[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #2: Resident Evil Apocalypse (2004)

Last time we left Alice waking up in the hospital of a zombie infested Raccoon City, grabbing a shotgun and heading for the ruined streets for sequels’ sake.

So obviously this was setup to loosely mirror the plot and setting of Resident Evil 2, while keeping the Alice and Red Queen subplots, meaning you could expect Alice to wander around Raccon City and tag along canon named characters called to intervene on the pandemic situation of the city and trying to escape it when they hear of Umbrella’s plan to just nuke it all.

And you would assume correctly, though it’s made a bit confusing as she’s instead joined by Jill Valentine and Carlos Olivera, the protagonists of RE 3, and they’re followed by the Nemesis mutant of RE 3 as well, which is even odder when you remember RE 3 is basically taking place at the same time of RE 2, let alone that RE 3 was originally conceived as a spin-off entry.

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A Resident Evil live-action film retrospective has risen from the grave

Starting about now, a retrospective about all the Resident Evil live-action films released so far!

September to Dicember, the decisive schedule of things to come (final cut)

As previously said before the mid-August break, due to me also going back to the uni for a master’s degree, i had to made some decisions for the blog, the rate of posting, and so on.

Basically from today onwards, i can guarantee a weekly article/review here, and some monthly rubrics will either go away or remain in downsized version, while i also plan some new rubrics altogether.

On the upside, EXPRESSO reviews will now NOT be bound to any schedule, so they will happen on a “as soon – and if – i can make them” base, which will result in most scheduled reviews being extended or not short one. Maybe.

In terms of what’s gonna happen and what exceptions to the rules will happen, here’s the lowdown:

September will have a weekly guaranteed post schedule.

October will have a review/post every 3 days, usually for The Spooktacular Eight, which will still be around indefinitely… but not this October, as we have a retrospective pretty much already done.

November will have a regular guaranteed review every 7 days, the new standard.

Dicember will have yet again a weekly posting base…. until the 24th as while Dino Dicember is NOT coming back yet, 12 Days Of Dino Dicember IS, so from the 25th up to the 5th of January (included), we’ll have a daily review about dinosaur movies.

For the other rubrics, here’s the plan so far.

Monster March will be back.

Musou May will remain.

Pinocchiorama will proceed with a monthly pick all the way through 2023 as previously planned, though December’s entry might arrive earlier than the last day of the month due to the 12 Days Of Dino Dicember post cavalcade.

One of the new rubrics will debut in February or later.

In case of changing schedules or relevant changes i’ll have to make, i’ll update you as soon as i can.

Later for a “back to school” review!

Pinocchi-O-Rama #7: Gepetto (Manwha)

If we’re talking about comics, we all known where Pinocchio comes to mind, though indirectly, as “The God Of Manga” Osamu Tezuka was inspired by Disney’s adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s book, and wanted to create a “reverse 21^th Centhury Pinocchio”, a robotic boy already created to be as close as possible to perfection. I really don’t need to introduce Astro Boy, do i?

Tezuka would eventually do his own manga adaptation of Pinocchio, which would be interesting, but maybe too obvious, so we’re not reviewing that or Astro Boy.

Nope, we’re going for something far more recent, and pay visit to what i feel it’s an underestimated country in terms of comics, South Korea, that while it did get inspired by Japan’s anime/manga style and legacy, managed to create something distinct or similar but possessing its own personality and soul, dubbed as “manwha” for shorthand.

Though one could be forgiven to think that mostly it’s a matter of where its coming from instead of the content itself, given we had many distincly “manga” series come out from european or non-japanese artists (an easy example is Tony Valente’s Radiant), and the more successful/publicized often are aimed to the same age demographic as shonen mangas, or belong to popular genre trends.

But for each “God Of High School”, we have more unique work, like Hyung Min-woo’s western horror themed Priest, inspired by Monolith Productions FPS game BLOOD.

While a number of manwha series were and are given print editions in many countries (including Italy and France), the most common way to consume and access manwha in both its country of origin and international is “the internetz” and sites like Webtoon.

And indeed one can read the entire manwha we’re talking about today, Gepetto by Jewon Yeon, english translated on Webtoon, for free.

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Crocodile (1979) [REVIEW] | Thai Croc Jaws #sharksncrocspartdeux

Can’t get more basic than “Crocodile”, not “killer”, not “mutant”, nor “apocalypse”, just your plain old reptilian creature to not be confused with an alligator.

Which is arguably kind of a lie, since this is an obscure Thai monster movie that was made – in unison – “to ride Jaws’ coat-tail”. I don’t even do this on purpose, there’s that big a chance even killer croc movies somehow can be linked back to it, either due to the decade of their release or the basic plot structure and popularized cliches.

Often it’s both, as “Crocodile” was released just years after Jaws rocked the box office, AND the plot it’s virtually identical… or is it?

Not to be confused with a 1978’s Korean movie also with the international title of “Crocodile”, from which this 1979 Thai film is edited from… and by that i’d say it borrows some stock footage from the 1978 one, i don’t know to what extend, since i couldn’t find a copy of the 1978’s film, because i do believe these are two different – yet almost identical sounding – movies, not one and the same.

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Future Shock: No Sleep From September (and Summer Plans) (UPDATED)

So, let’s not wait around more to lay out what’s coming in July and August for Wise Cafe International, and what will change from this September onwards.

July will have another round of killer croc AND killer sharks films, Sharks N Crocs Part Deux, alongside some timely videogame reviews to tie in with upcoming releases (aka – pardon me for the disgusting thing i’m about to say – trying to milk some “SEO juice” since this time i could plan ahead something reasonable).

August won’t have a One Piece retrospective per sè, but will have some One Piece videogames’ reviews, plus a newly written full lenght review of Film Red, and hopefully some fittingly summer themed posts about stuff that maritime or whatever.

From September instead – after thinking about it for months – i’ll have to slow down the posting significantly, so instead of a review or piece every 2 days, i opted for a weekly basis, since i will be taking a master’s degree this year, so yep, even less time on my hands since i will be hitting the books, attend and most likely still continue the dayjob.

So instead of shutting it down or opting for a “whenever i can” posting schedule, i feel this it’s a reasonable compromise, even more since i guarantee a review every 7 days, meaning there could be more if i can squeeze in some EXPRESSO reviews or something on the quick, i will try.

Meaning EXPRESSO won’t be retired, it never has been and that won’t change.

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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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Touken Ranbu Warriors NSWITCH [REVIEW] | #musoumay

As i previously said while discussing the demo for it, i eventually did get the pricey ass retail North American version, since i wasn’t paying full price for digital, or 100 bucks for the game and one of the most desperate and worthless example of season pass content ever devised by a publisher.

Due to import taxes i paid the same anyway, but we’ll talk about that later in the review.

FIY the game is also available worlwide digitally on Steam.

Touken Ranbu Warriors story is set in 2205, about a group of Touken Danshi sent back in the Sengoku period in order to avoid timeline alterations by the History Retrograde Army.

What are Touken Danshi? But beatiful boys with the souls of legendary japanese swords (often as iconic and famed as their possessors/wielders) bestowed upon them, because nothing else aside “bishounen sword boys” would strike fear in those dastardly time travelling history revisionists.

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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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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!