[EXPRESSO] Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon (2025) | Kompilation Kaijus

I usually rag on compilation films for anime series… for the obvious reasons, but i did watch Kaiju 8 Mission Recon it because i was curious about the manga but i never had time to check that or the anime out,, so i guess compromise it is.

Speaking of, the premise it’s set in a sci-fi future where academies train young people into anti-kaiju troops to dispose of the endless hordes of big ass monsters attacking Tokyo on a daily basis.

The protagonist, Kafka, actually a man in his 30s, working on cleaning up the kaiju remains and debris, after he flunked his entry exam as a soldier, but one day, while on the job, he’s infected by a parasite that lets him turn into a humanoid kaiju…

Obviously one of these new series that rose up after Attack On Titan success, even if the similarities are only superficial , as Kaiju 8 is more inspired by Ultraman (and a bit by Patlabor) than anything else, and the tone is more akin to One Punch Man than AoT… and honestly i think it’s pretty fun.

Nothing we haven’t seen before, but done fairly well, the animation is quite good, the action is solid, the kaiju designs are pretty cool, the cyberpunk aesthetic is well done, and i do like the protagonist being an older man than usual (despite being a teenager at heart) not just used for comedy bits.

The new material is a post-credits slice of life bonus episode about the other characters’ day off duty, which i feel is needed because these recap films of shonen battle manga series usually sacrifice most non-action scenes, especially if they aren’t about the protagonist.

Hope i can set some time aside to see Season 2 when it airs later this year.

Platformation Time Again #3: Asterix & Obelix XXL 2 PS4 | DS, PSP

HISTORY

Since i’ve given a basic description/primer for Asterix & Obelix as a whole for the Platformation review of the fist XXL game, i won’t be repeating that, so i will simply refer you back to that if you are not too familiar (or at all) with the series.

What i will do is talk about the context of the platforming genre as the time XXL 2 originally released, because in just 3 years after the first Asterix & Obelix XXL came out, a lot happened.

As i said, even the first game felt kinda old fashioned compared to other platformers on offer at the time, heck, not even going back to the original Conker’s Bad Fur Day, in 2003 alone Jak II kickstarted the whole “teenage edgelord “phase of the genre, influenced to be “more mature” thanks to the rise in popularity of games like the 3D Grand Theft Auto games, and this was made even more clear when Sonic Team clearly saw Naughty Dog’s sequel “dark” turnabout and made the Shadow The Hedgehog game.

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Platformation Time Again #2 EXTEND: Asterix & Obelix: XXL (GBA)

Main Review

Asterix & Obelix: XXL

GAME BOY ADVANCE

As i said in the main article, dedicated portable versions of home console games were quite the norm back in the PS2 era, it was WAY before the Switch and hybrid consoles of its ilk were common places. Especially for (but not limited to) platform games, it was rarer NOT to see a Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance version of a big budget multi platform IP on consoles and PC.

Heck, even that forgotten, pre-Lords Of The Rings film trilogy Hobbit game had one.

Had to cover all possible bases, squeeze out all the possible moolah, which Activision did to the extend of almost being an art form in itself, but indeed it was common to see a version sharing the same name and cover art of a console or PC platformer game but on a GBA cartridge.

Due to the system’ limitations, this usually meant basically doing either a redux version of the home console gameplay or an entirely new game also based on that specific license and idea, but in 2D, it was reasonable and expected, to a certain degree, to have the “dimensional downgrade”.

Sometimes they tried to “compromise” and opted for the ol’ “faux 3D on budget” choice of being isometric, like the first two GBA Spyro titles and the Banjo Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge, to name the first ones that come to mind.

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Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest For Balance PS4 [REVIEW] | Sokoban Benders

Cards on the table: i’ve never seen the Avatar animated series, always heard it pretty good, i know it had/has a big following, enough for a reviled live action film to exist, but i simply didn’t care too much because i didn’t grow up watching that, and i never felt like i needed to later, i mean, i spent my teens watching anime, why bother with a western cartoon (that wasn’t Samurai Jack) tackling asian inspired stories and themes, when i can read Naruto directly?

Can’t really say i learned much about the series through osmosis, as i’ve seen people discuss about it, and since i guess it didn’t grab much European markets, some of the games based off it did reach the PAL territories, but not when the series was wildly popular and discussed about, i feel, back then we also got the shitty Legend Of Korra game Platinum Games made, which i did play and review on PS3 but has long been delisted and never received a physical release.

