The Mummy Resurrection (2022) [REVIEW] | Budget Mummies

Since we’re getting a new Mummy movie meant as a stand-alone thing unrelated to the old, forsaken Dark Universe, i’ve figured instead of reviewing again 2017’s The Mummy and boring myself to tears, i might be more interesting to review a random mummy themed horror film i found new on Amazon for 4 bucks and bought sight unseen.

No prior research, just unwrapped the thing from my library and saw it, for a change.

The result of this dice throw is both not good, but also kinda interesting and not as bad as i would have assumed.

Still bad, but the more interesting kind of “bad”.

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[EXPRESSO] Thrash (2026) | Hurricane Sharks

A new shark movie just released on Netflix by Tommy Wirkola?

You got my attention, as i do like Wirkola as a director, but his output is often inconsistent, and this is far less Dead Snow or The Trip and more akin to his notably mediocre stuff like Seven Sisters.

The plot is basically like a more realistic take on Sharkenado via Alexandre Aja’s Crawl, as in, a level 5 hurricane is approaching a coastal town and the subsequent flooding brings in ravenous sharks, attracted by a meat truck splitting in half and basically inviting them to a feeding frenzy, the menù being a gaggle of unlucky people stuck in the flooded town.

Not a bad premise, not original, but it can work, and… it mostly does.

As in, it’s not good, but to be clear it’s just okay, it’s fine, it gets things going fast, its barely 90 minutes(ish) long, and while i do like that Wirkola films have some humour to them regardless, in this case the tone is undecisively split between being serious and jokey, with neither side working too well, even with some good actors like Djmon Hounsou we have characters that aren’t interesting nor fleshed out.

It’s a movie stuck between the desire to be a full on B-movie and wanting to be a serious shark film that never resolve its own tonal dilemma, plus even the shark effects are kinda lacking.

It has some standout moments but for every step towards being decent there’s something else dragging it back down to serviceable mediocrity, so i guess it’s for the better that it was once meant for theathers but eventually released on Netflix, since at least i didn’t have to fork out extra bucks for a mediocre, watchable but forgettable shark film such as this.

Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman (1958) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

One thing that might surprise younger people is that despite its popularity, Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman ain’t a precursor on the trend of giant/miniaturized people, quite the opposite.

It’s also funny how is such a movie obviously conceived for the drive-in circuits, since it’s so short than of course it had to be shown as a double feature, that being Corman’s War Of The Satellites.

So short than to expand the runtime from 66 minutes to 75 for the TV version they had to basically reuse sequences, add a long crawl at the beginning and even fuck around with frames manipulation to artificially lenghten the thing. Jesus Christ, the desperation indeed.

In hindsight, one does learn to appreciate the efficiency of these cheap movies from the era, for better or worse they ended up not wasting your time as much as some crap movies now do, even if they clearly wanted to reach the standard 90 minutes, but in the “age of content”, these films being to the point are quite welcome in their brevity.

Even though often they are so more due to budget than anything else.

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The Food Of The Gods (1976) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

As we gotta have a Bert I. Gordon film in the rubric every year, i figured we’d might as well knock off one of his lesser known films, as in, i don’t think color when i think B.I.G., but he did work until well beyond the 50s up into the 90s, and before passing away in 2023, he did screenwriting work for 2014’s Secret Of A Psychopath.

This is from the short lived “Wells period” of his career, working with Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American International Pictures, though this isn’t the first time he adapted the Wells novella, since his 1956’s Village Of The Giants film also took the entire basic premise of a substance that makes people grow larger to join the giant humanoid trend of The Amazing Colossal Man but mostly used to make another entry in the “teensploitation” trend that was going on at the time with surf movies and shit.

This time is a less bastardized adaptation, and by that i mean it actually uses the H.G. Wells moniker and is slightly more faithful to book… at least its basic premise, since it doesn’t cover most of the more interesting chapters and its themes, it basically reduces it to another “nature revenge” plot, which indeed was all the rage after Jaws, as already discussed plenty of times.

Meaning this has more to do with the unproduced kaiju film Nezura (and -again – Jaws and the) than Food Of The Gods, since the focus here is on giant rats that have eaten the “FOTG”, in this case a substance springing from the ground in a farm in British Columbia, with the farmer, Mr. Skinner, considers it a gift from God himself, feeds it to the chickens, which grow to giant size, and so do wasps, grubs, and rats, making the island overrun by giant vermin.

