[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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[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.

[EXPRESSO] Mercy (2026) | One Amazon Ring To Judge Them All

I’ll give director Timur Bekmambetov this: he does not lack tenacity, kickstarting the “screenlife” type of films with Unfriended back in 2015 and sticking to it to this day.

After the “so bad it’s good” Amazon commercial-crapfest that was his 2025 War Of The Worlds, we now have Mercy, a sci-fi thriller set in a distopic future where, to curb the criminality rates skyrocketing, the government and police concocted a new system to dole out justice: an IA program, Mercy, which basically acts a judge, jury and executioner.

One day a veteran police officer wakes up to find himself strapped to a chair and being a subject of the Mercy program, accused of killing his wife, with the IA giving him access to various databases, telephone records, private social media accounts, to try and defend himself from the accusation, by lowering a “guilty” probability rate via proving his arguments, all in 90 minutes, before he gets executed via sonic blast when time runs out.

It’s basically an attempt at a modern take on Minority Report in screenlife fashion, and it’s actually kinda okay? For once, it manages to not entirely take place via holograms and sci-fi screens from where a bound Chris Pratt has to investigate remotely, it’s kinda compelling and unlike War Of The Worlds 2025, it’s actually competent enough to engage the viewer and entertain enough, despite it also being fairly mediocre,

It’s also not really well written and the more you think about the plot points the more shaky they become, plus it’s also gross propaganda, given it’s a sci-fi film allegedly warning about the danger of leaving the judicial system to IA and algorhythms, but also promoting as the only solution a survellaince state (no qualms about the ethics of zero privacy), an Amazon sponsored one.

The Day The Anthem Died

So, as of today, Anthem’ official servers are being pulled, so the game – unless some fans do resurrect it via fan hosted servers, which some are working on – is officially dead know.

Hence now it’s the perfect time to plug back my review for the thing, as it’s indeed a “funeral-dirge” piece, why not, it’s also a very slow week and i won’t be having much if any EXPRESSO reviews (maybe i’ll do one tomorrow) out due to some unfavourable schedule issues (let’s put it that way) and most relevant films coming out on the 15th.

Don’t expect much of an eulogy about Anthem itself from me, since i never touched it again after the review, and what i played of it… hasn’t me weeping over it, to put it nicely.

12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 57: The Jurassic Games: Extinction (2025)

As promised, here we are talking about the Jurassic Games sequel, as in the actual one.

I still can’t quite believe the Dinosaur World situation, despite reviewing it and explaing it’s linkage to The Jurassic Games series, i still kinda struggle to accept this absurd situation.

But this time Ryan Bellgardt is back with a proper follow up to his mash up of dinosaur film with sci-fi virtual battle royale shenanigans, more in the vein of the Running Man than anything else, now that i think about it.

Like in the first film, we are in a dystopian future where authorities force selected deathrow prisoners into a seasonal death show, The Jurassic Games, where they compete in a VR simulation against deadly traps and expecially dinosaurs, this time with the only one left standing being able to avoid death by lethal injection.

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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 # 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 December #51: Ice Road Terror (2011)

Another one that’s been long overdue, and not because of any specific reason, besides resulting absurdly elusive to find so far, outside of buying a used import DVD of it on Ebay, which was also unbelievably expensive, hence the post-poning until eventual availability.

That did came when i found the thing uploaded on Youtube in full some months ago, glad i didn’t blow 40 bucks or something on just the US DVD copy. Without the box.

Especially for what is literally just a random SyFy dinosaur movie, Ice Road Terror is nothing more than that, and in hindsight it might sound like a mockbuster of that Liam Neeson starring film, The Ice Road, but that came out a decade later, in 2021, the title of this – apparently – its meant to reference a TV series i’ve never heard before, called Ice Road Truckers.

This movie too is about “ice road truckers”, as in a couple of truckers that are driving through Alaska’s frozen rivers in order to deliver some equipment to a remote diamond mine in the region.

But on arrival they encountered a prehistoric creature that had been long dormant in the ice.

Typical.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 50: Dinosaur World (2020)

I have been doing this long enough that i could tell this is a Chinese production just by the runtime alone, as it barely 80 minutes, like most of the stuff you can find on Chinese streaming platforms like YOKOU, or their equivalent channel on Youtube.

Well, i was half right, this is a Chinese-American production by a company called Flame Node (which just has this and something called “Clutch Shot” listed on IMDB) with mostly chinese or cino-american actors in the cast, and is also streaming on Amazon Prime Video (alongside other platforms) in some territories, and it has beloved social media comedian Steven He (aka the “EMOTIONAL DAMAGE” guy), whom also did star in a tokusatsu parody series called GINORMO, apparently.

Immediatly though i had a familiar feeling with the opening scene seeing people fight off dinosaurs with blaster rifles in sci-fi corridors… like didn’t Jurassic Games did the same maze as an activity mid way through the film?

The answer is yes, and immediatly after the title splash screen, it becomes obvious that this IS another copy of Jurassic Games, just this time done with the framing of “Dinosaur World” being a VR videogame coming off of its alpha stage and putting up a 5 million prize for partecipants to the closed beta, who will be picked randomly.

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