[EXPRESSO] Argylle (2024) | Spy Harder

Matthew Vaughn is back with that is essentially a Kingsman spin-off taking place in that universe/continuity with Argylle, which goes for the straight up spy comedy/parody with a premise that inevitably echoes Romancing The Stone, and by extent 2022’s The Lost City, but about spies.

Elly Conway is a successful writer of a spy series of novels titled Argylle, and while about to finish up the final chapter of her next book, she is approached by a real spy that reveals her books ended up mimicking too closely the machinations of a real life evil shadow mega-organization, forcing her to follow (with kitty in tow) the real life agent Argylle in order to escape the assassins sent after her.

There is more to this, and it’s a nice variation on this formula…. but i can’t deny at times it feels like an outright spoof done by accidents, as the twists keep coming to a degree that it almost feel like an actual joke (but ain’t) and the fun premise is ultimately weighted down by a convuluted plot and an overly long runtime. This really should have been 90 minutes.

It’s a bit too self-satisfied at times, especially in terms of meta jokes that aren’t too original or funny, the execution it’s far from lacking flaws, but i won’t deny the premise does give the formula some energy, the plot gets some needed mileage out of said premise, enought to keep you fairly entertained, with some fun performances, but it does suffer because often it weaponizes genre cliches unironically without actually improving on overdone tropes.

Despite all that, i’d say it’s still a decent time, but i do hope that the planned sequels (if they do come out after this “part 1” bombing so far at the box office) are better.

[EXPRESSO] Madame Web (2024) | Spider Vision

The new entry in Sony’s Spider Man Universe side of Marvel offerings, tackling the titural and lesser known – to mainstream audiences – figure of Madame Web, AKA Cassandra Web (Dakota Johnson), a woman working as a paramedic that awakens her powers of clairvoyance after a tragic incident, and will have to confront her mysterious past to help three young women unaware of being hunted down by a menacing “spider person”.

So, it’s not good, at all, i didn’t hate it or was let down, it’s at least inoffensive, as in, it’s hard to feel anything much from a movie that feels directed and acted in autopilot, the cast it’s good but the characters are shallow as hell and the movie’s overall light tone (fine in itself ) kinda backfires in making it hard to care about anything that happens.

Ignoring the fact its about a character intrisically linked to Spider Man, has “evil Spiderman” for its boring ass villain, yet it can’t/won’t even mention the Man-O’-Spiders, Madame Web is just a very unispired origin story that coasts on doing the bare minimum, one it could have been cut to 90 minutes, since it’s fairly repetitive, unengaging, looks cheap, and feels more like a set up for other films than anything, a movie set in 2003 that also perfectly feels like the kind of bad/subpar cinecomic that would have come out back then.

I was inclined on trying to “defend” it due to how harsh it’s being reviewed….. but sorry, this one IS pretty bad and lacks the trashy fun factor of the Venon movies or Morbius, with very little to like, feeling extremely throaway to boot, just “product” that makes futile even feeling angry about it.

Maybe the Kraven The Hunter movie coming out this summer will be better?

One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 – DLC Pack 5 PS4 [DLC REVIEW]

Before the final reveal in december, i honestly hoped this would have been a One Piece “Film Villains “DLC packs, but nope, the “reveal” (the silhouette gave it away since we knew of the this second Season Pass existing in trailer announcement form) of Uta was simply to indicate this was gonna be a One Piece Film Red DLC characters pack.

Which makes sense, since Film Red was beyond successful at the box office, it was arguably the goddamn best One Piece film since Film Z, and it also big a vehicle for j-pop singer Ado helped it making it the 6th grossing anime (and japanese) film of ALL TIME so far, so yeah, you bet your ass the production committees and suits were gonna push it into related One Piece products.

Still, it’s a shame because i do think a One Piece film villains DLC characters pack would have also sold really well if it picked some fan favourites like Zephyr or Shiki, but alas, this is not the case. Maybe in Pirate Warriors 5, whenever will that materialize.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember# 33: Pterodactyl (2005)

There’s no more Carnosaur movies for me to review, and while this isn’t directly related to that series, nor comes from one of his companies, it’s directed by another prolific director versed in both cult classics and huge big box blockbuster successes, Mark L. Lester, here clearly in his “TV B-movies” phase, decades after his adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter , Roller Boogie, good ol’ Commando or Class of 1984.

As one could simply guess, this is indeed a dinosaur TV movie made for the Sci Fi Channel, produced by Lester’s American World Pictures, and apparently was the highest rated tv movie of this type commissioned by and for “SiFy”. At least according to Mark L. Lester’s bio on IMDB.

The plot it’s that pterodactyls have survived and thrived to the present day, nesting into a dormant volcano within the forest of Turkey, preying on whoever and whatever they come across.

So of course that’s exactly where a group of teenagers are led for a science expedition by Professor Lovecraft (pretty much all the characters are named after science fiction and fantasy writers, that’s cute), but worry not, there are also US commandos led by Captain Berge (played by Coolio) hunting Russian terrorists that supposedly are hiding inside the nearby dormant volcano.

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Salutations!

You’ve made it to 2024, and hopefully we will be able to see and play Ena: Dream BBQ when it releases, really look forward to that.

And maybe to have all Disgaea titles ported to PS4 and PS5 in their “Complete/Complete +” edition, come on NIS, re-release Disgaea D2, cowards.

(Again, for clarifications, this is not a sponsorship or anything, i just fuckin love the ENA series by Joel Guerra, just big fan, even bought two of the ENA plushies to help them fund the game).

Happy new year!

