[EXPRESSO] The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) | Starbound and Bible Black

While i (mostly) stand by my review of the first Super Mario animated film by Illumination… i do wanna stress out i didn’t mean it was great (i even said “considering it’s from Illumination”), but i found it to be pretty fun regardless even if it was trying to basically be a big nostalgia trip and advertisment vehicle.

If nothing else, the Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a follow up that clearly knows it doesn’t have to put any effort in terms of plot, as the first movie did set up the characters and the world, so this one instead quadruples down on nostalgic Nintendo references to any of their Mario or non-Mario related franchise, including a certain starbound, Thunderbirds inspired woodland creature whose presence leaked days before release.

To be fair, the plot isn’t really that thinner than the previous movie, and adapting Galaxy’s story – with a splash of Sunshine’s via Bowser Jr. – isn’t a bad choice, but since they did establish the world in the first film, they decided to use this as an excuse to pump in even more characters and references instead of actually giving anything (like the romantic subplot) some space to breathe, beside the main focus, as in, Bowser Jr. launching a scheme to free his dad via Rosalina’s powers.

As a result it’s even more than the first movie an ensemble of things just happening, as the screenwriters just throw scenes and characters, all Mario (and non-Mario) things all into the pot, regardless… which the previous film did, but not to this degree, and the short runtime futhers exacerbates the matter.

I will admit it’s still very well animated, very cute, and the actions scenes (especially the various fights) are well done, making for a decent animated kids film. It’s okay.

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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Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman (1958) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

One thing that might surprise younger people is that despite its popularity, Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman ain’t a precursor on the trend of giant/miniaturized people, quite the opposite.

It’s also funny how is such a movie obviously conceived for the drive-in circuits, since it’s so short than of course it had to be shown as a double feature, that being Corman’s War Of The Satellites.

So short than to expand the runtime from 66 minutes to 75 for the TV version they had to basically reuse sequences, add a long crawl at the beginning and even fuck around with frames manipulation to artificially lenghten the thing. Jesus Christ, the desperation indeed.

In hindsight, one does learn to appreciate the efficiency of these cheap movies from the era, for better or worse they ended up not wasting your time as much as some crap movies now do, even if they clearly wanted to reach the standard 90 minutes, but in the “age of content”, these films being to the point are quite welcome in their brevity.

Even though often they are so more due to budget than anything else.

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[EXPRESSO] Project Hail Mary (2026) | Boldore Dash

Based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir (also author of The Martian, adapted by Ridley Scott back in 2015), Project Hail Mary is promoted once again as the kind of “sci film you’ve never seen before”, and i feel that might harbour some disappointment.

Not because the film is bad, mind you, but because – as already pointed out by other critics – this IS something we have seen before, or more correctly, an ensemble of sci-fi ideas we have seen before, to the point one could almost envision it as a more happy, family friendly take on Villeneuve’s Arrival, in a way.

The plot follows a math scientist, Grace, that wakes up in a spaceship with amnesia, only to find himself the only person left alive, but slowly remembers why he’s there, sent as part of “Project Hail Mary”, an expedition to study why only a single star in the galaxy, Tau Ceti, isn’t being “consumed” despite being in range of the infrared “Petrova line” connecting the Sun to Venus, acting as a vector for organisms known as “Astrophage”, which are slowly dimming the Sun and will eventually make Earth’s temperature drop by a catastrophical degree.

While working on a solution, Grace finds an unexpected visitor and forms a friendship that will help in his quest to avoid Earth freezing to death….

Dispelling the “it’s really original never seen before” marketing babble is more of a necessary observation than a diss, because it’s a really well done mix of already seen sci fi ideas, led by a notable performance by Ryan Gosling in a movie that’s ultimately a wholesome, family friendly ordeal, which is quite nice as the movie does manage to properly balance out the more cerebral aspects with the emotional and comedy-laden moments.

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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[EXPRESSO] Hoppers (2026) | Mindjacking In Nature

While i skip most of Pixar’s (and Disney’s for that matter) output nowadays, i decided to give Jumpers a try even if the premise didn’t quite excite me.

