Asterix & Obelix XXL: Romastered PS4 [REVIEW] | For Toutatis!

Oddly, this was the last of the Asterix XXL series to get the remaster treament, the first being XXL 2 in 2018, then we had the brand new XXL 3 in 2019, then the “romastered” version of the first game in 2020, the one we’re talking about today, to celebrate the release of a new Asterix & Obelix movie in theathers.

One of the live-action ones, but still, it’s new Asterix & Obelix material!

Originally developed for PS2, Gamecube and PC (with a GBA version that’s basically another game entirely) by defunct french studio Etranges Libellules and published by Atari Europe, this remaster was instead published by Microids (which pretty much took the place Infogrames had back then) and developed by the quite non-defunct (at the time of writing, anyway) french Osome Studios.

The plot sees the titular duo wander off of their little Gaul village to the ol’ boar hunt only to come back and find out Ceasar (yes, Julius Caius Ceasar from Caligula, exactly) has somehow managed to storm the village, capturing most people and sending them off to various distant ends of the Roman empire in order to have locked out sight and mind, hopefully for good.

But with the help of a fired roman spy, you find out that most of the imprisoned gauls most likely managed to get a piece of the map indicating their location, as Ceasar took the extra step – just in case – of ripping the map in pieces and scattering them in various locations.

Good enough as an excuse in terms of videogame logic to have Asterix & Obelix travel to various places like Egypt, Normandy, Greece and Helvetia, freeing their fellow gaul citizens and getting more pieces of the map along the way.

Continua a leggere

[EXPRESSO] The Bunker Game (2022) | Paranazical Activity

Out of the blue a new italian (well, an italo-french production, but still, shot in Italy with italian actors) horror movie sneaked into cinemas here as an event screening.

I will say that this time i’m not so much disappointed or angry but utterly confused as to what they were even trying to do.

The setup is that there’s a LARP set up in a WWII nazi-fascist bunker in Italy, with an alternate history post-apocalyptic scenario, but when security measures break down, they evacuate the place and only the staff decides to remain and investigate to what happened, as the game/scenario creator has gone missing…

Given the title you’d expect the movie turning into either a battle royale, a Saw-style thingie, even a simple slasher, but nope, it goes into supernatural territory…. for reasons.

In the first part you kinda forget – despite the movie stating immediatly it’s a LARP – that’s a farce, a game, and i honestly wonder why it didn’t play the “alt-history Fallout cum Fourth Reich” scenario straight, i mean, the production values are quite good, the costumes too, so it could have been simply a modern nazisploitation flick.

For what it actually is, a horror movie, one where the horror part feels really forced and cliched, there’s some atmosphere due to the setting but no tension as the movie randomly veers into horror, the characters are token, unlikeable or barely have any screen time to be even worthy of adjectives.

The Bunker Game has some good cinematography, decent-to-good acting, but it feels way longer than its 90 minutes runtime, as it meanders about unsure of what the hell it’s even doing or saying, if anything at all.

Still better than In The Trap, but this one frustrated me way more since it had actual potential.

[EXPRESSO] The Swarm AKA La Nueè (2021) | Zorak Disapproved

The international localized title, The Swarm (the original being “La Nueè”, which can be directly translated as “The Plume”), threw me a bit off, as it’s the same one for the older 1978 movie with Michael Caine, but this recent Netflix exclusive movie it’s not about killer bees, it’s about locusts.

Ok, more Locusts: The 8Th Plague. Or The Exorcist II: The Heretic, i guess.

Plot it’s a little less hockey than one would assume, as it’s about a single mother that raises locusts for a living, but just isn’t able to make them breed, until she discovers that the animals react well to human blood…

Obviously, this happens as an accident, and you can tell this isn’t an american b-movie because it’s not actually just about killer locusts, but the drama of a single mother desperately trying to make ends meet, ready to do many sacrifices for her family.

Still, it’s a bit unelegant the way in which the locusts acquire this bloodlust, or how the narrative it’s both too slow moving and forced in various points, because you were kinda promised a swarm of killer locusts rampaging, so here’s a character doing an obviously stupid thing for the sake of setting that up. Except… not really.

And even so, there’s no real pay-off or much in the way of horror until the last 15 minutes, most of the movie it’s spent with these…. kinda detestable and unlikeable characters, not much happens in general, so it’s really drawn out and when something does happen it’s way too brief, often feels forced or done more out of obligation than anything else.

There are worse movies, but this is so disinterested about its subject material and such a slow moving, boring pile of pointless that i would simply suggest skipping it.