Yuru Camp/Laid Back Camp: The Movie (2022) [REVIEW] | Eiga Camp

We all make mistakes.

One is that i completely blanked out on the Yuru Camp/Laid Back Camp movie, despite basically worshipping the series, learning that it was coming later last year, even seeing a promo poster and the news that Crunchyroll would have it’s available for its worldwide release (as they did carry the entire series, OVAs and even the Room Camp spin-off)…. i somehow simply “forgor”.

Until the announcement of a third season woke me up and made me remember i somehow completely blanked out on the Yuru Camp Movie, so while it’s still Autumn (kinda), let me undo this stain on my campered soul. Let me do right by the Secret Society BLANKET.

(and yes, eventually i’ll get to the live-action adaptation)

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[EXPRESSO] Five Nights At Freddy’s (2023) | Children Of Chuck E. Cheese

I kinda didn’t want to review this one for various reasons, but i did review The Flash movie after all, so let’s get this over with, shall we?

And FIY, i barely known anything about the games, i’ve seen some gameplay but i don’t know anything about this weird lore the series supposedly has running through, just the basic premise of the games, as in, it’s about a person employed as a night guard for an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese styled pizza place-kids entertaiment center, where the animatronics mysteriously still walk around its grounds and attack anyone they find in their roamings….

Kinda surprised it took so long for the series that basically invented the “mascot horror” subgenre to have its feature lenght film out, so long that a horror version of the Banana Splits came along, and we even had Nicolas Cage join into the mascot massacre fun with Willy Wonderland.

And honestly, in itself, it’s not very good… though i don’t think it’s very bad either.

Production value are fairly high, the animatronics look good and have a substantial presence on screen, though it takes a while for the movie to show and have the animatronics move about and do something of substance, as it spends a lot more screentime establishing its lore and okayish characters than in actually trying to be scary or gruesome.

Which itself it’s a non issue since this movie it’s clearly targeted at a children audience (even though most fans that grew up on the games are most likely in their 20s now) and relies on jumpscares, which maybe fitting, feels like a missed opportunity, since it’s really not scary…. but it’s also not deliberately trying to be child-friendly or goofy, kinda feels stuck in between, for whatever reason.

Still, not quite awful.

[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #6: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

“Funny” story: this is actually the second RE movie i watched, and the only one i ever watched in theathers. I wasn’t that interested at the time in the film series, so i just picked up on DVD years later the first Resident Evil movie, but didn’t bother with the sequels.

But since it was gonna be the final installment, i was a bit curious, so i went to see at one of my local cinemas, and turns out it wouldn’t have really mattered much if you saw all the sequels or none at all, because The Final Chapter will forever remain in my head as one of the most embarassing final bouts for a film series, or movies that somehow end up being distributed to big cinema chains.

An istance where i could realistically see people asking for their money back at the end of the movie, where i would agree with their anger and supplement them with rotten vegetables, so they could aim for the distributors and anyone involved outside of the poor employees, because it’s not their fault, so instead of littering the floors, give them a rotten leek so we can all stick it up Sony’s picture (via their Screen Gems’ hole, specifically), or throw a tomato at the HQ of Costantine Films.

Jesting aside, i’d be embarassed to release a movie like this, personally, even if – truth to be told – it’s not as bad as i remember it being, not “if your eyes could puke” bad, it’s still incredibly badly edited, so choppy that it’s a miracle you can actually tell what’s going on in almost half of the action scenes that involve melee fights (and some others too), where you can barely see things happening, mostly thanks to some occasional slow mo, but still, it’s almost a “blink and you missed it” type of deal, so badly edited is more than a good 40 % of the action scenes.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #5: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Not even waiting the 3 years between sequels anymore, as the well is running dry and instead of filling it with blood of the scribe, we’re making these even faster as we approach the penultimate chapter, with Retribution following upon the twist reveal at the end of Afterlife, with the Arcadia surrounded by a lot of black Umbrella helicopters that captures the original Alice and brings her to a remote underwater location in the Extreme North section of Russia, used for testing the T-Virus, from where she has to escape alongside both old and new faces, including many other characters from the videogames that Paul W.S. Anderson couldn’t cram in the previous script, like the fan favourites Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong and Barry Burton.

So, if the keyword of Afterlife was “clonatron and mind control robo-scarabs taken from RE 5”, Retribution also adds to the vocabulary salad “simulation” and “diorama”, showing off obvious inspiration from Westworld with Umbrella creating sets and clones to populate it before they die in it, because fuck any attempt of constructing more setpieces when we can literally redo the previous ones like it’s a rematch of previously beaten bosses in an older Zelda game.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] 4#: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

By now it was official and expected to get a new Resident Evil film sequel every 3 years, and in like clockwork in 2010 arrived Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth one, which also brought back to directing Paul W.S. Anderson, whom passed around the director duties after the first one, but was always writing the scripts, and as we will see, he would stick around for the rest of the film series as director & writer of his wife fanfic adventures in this Resident Evil canon.

And since we passed the third entry already, i guess they felt necessary to also go the 3D route, as the entire movie was shot this way, for obvious gimmicky (and lucrative) reasons, with the obvious parts meant for 3D as easy to notice in 2D as usual.

We immediatly continue from where Extinction left off, with multiple Alice clones attacking the Tokyo Umbrella hideout as promised, wielding kunai, double uzi, double katanas, and their psionic power, so yeah, Anderson it’s so obviosly and strongly back at the wheel, for better or worse, and it’s definitely not in the mood for hotdogging, so we jump straight into the bombastic action at the beginning, we’ll do the exposition and new and returning characters later.

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