[EXPRESSO] Whalefall (2026) | Of Monstro And Men

Figures the best movie i see all week is the one that might sound like an Asylum turducken proposal, since it was marketed heavily on the premise of a guy scuba diving that not only sees a giant squid, but accidentally gets swalloved by a sperm whale that was hunting and already gobbled said squid, and is forced to try survive the inexpected Pinocchio style innerwhale exploration.

Sure you can word it to sound stupid and outrageous, but even without the squid it’s already a terrifying and novel premise for an underwater survival thriller, you really can’t get much more claustrophobic than the insides of a living creature, and the many moments of body horror it brings.

Yeah, there’s not too much to premise itself, that is gist, with the protagonist having just 1 hour of oxygen left to escape, but already the context makes it clear the themes underlining the spectacle of the survival itself, since the scuba diver, Jay, decides to go under in spite of everything else because he hopes to find the body of his estranged father, whom afflicted by cancer, decided to drown himself.

He wants to get closure due to the troubled relantionship he had with him even before the cancer, but in these moments of desperation, Jay recalls the many lessons his very stern father taught him (often teaching him the importance of the ocean and its creature), confronting his repressed feelings and coming to also understand – a bit more – why he was like that.

Not wholly original but its very effective, as the emotional core of the film sustains the intense, gripping and often disgusting survival, the few main characters are pretty well defined (and very well acted by Abrams and Brolin) and i feel is as long as needed.

[EXPRESSO] Street Fighter (2026) | Human Killing Machine

FIY, i never saw the old 1994 live action adaptation (or the 2006 one).

Still, there is something to be said about modern videogame films somehow failing to adapt the source material, getting lost in bullshit of their own making.

It’s just tiresome to see the new Street Fighter live action reboot catch every rake in the face like Sideshow Bob.

Despite on paper adapting the plot of Street Fighter II, this story focuses on Ryu and Ken being trained together as martial artist, like brothers, until a tragic event sets them apart, but now, with Lord Bison helming the second World Warrior Tournament, they are now bound to meet again….

it’s not bad per sé, but the narrative doesn’t move, as it stumbles drunkenly to setpieces from setpieces for 2 hours, with no focus to anything (we just outright skip big chunks of the tournament), hyperactive editing and weird choices that let you see very little of the otherwise entertaining fight scenes, all leading up to a “stop”, overconfidently setting up the sequel instead of writing a third act.

it has the same kinda of nostalgia (just swapping the ’80s for the ’90s) of the recent Masters Of The Universe film, and the same tone issues, flipping constantly from a quippy comedy where they forgot to put actual jokes in, or being sincere, in a way that neither works, with the actors either sleepwalking their parts or going full ham.

the best thing this movie has, the anime styled flashbacks are cool… just makes you wish the entire movie was made that way.

This isn’t awful, i did enjoy it at times, but it’s on the lower side of mediocre, and i docked the vote down a notch, for similar reasons i already did on the MKII film review.

Hidden Dragon and Crouching Tiger and Sengoku Zombie [MANGA REVIEW] | Warring States Undead (Undead)

Zombies. The horror comfort food, that if an apocalypse actually happened without them, people would somehow make them happen just to not have that Y2K style survival book and mental training for a Walking Dead roleplay go to waste.

After all, we stuck them even in Pride And Prejudice, we had them destroyed by Abraham Lincon, and Sankarea exists to ask questions we shouldn’t really ask.

So of course we were gonna have them mixed with historical fantasy, going basically the Onimusha route but during the Warring States era of Japan (as depicted in popular media like Samurai Warriors more than actual historical drama), specifically reenacting the legendary rivalry between Kenshin Uesugi and Shingen Takeda… in modern day.

Mugen Tenshou: Hidden Dragon and Crouching Tiger and Sengoku Zombie is indeed the manga that dares asks: what if Sengoku era zombie samurais happened today, with a darkness castle emerging out ot nowhere, undead warriors of old, and of course Oda Nobunaga emerges as the Demon King that had been planning this while lying in Hell for centhuries?

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[EXPRESSO] Other Mommy (2026) | Doppel Mutter

Know what, i can’t claim that the trailers for Other Mother were misleading, this indeed the kind of slapdash, jump scare ridden thing you’d expect, boiling down to someone trying to make an entire horror movie about a screenshot of Other Mother from Coraline someone forwaded them.

Bela is a regular kid… well, aside the fact she is friends with an entity that lives in her house and she has come to call “Other Mommy”, because she looks like her actual mother.

