[EXPRESSO] Evil Dead Burn (2026) | Cthuga Chant

In other circumstances, i would lament the fact that an old franchise like Evil Dead or its name are being used for making new films unrelated to the old ones…. but in this day and age, this approach works, it doesn’t lock viewers into expanded universes continuites, and while it is a sequel to Evil Dead Rise, it doesn’t really depend on you having watched that, to the point this could be another stand alone sequel or reboot, and yet it would have fit being called Evil Dead.

Evil Dead Burn is about a young woman who has lost her husband, and after the funeral is meeting with her in-laws in a secluded house in the woods. The family reunion starts off glacial and tense at best, but goes quick south as the family members gradually start turning into Deadites….

The movie doesn’t reinvent Evil Dead as a formula, it has the nasty ass Deadites demons-undead fucks, the Necronomicon is involved too, there are chainsaws that you know will be used for lots of gore, and like Rise it involves family, though in this case it does so to tackle domestic abuse, familial dysfunctions and guilt-tripping…. and deliver a fuckton of very very nasty, over the top gore, with a bit of comedy to the delirium, not pulling any punches in any aspect.

Again, this movie isn’t trying to buck the “Evil Dead formula”, but it manages to give this Evil Dead film a slightly different feel, while balancing very well its elements, so gore never lacks its grisly punch, the comedic bits aren’t too clownish to undermine the nastiness of the violence or gore, we have likeable characters and yet never feel like we’re wasting time, as it’s all a costantly entertaining, retentless, fun, bloody damn good horror romp.

A Murcielago anime in this economy, Steel Ball Run actual release schedule, the new GITS anime, Tanya Degurechaff is back, AOT 3 and the Mini Summer Of EDF delay

So, Murcielago is a manga about a super serial killer woman with 715 homicides to her name, Komori (she the titular “bat”, since “murcielago” means exactly that, but in Spanish) gets her death penalty halted due to the city being overrun with crime, and Komori gets into assisting the Japanese police in tackling other murderers and criminals that the regular police force fails to catch, helped by the expert driver Hinako and the daughter of a yakuza boss

Komori is also a super lesbian and she basically tries to get into the pants of the many extrabosomed female characters, and even without her there’s a lot of nudity just shy of scissoring because i don’t think you could get away with that on Shonen Gangan. not quite.

It’s delectable action yuri exploitation trash, i love it, i’ve been following and buying the volumes for the past years, but given there’s so much premarital selbian gex and hyperviolence, i never really expected it to get an anime adaptation, heck, it’s ridiculous how much difficult is to see new horror anime exist, which is why i’m not really expecting a Franken Fran adaptation or something.

Yet, a few days ago a teaser trailer for the Murcièlago anime just popped up, and yes, my birthday was earlier this year, but whatever, it may be on time for that since is slated for a generic “2027 release” and i guess will stream on HIDIVE in US territories, we don’t have that here..

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[EXPRESSO] Disclosure Day (2026) | Those Alien Bastards

Steven Spielberg is back again to revisit his favourite subject, aliens, the third kind of encounters one could have, in Disclosure Day.

I would commend Mr. Spielberg for sticking to this particular subject in this day and age, and indeed having the plo tackle how a sudden revelation and proof of alien life existing and being previously covered up by the government would change things in a modern setting where reality barely registers as such, via a security computer expert going rogue once contacted by a mysterious faction, and an unwilling local meteo woman that finds herself capable of unexpected feats…

But then i saw the film.

I’m just miserable, since Disclosure Day is Spielberg as his worse in recent years, and maybe ever.

Despite allegedly being a passion project and providing the subject, Spielberg seems to half-ass it most of the time, not that there’s much to be done with an embarassingly awful script, so bad it’s outright stupid, full of undeveloped characters with no chemistry spouting embarassingly bad dialogues, doing incredibly stupid shit to an absurd degree, plus one it thinks its so profound despite barely touching upon its own themes.

The runtime its incredibly bloated too, and all feel so absurd by taking place in modern day and have us believe that in the internet age uploading some video files to the web is like hacking one of those 80s mainframe computers that were as big as rooms.

Even with Spielberg as his worse, he’s still better than most and occasionally some scenes will actually be kinda good, entertaining and tense, like the car chases and the train scene, and the cast often delivers performances that are way better than this film deserve, and help carrying the thing.

It’s not unwatchable, but it’s so disappointing and frustrating.

Tentacles (1977) [REVIEW] | Jawsuckers

While i have already set my shark movie picks for the summer, i wanna give you something extra in the “killer aquatic animal” subgenre of Jaws rip-offs that don’t fit the “shark month” criteria… well, because they are not about sharks at all.

