Spy X Family: Code White (2023) | Alpine Capers

So, the Spy X Family movie, which feels kinda odd to see release in most territories (EU and english speaking ones) now in late April, as it debuted Dicember 2023 in japanese theathers, an and it’s very easy to notice it was meant as a winter/Christmas release, because of it taking place in a faux-Switzerland-esque city and the tone of a winter holiday vacation.

Not having watched further than Season 1, i was a bit worried to accidentally spoil myself, but this is a non-canonical original story…… that actually doesn’t even really need you to have watched Spy X Family at all, as it introduces the main characters and quickly explains the gist (which i won’t for time’s sake) anyway, you will miss some context for some side characters, but there’s nothing that you can’t catch on the fly by watching the movie.

The plot has the Forger family go into a vacation in the nearby alpine and Switzerland-esque town of Frigis in order to get the recipe for a cake that will make Anya pass the cooking exam at her prestigious school, in turn advancing her career and letting Lloyd get closer to the target of the secret operation he undertook and formed the family for.

But things go south when Anya accidentally gets imbroiled with the army and discovers their plan to undo the fragile peace between non-East Germany and non-West Germany…

It’s a fun time, but it could have been easily a 2 parts long special episode instead, very little feels “cinematic” until deep in the second act, but even in terms of animation quality there’s little (some brief dream sequences, mostly) that feels like this “needed” to be a movie.

Still quite cute and wholesome as is the series itself, but nothing really impressive either way.

Ape VS Mecha Ape (2023) [REVIEW] #giantmonstermarch

As we all knew it, the adventures of “untrademarked simian monster” would continue after his debut against “copyright free atomic dinosaur”, after all Ape Vs Monster was one of the few new modern Asylum movies that people gave a shit aknowledging at all, as they basically resorted to rip-off themselves for the most part, but that’s another review, and with Jagged Edge Productions now outilining clearly their shared cinematic universe called Twisted Childhood (planned to end with Poohniverse: Monster Assemble in 2025) after unleashing the first Winnie The Pooh slasher, Winnie The Pooh Blood & Honey… the Asylum spirit lives on stronger and worse than ever.

For todays’ feature though we have to kinda go back to Toho’s handling of the Kong property during the 1960s, as after the first King Kong VS Godzilla there was a follow-up… as in, Toho made another King Kong monster film back in 1967, King Kong Escapes, again a Japanese-American collaboration, but not a sequel to King Kong VS Godzilla (which is even funnier considering that film too ignored everything but the first Godzilla film), that would make some sense.

No, instead it was based more around the animated children TV series The King Kong Show, a collaboration between Toho and Rankin Bass, co-produced by Videocraft International and Toho Animation, and featured – in the japanese kaiju tradition – a mecha antagonist version of the protagonist monster, called Mekani-Kong, created by an evil genius called Dr. Who, not fans of the BBC show, but more of the then common asian evil genius scientist-mastermind, as popularized in Bond films and spy flicks of the era in general, with the obviously attached racism.

Continua a leggere

[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] The Beekeeper (2024) | Sleeper Cell

Let’s start the year off with the new Jason Staham movie, The Beekeeper.

One merry day, a kindly but tech “un-savvy” old lady is scammed by one of those “call this number to recover your computer” operations, resulting in them draining all her money, even the 2 millions of the pro-bono teaching fund she was tasked with.

In utter despair, she commits suicide, and her daughter, working at the FBI, initially thinks is the man whom she found in her house, but he was simply her neighbour, a quiet man that worked as a beekeeper and was beyond grateful of the kindness bestowed upon him by the old lady.

So he sets out in a quest for revenge against those responsable, because he’s a beekeeper, but also a “beekeeper”, as the codename given to highly trained assassins, one-man army agents belonging to a super-secret government project, operating outside of the system to protect the system itself in case it becomes unstable or operated by bad actors.

Some very bad actors in this case, not that will stop Jason Staham to avenge her kindly neighbour by kicking ass, eventually crushing skulls and popping caps into anything that doesn’t wanna de-escalate scamming people, when the sheer magnitude of his one liners somehow doesn’t immediately scare the life out of the douchebag thugs and their untouchable masters.

