Shogun’s Blade PS2 [REVIEW] | #musoumay

Ah yes, one of the very first istances of “we have Dynasty Warriors at home”.

Obviously done on a budget and part of the Simple Series (this one titled simply The Kessen Sekigahara, quite to the point as these games’ titles often are), hence once could just assume this was developed by one of D3’s regulars, and if you guessed Tamsoft get yourself a big pint of beer, you know your stuff indeed.

Of course if there’s a cheap hack n slash from D3 the chances of being handled by Tamsoft are pretty high, which in hindsight makes it extra funny to me they went from Onechanbara, then Senran Kagura, to being given the reins of a Bandai Namco published Captain Tsubasa game.

But we’re getting off track, again.

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Pinocchi-O-Rama #4: The Golden Key (1939)

While reviewing Pinocchio: A True Story, we touched upon the fact Tolstoy created his own take on the story of Pinocchio when introducing it to russian children in 1936, calling it The Golden Key Or The Adventures of “Buratino” (taken from the italian “burattino”, a term lifted from the commedia dell’arte and that indicates a wooden doll/puppet), which also became an iconic piece of children literature during the Soviet Union and it’s still remembered in Russia to this day.

So of course there were film adaptations of the “Russian rejigged Pinocchio”, and today we’re taking to task the first one ever, done in 1939 by the legendary soviet director and stop-motion master animator Aleksndr Pthusko, which fellow “MSTies” might remember for his later fantasy epics and adaptations of popular russian (and finnish as well with the Kalevala based “Sampo”) fairytales, from The Stone Flower to Sadko (absurdly retitled The Magic Voyage Of Sinbad) and of course Ilya Muromets (there’s a Fate joke here, but i ain’t touching it).

Without forgetting the more well known film that often overshadows this one, The New Gulliver, released 4 years priors, which got Pthusko praised by fellow legend animator Ray Harryhausen.

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Grizzly (1976) [REVIEW] | Plantigrade Peckish

To honor the upcoming release of Cocaine Bear here in ol’ Italy (and presumably other european states), there’s only one thing to do: talk about Grizzly… the first one.

Of course, i know, you wanna hear about the infamous sequel that for decades languished in post-production hell, until it actually released in 2020 (what a fuckin year indeed), Grizzly II, but i like being through, and the original Grizzly does have some history as one of the earlier and more popular/recognized Jaws rip-offs, especially for “having everyone in it”.

Just in case the release date didn’t hint of why this one was made, the theatherical poster sported the tagline “the most powerful jaws in the land”, what’s shame for movie marketing anyway?

And given the bucks made by Universal with that animatronic shark that often did not work well or at all, it’s no wonder everyone was jumping on the now proven successful formula, and Grizzly is no different, to the point there’s really no reason in discussing the plot.

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Super Mario: The Great Mission To Rescue Princess Peach! (1986) [REVIEW]

Before this deal of an animated Mario movie was written between Nintendo and Illumination, heck, 7 years before the infamous live-action film with Bob Hopkins and John Leguizamo, Nintendo already had its Super Mario anime movie, with Super Mario: The Great Mission To Rescue Princess Peach, based on the seminal Super Mario Bros game, which was released just 1 year prior.

While not totally unknown, for years it had been quite the rare, obscure and elusive piece of forgotten Mario media, with some horrible VHS rips flying around the web of thing, until some absolute chads in 2021 came together to fund and execute a 4K restoration project of the film from a rare (possibly even the only surviving) 16 mm print secured by another madlad called “Carnivol”, and then put it on Youtube for free, with updated (and upgraded) english subs.

So you can easily check it out there, not gonna put the link directly because Nintendo, but the effort it’s more than laudable and the people behind the restoration deserve some money thrown at them.

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Giant Monster March Lives Again

It’s March, so you know what that means, some select picks from the monster movie genre, as we try to not do the obvious ones but search deeper within the evergrowing sands of time, pulling out some familiar names as well as some of the more obscure entries, without completely forgoing more recent releases.

It’s not gonna be the more extensive year of the rubric, but i think the picks for this year’s Monster March are some of the better ones so far.

We’ll be starting on the 6th with some vintage rear projected cheese, after some EXPRESSO reviews of some recent releases i couldn’t get to before, see ya!

[EXPRESSO] Burning Fight (Arcade Classic Archives Neo Geo) NSWITCH DDL | Streets Of Mid

I’m a simple man, i see some Arcade Classics Archives games on sale on the Switch eShop, i usually buy them, especially if it’s early Neo Geo beat em up i’ve never even seen mentioned before.

With 3 bucks less to my wallet, i realized why exactly.

I mean, it was the age of the beat em up, and while it’s not often fair to just call them knock-offs…. Burning Fight really can’t be called anything else than a “knock-off” of Final Fight, Streets Of Rage, heck even Double Dragon, and one that embodies the definition of “one of those”, since it’s so predictable and derivative to have even the special health-draining moves feel like “legally distinct” imitations of Capcom’s other big series about punching people.

The only distinctive feature is that you can enter some of the shops/facilities and smash some furniture to find health and point pickups, but even these diversions last 4 seconds tops, though there’s some attempts at doing something new with some stages where you move on a conveyer belt while thugs throw explosive at you from the background, but it’s very small stuff.