The entity has had enough of just being “second banana”, so it manifests in increasingly dangerous fashion trying to sway the girl to her side…

In a way i was surprised because the movie doesn’t play any cheap trick of the “Unsorry Mommy” being just in the child’s imagination or not, this thing is real, tangible and will explode your brain into confetti, and there’s no half the movie predicated on the parents slowly realizing the entity is actually real.

… But that isn’t nearly enough to make this even mediocre, let’s not accept “things do happen” as an actual standard when there’s little to no plot, the characters are paper thin stereotypes, the jumpscares limp, most of the “weird morphing” fees like rejected Backrooms-esque material.

I’ts never proper scary, though it’s hard to even feel any tension because not a single character reacts appropriately to anything that happens, they all just shrugh it all off, regardless.

There’s little to no logic (or depth) to almost anything, and frankly this feel like an untentional “supernatural entity” variation of the Pickle Rick episode.

It’s not boring per sé, nor is it “the worse thing ever”, it’s not, yet at just 93 minutes feels stretched, and it’s also not quite unintentionally hilarious, just a “slightly different than expected” kind of garbage.

The Spooktacular Eight #36: Snoop Dogg House Of Horrors (2006)

I gotta admit, despite everything (and he sure has bought into some questionable shit) i love me seeing some Snoop Dogg bullshitting around, so yes, have him do a ghetto Cryptkeeper presenting and commenting an anthology of short horror stories themed around an American inner-city ‘hood.

So yes, this is basically a Snoop Dogg licensed “Tales From The Hood”, which i discovered only after locking this into the schedule (and i’ve heard it’s pretty dang good), sorry but we’ll make do.

Yeah, there’s not much to say about the presentation, but i was curious when this showed up on Amazon Prime Video and for some reason has an anime-esque style animated prologue… and yes, it’s because it customary for horror anthologies (as this way they also tribute the old horror comics these films often base their material on), but i was also right, because the animated intro and outro are animated by renowned anime studio MADHOUSE.

Kinda funny because this also predates their work on The Boondocks, though these sequences are stylish but they’re not well animated, let’s be honest, most likely as they were done on the extra cheap, which wouldn’t surprise me, since it’s indicative of the production as a whole.

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[EXPRESSO] L’Estranea/The Spiral (2026) | Not My Uzumaki

The latest from italian director Marco Strippoli, after his celebrated La Valle Dei Sorrisi (released worlwide as The Holy Boy), L’Estranea, which translates to The Stranger but is releasing under the international title of The Spiral.

And before you ask, no, it’s got nothing to do with Junji Ito’s Uzumaki/Spiral, this is actually a psychological horror revolving around the fall from grace of a previously wealthy and influent South Italian family.

After years, the mother shows up at her daughter’s house in Rome, trying to explain how all the disgraces the family had to endure where brought about by how, after an accident with the family dog, the mother struck a Faustian deal with a mysterious woman.

But after the first two very, very good chapters, the movie just kinda drops off, instead of exploring further its themes and ideas it just sticks to repeating them, to hold pattern, in a very traditional way that kinda clashes with the ambition of being more akin to a modern psychological horror film.

It’s a shame because the acting is great and direction is so good you almost won’t care…. until the finale, which is both fitting but doesn’t that much going on after all, and while not underwhelming, it franklyit feels like a compromise so we can fish for some Oscars and to be more like an A24 release, to walk an already overtrodden path, despite the intent to also give the movie its own Italian identity being successful.

I will subtract a point because i really respect Strippoli, i do agree it’s one of the new promising authors of Italian horror, so i won’t be handing out pity points to an author that doesn’t need them, since he had already demonstrated he’s capable of even better.

Still worth seeing, absolutely so.

The Spooktacular Eight #35: The Monster Of Piedras Blancas (1959)

The 50s were the new golden age of classic monsters… and a lot of stinkers, cheesy drive-in stuffers, often made to profit off each other.

This is case for the when Universal created a new monster icon, the aquatic Gill Man, in 1954’s Creature From The Black Lagoon, and while it’s not the more revisited of the classic “50 monster pantheon”, it created an enduring depiction of the “fish man” monster.

Riding the success of the 1954 debut film for the Gill Man, Universal pumped out two sequels the following years, to mixed reception, but when you have a successful trilogy, you attract imitators.

This is the tale of its most infamous drive-in knock off, The Monster Of Piedras Blancas.

