12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 60: Grunt! (1983)

Back in the mid 60 and 70s cavemen films had come back, going initially for an adventure feel, alongside other dinosaur or prehistoric themed films (most already covered here), but it became clear soon that what made One Million Years B. C. a success wasn’t the stopmotion dinosaur effects by Ray Harryhausen, but Rachel Welch in cavegirl garments, and hence these film began more focusing on the cave girls and the “historical” excuse for pseudo-nudity.

In Italy we had a tradition of sexy comedies budding in the late 60s, so in the 70s some filmakers hopped onto the bandwagon and made sexy cavemen comedies like When Women Had Tails, while others latched unto the more extreme trend of the cannibal films.

It was a fad, in the grand scheme of things, but the genre survived into the early ’80s with stuff like the alredy reviewed Caveman, the one with Ringo Starr, which i assume was the catalyst for director Andy Luotto to try his hand at a caveman slapstick comedy, with Grunt!, indeed one of the more apt titles ever for a caveman comedy, sporting the tagline “La Clava E’ Uguale Per Tutti” (lit. “The Club Is Equal For All”), also used as a subtitle for the kinda modern DVD rerelease it got and which i’m using for review.

You can find the entire movie on Youtube, but you might need to find some subs unless you understand italian, as yes, it’s a dialogue-less film…. BUT there’s also a voice over narration by the director, Andy Luotto (also in the film as the caveman that looks like a Squawkabilly) talking bollocks that intervenes here and there.

Then again, it’s not like it makes the thing have more sense (it’s mostly bollocks, including random homophobic shit and shit tier cabaret jokes), but maybe there are some german dubs around, or maybe french, as far as i know there are no official english dubs for the film.

Which makes sense since there’s just so little voiceover to dub, and no spoken dialogue per sé.

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12 Days Of Dino December # 55: The Invisible Raptor (2023)

Sadly i learned of this midway through doing last year’s batch of reviews for 12 Days Of Dino Dicember, so i wasn’t able to cover it back then, but we’re fixing that right now.

The idea is both cute and obvious as hell: a dinosaur film without the dinosaur.

More correctly, the dinosaur is there, it’s a velociraptor, but due to “science” it was made super smart AND invisible, escaping from the lab and going on a rampage, leaving it up to a disgraced paleonthologist (reduced to mascot costume shenanigans at a dino themed amusement park) to save the day from the invisible menace.

I don’t need to, but i will point out that this so obviously feels like them stumbling into a somewhat genius solution when they couldn’t afford the dinosaur in their dinosaur film.

The film knows everyone would have sussed that out immediatly, so it plays as a horror-black comedy that’s basically a spoof of all things Spielberg… well, mostly a flood of references mushed in together, with protagonist being Dr. Grant Walker, an appropriately named fusion of Indiana Jones with Dr. Grant and i suppose Chuck Norris’ character from Walker Texas Ranger, maybe?) as he teams up with an hapless security guard in trying to stop the invisible dinosaur, while everyone obviously doesn’t believe his story until it’s too late, Jaws style.

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[EXPRESSO] Mantopus! (2025) | Octaman’s Father

Had to see a newly released on Amazon Prime Video film called “Mantopus!” that is retro styled meta comedy about a now washed horror director finding the titular “man-octopus” hybrid in a mysterious antique shop and deciding to use it as the star of his final horror film, Mantopus, a Creature From The Black Lagoon knock-off.

It’s one of these modern retro styled comedies akin to stuff like The Lost Skeleton Of Kadavra, but set in the late 50s-early 60s, arking back to the drive-in era of monster movies, with a Michael Gough-looking director (as the whole movie it’s basically a tribute to him), a slimeball making stuff like the fictional “Frankenstein In Texas” to the dismay of his producer, running “not-American International Pictures”, but the director becomes mad and starts using the monster to eliminate his “enemies”.

I will say it’s an interesting proposition, because while it’s not too hard by now to emulate the visual style of these shlocky films, you ironically gotta have decent actors able to deliberately act bad the purposefully stock dialogue that seems somehow dubbed in post even when it’s obviously not, but Mantopus manages to get that and most importantly gets right the feel of these old movies, and the tone, that both makes fun but also celebrates with sincerity these films, that actually likes the drive-in trashfests about monsters with little to no budgets but high on violence and “nudity”.

It’s all done with affection instead of spite or mockery, the overacting is lovely as its the deliberate awkward delivery of basically every line and stock discussion, it’s a quite fun film, though it’s a very niche movie made for a very specific audience, one that loves cheesy horror of yore and will notice the posters aren’t for made up old movies.

