Paws Of Fury: The Legend Of Hank/Blazing Samurai (2022) [REVIEW] | “You know…. morons”

While i’m no Saberspark, i feel this deserves to be spotlighted for it’s such a weird, messy and obtuse piece of animation cinema and its tale has all the juicy bits, from misguided inception, development hell rot, leeching off an already established film, Paws Of Fury: The Legend Of Hank has it all.

If nothing else because somehow a sequel/tie-in game for it was released last year and i recently found out to my complete bewilderment.

Nothing to with the Sega Genesis videogame Brutal: Paws Of Fury, they both just happened to be recycling Bubsy naming conventions for when you can’t be arsed to make jokes, just puns, and taking a martial arts-asian aesthetics, though for different reasons since The Legend Of Hank is not a ’90s film, but a product of the late 2000s-2010s, when it was still in vogue to remake foreign (often Asian) films for the “american-internation market”, in a way also a product of the same vein of racism already tapped into the 90s by most western shows and games.

For the youngins it might sound strange, but especially in the late 2000s you couldn’t blink without seeing America remake a Japanese horror film, heck, they even remade Park Chan Wook’s Old Boy, they couldn’t stand the idea of something not being western enough at the time, especially if it dared ail from a country in the Asian sphere, so to speak.

Unless Tarantino did it.

I say this because this movie was pitched in this climate, back in 2010, as Blazing Samurai, an animated remake of Mel Brook’s beloved western parody Blazing Saddles.

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[EXPRESSO] A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) | The Cat Will Inherit The Earth

The acclaimed horror series about an alien invasion of sound-receptive creatures continues…. as it actually does not, by playing the classic “prequel” card, which is often a double edged sword, as it can actually expand upon the material or just feel like a stop-gap “filler” release.

In this case – as the title lays out – we go back to the very first day of the invasion, breaking out in New York, and we follow a terminal cancer-diagnosed woman (and her support cat) brought with the rest of the hospice to see a show, when suddendly vicious alien monsters fall from the skies and rampage, blind as bats but immediatly snapping in chase of of any loud noise…

In many ways, there’s little to say about A Quiet Place Day One that couldn’t/hasn’t already been discussed plenty about the previous movies, it doesn’t add really much “lore”, it just has some characters that will show up in the mainline films, but in this case it’s actually a good thing, as we have another good horror thriller with great suspence, a relatively novel twist on the monsters, excellent effects, good characters, and most importantly the ability to keep things simple at heart but far from boring, without bogging down the dread by forcing a mythos, for example.

Honestly i feel the “Day One/Origin” spin works well enough, i’m quite okay with it following mostly new people, as the “cancer-not-the-sign woman” is actually a pretty good main character, relatable, and while there’s nothing new or mindblowing added to the series, the execution it’s still quite good enough to make for a great film.

It’s a rare case when the “if not broken, don’t fix it” approach does actually still pay off, with the only little wart being the humdrum, shoehorned dream sequence.

[EXPRESSO] Shazam! (2019) | Say My Name!

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Superhero time again, with the DC offering of Shazam!, a series/characters that (like for most DC properties) i really wasn’t familiar at all, so i didn’t have any expectations of fidelity to the source material for this adaptation.

Billy Batson is a 15 years old boy that keeps escaping from foster homes in search of his mother, and yet again is assigned to a new family, that he tries to get away as well. But he summoned as the Champion by an old wizard, that passes his powers unto him by uttering his name, Shazam, as he’s too old to keep the Seven Deadly Sins sealed away into stone statues.

Billy transforms in a full grown and caped adult superhero (played by Zachary Levi), but as he’s still a teenager, he just fucks about with his newfound abilities, acts like an arrogant idiot, but the appareance of an occult villain (played by Mark Strong), will force him to not play the hero, but become an actual one in order to save his family.

If you are feeling tired of the genre (and of some of Marvel copious offerings), and think you might skip this one, don’t. It’s funny, really funny, the action is good, the humour is incredibly well balanced with the more emotional moments (which don’t shy away from being serious and dramatic), and overall the comedy never feels out of touch or “mandated”. It’s earnest, understanding, like it’s young main character, trying to figure where he belongs more than how to cast lazer beams from his eyes.

All of this with good characters, and a really welcome touch of horror (there’s some decapitation, which i really didn’t expect, but nothing too graphic overall), making it one of the best superhero movies i’ve seen in a while.

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P.S.: Stay not just for a post-credit scene, but for the ending credits themselves, funny and tonally fitting of the overall tone. 🙂

Also, yeah, i know that the horror bits are not so surprising, given the director previous works, like Lights Out.