Megalodon: The Frenzy (2023) [REVIEW] #thesharksix

Somehow, The Asylum stumbled their way into making a trilogy of films about Megalodon sharks, with the third and last entry so far being last year’s Megalodon: The Frenzy.

I say “stumbled” because i seriously doubt they planned any of this at all, but Megalodon Rising was indeed a sequel to their own 2018 Megalodon film, and this one starts with a recap to get you up to speed and confirm that the events of the previous movie happened.

…not sure entirely to what end, as the plot itself doesn’t have returning characters from either Rising or the 2018 movie, and is about how a submarine mission meant to establish a supply of clean geoenergy from an underwater volcano ends up causing a fissure in the seabed, accidentally unleashing 5 megalodons that wreak havoc.

They do eventually reference the events of Rising and the 2018 film, and the USS King, damaged after the finale of Rising comes into play, but then is now helmed by a character played by Eric Roberts… problem is he wasn’t in Rising, but since the lead characters died in the finale, i guess he was on ship and took over, whatever, who cares, now Eric Robert is manning the ship, in this “it was supposed to be filmed for the finale of the previous movie, but wasn’t” intro.

Whatever keeps him to star into A Talking Cat?! 2: Paws Of Fury, i guess.

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Seven Samurai 20XX PS2 [REVIEW] #meleemay

Technically this is a re-write, because i did review this game years and years ago in italian, but time gave me the distance needed to realize i could actually write an entirely new review from scratch for Seven Samurai 20XX still based on my experience of like 7 plus years ago, since the hatred i felt for this one never actually went away, and i guess festered on the back of my mind.

But i did replay it, and i can futher confirm that there are indeed many reasons to istinctually hate it, if nothing else for the fact it had the brass balls of being the closest to an actual videogame adaptation of Kurosawa’s seminal samurai film, as it actually had the rights by the Kurosawa production, and i wanna make it clear it also has Moebius (yes, THAT Moebius) as the character designer and music by another legend, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.

So yeah, it’s kinda impressive how Sammy (an arcade publisher that by the early 2000s fused with Sega in order to enter the home console videogame market, which i will always associate with my beloved Metal Slug clone called Dolphin Blue) got permits from the film studios, rounded up people of incredible caliber from different industries, and then managed to deliver such an obvious, steaming turd that was destined to haunt the 5 bucks bargain bins for a good decade.

So much for a product meant to celebrate the movie’s 50^th anniversary, as it did the anime series Samurai Seven, both curiously fiddling with sci-fi re-imaginings of the film but actually unrelated to each other besides both meant to attract younger audiences to Kurosawa’s story.

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[EXPRESSO] Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga (2024) | Scrotus Maximus

We’re back to the Wastelands with the long post-poned prequel/spin-off of Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa, and i’m being vague on what is is… well because it is a prequel that tells the origins of Furiosa from Fury Road, but it also not obsessed with continuity purity or that crap, understanding that these stories are not history logs, more chronicles, myths, with the inevitable variations that get told to and passed by the lore keepers and such.

As the subtitle puts eloquently, it’s a saga, it’s a legend.

The story sees a young Furiosa being kidnapped from the safe and still fertile haven she was born into by goons of a certain Dementius, only for her mother to get her back and dying while trying to protect her, with Furiosa living for years as a slave to Dementius, whom eventually grows cocky and tries to expand by taking over the territories of Immortan Joe… with middling results, but Furiosa never flinches or wavers, awaiting for a chance to exact revenge on the man that took everything away from her….

While a good chunk of the cast from Fury Road is back, Furiosa is played by Anya Taylor-Joy instead of, and honestly she’s amazing, delivering a great performance with very few lines, Chris Hemsworth is quite fun as the new douchy villain Dementius, and overall it’s great to have more Mad Max, Miller’s approach to action is still amazing, and its comic book-style post-apocalyptic desert world – and its tribalistic weird characters – is as fascinating as it always has been.

Honestly my only gripe is that it’s just not as good as Fury Road, i’d say mostly because it’s still a very good damn ride but it feels a bit too drawn out, in spite of its uber direct storytelling.

The Summer Of EDF & The Shark Six

So, to celebrate EDF 6 finally releasing westward in late July, we are gonna have ourselves a little Earth Defense Force retrospective, covering all the games yet not reviewed here (EDF 5, EDF Iron Rain and EDF World Brothers – alongside the PAL release of the first game in the series – have already been covered, FIY), mostly mainline ones, with 4 reviews spread across June and July.

This was already planned as such before D3 finally put down an actual release day (after the delay from spring 2024 to summer 2024), and since those months will have the now regular weekly release/cadence for articles/reviews, i’m also bringing back the sharks with 6 selected films about these poor animals, with 3 reviews per month.

August will be a surprise. For now.

Also, an expresso review of Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga is coming up next.

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.

[EXPRESSO] Civil War (2024) | FraKctured

I was disappointed by Garland’s previous (and winner for “most on the nose possible horror title”) film, MEN, and the trailer for Civil War really was so generic i could almost believe it was promoting a live action adaptation of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division 2’s, or whatever a big budget version of a “January 6 Simulator” without a Trump phrophecy orb would have looked like.

(then again, this is an issue A24 seems to have recently, see the trailer for The Zone Of Interest)

That aside, when i actually got to see the film in theathers, i was pleasantly surprised Garland didn’t “lost it”, so to speak, at all, as Civil War definitely deserves the critical “praise nugget” of punch packing and delivering, as you would with the subject matter.

