Jack Frost: The Amytiville [MANWHA REVIEW] | The Teen Hellsing Years

This has been on my bucketlist for a while because it was such a transparent case to me.

As in, sometimes you have comics more or less explicit in showing their inspiration, their model to copy and emulate, happens a lot in shonen manga but it’s not always what one would assume

Sometimes it can be just a conflation of this kind of comics being very iterative and built (like most books and movies, for that matter) on clichès, on proven formats, time-tested formula, so similarities are often more coincidence than deliberate emulation of a specific series among the sea of many similar ones, expecially when in turn they influence each other as they go, and in time are themselves taken as examplse to follow.

But once i laid eyes on this manwha (a “korean manga”) by Ko Jin-Ho, Jack Frost: The Amityville, aimed at basically the same demographic of an edgy Shonen Jump series, then red the first volume, i was kinda happy in how immediatly obvious it was to me what this wanted to be.

As in, a more shonen take on Hellsing, the renowed pulp classic by Kohta Hirano about vampires, guns bigger than people, religious freaks with knives that double as lances and undead nazi cyborg monsters.

Continua a leggere

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe And The Blight Below PS4 [REVIEW] | #musoumay

RPGs aren’t really my bag anymore, not because i dislike them, but because they’re way too much time consuming for me nowadays, they simply are, and while i make some exceptions.. i usually don’t bother because i know i will most likely lose interest or be forced to play something else that i can finish in far less time so i can write a review for it and have it out in a reasonable timeframe.

Dragon Quest doesn’t need presentation nowadays, as is THE quintessential Japanese RPG series since its heyday, arguably even more than Final Fantasy in the land of Nippon, but since i’m not familiar with it, i won’t be making any presentation, even more so since this title is clearly catered to hack n slash fanatics that might or might not have played at least a Dragon Quest game, meaning it’s a gateway title for musou fans or general audiences that have some understanding of the series only through pure gaming osmosis but not had any chance or big interest for the series itself.

Which leads us to the plot being a spin-off affair with an original story that does the “multiversional tango”, as it custom to most of these Warriors crossover games overall, in order to have an ensemble cast of heroes from the various mainline games enter the fray alongside original protagonist characters and a fairly generic common threath for everyone to band together against the baddie responsable, in hope this can also sent the various heroes to their home world/dimension.

Works for me.

Continua a leggere

[EXPRESSO] Wolf Man (2025) | “Get away you weirdo monkey man!!”

Leigh Whannell continues his “remake rumpus” of the classic monsters following up his 2020 releaed The Invisible Man (and the whole Dark Universe failure) with his take on the Wolf Man.

The story revolves around a family on vacation in a house in the woods of Oregon, with the father trying to use the unfortunate circumstances that brought them there in order to mend his strained family situation, then being bitten by a strange animal while protecting his wife and daughter, and gradually transforming into a beastly creature…

The themes of “sins of the father/parental neglect-abuse” are interesting for a werewolf film, as it the idea to opt for body horror, to focus on the slow transformation to parallel the father’s descent into the brutal, alienated and alienating monster that once walked the skin of a man, and i’d never felt like the idea didn’t work or the script didn’t quite click, nor like there was some “filler”.

Nothing like that.

Honestly, it’s far from bad, but it also frustates me as being so close to being straight up a good, because it’s quite decent but it’s bogged down by feeling honestly uneven, starting good, delivering on the tension, on the claustrophobic atmosphere, even managing to make you care more than you’d wager about these characters that at a first glance feel generic… and honestly never proper bloom, despite the good acting, especially by Christopher Abbott (yes, funnily enough) as the father.

That combined with some questionable special effects, some retreads on cliches, the movie never achieves the emotional depth it soughts to, so it ends up feeling incomplete, like something is plain missing, uneven in execution and underdeveloped where it counts in spite of clear effort.

Not bad, at all, just… kinda disappointing, especially considering the talent involved.

Pity.