[EXPRESSO] The Naked Gun (2025) | Piss, Taken

On its face, this seems like a stupid idea, and another chapter in the modern trend of reviving any old franchise because desperation.

Even more so since this is a comedy franchise, the kind of films that usually you don’t consider for revivals since the genre is even more specific to its time than most and almost immediatly ages out of relevance (also due to changing sensibilities).

So i was kinda blindsided when i went to see the Naked Gun sequel-reboot… and it works.

It works and it’s actually feels like the Naked Gun, with its recognizable brand of “dirty jokes” (almost deliberately kept retro in that sense too), wordplay, 90s metahumour, slapstick and mostly absurdist delirium of actively trying to be stupid beyond stupid, just updating the farcical non-sense to modern standards…. but not quite, as it blatantly doesn’t care to coddle modern audiences and keeps the spirit of the 90s movies, it relishes it also being “dated” and throwing out references to Buffy’s musical episode, uncaring if the youngins will get it or not.

say “sequel-reboot” because the set up is that Liam Neeson is playing the son of Lielsen’s character, Frankie Debin, as an idiot sauvant old fashioned cop that this time has to dismantle a plan from a tech mogul that wants to use sonic frequencies to make people regress or something…. the plot is just a crutch for the jokes as usual, but the casting (including Pamela Anderson) and the committment make it work, Liam Neeson actually makes perfect sense as Frankie Drebin Jr. given how Lielsen’s carreer transictioned from serious drama to spoof comedies.

Plus it’s also short and sweet, just 80 minutes of unfettered retro comedy delirium that is confident and earnest, and is most likely gonna be enjoyed by newer audiences too.

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 PS4 [REVIEW] | Gaia’s Wrath

Given the first World Brothers turned out quite well in terms of review and profits, D3 did the obvious, by greenlighting a sequel, simply called EDF World Brothers 2.

Obvious to a certain degree because EDF spin-off never received sequels, but i did like the first World Brothers, so i was more than happy to see Yuke’s (also behind EDF Iron Rain) come back for more voxel Earth Defense Force.

This is a direct sequel as well, and this time, after watching the skies so hard in case of another alien invasion coming from there, we get bitten in the ass by a monster that was inside our squared, voxely Mother Earth, Gaiarch, which erupts from its core and breaks the world apart, meaning it’s up to the EDF once again to make the planet whole by sticking back the destroyed pieces.

This is done by your team of newbies trying to find the more experienced EDF members scattered around the globe, and also new allies like an alien-esque amnesiac girl (that’s like an anthromorphized version of the Daroga enemies, since she loves the buggers and has a Daroga style hat of sorts), new and old bros and sisters, a time travelling Caesar (not the monkey), highlighted by odd giant replicas of the main EDF classes to fight as enemies before taking down a mothership.

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Shiver Me Timbers (2025) [REVIEW] | Night Of The Sailor Comet

As the time of writing (and posting, since i improvised this trifecta of Popeye horror films’ reviews) this is the more recent in the batch of 3 horror films based around Popeye’s copyright falling into the public domain that were basically dumped on VOD, all released in a matter of months (or weeks) from one another, and while i’m fairly sure there by September (to be very generous) this specific declination of the fad will have died down due to diminishing returns (since it’s the third time, after Winnie The Pooh and Steamboat Willy’s Mickey Mouse) … i’m not putting this mini-marathon of modern “public domainxploitaition” in “extend mode” if another one or more of these eventually crop up, i’m not playing catch-up anymore.

So let’s see how Shiver Me Timbers, the debut film for director-writer Paul Stephen-Mann, fares out.

In the summer of 1986, a group of friends, led by Olive Oil and her brother Castor, are going on a trip in Northern California to witness the rare Haley’s comet meteor shower event, but they couldn’t expect that a comet piece would fall to the ground that night, a piece lodging itself into the corncob pipe of a reclusive fisherman living nearby, Popeye, now turned into a monstrous, violent killer with superhuman strenght, ready to sate its bloodthirst on Olive and his friends..

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Platformation Time Again #3: Asterix & Obelix XXL 2 PS4 | DS, PSP

HISTORY

Since i’ve given a basic description/primer for Asterix & Obelix as a whole for the Platformation review of the fist XXL game, i won’t be repeating that, so i will simply refer you back to that if you are not too familiar (or at all) with the series.

What i will do is talk about the context of the platforming genre as the time XXL 2 originally released, because in just 3 years after the first Asterix & Obelix XXL came out, a lot happened.

