I guess I’m doing an unintentional theme week, when it comes to hard-boiled urban fantasy, as this time I’m taking a look at the anime film Wicked City, based on a novel by Hideyuki Kukichi, and directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri.
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We finally finish off Dagon and his goons.
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We continue to fight our way to the boss, including figuring out that those Brute units are only vulnerable to magic.
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We have a Mortal Kombat and a Street Fighter game at the same time!
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We continue the fight, as a ninja goes down on each side.
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We go to rendezvous with our new allies and run into some more bounty hunters along the way.
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Cast a Deadly Spell is interesting as a historical artifact. While the film wears the trappings of the Cthulhu mythos, with the Necronomicon being the focus of the plot, and the protagonist bearing the name of H. P. Lovecraft (though with a different first name than the spectacularly racist author), it has almost more in common with the Hardboiled Detective variety of Urban Fantasy that we now associate with books like the Harry Dresden series. It’s not by any stretch the first urban fantasy work – Mike Resnick’s John Justin Mallory novels and War for the Oaks pre-dates it, with Resnick’s series also being hard-boiled detective fiction. But by being a movie made for HBO, it provided the genre a level of visibility that it had never before seen. But is it good?
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What happens when you give the director of Ghost of Yotsuya $1.95 and a ham sandwich (or, in this case, 195 yen and an onigiri), say the studio is on the brink of bankruptcy and tell him to make a horror film – you get Jigoku. This is a dark, grim, surreal, and truly nightmarish film.
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Re-Main is the latest of what I’d call a series of anime series made with the Summer Olympics in mind, highlighting various sports from the game, including Sk-8: The Infinity (Skateboarding), Sport Climbing Girls (Bouldering and Speed Climbing), and Wave!! (Surfing). While those covered some of the new sports at these Olympic games, Re-Main focuses a longer, more established Summer Olympic sport – Water Polo.
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I have, at long last, watched the (to date) final Evangelion film, Evangelion 3.0+1.01: Thrice Upon A Time. I have some considerable thoughts about this – and I’d like to talk about them with spoilers, so the entirety of my review will be below the cut.
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This time, we get Jean Paul Valley’s first outing as Batman, taking on Scarecrow.
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We take out the boss, with the awkward revelations that come with it, and determine our next objective.
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We continue taking on this new boss, now fighting her directly, and finally taking action and unmuting our audio.
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Madhouse is a very good film with a title that has effectively nothing to do with the plot, but that’s okay. It is – in short – Amicus making a very serious effort to do their take on giallo films, and they do fairly well.
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I have come to the conclusion that my first non-anthology Amicus film I watched, Scream and Scream Again, may have been an outlier, in terms of quality. By contrast, The Skull, while very light on narrative, has some very nicely done imagery and well done cinematography, which makes it an incredibly fun film.
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We go on to rescue our third Liberation Army member, blissfully unware of the horrible fact that my audio is still muted.
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We finish off the pirates, and agree to rescue another member of the Liberation Army – but little do I know that I’m still muted.
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I’m following up on my review of Paperbacks From Hell, with a video review of a novel covered in that book – 1977’s The Sentinel.
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We continue trying to rescue the mage, while I continue to forget that I’m muted.
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We go to take on some pirates, and I fail to notice that I’m muted.
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Legend of the Mountain is King Hu doing a ghost story. Not in the sense of a work of cover-to-cover overt horror, but more in the sense of a general vibe of dread, but never quite getting a heavy level of spookiness beyond a few moments.
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From the discussions I’ve seen online as the season went on, My Hero Academia Season 5 is probably the most divisive season of the show thus far, between those who have been reading the manga, and those who have been watching the show, and a lot of that comes down to the decisions made around the final arc of the season, the My Villain Academia arc. It’s not that the season is bad, it’s that the narrative decisions that were made about where they would include that arc in the season was very controversial.
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Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S is Kyoto Animation’s big return to television after the horrific fire of 2019, along with the pandemic, so it feels right for them to come back with something as cheerful and heartwarming – and also horny on main – as Dragon Maid.
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