(This was supposed to be an extra review for July, but i’m gonna do it now as “compensation” for the Masters Of The Universe movie review having to bedelayed AFTER i posted the schedule)

But make no mistake, this is basically the producer of the original Piranha, Ovidio G. Assonitis, credited as Oliver Hellman, cashing into the Jaws craze by stringing together a lot of old big Hollywood actors and having something to put in theathers ASAP, ideally to get some box office revenue in before Universal released their sequel to the original Jaws.

There’s very little point to go over the plot of Tentacles (“Tentacoli” in its original italian release, which is just the italian word for “tentacles”) because you know the plot outlin-well, the plot everything, this is just Jaws but with a giant octopus doing the terrorizing and killing in the waters of a small beach town.

Some small details are different, but there’s no point circling around the obvious, this is “Octo Jaws” and the characters are also transparent in functioning the same as in Jaws, but look, we have an admittely impressive number of big name Hollywood actors roped in: Bo Hopkins, Shelley Winters, John Huston and even Henry Fonda.

Even with Fonda swapping in and in doing so eluding us from having John Wayne in a Jaws rip-off, i can’t deny this is impressive, and sure did help a lot in marketing the film… as in, good for having those names on the poster and hence working wonders as a honeytrap to sucker people into seeing a very fuckin boring Jaws rip-off.

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The June EXPRESSO schedule

Time for more talk of “upcoming attractions” for EXPRESSO revies, and terms of upcoming or just released films i can make some promises.

First, since we also got a limited theathrical release of The Amazing Digital Circus finale in cinemas here, i will be attending tomorrow, so for Sunday that review should be up.

Not too long after that the review for the new Masters Of The Universe live action film (which released yesterday here) should be up.

Some of you might think i’m missing a horror related comedy thing…. i don’t know what you’re talking about, we know those things don’t actually exist, no point in assuming what a movie like that would be if it doesn’t exist, nor i recall ever being a thing before. One can wonder, though, of a what such a hypotetical film would be.

I will be seeing Toy Story 5 and Disclosure Day, there’s no fixed date yet but reviews for those will happen.

Closing off the month, we’ll get reviews of Gore Verbinsky’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the Supergirl film, and of an anime film called ChaO (which is releasing here in late June).

Maybe (MAYBE) you’ll see a review of the new and last (the very last one this time i suppose) Jackass film, again, a very big MAYBE.

[EXPRESSO] Backrooms (2026) | Liminal Architects

I’ll come clean, i’ve heard of this being another creepypasta phenomenon (apparently spurred at random by a single picture never meant to be more than that)… so i immediatly lost interest, as these come off as just another horror frenzy whipped up to make some quick buck in a way or another, so imagine my confusion when i saw the A24 logo for the Backrooms movie trailer.

I guess Ari Aster movies lose more money than they make nowadays, and for the record i never saw the titular web series by Kane Parson, which here directs and writes this film adaptation, nor i will be lambasting Backrooms The Movie because it’s from a Youtube turned horror filmaker, because it’s unfair, and – as i’ve noted before – this pipeline mostly seems to be working out decent or good work, weirdly enough.

The plot is set in the 90s, about Clark, a frustrated man that would like to pursue his dream career as an architect, but he’s stuck running an unsuccessful furniture store, and one day, while checking the electric grid for malfunctions, finds a hidden door in the basement room of the store, leading to a weird labyrynth resembling desolated office spaces, full of weird geometry and irregularly placed objects, that seems to span and lead into a seemingly infinite number or rooms….

Honestly, while you can tell this was spun from the “SCP-creepypasta-analog horror” side of internet trends, the Backrooms film does fare better than i expected.

It’s nothing special, again, and this is basically a “liminal space” iteration of the found footage formula, arguably the more normal film A24 ever distributed, but the plot has some surprises, the sound design is top notch, acting is good, it is entertaining, visually captivating and avoids overexplaining itself into absolute banality.

Decent.

[EXPRESSO] Passenger (2026) | Roadside Hitchin’

I was a bit concerned when i saw Passenger pushed by very little marketing even here, given it’s the new horror movie from respected director Andrè Øvredral (Trollhunter, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe, Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, The Last Voyage Of The Demeter).

The plot involves a couple that has to leave their house and decide to start living on the road, driving their little caravan around the US, but when they stop one night to try and help the victim of some gruesome road accident, it turns out they involutarily picked up a sinister entity, dubbed by early travelers as the “Passenger”…

The premise isn’t bad at all, and i’m glad we have Øvredral directing, because he can actually do effective jumpscares, the photography is good, the characters are decent, the acting is pretty solid too, but Passenger as a whole isn’t even bad, it’s just disappointing, especially coming from a director that has already proved he can do better than this.

most of the script has either half baked ideas or just rehashes very generic horror elements, which is especially true of the “Passenger” itself, this derivative, generic ass looking and acting demon motherfucker, and even with the lore being an American roadside folklore mythology affair, it then pivots into religious territory… which doesn’t really fit.