Unaware of this, a professional football player and some his teammates head there for a hunting trip, but they get more than they wanted from it…

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[EXPRESSO] Whistle (2025) | Must Have Been The Aztec Wind

I’m not bothering with the new Scream sequels, for reasons that should be obvious (including its collaboration with GenIA crap and gambling giant Kalshi), so instead i did went to see this little new-ish horror film called Whistle.

This one also isn’t breaking any new ground, being a very typical teen slasher, this time about an Aztec sacrificial whistle, said to be used in order to call upon Death itself and offer it the souls during ritual sacrifices. After causing the mysterious death of a high school basketball player, 6 months later the death whistle shows up in the locker of a newly transferred girl with a troubled past of drug abuse, and alongside some of her new classmates, she hears the hellish sound it produces, which also signifies Death itself will come for them sooner than it should….

Yeah, you’ve heard this before, and yes, this is basically another variation on/of Final Destination, just using the old “Aztec curse instrument” spin to avoid being a complete rip-off, but it likeable how it basically owns the fact is not doing anything original, it knows, so it doesn’t even bother to be mysterious, and decides it might as well have some fun and give audiences what they expect.

Unsubtle as fuck, by design, the characters also being very typical but mostly stereotypes stock as ever, especially the jocks, the plot hits very expected beat like clockwork, and while i do wish it didn’t straight up copy the finale of Countdown, Whistle does seek out to entertain more than scare, and it does manage to do that, thanks to a brisky pace, decent acting and honestly decent-to-good gore effects and grisly supernatural kills.

It’s entirely forgettable but also quite serviceable slasher interested only in being entertaining and gory more than anything else.

I.K.U. (2000) [REVIEW] | LGBT Robosexual Runner

While i most likely won’t be reviewing the new Wuthering Heights film adaptation, to prove my platonical love for you, the audience, i will review this film i found on DVD in a flea market, and no, it wasn’t on the porn section.

I know i had to get it, it was like, 5 bucks at max, and with a title that screams “CINEMA” as IKU gets a IGN certified “10 out of 10” just for reference-pun combo that is the subtitle “I, Robosex” added in the Italian DVD release.

Sometimes i get to find import DVD copies of weird state sponsored video art when i go thrifting, sometimes i pick up fully localized and officially distributed “technically not porn” like this.

So, the hell is this?

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[EXPRESSO] Send Help (2026) | Triangle of Sodness

Sam Raimi is back to cinemas with Send Help, which tells the tale of Linda Liddle.

Linda works as strategist for her company, and has been promised a vice-president role by the late CEO and father of the current one, Bradley, but she is shunned and humiliated by him when it becomes known he will put his incompetent friend, Donovan, in charge.

He still decides to invite her to a corporate flight as a gesture before axing her, but fate has is that the plane crashes, and only Linda and Bradley survive it, finding themselves stranded on a deserted island. Linda isn’t too fazed, as she also knewn a lot of survivalist tactics and skills (enough to try her hand at competing in a survival reality show), as even back in the office she was the actual employee holding the company together with their ability to actually get shit done, much to the disgust of the nepo baby that is Bradley.

The two end up having to work together, and put together their mutual hatred in order to survive and eventually get rescued…. or not.

While the plot it’s basically a mixture of familiar beats you’ve seen before, mostly Cast Away and stuff like Triangle Of Sadness, but mashed together very well, tackling the overdone “eat the rich” angle of late (alongside the obvious themes of workplace toxicity and corporate misoginy) but with a clever and funny script, many twists and some terrific performances by Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien.

It’s also so very a Raimi movie, full of his sensibilities, which include a lot of projectile vomiting, ropes of blood shooting everywhere (to name the tamer ones), and his comedic horror sensibilites are full on display and recognizable as ever, great to have him back in full form.

Recommended!

[EXPRESSO] Primate (2025) | Not part of the “DK Crew”

From director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, The Strangers: Prey At Night, Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City), we have a new entry in the now sparsely visited “killer ape” fringe of natural horror, simply called Primate.