So i’ve figured i’d grab this last one, as it was actually released in 2023 by Gamemill, got in a bundle with the infamous Rise Of Kong, because why not? Might as well stick my entire head into the garbo bin, to see what foul creatures are lying in wait below the surface.

And to my understanding, the games based around this beloved Nickelodeon show (and the spin-offs) are mostly crap or disappointing at best, and this i feel ain’t gonna be the exception.

This is to say i don’t know the story in any detail, but i know the gist… and i feel the people that developed the game did know less than me, and just skimmed some summaries online in order to write the story and dialogues..

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Creature From The Haunted Sea (1961) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

So yeah, this is not quite “giant monster” territory as the poster would imply, but i wanted to cover this one for a while and it will do as a parallel to Monster Armageddon, as any excuse to compare Roger Corman’s output of the 50s-60s with the Asylum’s to shame the latter… it’s a good one.

Even if it’s still a tale of lies, because this was deliberately made as a comedy but was never advertised as such, with the promotional material playing it straight, like this being a “serious” monster flick in the vein of Creature Of The Black Lagoon, only to ambush the audiences come to see this in a double feature with Devil’s Partner.

Goading people into seeing a deliberate farce, a parody of basically every movie Corman did to that point, another quickie he actually shot in Puerto Rico alongside Last Woman On Earth, but it wouldn’t be seen until a year later in 1961, a farce that also a political satire and then lastly a monster movie, with one of the silliest looking aquatic monsters ever, as if The Monster From Piedras Biancas was made to look as silly as the bird thing in The Giant Claw. Deliberately.

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Monster Armageddon/2025 Armageddon (2022) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

I’ve lamented the downright lethargic, nearly comatose state and distinct disinterest, so nested and in a rot The Asylum is with their output in this last period, i’ve done that before.

It’s clear whatever “magic” they summoned with Sharknado didn’t last long, and now just rest on their laurels, so to speak, as even the usual aficionados of trash got disinterested in the same way the company itself seems to be with whatever they cram out, they keep doing their thing but just because it’s what they have always done, and will keep doing until there’s not any money left off mockbustering.

I remember from a class in genre cinema i once took that – broadly speaking – a genre has reached a stage of severe stagnation when it starts becoming metatextual, to speak of itself more than anything else, as it can obstensibly find nothing else to iterate on, so it “turns on itself”.

And while it no longer hold completely true, as we’re now in a post-meta phase, if you will, there’s still a valid argument in there, because films like Monster Armageddon (released as 2025 Armageddon in trying to fool more people) validate the implied drying up of the “creative well”, and are a testament to this decade of post-irony, meta overdosing incestinal multiverse crossovers, of finding out there’s no bottom of the barrel, no real lowest of the low that can’t be “improved” upon.

I remember buying the DVD for this one for 5 bucks, sight unseen, on Amazon back in 2023, i knew it was an Asylum joint, and the cover art was nice, featuring a lots of monsters and creatures.

As with Monster Island (their mockbuster response to 2019’s Godzilla II: King Of The Monsters), the cover art is way better than the movie itself, but this time around it isn’t a complete lie like it was with that movie… as in it’s not technically a lie.

It’s worse… or is it?

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[EXPRESSO] The Electric State (2025) | Mr. Peanut, Break Down This Wall

VERY loosely based on Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 retro-sci-fi illustrated book of the same name and directed by the Russo brothers, The Electric State is set in an alternate 1990s where robots, gaining sentience after decades, rise up and engage a full on war, ultimately won by the humans using headgear controlled remote drone soldiers. After the war, the headgear/vr sets are sold commercially to pacify the masses, while the surviving robots are sent to a giant desert prison colony.

We follow a juvenile delinquent, Jessie (Millie Bobby Brown), whom lost her family in a car accident years ago and is now a foster kid, as one night she gets visited by a robot of Kid Cosmo, her beloved brother’s favourite childhood cartoon, which claims to actually be him, leading the two in a roadtrip-escape adventure…..

One that plays it super-straight, all in an attempt to get us invested into this world… hard to when there’s simply no charm, with the movie actively refusing to embrace its inherent sillyness AND doubling down on being “gritty”, which backfires on a nuclear scale.

There’s a palpable attempt at telling a Spielberg style tale, but there’s no soul or substance to it, just a Ready Player One masturbatory penchant for pop culture regurgitation (that makes NO SENSE in context, to boot), well known actors half-assing their admittely bad characters, and a plot being a senseless, meaningless hodgepotche that makes even less sense as it goes on, never committed to anything besides vague, overly basic metaphors, or Funko Pops-friendly character designs.