The plot follows a couple of war journalists that, after surviving a suicide bombing attack while reporting in New York, they decide to accompany a mentor of theirs and a young girl that idolizes their work while travelling through an America torn apart by (yep) a civil war, as many states have split and factions formed, with the goal of interviewing the president, as he holes up in a contended Washington, and his forces slowly losing steam to the “Western Forces”…

It’s a bleak depiction of a fairly realistical future scenario where the many contraddictions and divisions in the American social stratum broke out from social media mudflinging into actual, literal, civil war, but the movie avoids any easy weaponizing and name calling by putting focus instead in the day-to-day ground reality and the routine atrocities witnessed and perpetrated.

And it’s an uncompromised vision because it denies itself comforting platitudes or hypothetical, naive resolutions, while sporting a stellar cast and being constantly engaging and entertaining on an immediate level.

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.

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[EXPRESSO] The Zone Of Interest (2023) | Heil Honey I’m Home

Jonathan Glazer’s film about the Holocaust won the Oscar for best screenplay, that much is true, but given El Conde received a similar nomination at last year’s Venice Film Festival, i wasn’t really sold on the movie because of that, but regardless i finally managed to catch a screening.

And this honestly surpassed my expectations.

Loosely based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis (itself based partially on real events), The Zone Of Interest is about the life of Auschwitz SS commander Rudolf Hoss and his family, as they live in a home in the titular “zone of interest” that places them meters away from the concentration camp itself, so close that you can see prisoners go in and out the camp to do chores, and hear the many atrocities committed there.

The plot focuses on the Hoss family life and the drama that Rudolf having to move to another outpost causes them, while they fully believe the Nazi creed through and through, all to further enunciate the abhorrent reality of the concentration camps and the Nazi war machine while we never even move outside of their house, let alone enter Auschwitz.

And this slice of life apporeach it’s indeed perfect to fully expose the “banality of evil” at the heart of it, it’s a glacial remind there’s no need to shock people when its far worse to remind us the Holocaust wasn’t run by a small gaggle of evil demon warlords alone, but was also accepted by regular people, and reminded that it was also run by capitalism as everything else, with architects calmly discussing with Rudolf Hoss the plans of how to costruct the more efficient, cost-saving method of massacre, while his wife idly chats over tea with her friends in another room.

Noteworthy indeed.

[EXPRESSO] Godzilla Battle Line iOS | Army Mon’

So, you may or may not remember i tried to review this one alongside the other two mobile smartphone free-to-play Godzilla games Toho put out in 2021, the now (thankfully, as it was ugly and very, very shite) defunct Godzilla Destruction and the weird Uma Musume-ish training sim Run Godzilla.

Problem is that Battle Line didn’t work on my smarthphone, try as i might it would just crash after it booted, every single time. Almost 3 years later, with the prospect of the new Monsterverse film that will have Godzilla and Kong “collab” (and 2024 marking Godzilla’s 70^th anniversary), i went to see if it was still available to download… and yes, for some fuckin reason now it works, despite my smarthphone being fairly outdated, better late than never.

Godzilla Battle Line is actually a decent little RTS-thingie where you battle other human players by placing down what are basically toy-sized monsters, vehicles and weapons from the Godzilla franchise, all to overwhelm the other leader monster on the opposite side of the battle grid while defending yours.

Despite the cheapish production values, i do like the “playing with Godzilla toys on a diorama” aesthetic, there is some depth to it, over time it has had many updates (the latest adding Godzilla Minus One content), and despite the focus on versus matches, there’s also a single player mission-based mode.

Sure, its a gacha with a “battle pass”, some obnoxious in-game ads, i’ve heard cheaters are a thing…. hard to tell because right now the game it’s nearly unplayable, is THAT unstable, prone to crashes and costant disconnections at any time.

When it works, it’s actually a fun lil’ game, the free to play elements aren’t the worst, so if you’re into Godzilla it’s worth a punt at the very least.

[EXPRESSO] The Three Musketeers Part II: Milady (2023) | Into The Dumasverse

More Muskeeters of the non-Mickey Mouse variety with part 2 of the new French big budget film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ enduring classic, which i mistakenly assumed was a two parter and called it that in the review of the first film…. and yet it still IS a two parter, and it, with this second film focusing on the figure of Milady De Winters and covering basically all the way up to the novel’s finale.

Makes sense, and that much is true, but the script changes some things around and we have it basically ending on a cliffhanger ending… but apparently not for a “Three Muskeeters Part 3”, though many forget this is the first of a series of books about D’Artagnan and fellas, and apparently there are some spin-offs in the works, so yep, most likely this is the set-up for a “Dumas-verse”.

That said, this “part 2” is a good continuation, the energy and intensity to the fight scenes of the first part is still there, Eva Green as Milady gets a good bout as the anti-heroine Milady, and there’s quite the fun to be had still, but sadly it feels kinda rushed, even more than the first part, as some character that were set up to be important barely have a sub-plot or do anything of relevance to do, and i won’t deny at times i felt, if not lost, a bit hurried along the many characters, conspirancies, plans and such, to the point you can follow it but barely.

It there ever was a movie that could have used half a hour of extra runtime, this is one, because it could have actually benefitted from it in a noticeable way, and made this second part as good as the first one instead of decent if messy.