This is as straightforward, simple and generic as a beat ‘em up could be in that era.

Originality aside, the problem with Burning Fight is that it’s indeed a cheap, brazen and almost sub-par knock off, not unplayable or anything, but the kind it inevitably just makes you wish you were playing the older titles on SNES and Genesis it’s clearly aping, since they’re better in every regard.

So ironically the only way i can justify bothering with this one it’s if you’re a beat em up buff that has already played all the popular ones and are searching for a fix, something that “will do”, and not really anything else.

12 Days Of Dino Dicember #18: Cowgirls Vs Pterodactyls (2021)

In the spirit of exploiting terms like “gender equality” and “inclusive”, i had to follow up my review of Cowboys VS Dinosaurs with this one, because everyone (aside from nazis, fascists, and their “variants”) is welcome to make its own bad movie about dinosaurs, with effects that really stretch the modern goodwill towards crap movies to excuse stuff that’s embarassing even by film student standards.

So cowgirls can fight the other – and honestly more represented in cinema – group of specific dinosaurs, because we’ll pretend we can’t afford to create any other dinosaur that isn’t a pterodactyl.

I do like pterodactyls (and Aerodactyls), so whatever, what plot brings these two factions to fight for the fate of the land without having to kidnap emperors?

A stolen husband. Yep. One day a teacher’s husband is pteronapped, so she enlist the helps of a prostitute and a gunslinger (a rpg class not represented in the title, for shame) to save his ass.

One thing i was hoping for is them trying to do this as “period piece”… and they do!

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember #17: Dinosaurus! (1960)

Among the many dinosaurs films ailing from the 50 and ownards, Dinosaurus! comes to mind as a classic cheesefest full of b-movies cliches, incredibly outdated values and characters that would fly only in that decade, sometimes for other reasons besides being offensive.

Never mind it being from the ’60s, or the fact that Steve McQueen was intended to play the lead character (after his success as the lead teen in 1958’s The Blob, also produced by Jack Harris, and also directed by Irvin Yeaworth), but opted out to star in The Magnificent Seven, never mind, because this is such a cornucopia of old timey laughable b-movie trash that it was eventually featured on Rifftrax. It was just a match made in cheap dinosaur heaven.

Such a perfect film to lampoon and ridicule that i’m surprised it took them until 2018, and now it’s fully free on their Youtube channel, so you have no excuse now.

But for us, we’re gonna try and review it in his “riff-less” original release, it’s the season of giving after all, so let us partake in some fermented dinosaur cheese of yore.

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[EXPRESSO] Diabolik 2: Ginko Attacks! (2022) | Color Cinecomic Photoplay

After the Diabolik revival movie of 2021 was surprisingly succesfull, we now have the sequel, Ginko Attacks, with inspector Ginko pressing its dogged hunt for master criminal Diabolik, managing to find its hidden lair, and eventually collaborating with a betrayed Eva Kant.

Though Diabolik himself was recast, here being played by Giacomo Gianniotti instead of Luca Marinelli from the 2019 movie.

As of why, Gianniotti does look almost identical to Diabolik as depicted in the original comics, but it’s a bad trade-off as Marinelli was by FAR a better actor, and a better Diabolik.

He doesn’t even feel like the same character either, but then again almost no character in Ginko Attacks has a semblance of personality, just existing as a barren narrative gear.

Cumbersome pacing (for a 2 hours and 20 minutes movie) doesn’t help, nor having Monica Bellucci in the cast.

Dialogues are pretty awful too, and tipify the whole problem with the movie, as it feels excessively faithful to the source material, making one wonder if they lifted the text verbatim from the comics, without ever considering how (or if) they would work in an actual film, or to actually update the literal decades old material for modern cinema standards.

So it’s no wonder the plot it’s also bad, utterly predictable from the get go regardless, with the twists/reveals actually making thing worse, because the entire narrative relies on almost every “character” being way too fuckin stupid to predict what the audience did hours ago.

Though it’s hard to get angry because it’s such an alienating, empty experience, with some style backed…by absolutely zero substance, and it’s very disappointing since the first movie was flawed, yes, but also WAY better.

So i’m not exactly looking forward to the third one already in the works.

Awful. Disappointingly awful.

The Ninja Warriors (Arcade Archives) NSWDDL [REVIEW] | Arcade Ninja Terminators

Well, guess who bought this on sale on the Nintendo eShop on a whim and kinda regretted it.

I was surprised to see this on the “ACA” label, as The Ninja Warriors received a remaster on Switch, even on a non-limited physically produced cartridge, didn’t knew it had an arcade version…

and i was right because it didn’t, Taito just happened to make an arcade game called “The Ninja Warriors” (the one being reviewed here) in 1987 and then reused the same name for the sequel on the SNES… which is kinda confusing anyway(and also oddly appropriate) as it’s more of an enhanced remake.

And boy, the arcade precedessor/original, aside being outclassed in everything by the SNES game….didn’t age as well, as the arcade trappings are so obvious and dated, thought it’s not a complete disaster or a completely mediocre forgettable relic that leaves nothing to say about it.

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