In 1983, when House of the Long Shadows came out, it was heavily panned by critics of the time as being derivative of the old film “Seven Keys to Broadpate”, that the ending undermined the story, and it didn’t have much for scares. I would argue that the critics of the time were simply not picking up what this movie is putting down.
There will be spoilers below the cut.
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Now that I’m caught up with the most recent anime reviews, it’s time to get back to the horror with some Dario Argento, and him returning to a more… conventional Giallo with Tenebrae. There will be some spoilers for a 20+ year old movie
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Spy Classroom Season 2 is one that is a lot more serious than the first season. It’s not to say that there isn’t a large quantity of slapstick, some comedy around the members of Team Lamplight’s personality foibles, and more development for some of the other members of the group – that’s definitely there. However, it does make an attempt to be more dramatic than last season, with varying degrees of success.
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Oddtaxi is one of those truly unique series – on paper it’s the sort of hyperlink-cinema noir story that fits right in with series like Baccano and Durarara (or, for that matter, films like Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and Pulp Fiction). However, how the presentation of the story helps make it truly distinct from the other stylistic works that came before. There will be some spoilers below the cut.
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So, this anime is a little less “spooky” and a little more “fanservice-heavy”, but it’s a series that also involves the Yokai, which are used in both spooky and silly contexts, so I feel okay including this more recent series, Ayakashi Triangle, into my Halloween reviews.
Continue readingIt’s time for the Spooky Season – so let’s do some horror movies from outside the US – first off is Deep Red, a Giallo film from Dario Argento from before he did Susperia.
As far as Jaws ripoffs, especially those of the Italian variety, are concerned, Tentacles doesn’t mess around. Within the first 5 minutes of the film, the movie’s antagonist – a giant octopus – has murdered an infant. And the movie barely slows down from there.
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Of the Summer 2023 anime series, Synduality Noir is the other of the series that I’d almost describe as “horror adjacent” – in this case not because of the inclusion of traditional gothic horror monsters (Werewolves, Vampires, etc.), but rather because of a few of the elements introduced later in the series.
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I’m starting off my October horror reviews with a mystery horror anime – Undead Murder Farce.
Continue readingIt’s time to get further into the weeds when it comes to how anime gets made.
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It feels weird to call Byston Well, the setting Yoshiyuki Tomino created for Aura Battler Dunbine – a series that many Isekai novels draw their lineage from – as a “joke”. However, arguably no creator has so desperately tried to “make fetch happen” with a setting that Tomino has done with Dunbine – not only with New Aura Battler Dunbine, but also Wings of Rean and Garzey’s Wing. Yet, with the degree of traction the original work obtained, there has to be something there – right?
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Tonikawa: High School Days is a short 4 episode miniseries that basically makes up one miniature arc. I don’t know where the manga is at by comparison, so I don’t know if this is a case where the studio is waiting on the next arc to wrap before continuing with the story, or what. But what I do know is that this is a nice, warm and cozy little morsel to tide us over until we get the next arc.
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When Chow Yun-Fat came to the US, he brought a reputation from various Heroic Bloodshed epics, from John Woo and Ringo Lam – a reputation as an action star with a strong acting range. So, it’s unsurprising that his early roles would fall into that same category, with The Replacement Killers doing a film in that style, but with some admittedly more Hollywood sensibilities.
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There’s sort of a Big Three list of anime anthology films that are frequently recommended, all of which have Katsuhiro Otomo involved to some degree or another – Robot Carnival, Neo-Tokyo/Labyrinth Tales, and Memories. I’ve seen Robot Carnival a couple times in the past (and should probably give it a review here), and I got to see Neo-Tokyo as part of the OVA film festival at the Hollywood Theater in Portland. After that screening, they announced their next event would be a screening of Memories – so I had to finish up the hat trick.
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On the one hand, Logan’s Run is a pretty straightforward ’70s dystopian SF film – a futuristic society (likely controlled by computers) created in the wake of some form of ecological collapse that is malevolent and oppressive. We’re in the territory of Saturn 3, or Silent Running. However, this builds off of the premise of “What if the people saying ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’ turned 30?” – which isn’t exactly the best premise to build a movie off of.
Continue readingThis month is the last month Netflix will be mailing out physical DVDs, so I give my thoughts on the end of an era.
Continue readingThis month we talk about the Record of Lodoss War OVA – with some tangents to the novels, the Actual Play, and the Chronicles of the Heroic Knight OVA (and also Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth).
Continue readingIt’s time for the final showdown with Dio!
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This season had the second halves of not one, but two very LGBT-ish anime from Bandai/Sunrise, and a lot of worry about whether these would be able to stick the landing. Let’s start with the mecha series: Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch from Mercury, Season 2. There will be some spoilers.
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The last two cours of Sorcerous Stabber Orphen went back-to-back, feeding directly into the other, at a total of 24 episodes (which was the same length as the previous seasons of the show) but with two different subtitles – Chaos in Urbanrama and Doom of Dragon’s Sanctuary. The two series are somewhat mixed in quality, but they go one into the other to such a degree that it’s hard to talk about them in isolation.
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If you have followed the anime industry in Japan, and with it have paid attention to Japanese voice actors and the pop singers who do the opening and closing songs of the shows you like, you may have come to the realization that the Japanese music industry kinda sucks, and maltreats people (something that was also previously covered in Key The Metal Idol and Perfect Blue). This past season we got Oshi No Ko, an adaptation of a manga from the writer of Kaguya-Sama: Love is War and also the artist of Flowers of Evil, which gives its own take on this, which I think gives a different spin on some of those beats.
There will be spoilers below the cut. There is some real benefit of going into the show – at least the first episode – completely unspoiled, but if you’d rather not, that’s perfectly okay.
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My Love Story With Yamada-Kun at Lv999 was a tremendously fun little romantic comedy shojo anime. After the last Shojo series I watched, Fruits Basket, went kinda hog on the melodrama, I was rather pleased to find that this series was a lot more pleasant and chill.
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As per usual, a couple times a year I like to watch a fanservice series or so to just sort of gauge the state of the genre. For the Spring 2023 season, I went with the Cafe Terrace and Its Goddesses, to see if it fares a little better than the last fanservice series I watched with Goddess in the title. The answer is very much “Yes”.
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