The premise sees Mable, a young girl that loves animals and grew attached to a pond her grandma used to take her and relax with the sound of nature, trying to fight a local politician that is banking its campaign on expanding the highway by constructing over that very pond.

Much to Mable’s dismay, he can because the pond is actually devoid of animal life, but she finds out bringing in a beaver will make the other animals follow suite, and trying to do so, she discovers a secret university project where they use advanced robot animals and project their mind into these to infiltrate and monitor the fauna better.

She then forcefully “mind jacks” into the robot beaver using the device in an effort to make the animals swarm the pond and so demonstrate they can’t actually build over that habitat….

Gotta say, maybe Pixar isn’t completely washed up, because Jumpers is actually quite good.

First, it doesn’t take nowhere as long as expected for Mable to get into the “not Avatar” device and start journeying into the animal’s world, there is enough time spent to characterize Mable herself as a likeable young activist moved by actual love and respect for the animals, maybe a bit too much to understand some consequences, but well meaning, plus the animal world itself and its rules are actually more interesting than one would expect, harboring some genuinely surprising turns.

It’s an ecological fable that’s actually is more effective because it isn’t preachy, there are some fun designs and very cute animation quirks like the switching from realistic and “talking animals” vision of the events.

Final Verdict: Expresso

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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Giant Monster March is a-ready to go-go once more

FIY i also had a hands on ramble about the Virtual Boy accessory for Switch 1 and 2 that i planned to release earlier, but didn’t due to having to tie some uni knots, that article will still come out, for now we’re once again about to begin the now staple rubric of the blog, Giant Monster March, which will have some “obvious” picks alongside some a lot more obscure pulls this year.

I really wanted to make it extra this year but couldn’t due to the aforementioned universitary education business taking a lot of my time, but after all, the new Monsterverse Godzilla film is scheduled for 2027, so..

[EXPRESSO] Scarlet (2025) | “Why Don’t You Ramlet?”

After debutting at 2025’s Venice Film Festival, Hosoda’s latest film, Scarlet, is releasing in theathers worlwide.

And to be honest i was ready to be disappointed, but you know, even Belle with its flaws was quite interesting, but Scarlet instead surpassed my expectations for the worse, and it pains me to say that it is, without a doubt, the worse Hosoda film ever, however you slice it.

The premise is not necessarily bad, at all, basically doing a genderbend version of Hamlet, but when the heroine Scarlet, fails to avenge her father’s death at the hands of her evil uncle Claudius, she finds herself in a limbo where souls gather after death, regardless of era or nation.

There is she informed by a strange shaman woman that her uncle Claudius is here too, and is amassing an army to stop others going to the “Infinite Lands” beyond the mountains, so she continues her quest for vengeance, helped by Hijiri, a pacifist paramedic from modern day Japan.

Scarlet it is the worse written Hosoda film ever, with a story that even by its own fantasy sci fi logic makes little sense, a super basic Hamlet deconstruction that has nothing to say and doesn’t proper explore anything, just throws in the air the usual waffling about the “futility of vengeance” and “the necessity of violence”, features incredibly dull, uninteresting characters and ends with one of the stupidest “optimistic” endings i’ve ever seen.

To make matters worse, it’s not even pretty, starting off strong with good 2D animation in the prologue but then it’s a constantly inconsistent flip-flopping between 2D and 3D CG animation, all looking astoningly cheap for a feature film by Hosoda’s Studio Chizu, with musical scenes meant to wow audiences being downright laughable and featuring generic, unispired music to boot.

I.K.U. (2000) [REVIEW] | LGBT Robosexual Runner

While i most likely won’t be reviewing the new Wuthering Heights film adaptation, to prove my platonical love for you, the audience, i will review this film i found on DVD in a flea market, and no, it wasn’t on the porn section.

I know i had to get it, it was like, 5 bucks at max, and with a title that screams “CINEMA” as IKU gets a IGN certified “10 out of 10” just for reference-pun combo that is the subtitle “I, Robosex” added in the Italian DVD release.

Sometimes i get to find import DVD copies of weird state sponsored video art when i go thrifting, sometimes i pick up fully localized and officially distributed “technically not porn” like this.

So, the hell is this?

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