It’s a decent action romp with some nice ideas that ultimately delivers a lot of satisfying graphic violence, the plot it’s essentially nothing new but the flair (and the “bee angle”) is nice enough, the action is enjoyably cheesy, and it’s a pretty straighforward narrative that doesn’t wast time nor tries to sequel bait.

It’s definitely better than most of the other movies Staham was in last year, this is decent, and very, very entertaining indeed.

Ninja The Shadow Killers AKA Shadow Killers Tiger Force (1986) [REVIEW] | WIN (Women In Ninja)

Endless is the quest for the acolytes of the ninja way as teached by Master Ninja Ho, after all – as E. Honda once said – the training never really ends, and there are at least still DOZENS and DOZENS of cut-n-paste ninja flicks from the IFD Film & Arts mill left to review and catalogue properly.

Ninja The Shadow Killers is definitely one of them, but this time we have something slightly different in terms of the witch’s brew that will pass for a film, as i’m pretty sure i never saw any other one where he spliced his western ninja footage…. into a women in prison film.

Definitely a genre we don’t really cover to any degree here, not on purpose or anything, but yep, indeed, the “host movie footage” is taken from 1976’s Taiwanese-Hong Kong-South Korean film Prisoner 470 (reminding me of yet another movie series i could be watching instead), and is also notable how this time we have a female ninja protagonist/master, Jenny, played by Deborah Grant.

Continua a leggere

September to Dicember, the decisive schedule of things to come (final cut)

As previously said before the mid-August break, due to me also going back to the uni for a master’s degree, i had to made some decisions for the blog, the rate of posting, and so on.

Basically from today onwards, i can guarantee a weekly article/review here, and some monthly rubrics will either go away or remain in downsized version, while i also plan some new rubrics altogether.

On the upside, EXPRESSO reviews will now NOT be bound to any schedule, so they will happen on a “as soon – and if – i can make them” base, which will result in most scheduled reviews being extended or not short one. Maybe.

In terms of what’s gonna happen and what exceptions to the rules will happen, here’s the lowdown:

September will have a weekly guaranteed post schedule.

October will have a review/post every 3 days, usually for The Spooktacular Eight, which will still be around indefinitely… but not this October, as we have a retrospective pretty much already done.

November will have a regular guaranteed review every 7 days, the new standard.

Dicember will have yet again a weekly posting base…. until the 24th as while Dino Dicember is NOT coming back yet, 12 Days Of Dino Dicember IS, so from the 25th up to the 5th of January (included), we’ll have a daily review about dinosaur movies.

For the other rubrics, here’s the plan so far.

Monster March will be back.

Musou May will remain.

Pinocchiorama will proceed with a monthly pick all the way through 2023 as previously planned, though December’s entry might arrive earlier than the last day of the month due to the 12 Days Of Dino Dicember post cavalcade.

One of the new rubrics will debut in February or later.

In case of changing schedules or relevant changes i’ll have to make, i’ll update you as soon as i can.

Later for a “back to school” review!

[EXPRESSO] Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part 1 (2023) | Man Machine Interface

That ol’ darn Ethan Hunt is at it again, with the seventh installment of the Mission Impossible movie series, or its first part, because – as it should be clear by now – the two parter trend is back for mainstream big budget movies released in theathers. Heck, even Fast And Furious did it!

But if you had somewhat lukewarm or mixed expectations about Dead Reckoning, especially when it also follows the other trend of making movies even longer than before, inching ever so close to that dreaded 3 hours runtime…. well, Dead Reckoning Part 1 will put those to rest, because it’s actually a rare treat, in a way, both as the new installment of a very long running series that remained mostly constant in tone and style, but also as a demonstration that this kind of blockbuster action thriller movie can still be done today and actually impress audiences.

First, the plot it’s actually very modern (though a decade before would have been considered pure sci-fi), with an advanced learning IA that went rogue, became sentient, then made its incredible power of changing reality known, thus starting a race between nations for the only item that can give control over this almost-omnipotent entity.

Ethan Hunt and his crew are enlisted too, but they realize that to do the right thing they will have to go rogue themselves, given the unbelievably high stakes at play.

In a way there’s – mostly – nothing we haven’t seen before, but the execution is so good, the dedication to not cut corners and actually use the budget where it matters, especially the incredible stuntwork, there’s just so much obvious committment to make this as intense, suspensful and entertaining as possible, while not making the long runtime feel excessive.