As i said, even the first game felt kinda old fashioned compared to other platformers on offer at the time, heck, not even going back to the original Conker’s Bad Fur Day, in 2003 alone Jak II kickstarted the whole “teenage edgelord “phase of the genre, influenced to be “more mature” thanks to the rise in popularity of games like the 3D Grand Theft Auto games, and this was made even more clear when Sonic Team clearly saw Naughty Dog’s sequel “dark” turnabout and made the Shadow The Hedgehog game.

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Monster Armageddon/2025 Armageddon (2022) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

I’ve lamented the downright lethargic, nearly comatose state and distinct disinterest, so nested and in a rot The Asylum is with their output in this last period, i’ve done that before.

It’s clear whatever “magic” they summoned with Sharknado didn’t last long, and now just rest on their laurels, so to speak, as even the usual aficionados of trash got disinterested in the same way the company itself seems to be with whatever they cram out, they keep doing their thing but just because it’s what they have always done, and will keep doing until there’s not any money left off mockbustering.

I remember from a class in genre cinema i once took that – broadly speaking – a genre has reached a stage of severe stagnation when it starts becoming metatextual, to speak of itself more than anything else, as it can obstensibly find nothing else to iterate on, so it “turns on itself”.

And while it no longer hold completely true, as we’re now in a post-meta phase, if you will, there’s still a valid argument in there, because films like Monster Armageddon (released as 2025 Armageddon in trying to fool more people) validate the implied drying up of the “creative well”, and are a testament to this decade of post-irony, meta overdosing incestinal multiverse crossovers, of finding out there’s no bottom of the barrel, no real lowest of the low that can’t be “improved” upon.

I remember buying the DVD for this one for 5 bucks, sight unseen, on Amazon back in 2023, i knew it was an Asylum joint, and the cover art was nice, featuring a lots of monsters and creatures.

As with Monster Island (their mockbuster response to 2019’s Godzilla II: King Of The Monsters), the cover art is way better than the movie itself, but this time around it isn’t a complete lie like it was with that movie… as in it’s not technically a lie.

It’s worse… or is it?

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Avenzers: Italian Super Heroes (2023) [REVIEW] | Spaghetti-Fi: Endgame (ft. Anatar from the Anatar series)

Remember the bright minds behind the italian duck parody of Avatar, Anatar, one so stupid and cowardly it couldn’t even release before or close to the second Avatar movie it wanted to leech off?

No? Well, i did a review of Anatar, go read that. It’s definitely quite the something.

Today we’re talking shit. Super hero shit.

In one way, i can at least understand the idea of Anatar: it’s a mockbuster of a franchise that made gajillions and had a new movie coming out back then.

Tale as old as cinema itself.

This one is even more dead on arrival, it is when you do an Avengers parody, an Avengers Endgame parody after what feels like a decade since movie released, with Marvel still pumping them out to a public that notably was reasonably confused to see the sagas go on after something called “ENDGAME”, and reasonably tired of them trying to redo the same magic but cheaper, faster, taking for granted you just had to press the “redo button” to actually duplicate the success.

But it just fits, it’s that outdated, decades late to the party, or unaware that the building you rammed a tank through even had a party in it, that attitude defining most of the lowest fuckin italian media trash.

And like Anatar, Avenzers was outdated (moldy, even) the second it came out, and i still believe it actually releasing in theather is a psy-op of sorts, just gaslighting people into believing that it did receive a theathrical release, despite very few evidence to be found online, aside from an european theather chain, UCI Cinemas, advertising as it did with Anatar, and a report of it raking the miserable box office of 1.200 euros.

Which is so fuckin pathetic it ain’t even funny, just plain sad.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember #42: Caveman (1981)

Ah yes, the caveman movie with Ringo Starr, that was a thing, and honestly anything with actors or people that are actually known in the wider sphere of interests… it’s a welcome break from a lot cheap ass dinosaur flicks done with nobodies and with the cash of a ham sandwich, i’ve said this before but i’ll repeat myself since the 30 cents trash is by far the more numerically abudant.

Especially as it’s kind of ambitious for what’s conceptually just another cavemen comedy, as the main appeal is the cast, with Ringo Starr, Dennis Quaid, Barbara Bach, but it’s almost completely recited in “caveman language”, and in some theathers they even gave out a translation phamplet for 30 words in caveman lingo, which isn’t a complete gimmick since there is a sort of caveman dialect-vocabulary that’s recurring through the film, so no subtitles will ever be needed to watch it.

There is a plot of sorts, with Atouk, a caveman a bit too thinky and curious for its tribe, getting kicked out and joining a merry band of outcast cavemen, and with them they basically go on to improve themselves, invent fire, weapons, learn to walk not hunched like a baboon, all that stuff.

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