characteristics with sauropods, dinosaurs basically, leading the two to find a family of brontosauruses deep in the jungles of Congo.

The two are followed by the African military, which seems the dinosaurs as a potential treat and will have to escape them in order to save the baby and its parents as well…

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Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022) [REVIEW] | Mecha Santa MK-II

Okay, just ONE christmas themed slasher to review under the tenenbaum.

It is Christmas’ Eve, after all.

Also, not one of the more obvious one, yet not an oldie, so that brings us to 2022’s Christmas Bloody Christmas, which is an apt if generic title, unrelated to the Silent Night, Deadly Night series (even though it started as a remake of that one, which did get a remake-reboot released earlier this month) or Black Christmas, the 2020 reboot which i was denied seeing by local distributors saying it was coming to theathers here too…. it never did in any widespread way.

We’ll do that next year, i’m really not feeling it this time around, nor dumpster diving for another shitty Krampus film that might or not be about the Krampus.

No thanks, i’ll stick to something more recent and normal, like this film about a defective robot santa malfunctioning on Christmas’ Eve and starting a killing spree.

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