Anatar (2022) [REVIEW] | Howard The Fuck

No, this isn’t a typo. And it’s not that kind of pun.

And yes, this poster is 100 % legit.

Since it’s my birthday, let’s review a movie i’ve been meaning to cover here for a while.

This is an actual italian parody/spoof of Avatar, that released in italian theathers, for actual money, with the intent of launching a new brand of “cinepattone” (aka a type of italian extremely low brow dumb comedies that once infested theathers every year around christmas), the “spaghetti-fi”, in the words of Anatar’s producer Salvatore Scarico, whom also literally and openly calls this an Avatar’s mockbuster film.

So much for clarity.

Reeling back my jaw from the freezing pavement after realizing this isn’t a troll style marketing campaign for another, real movie…. i must also point out this was never really properly advertised anywhere (or almost anywhere) and i stumbled upon its existence last year while browsing upcoming early dicember cinema releases here.

While this also gives me whiffs of Creators: The Past (a huge italian scifi epic that flopped back into the obscurity from whence it came)… you know, at least they marketed it at popular Italian anime/manga/videogames cons that year, Lucca Comics & Games. They tried proper. And at least that movie had William Shatner.

Here they were so spineless that at the last second (literally, 2 days before the intended 1st December release, hence 2 weeks before Avatar: The Way Of Water opened in theathers here) they chickened out – ha ha – and rescheduled the release between January and February 2023.

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[EXPRESSO] Creators – The Past (2019) | Star Odissey Barbarian Italian Gods Of Space Magick

You might be wondering what the hell is this.

I did too, until i remembered the name from 2019’s edition of the Lucca Comic & Games convention in Italy, but i never “investigated” and i….completely forgot about it.

Then again, they didn’t market it AT ALL, despite being an italian production with William Shatner and Gérard Depardieu, alongside a cast mostly made by americans, italian actors at their first role and italian musician Angelo Minoli.

The year is 2012, and an extraordinary planetary aligment is about to happen. The eight members of the Galactic Council (each governing their own planet as a “Creator”) meet to discuss of the coming events, but following an incident they lose an essential artifact, and task a human girl to retrieve it before the planets disalign.

This is the basic gist… the movie itself it’s INSANE, it really lives up to the “colossal” monicker, as they basically threw together 3-4 movies. And – as you would expect – it gets confusing, as the sub-plots splinter into smaller sub-plots, each of the Creators has their hidden agenda, and the movie just keep throwing things at the viewer, like Jesus Christ, aliens abductions, conspiracies, sword and sorcery bits with scorpion-men, the very specifically italian “battle of the oranges”, etc.

And YES, all these things are connected together. The drawback is that with that many subplots and a runtime under 2 hours, some are abruptly resolved in seconds. Often because the movie just makes up new bullshit rules to do so. It’s anything but boring or stale, it’s visually intriguing, there is definitely dedication and ambition here, alongside a lot of money for an italian production of this type.

It tries to set-up sequels.

… I really wouldn’t mind, at all, but i “feel” they ain’t gonna happen.