Those that aren’t already well known brand figureheads like fuckin Mr. Peanut (what is this, Food Fight?).

It’s not even boring, but it’s quite bad, stupid, mostly just so confounding you had to wonder “Why?”, especially when it had a 320 million dollars budget.

[EXPRESSO] Captain America: Brave New World (2025) | The Credible Hulk, Part 2

I haven’t seen the Falcon And Winter Soldier this apparently continues from (in general i don’t care about the tie-in shows for these), i honestly don’t care too much about Captain America, the character itself or the film subseries, but sure, Harrison Ford is here as the US president (not that one?) and Giancarlo Esposito is here as well, so why not?

I honestly think it’s decent, it’s fine, it’s far from the worse ones, again, considering what we should expect from these era Marvel movies, but it also has most of the issues we’ve come to expect, from trying to juggle too much without fully committing to anything in terms of themes, with subplots and characters that are set up to be important but (most likely by the many documented and reported reshoots, rewrites and production troubles) don’t really add up to the plot.

A plot which itself it’s half reharshing The Winter Soldier, half being basically the unofficial sequel to the 2008 Hulk movie, so much returns and comes to play from that film into what’s extensibly a movie about the new Captain America trying to advert a conspiracy meant to undermine the new presidency of General “Thunderbolt” Ross, trying to turn a new leaf after his questionable past, as the new “Cap” is trying to live up to Steve Roger’s legacy.

On the upside, Mackie makes for a good “Cap’”, some plotlines that were seeded in other movies but were then mostly “abandoned” get revived or given a purpose, the action is often good, but the “New Cap” VS “Harrison Ford as Red Hulk” brawl (which features some iffy special effects) kinda feels there because they based the marketing on that and the movie it’s almost over, so it had be squeezed as the unintentionally anticlimactic climax.

The Return/Itaka: The Return (2024) | ♫ Odyssey, Ya See ♫

Premiered at TIFF in 2024, The Return, here called Itaka: The Return, to make more clear this is indeed about The Odyssey, that one from Homer.

Directed by Uberto Pasolini (uncle of cinema maestro Luchino Visconti and mostly know for producing the 1997 Peter Cattaneo directed cult comedy The Full Monty), The Return is a retelling of the last chapters of the epic, with Odysseus washing up naked to Itaka, the island he once ruled before getting involved in the Trojan War, only for it see having been overtaken by arrogant sultors to the queen Penelope, whom she keeps rejecting, buying time with the loom scheme, but their son, Telemachus is also facing death as the sultors see him as a treat to their ambitions.

So Odysseus, posing as a vagrant, visits the city, and despite being traumatized by the horrors of the war, he eventually rises up to the challenge in his characteristically crafty fashion.

We know the story. This retelling opts to focus on the “Journey To Ithaka Arc” and eskew any mythology, doing away with gods, magic and monsters to center of the familial and human drama of a father coming home to see it defaced by strangers, a king his kingdom brought to ruin, his relationships with the son he never saw before already compromised, and his reluttance to shed blood (even for justice) as we focus on him suffering basically from PTSD.

This is where i say there’s a “small” issue that ultimately undercuts the whole idea… but actually no, the more realistic-gritty tone works without defacing or changing the events chosen to be retold this way, even if the pacing suffers a bit it sticks to the canon, the acting by Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in particular are terrific, making for absorbing drama.

Bloody New Year (1987) [REVIEW] | The Evil Dead Spooktacular Fun Fair Knock-off-O-Rama

I know i was supposed to rewrite/revise or straight up redo old reviews for the rest of January, but since i usually don’t do it due 12 Days Of Dino December filling up the slots, i’ve figured i still would write a brand new review, about one of the few “New Year’s Eve” themed holiday 80s slashers.

No, not that one, we’re doing Bloody New Year.

Yeah, it’s a cop-out since it’s almost February, but whatever, consider it a freebie of sorts, a Spooktacular Eight review but in January, if you prefer.

Regardless, yes, surprisingly this subniche of holiday horror hasn’t been mined.. at all, without doing some research i struggle to come up with any more of “new year’s slashers” that isn’t the other one i alluded to before, New Year’s Evil.

That one is far more memorable and actually features prominently the “new year’s eve” as part of the plot…. this is Bloody New Year.

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