Cobra Against Ninja (1987) [REVIEW] | Thai May Cry

Time to crush your flimsy hopes right away: sadly we don’t have ninja fighting a giant king cobra snake (or a giant James Latta), nor we get stock footage of snakes, the movie just has a guy that names himself “Cobra”, proper christian name as thai dudes called “Chester” and “Raymond”.

Why does he want to go against the ninja (♫ he will fight the battle to win ♫) ? The ninja of course being Ninja Master – read notes – Gordon (even though Cobra is also a ninja), this time also known as the “Red Champion”, despite his jumpsuit being red AND yellow for this specific movie.

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Ninja Champion (1986) [REVIEW] | Grindhouse Ninjas

As we already saw with previous reviews of Godfrey Ho ninja flicks, anything goes with ninjas, he could splice them and stitch them to any kind of foreign, unfinished and often obscure asian movie he could get his hands on.

Even so, it still comes as a surprise that he would also splice his brand of multicolored, bandana wearing, self-adverting ninja in a rape revenge movie. WHY?

I love how the italian dvd release has a sword with diamons on the cover, it’s extra hilarious considering how it implies that diamonds are important to the plot…. they fuckin aren’t, the sword is way, WAY more relevant.

It’s just that the rapists happen to be diamond smugglers, it doesn’t really matter what they smuggle, AT ALL, they could sell bootleg boglins and nothing would really change, and even the movie barely remembers at the last minute that yes, this should somehow tie together the new storyline and “ninja footage” with the existing footage, this time taken from the 1985 corean rape-revenge movie known as “Poisonous Rose Stripping the Night”, directed by Kim Si-hyun.

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One Piece TV SP 13: Episode Of Skypiea (2018) [REVIEW]

Director: Tetsuya Endo

Writer: Tomohiro Nakamaya

Runtime: 105 minutes

So, by the fact that Episode Of East Blue wasn’t followed up by a special with an original story later in 2017, you can tell Toei quietly just kinda ditched the promised output of One Piece TV specials with original stories following new adaptations of old material.

It wasn’t until a year (a year and one day, to be pedantic) after that we got another special in the summer of 2018, with Episode Of Skypiea, another abridged remake of a story arc from earlier in One Piece’s storyline. BUT i find that this one makes a bit more sense, as Skypiea is such an unfairly hated story arc for many fans (which often made a lot of videogame adaptations of One Piece just completely skip it over it, while keeping a lot of minor story arcs)…. because someone shunned it entirely due to Ener’s ability being basically doomed to begin with against Luffy’s. But Amazon Lily’s arc that features Luffy making women marvel at his golden balls is perfect.

It makes even more sense to give Skypiea the “Episode Of” treament since we didn’t get any tangental piece of re-animated material from this arc in any of the specials before.

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Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal PS4 [REVIEW] | Godfrey Hoppai

Expect to see more Senran Kagura reviews in the future, for now we’ll talk about the remake-port of the first game in the series, arriving in the west on 3DS alongside the extra campaign added in the “Burst” version, and later remade for PS4 and PC. I choose the PS4 version, but it’s also on Steam.

Having played the 3DS version throughly, i wasn’t opposed to a remake like this, unlike many fans that didn’t want to accept the fact the game was crap. It was. It had something to it, but like most of the Oneechanbara games (and overall a lot of Tamsoft’s output), too many flaws and a lot of repetition harmed the experience, and in the case of the first SK game, it didn’t help it tried to pull off a 3D style beat em up while having the set-up of a 2D beat em up. And being really long just to be long, without any variation and the 5/6 stages backdrops re-used again and again.

One thing that didn’t change is the story or it’s presentation, they just upscaled and used better polished assets, models and sprite from the more recent main Senran Kagura games, but even so most of the visual novel segments and illustrations are preserved, alongside the anime opening. Which is fine.

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One Piece TV SP 7: Episode Of Merry – The Tale Of One More Friend (2013) [REVIEW]

Director: Katsumi Tokoro

Writer: Hirohiko Kamisaka

Runtime: 106 Minutes

Time for another frigging special that retells with the new animation older story arcs.

In this instance, it’s…not even based on a person, but this is One Piece, so of course the ship itself ends up being a character, important enough to warrant crucial conflict over it, to say without spoiling some surprises for fans that have not yet made their way up to Enies Lobby’s conclusion.

It is the crux of some of the fondest memories for the main characters and i mean, it really speaks of how profoundly One Piece romanticize piracy from the age of conquest. Also, there’s the plain fact of the Going Merry having actually been ranking fairly high in characters popularity polls for the series, heck, even in the most recent one (held from January 3 through February 2021, on a worlwide scale) it ranked 32th, just below Whitebeard and above Silvers Rayleigh. Amazing.