Quite a blast, honestly.

[EXPRESSO] Fast X (2023) | Furious Finale, Part 1

As the Fast And Furious series sheds even more words from their movie titles (in order to gain even more speed, obviously), with Fast X we reached the finale… kinda, as it’s a two parter, given how over the top the series is nothing else would have quite sufficed.

I would say they fumbled the opportunity to make the franchise go into space… but that already happened, so Fast X had to somehow up the ante of absolute bullshit that most people have come to love over the years. Myself included, these movies are so dumb but also utterly and sincerely committed that they come off as endearing.

It’s like a live-action shonen manga version of The Italian Job where superpowers are replaced by improbable car manouvers and the universe is themed/styled after the Gasolina music video, where Vin Diesel instead of unleashing a Bankai presses the NOS button or tailspins like a beyblade, it’s fucking great preposterous nonsense and i love it.

In terms of plot we have another shadow from the past style character, Dante Heyes, come and unleash vengeance for the “Toretto team” having killed his father many movies ago, and he’s planning to go full on the eye for an eye business upon Toretto’s family, prompting Vic and his allies on a world throtting chase to stop Dante’ schemes.

To be honest, this is kind of a lukewarm “part 1”, aside from the fact that yes, this is supposed to be heavier on setup… it’s a bit “meh”, as in, still entertaining but we’ve seen better and far more absurd shit happen in these movies, thankfully we have Jason Momoa as a fruity sociophatic villain stealing the show and giving the movie some needed energy.

Cautiously optimistic part 2 will actually be a worthy pay off.

[EXPRESSO] Diabolik 2: Ginko Attacks! (2022) | Color Cinecomic Photoplay

After the Diabolik revival movie of 2021 was surprisingly succesfull, we now have the sequel, Ginko Attacks, with inspector Ginko pressing its dogged hunt for master criminal Diabolik, managing to find its hidden lair, and eventually collaborating with a betrayed Eva Kant.

Though Diabolik himself was recast, here being played by Giacomo Gianniotti instead of Luca Marinelli from the 2019 movie.

As of why, Gianniotti does look almost identical to Diabolik as depicted in the original comics, but it’s a bad trade-off as Marinelli was by FAR a better actor, and a better Diabolik.

He doesn’t even feel like the same character either, but then again almost no character in Ginko Attacks has a semblance of personality, just existing as a barren narrative gear.

Cumbersome pacing (for a 2 hours and 20 minutes movie) doesn’t help, nor having Monica Bellucci in the cast.

Dialogues are pretty awful too, and tipify the whole problem with the movie, as it feels excessively faithful to the source material, making one wonder if they lifted the text verbatim from the comics, without ever considering how (or if) they would work in an actual film, or to actually update the literal decades old material for modern cinema standards.

So it’s no wonder the plot it’s also bad, utterly predictable from the get go regardless, with the twists/reveals actually making thing worse, because the entire narrative relies on almost every “character” being way too fuckin stupid to predict what the audience did hours ago.

Though it’s hard to get angry because it’s such an alienating, empty experience, with some style backed…by absolutely zero substance, and it’s very disappointing since the first movie was flawed, yes, but also WAY better.

So i’m not exactly looking forward to the third one already in the works.

Awful. Disappointingly awful.

The Spooktacular Eight #10: Robo Vampire (1988)

Oh boy. THIS one.

Quite the legendary trash film from Godfrey Ho (credited as Thomas Tang, once again), one that definitely lives up to its status as one of the most bonkers heaps of garbage to ever come out of the 80s never ending cauldron of action-xploitation movies.

It’s definitely quite infamous and rightfully so, because even if you’re acquainted with Godfrey Ho, Joseph Lai, their companies like Filmark International and IFD Arts, this is still absolute hokum of majestic proportions, downright unbelievable and baffling.

I can’t even imagine how much cocaine did Ho and his unnamed writers snort up for this one in particular, because it makes their cut n paste ninja flicks look downright sensible and composed.

The main reason it’s because Ho (or Lai, or whoever supervised the scripts, hard to say when Ho is credited for many films he didn’t even direct) didn’t bother to say no to anything proposed, i refuse to believe anything got cut from the script since it’s all a non-sensical demented mish mash.

Continua a leggere