There are some nice ideas like them using the cinema projector to visualize the entity, but the rules of the entity seems vague at best, often ignored anyway, the setpieces don’t really build upon each other, and overall the movie just doesn’t do anything original, interesting or that hasn’t been done WAY better before.

Passenger isn’t terrible or anything, it’s watchable, but also incredibly disappointing and frustrating, because you can see the better movie this could have been.

[EXPRESSO] Obsession (2025) | Yandere Simulator USA

Apparently there is a youtuber to horror filmakers pipeline/trend and it seems to be panning out fairly well (i haven’t seen Iron Lung yet), even if i never even heard of Curry Barker before, and to be frank i didn’t knew that going into the film, at all, nor it matters much to me.

Set in some modern pre-COVID american small town, Obsession tells the story of “Bear”, a very typical shy boy that works in a music store had a crush on one of his coworkers, Nikki, for a while, but couldn’t muster up the courage to confess even when he could, so he instead uses a “willow wish stick” novelty toy he originally bought on a whim to wish for her love absolute.

But like in every classic “be careful what you wish for” kind of story, Bear gets more than he bargained out of cracking that novelty item, as Nikki’s new sudden behaviour has her go to increasingly creepy, delirious, erratic and violent ways, basically going for that infamous “american yandere” experience, a suburbian flavour of Yuno Gasai for the yanks.

And while it’s funnier than you might expect, it still works tremendously off its simple and apparently “thin” premise, as it commits to it without resorting to cheap jumpscares or trying to destroy your eadrums with sudden volume increase and screaming or shit like that, it builds this tension between Bear and “Nikki”, as the guy is also – for lack of a better word – obsessed to get her affection one way or the other that he’s willing to simply go along with whatever insane or horrific event is thrown is way, despite his fear of Nikki growing stronger every day.

It’s a very good modern take on a very familiar formula, in short.

Recommended.

[EXPRESSO] The Long Walk (2025) | March Royale

Based on a Stephen King novel of the same name, The Long Walk is set in an alternative 70s America, where a totalitarian fascist rule (following some unclarified economic crisis) helds the titular “Long Walk”, where fifty young teen boys enter to represent their state and they have to walk while keeping a certain pace, and where any kind of action that involves stopping gives them a penalty, with a squadron ensure that after three strikes the runner will be shot dead, this all televised (“to inspire” economic and production growth in the nation, allegedly) and with no clear goal besides thinning the contestants to one, a single winner which will receive a big money prize and to have one wish fulfilled.

On its face, this it seems like a very late adaptation of an older King story (as this was indeed written way back in 1979) made to capture the resurgent interest in battle royales as a widespread and easily recognized concept – even outside of cinema -… and while the premise of King’s novel was indeed prescient, it still feels like its own thing since it doesn’t try to emulate the modern battle royale formula.

It has the themes, surely, but it forgoes any of the exaggerated theathrics by focusing almost exclusively to the titular “long walk”, the deadly youth marathon allegedly meant to be “inspiring”, which also conveniently works as a public execution exercise, a way to manifacture consent and to send a message to any possible young insurgents.

While not overly long itself, the direction does manage to keep the narrative focus, make you feel the insane and exhaustingly pointless death march that seems to never end, but also not bore the viewer thanks to great performances and very well rounded, engrossing teen characters.

Quite riveting.

[EXPRESSO] Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026) | Sacrifice Unto Sebek

As the title implies, this isn’t really a remake of the classic 1932 Universal film, nor a reboot of the 1999 Frasier starring film (which is actually coming in a couple years, because we live in the past permanently in the future), but more of a new retelling of the mummy and its mythology.

Set in modern days, we have a family that – while briefly living in Cairo – suffers the disappearance of the youngest daughter, Katie, by a mysterious woman.

8 years later, the family is still heartbroken but had to somewhat moved on, until they receive the news from Egyptian authorities of Katie being found in a 3000 years old sarcophagus, which itself somehow survived a deadly plane crash.

Even stranger, Katie is found, heavily scarred, wounded, in a catatonic state but alive, so she is brought back into the family, but soon her behaviour becomes even more worrying and strange events afflict the family…

Lee Cronin’s take on the classic monster has some nice ideas to make it distinct and not just a rehash of the old mummy myth, modernizing with a touch of folk horror and some creepy ambience, but it’s not fully realized as it relies a bit too much on other horror cliches, to the point it basically pivots to be just another exorcism film with an Egyptian flavor topping.

Props for it actually taking place a lot in Egypt and involve actively egyptian characters (instead of just having scenes in Cairo at the beginning), plus there is some good gore, but it never becomes properly scary, nor it manages to escape some overdone trapping with exorcism/possession films, the good acting helps as the characters ain’t much more than functional, and the script could have used some trimming, as the runtime feels bloated.