The story is to the point as the title itself, since we have a familiarized chimpanzee, Ben, whom was nurtured and cared for, has been tought words and has become a family member, being bitten by a mongoose carring rabies, then contracting the virus and becoming violent, just when one of the sisters comes back to their family home in Hawaii, bringing some friends along…

So the sisters and her friends found themselves trapped with the rabid animal, and basically confined to the house’s infinity style pool, as Ben is afraid of water.

You’ve seen killer animals films before, you’ve seen killer ape films before, so there’s not really much to explain or discuss, as while Roberts still manages to make likeable enough characters, this is not a movie much about those; beside the two sisters’ bond, everyone (some more than others) are pretty much future “dead meat”, if you will.

It’s mostly about the body count and gore, which is pretty good and especially “crunchy” since it’s all done via quite practical effects.

Again, it is familiar territory, akin to a monkey version of Roberts’ shark films (or a Cujo remake, basically), it’s simple, but there’s nothing wrong with semplicity when it’s done right, and here is done very right. It’s a very well executed familiar formula that makes the best out of its few character and single location, but also knows it’s often for the better to keep these films short, clocking slightly under 90 minutes.

Honestly i don’t know what else you might want from a good killer ape film.

[EXPRESSO] Mercy (2026) | One Amazon Ring To Judge Them All

I’ll give director Timur Bekmambetov this: he does not lack tenacity, kickstarting the “screenlife” type of films with Unfriended back in 2015 and sticking to it to this day.

After the “so bad it’s good” Amazon commercial-crapfest that was his 2025 War Of The Worlds, we now have Mercy, a sci-fi thriller set in a distopic future where, to curb the criminality rates skyrocketing, the government and police concocted a new system to dole out justice: an IA program, Mercy, which basically acts a judge, jury and executioner.

One day a veteran police officer wakes up to find himself strapped to a chair and being a subject of the Mercy program, accused of killing his wife, with the IA giving him access to various databases, telephone records, private social media accounts, to try and defend himself from the accusation, by lowering a “guilty” probability rate via proving his arguments, all in 90 minutes, before he gets executed via sonic blast when time runs out.

It’s basically an attempt at a modern take on Minority Report in screenlife fashion, and it’s actually kinda okay? For once, it manages to not entirely take place via holograms and sci-fi screens from where a bound Chris Pratt has to investigate remotely, it’s kinda compelling and unlike War Of The Worlds 2025, it’s actually competent enough to engage the viewer and entertain enough, despite it also being fairly mediocre,

It’s also not really well written and the more you think about the plot points the more shaky they become, plus it’s also gross propaganda, given it’s a sci-fi film allegedly warning about the danger of leaving the judicial system to IA and algorhythms, but also promoting as the only solution a survellaince state (no qualms about the ethics of zero privacy), an Amazon sponsored one.

[EXPRESSO] Return To Silent Hill (2026) | Pyramid Ass

Okay, i’ll confess i haven’t really played proper the mainline Silent Hill games, as ironic it might sound given my obsession with horror in general, and while deserving the tar & feathering, i will say i do know at least the premise of Silent Hill 2 and some surface stuff about the plot and characters via cultural osmosis.

I say this because Return To Silent Hill is sold as a faithful adaptation of Silent Hill 2, not a sequel of the first Silent Hill film from 2006, apparently, i never bothered with the SH movies either.

That said, the premise is what you’d expect for a Silent Hill 2 film adaptation: James Sunderland is devastated after being separated from his love, Mary, receives a mysterious letter that leads him back to the sleepy town of Silent Hill, where he hopes to find Mary.

Upon entering town, though, he realizes Silent Hill has changed drastically, as he fears something malevolent is haunting it, and while struggling to discern reality from allucinations, he ventures hoping he’ll be strong enough to find and rescue Mary…

the director of 2006’s Silent Hill film, Cristophe Gans, is back here, but (as explained above) that doesn’t mean anything to me as of now nor stops this from being a honestly aggressively bad film.

Sorry, it’s just not good, at all, every way you slice it, production values are high and acting is decent, but it feels more a 2000’s high budget amusement park ride adaptation of Silent Hill 2, with the script triple-explaining everything in case you got a lobotomy after entering the cinema, it’s almost a parody so veemently the scripts fights any attempt at vagueness, let alone mystery.

Still, i’ve seen far worse horror films, at least it’s not boring and goes by fairly quickly.