Deadly Eyes (1982) [REVIEW] | Game Of Rats

I would like to thank Canada for asking the question: can we remake The Killer Shrews and make it less crap, despite also making it about rats?

I mean, especially if you’re a fan of MST3K it’s hard not to think of that, not because the mutated animals are shrews, but because they did the same trick of dressing up dogs (daschunds here) with special effects to make the rats, alongside some puppet props.

To be fair, of course this movie was bound to have a bigger budget and be better given how notoriusly low the budget was for The Killer Shrews, how it was pretty much a “regional” drive-in flick with actors that were hard to understand due to the accents and dialect… and it’s a better movie all around. The old trick of using dogs masquerading as rats actually works here, because they do have better budgets for the effects, instead of just putting moss and bad wigs on the poor canines, so you don’t really notice they’re dogs while watching, and the rats puppets and props are actually decent-to-good in quality, so the answer to the question posed at the beginning is already “yes”.

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Shockwave A.K.A. I.A. Assault (2006) [REVIEW] | Wynorski’s War Of The Worlds

I didn’t plan to do a Jim Wynorski-A-Thon when i accidentally started watching movies in my saved list that would soon abandon Amazon Prime Video (or gate themselves beyond another paywall), and i’m tired having to preface this already, but i can’t say i really wanted to see this movie that much.

Then again, i did put in the “watch for later” list because the robots in the thumbnail looked like the martian war machines in H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds.

Plot is sadly not as interesting, with a couple of experimental robots sporting advanced IA being carried on a plane over a desert Pacific island, plane crashes, and Navy Seals (because the OSI is busy learning not to plug the entire mainframe into a single wall socket) are sent in to recapture the robots, as they turned against the humans, and they’re getting smarter and smarter….

Script convenient criminals also happen to be arrive on the island, as they manage to get the helicopter stuck there after robbing 2 milions from a passenger cruise, but then again, the Navy (Such As) Seals might as well bring nerf guns, despite knowing the “supah” robots can be harmed only by a specific weapon. And they know because the scientist’s daughter, also a scientist and carrying on her father’s work, told me it is so.

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EX-ARM anime (2021) [REVIEW] | Make the bad guys cry like….

I knew of Ex-Arm before the series was announced, as in i red the first volume of the manga, and thought that was.. alright.

Then in early november 2020 i discovered there was an anime planned for it, and apparently it was supposed to launch earlier, but got delayed a couple of times, post-poned until its January 2021 release on Crunchyroll, as one of their “Crunchyroll Originals” exclusive projects.

I heard about it on Twitter, alongside many baffled comments on why the hell is a live-action director with no experience in anime directing a 3D CG anime and also tasking a production company that also has no experience in anime… and i immediatly knew i would just “have” to review it, to witness the monstrum and write a report about what could be found in its wretched bowels.

Get confortable, as this autopsy-review will examine all the guts and decomposed organs, and there’s a LOT of those to rifle through with this one!

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Bermuda Tentacles (2014) [REVIEW] | BDF BDF BDF BDF BDF BDF!

You work at The Asylum. SyFy has commissioned another movie, it is a day of the week.

You’re told no sharks, no tornadoes, no dragons, no spiders (giant or normal size) or any combination of these.

No, the monster can’t be made of lava, trapped at the bottom of the sea (being trapped under the sea floor counts) or from another dimension.

The note just says:

“the american president is in danger, after the Air Force One got hit by a tremendous thundestorm just over the The Bermuda Triangle. The _______ is sent in to retrieve the president, but a giant ____ emerges from the deep, potentially posing a threat to America and the world. You are a bad enough dude to save the president.”

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Dino Dicember #30: Jurassic Predator (2018)

Yes, “Predator”, singular, this has nothing to do with Extinction: Jurassic Predators (plural), which was done because The Dinosaur Project/The Lost Dinosaurs did ok in review and made some money, so we’re gonna make another found footage dinosaur movie, with good practical effects and worse in every other aspect.

But i already reviewed that. Just yesterday.

I have to preface i was gonna review Jurassic Thunder (the one head mounted machine guns on a T-Rex) for this Dino Dicember slot, but i relented, because i felt nothing i could say will matter to a movie built on the foundation of the Dr. Evil meme, and doubles downs on its putrid shit factor, amplified and self-excusing itself due to the narrative frame of 80’s comic book and action flicks.

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[EXPRESSO] Sly Spy/Secret Agent NSWDDL | Rolling Thunderball

Another Switch eShop sale on old arcade games from Data East (as part of the Johnny Turbo’s Arcade releases), another EXPRESSO review.

This time i picked up Sly Spy… never even heard of it before, but it look like it’s gonna be heavy on spy movie cliches and Bond references…for 2 bucks, sure,

And my intuition was spot on, alongside plenty of posters in the background, bearing titles or characters from other Data East games, like Karnov or Bad Dudes, there are plenty of Bond references in it. I was also right in guessing it being a fairly transparent Rolling Thunder rip-off, from the screenshots and description.

While it’s totally that, the game tries to disguise it a bit byt adding some variety, since it opens on a sky.-diving level, has a driving section on a bike with built-in machinegun and a couple of underwater levels where you harpoon sharks avoiding scuba enemies and mines.