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One Piece TV Specials Retrospective

An entire retrospective on One Piece films is coming, but since i already reviewed them all (expect for Stampede, which was due in Japanese cinemas by the end of the retrospective) for the italian Wise Cafe just 2 years ago, and we already covered the OVAs & featurettes last year, i thinked about it and figured making more time pass would lead to better material, instead of me just translating and partially rewriting the old pieces. I want to, but not yet. Not yet.

This retrospective will only consider the 13 TV Specials considered as such, you could argue a lot of special episodes (like the Romance Dawn version 2 anime remake or the Chopperman episodes) also fit, but then i would have also to consider the crossovers episodes with Toriko and Dragon Ball Z, and i’ll come clean: i considered doing them as well, but i simply don’t have the time right now. Sorry.

Look forward to those and an extra One Piece videogame review as well!

Shark Zone (2003) [REVIEW] | Welcome To

As opposed to any other zone. We gotta be specific, it’s only the billionth shark movie to come out, but apparently the first one to have the balls to claim this zone as specifically designed for shark use only. So it’s NOT their fault you happen to walk in there and get eaten. Sharks are people too.

Or in other words “Go into the water, live there, die there, live there die”

What do you want? You wanna know the plot? You don’t. More accurately, you don’t need to, even if you just red a lot of reviews of shark movies you can fairly accurately assume what is gonna happen before even seeing it, or go pretty close.

This one of those that aside the usual fare of beach community, majoral dickery, and sharks munching people has the “lost treasure hunt by order of a mob boss”.

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Sharks In Venice (2008) [REVIEW] | Bambino Sharks In The Canal

I’ve actually already reviewed this one on the old italian blog, but it was years ago, and this is a crapfest worth a complete rewrite: I mean, i kinda have to spotlight a movie called Sharks In Venice during shark month, even though i would have felt the same obligation if i was bulgarian, because of course Sharks In Venice isn’t shot in Venice, but the far cheaper Sofia, Bulgaria.

This one in particular it’s produced by Nu Image, and boy were they pumping out shark movies fromn the late 90s to the 2000s, so it comes at no surprise this is directed and written by Danny Lerner, director of Raging Sharks/Shark Invasion (itself a kind of spin-off of the Shark Attack series), and 2003’s Shark Zone. So we are in… middling hands, at the very best.

I guess he really wanted to make a shark movie with the mafia involved, which brings us back to Jaws once again… the original novel, this time, but still, we are bound to eternally have to notice how all sharks movies in some way spawn from that Spielberg’s 1975 classic. In some way or another.

The plot sees a scuba diver, David Franks go to Venice accompanied by his wife, in order to talk with the local police force and locate the whereabouts of his missing father. While investigating the canal where David’s father may have been seen for the last time, he discovers an underwater cave filled with treasure, and manages to survive the attack of a shark. The mafia gets wind of this and then blackmails David into going to the cave and bring them the rest of the treasure.

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Jaws In Japan AKA Psycho Shark (2009) [REVIEW] | Sharkmills Of Your Mind…

In retrospect, it’s kinda hard to believe that Japan didn’t really contributed much to the avalanche of “sharkxploitation” movies seen in late 2000s and the 2010s, aside from the movie we’re talking about today, since this is the country that the very same year gifted us stuff like Vampire Girl VS Frankenstein Girl, to say nothing of the amazing exploitation masterpiece of Tokyo Gore Police.

You would think japanese genre directors would have jumped on the trend and gifted us plenty of insane shark movies with people cutting off their limbs to replace them with shark heads or something, but nope, the only exploitation japanese shark movie that pops up in related searches is this one, and it becomes clear why now it has just been kinda forgotten and left to obscurity.

Because it is fully deserving of such treatment.

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Open Water 2: Adrift (2006) [REVIEW] | Sequel Sharks

What happens when you get to do a sequel that’s really not a sequel, but another iteration on the same basic premise? You get slapped for asking obvious and stupid rethorical questions, as you know damn well the industry will conjure series out of unrelated movies anyway, so doesn’t matter that not even the production company is the same as Open Water, we’ll release it with a different name first and then slap “Open Water 2” when it hits home video, passing the original title as a subtitle. Not to be confused with the 1993 movie by Christian Duguay, also called “Adrift”.

This one is directed by Hans Horn, also behind german produced TV movie like Death Water (Tod aus der Tiefe) and with a new movie in pre-production, Going Down, which sound like it’s gonna be an unofficial Open Water or a rip-off. But we’ll see about that.

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