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[EXPRESSO] Onslaught (2026) | Die Dudermensch

On paper, this should be an easy win, even if it’s a bit weird A24 is distributing what is really a genre offering reminescent of 80s exploitation grindhouse action flicks like The Exterminator.

Onslaught is about Celeste, an US army sniper, whom has defacto retired into a parking lot in the New Mexico desert to deal with her PTSD, complicating her troubled family life.

That is, until a trio of genetically engineered super soldiers, created by a former Nazi scientist, escape from the secret experiment bases they were held in, killing everyone in their path, and eventually moving their systematic massacre to Celeste’s parking lot..

Apparently this is a continuation from Adam Wingard’s 2014 movie Guest, which i didnt’ see, and on its own, Onslaught, despit some stylistical apt choices and some good old school practical gore effects, doesn’t really live up to its own title, in every aspect it lacks the substance, it never displays or conveys the raw fury it promises, nor manages to properly develop some of its ideas.

Maybe it would be easier to accept the movie for what it is instead of what could have been…. if it didn’t deliberately AND aggressively built up the final “onslaught” to be some this thing you need to brace for, and frankly you really don’t, it’s not even that excessive.

Even the literal super soldaten are kinda of a letdown, i liked the idea of these being de facto militarized slasher villains… but that is really as far as it goes.

It’s entertaining, the action is fun, the characters mostly stock but okay, and it’s barely above 90 minutes, so it’s not boring and knows to keep things as long as they need to, but you’d wish the movie didn’t set itself up for disappointment as it did.

[EXPRESSO] Digger (2026) | Rock And (Petrol) Stone

I haven’t seen Bardo, to be honest i wasn’t even aware of it before… now, but whatever, i was gonna see Inarritu’s Digger anyway, especially with the premise of Cruise acting against type.

Here he plays Digger Rockwell, a petrol mogul from Texas that lives in its opulent mansion, tending to his absurdly old and withered cat while ignoring the disaster brewing on some of its rigs… until he can’t anymore, as the situation on an Artic rig of his has exploded, resulting in a gigantic glacier breaking away and headed to Europe, where it would cause constant tsunamis.

The US President is called in, alongside many experts and politicians to find out any sort of solution in how to deal with the glacier, so it’s up to Digger to save the world he almost destroyed…. or is it?

There’s no way to discuss properly the film even further because that would give away the movie entirely and spoil the “twist”… actually the entire premise.

But that isn’t even the issues, as the “twist” happens early on, you can actually kinda assume it if you’re familiar mwith Inarritu’s body of work, and there’s actually more to it.

The problem is that, the attempt at satirizing modern satires about the climate crisis in how…. kinda feels hollow because ultimately it adds nothing to the conversation either, and it becomes enamored with its own deliberate farce (and playing around with its incredible cast) to the point it becomes the very thing it supposedly satirizes, so much that ultimately any potential of the “twist” serving as a way to actually say something becomes nill.

Disappointing.

And yet, there’s still some fun to be had with/in Digger, in spite and because of its empty excesses, of how it sadly crumples under its own ambition.

[EXPRESSO] Her Private Hell (2026) | Kojima-ing In The Darkness

I don’t think Her Private Hell is a bad film, and i usually like his stuff, i loved The Neon Demon, but it’s a special kind of disappointing, as this feels Refn trying to imitate itself more than anything.

And not doing it that well either, to be brutally honest.

It’s definitely his vision, no mistake, but one that feels like he’s trying to recapture the old spark…and again, coming off as a self-imitation more than anything else.

The premise sees Elle, the daughter of wealthy man, trying to reunite with her stepmother (by shooting a movie in a luxury motel), but warned about a supernatural legendary serial killer, Leatherman, whom appears when the fog permeating this Blade Runner-esque city grows even thicker, its diamond fists shining in the darkness,

She ends up crossing paths with an american GI agent that has lost his daughter to this entity, and is desperately searching for a way to get her back…

Even more than before, it’s all about the vibes, the feel, as the hyperstilization here belies little for the audiences to care about or hold onto, the cinema pastiche of sci-fi, comic book, samurai and giallo cinema, one that does look good in screenshots, but lacks the strenght it had before, so you end up just kinda tolerating more than looking forward to see where it’s all gonna go.

wondering why should even care about anything, since the plot is more of a vague outline than something worth discussing, i’d complain about the characters… if there were any (aside the stepmother), these are ideas of characters, and the movie overall is just lacking much substance – or impact – to back up its pretense and stylization, so you end not even intrigued or curious to know more about this sci-fi world.

Sadly disappointing.