The variety isn’t bad at all, but the main bulk is still on-foot levels and it’s basically Rolling Thunder, with a limited amount of ammo for the gun and the deliberate inability to just shoot upwards. Same sidescroller formula, plus the ability to shoot while jumping, use fists and kicks when you’re out of bullets, minus the ability to enter doors to replenish ammo. You can also fire a powerful golden gun-rifle when you get all pieces from fallen enemies.

And like Rolling Thunder, while there is some challenge involved, it’s way more about memorization of the often unfair level design through multiple quarters inserted into the machine and out of your pockets.

It’s alright, all things considered, but i don’t recommend spending more than 2 bucks on it, since it’s a very short experience from an era of design best left in the past.

Dino Dicember #27: Jurassic City (2015)

From the director of Silent Night, Zombie Night, and Terror Birds (also editor for many films, including Sand Sharks, obviously), we have yet another dino flick where Los Angeles is attacked by dinosaurs… not a single giant dinosaur, because people that write the synopses for these movie (on Wikipedia and/or IMDB, depends) don’t actually watch them most of the time, or they do watch them drunk and try to piece together the plot later, because there isn’t a T-rex (or equivalent) rampaging alone through LA. Yes, the DVD cover has it, but that’s false advertising.

In this occasion the dinos didn’t arrive via a Stargate-style time portal, but were created in a lab and escaped a secret facility manned by a shadowy government squad, and due to an incident they bring an armored van (containing 3 Monolophosauruses, in the same genus as the T-Rex but acting as this movie’s raptors equivalent) inside a nearby prison, where they just brought a serial killer… and a trio of college girls temporarly detained (having been busted the night before at an obnoxious party). As the dinosaurs break free and kill most guards and soldiers, the girls and the serial killer and are now forced to escape deeper into the prison, bedgrudgingly having to cooperate.

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[EXPRESSO] Bleed 2 PSN | They Watch The World Burn

After becoming “the world only and truest hero” in the first game (as in her fantasy videogame world), Wryn sat around playing videogames and all was well with the world. Until the usual gaggle of old rivals, new villains and alien invaders (some of them robotic) attack The City, for the usual reasons that this is a videogame and we need to shoot a lot of baddies. Not that it matters in any way, it is a videogame.

What has improved is the gameplay (graphics not so much), which was already good but has been refined, with better controls and a better control over the jump and dash manouver, and a new found emphasis on deflecting back projectiles and countering boss attack thank to the katana, already available in the fist BLEED, but now given as the standard melee weapon to compliment the usual twin pistols, making for faster, tougher and more satisfying encounters and ways to control the flow of battle.

Even the campaign levels are paced and flow better into each other, while also providing more variety, ticking all the classic arcade clichès, like riding and moving around rockets shot by the enemy airship, standing on moving cars while fighting in the highway, levating into the alien mothership, etc.

It’s still a short experience, but this one improves on replayability thank to the better gameplay, as it lends more to speed-runs or the Arcade “1 life only” run, but it also has more varied and interesting characters to unlock (including the Clawgirl from They Bleed Pixels), mutators and a mode that offers a set of 5 randomized levels. The Challenge mode is back unchanged, but at least they just outright say “it’s totally unbalanced”.

Short but quite sweet, i’d recommended getting the series bundle when it’s on sale.

[EXPRESSO] Bleed PSN | All The Shakespearoes

You’re not a hero. You’re a girl with magenta hair, Wryn, and you do have pen and paper, so it’s time to write and draw yourself into a story where heroes aren’t relevant anymore, and you twin-stick shoot your way through the random cabal of ex-heroes, from the alien defender, the “Astrogirlie” robot, the dragon, etc. so you can indict yourself to the Hall Of Heroes in the story you insert youself in. And maybe think what would Travis Touchdown would do.

The story is non-sensical meta-narration there just to “excuse” the kitchen sink approach to enemies and bosses, complete with passable 2D retro style graphics and characters that remind one of early 2000’s webcomics. Here it’s cute because it doesn’t hide itself under some “high pretense”, and because it focuses on what it wants, gameplay, and to be honest it delivers, combining side scrolling action in a twin stick shooter style,with emphasis on style, since you’ll have to master the triple jump dash and a bullet time bar to avoid the fairly challenging patterns of enemies and bosses.

Controls fairly well, shooting is satisfying, it’s quite challenging even on the standard setting without feeling impossible and so becoming just pure frustration. It’s good fun, but it’s fairly short lived fun, by design drawing in from the arcade era with just 6 stages. This isn’t necessary an issue, since it is a small indie title sold for relatively cheap, but i can’t say it has as much replayability as it parades, as aside from harder difficulties and trophies/achievements, the extra modes are kinda lousy, and there isn’t much that much to unlock or upgrade.

I’d still recommend pickin it up for fans of the twin stick shooters and sidescrollers, especially when it’s bundled on sale with the sequel, Bleed 2.

Dino Dicember #13: Jurassic Attack / Rise Of The Dinosaurs (2013)

Quite the functional, generic-ass title, i must say.

This one has TV movie and genre actor Corin Nemec of Stargate SG-1 and Beverly Hills 90210‘s fame, whom also was in Dragonwasps, Sand Sharks, Dracano/Dragon Apocalypse, and many more, including… Robocroc, which it’s exactly what it sounds. And will be quite likely reviewed here in a double feature with Roboshark. Eventually.

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