The Spooktacular Eight #27: Possessor (2020)

While unearthing gems or trash champions of yore is fun, i also want to cover more modern films in this rubric, and today we remedy that by reviewing a film that i feel somehow was ignored or put to the sides, more due to its unfortunate release timing than anything else.

I mean, if 2020 didn’t hit the world with a pandemic, maybe this and the Invisible Man remake/reboot would be better known, not that they’re “obscure” or were treated as pariahs by the press.

“This” being Possessor, a sci-fi horrot thriller by Brandon Cronenberg, yes, the son of body horror maestro David Cronenberg, who’s still making movies of varying quality, like the more recent The Shrouds (and the 2022 Crimes Of The Future movie that isn’t actually a remake of his older film of the same name).

The premise is immediatly gripping, set in a cyberpunk-ish future where an assassin, Tasya Vos, carries over her murderous assignment by possessing other people bodies, but finds herself fighting for control of her lastest host body, belonging to a man named Colin, the boyfriend of a wealthy CEO’s daughter, whom is also being forced at his data mining company in a menial role.

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[EXPRESSO] The Beekeeper (2024) | Sleeper Cell

Let’s start the year off with the new Jason Staham movie, The Beekeeper.

One merry day, a kindly but tech “un-savvy” old lady is scammed by one of those “call this number to recover your computer” operations, resulting in them draining all her money, even the 2 millions of the pro-bono teaching fund she was tasked with.

In utter despair, she commits suicide, and her daughter, working at the FBI, initially thinks is the man whom she found in her house, but he was simply her neighbour, a quiet man that worked as a beekeeper and was beyond grateful of the kindness bestowed upon him by the old lady.

So he sets out in a quest for revenge against those responsable, because he’s a beekeeper, but also a “beekeeper”, as the codename given to highly trained assassins, one-man army agents belonging to a super-secret government project, operating outside of the system to protect the system itself in case it becomes unstable or operated by bad actors.

Some very bad actors in this case, not that will stop Jason Staham to avenge her kindly neighbour by kicking ass, eventually crushing skulls and popping caps into anything that doesn’t wanna de-escalate scamming people, when the sheer magnitude of his one liners somehow doesn’t immediately scare the life out of the douchebag thugs and their untouchable masters.

It’s a decent action romp with some nice ideas that ultimately delivers a lot of satisfying graphic violence, the plot it’s essentially nothing new but the flair (and the “bee angle”) is nice enough, the action is enjoyably cheesy, and it’s a pretty straighforward narrative that doesn’t wast time nor tries to sequel bait.

It’s definitely better than most of the other movies Staham was in last year, this is decent, and very, very entertaining indeed.

Fate EXTELLA: The Umbral Star PS4 [REVIEW] #musoumay

Ah yes, the Fate musous. Yes, Plural.

One that took surprisingly long, despite being one of the more requested crossovers with the formula, according to many japanese surveys results.

And oddly wasn’t snapped up by Tecmo Koei, but by Marvelous, which is both a good and a bad thing, for reasons we’re gonna get into later. But regardless, it’s nice to be reminded that these kind of games aren’t actually a patented formula…. at least i don’t think anymore, but still, this game is another proof that you can attempt a similar formula and Koei won’t sue off the back of their old, very vague patent.

I mean, they did make a “sequel” after this, so i’d think it’s safe to say that at least you can make “musou-likes”, if you so desire. And if the company that owns Senran Kagura can have more than a crack at it, you know the “low budget” excuse doesn’t quite hold as you’d expect and/or hope.

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