Upcoming Attractions: Sharks und Pirates

(Source) https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/4273516?q=sharknado+

(no, a Girls Und Panzer retrospective isn’t afoot… YET)

Just a quick overview of what’s coming for the rest of the summer on the blog.

July will be Shark Month. Usually it is anyway, but this year i actually have managed to pile up enough material (despite everything), so there will be a shark movie review out each day, and maybe some EXPRESSO ones too, depending on when i can get to some releases in theathers.

August will yet again be a One Piece retrospective…. of the TV specials.

Last summer we did go over the featurettes, and it’s still too early for me to properly re-assess all the One Piece movies. Like i said before, i’d prefer some more time to pass,, in order to avoid some lazy rewrite-recycle of the old reviews i made in italian years ago.

Also, i’m gonna take a break from the 15th of August (included) until the 1st of September.

This doesn’t mean i will stop posting at all, since EXPRESSO reviews will be made and published, but any time consuming form of review or retrospective will go on hiatus.

That’s about it, so look forward to another summer of sharks and anime pirates!

#E32021 Conferences Recap/Review/Thing

As already pointed out, E3 coming back this year was kind of a big deal, as the pandemic made it impossible to be held as usual in 2020, and even with the usual croc of shit that the event is and promotes… it’s a ritual, it’s a tradition for many people with huge interest in videogames, it’s a communal experience.

But i wonder if one year of non holding the event made many companies just forgot what the hell the expo was even supposed to be, like old people forgetting something they usually did out of habit because they had to stop doing it for a reason or others.

Mind you, E3 history is full of cringy – and often legendary – conferences often full of people that barely could speak english or had any PR experiences, overblown lies and hype for everything, announcements of announcement without nothing to show for titles of interest, so it’s telling this year’s output was a complete mess.

I don’t think that’s too hyperbolic to say.

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#E32021 Nintendo Direct & Bandai Namco [Highlights]

The final piece of rambles-recap-highlights i’m gonna write about this E3 edition… before the actual “final piece” of considerations and overall evalution.

First the long awaited Nintendo Direct, often topped only by the community basically setting themselves up to expect the moon and bitching about when they don’t get it…. or when they get it, because a certain set of people enjoy ranting and being miserable about the videogames they say to love so much, instead of actually playing said interactive entertaiment. You can’t please people that don’t even know what they want.

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#E32021 Koch Primetime Gaming Stream & IGN EXPO [Highlights]

Yeah, compressing both together for my own convenience and because i really don’t have much to say about the Koch Primetime Stream (originally aired on Twitch) they had. I can say it was quite bad as a showcase for Koch Media new gaming label, named “Prime Matter”, 2 hours of mostly boredom thanks to the shit format of having basically an awkward interview relay race between various developers, with a lot of very dry talk and very little footage shown.

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#E32021 Summer Game Fest [Highlights]

Changed my mind, i will write small recaps/highlights of the various conferences, starting with this one.

Which is reall Geoff Khiley hosting “The Games Awards” by another name… yay?

Even more due to the event being sponsored by Prime Gaming…YAY.

Yeah, i didn’t miss this part of the E3 so much.

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“It’s Like Pokemon, but with Guns!”, for real this time

So, a couple of days ago a saw someone posting the trailer for this game in Early Access on Steam, called “Palworld”, saying that you were not ready to see it. They were fuckin right, because this game looks incredible. And pending for a legal bending from Nintendo. Or not?

I thought, oh, this is another of these Pokemon clones that are coming out now, like Cassette Beasts, or stuff already released like Monster Crown, who clearly borrow something or a lot from Nintendo popular series, Big N doesn’t have a trademark of “collecting monsters” as a game mechanic, why is this diff- HOLY SHIT, the character did a fly-by shooting with a rifle!!!

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Camel Spiders (2011) [REVIEW] | Not camels, nor spiders

Spiders: when you can’t afford sharks or giant reptiles for your creature feature.

And because many people do find arachnids in general to be quite disgusting, so it’s no wonder they’re a constant for b-movies since forever, especially if they’re of giant size.

This time we have Camel Spiders, one of the many late 2000s/early 2010s Roger Corman productions (sporting the “Roger Corman Presents” label on DVD releases), this one directed by Jym Wynorski… credited as Jay Andrews as usual.

For consistency’s sake, i guess.

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[EXPRESSO] Army Of The Dead (2021) | The Uncertain Dead

Zack Snyder has taken a break from superhero movies to come back to the zombie farm for Army Of The Dead, a zombie flick that’s also a heist movie, originally conceived as a spiritual successor of Snyder’s own 2004 Dawn Of The Dead remake, but over time becoming his own distinct thing, while it stewed in development hell until Netflix picked it in 2019.

While Las Vegas is plagued by a zombie epidemic, a group of mercenaries is crazy enough to try pulling the absurd and hugely risky feat of going into the quarantined zone to pulls off the biggest heist ever conceived, and do it before the government drops a nuclear bomb on the area.

This sounds like a great recipe for a bombastic, excessive good time… but it isn’t.

Putting aside that the movie is not so full of action as it marketed and presented, it’s a flawed execution of a good premise, one that’s also very long (2 hours and a half) and totally feels like it, even more as it feels unclear on what exactly it wants to pull off, not helped by the fact there are tonal inconsistencies; figures when it feels so conflicted between almost being Zombieland or a more Romero-style zombie film.

It’s frustrating, because it has some interesting, noteworthy variations and additions to the zombie mythos, it does live up the title in that regard, the actions scenes are quite good, there’s even some decent humour. There’s something to it, but it tries to pack too much stuff in and it never fully “clicks” because of it.

We’ll see more regardless, as Snyder wants to do a sequel, and Netflix already greenlit two prequels, in form of a film and an animated series, so maybe something better could come out of it.

Alligator II – The Mutation (1991) [REVIEW] | Back To The Sewers

Another chapter in the accidental saga of Jaws rip-offs and their often interesting tales of genre producers basically kicking a young James Cameron out of the director’s chair, of people making movies about barracudas that actually just used them to trojan horse a completely different thriller plot, of alligators becoming giant in Chicago’s sewer system due to pharmaceutical experiments on dogs, and producers pestering poor Joe Dante into directing rip-offs of his own movies…

Once again we wander in the territory of “we wanna make another one and trick people into thinking it’s a sequel by slapping a number 2 and a subtitle on the title”, but i struggle to even justify this one’s existence. Sure, the first one ended with another baby gator being flushed down the same sewer, but usually you’d want to cash-in into a movie like this right away…. not 11 years later.

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Python II/Pythons 2 (2002) [REVIEW] | The Russian Connection

The snake factory always has more, because it’s easy as always to slap some roman numerals over a snake image and call a movie a sequel to another movie about killer giant snakes, regardless of continuity.

Yeah, another un, tied to the 2000’s Python more by some cast members than anything else, and by that i actually mean William Zabka is here playing one of the lead characters, and it’s still produced by Python Productions and Unified Film Organization.

Clearly it made more sense to use the name “Python” once more, since New Alcatraz bombed very bad, not that it was great, but the fact they didn’t simply title it after the main killer snake probably didn’t help at all.

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