Subspecies 5: Bloodrise (2023) – After twenty-five years, this Full Moon franchise is resurrected with an installment centering on Anders Hove, the original star of the first four films! Plus, Denise Duff, who plays his love interest/antagonist in the second through fourth movies, returns as perhaps the same character sorta, but in a previous life (and with a holy hell lotta cosmetic work done). Because this is a prequel: This is the story of how Radu, born of a vampire and a demon, was rescued/kidnapped by the church to become a holy knight, but then fell back into the paths thrust upon him by his blood.
…And it’s not great, but neither were most of the installments before it, so I guess it fits. At least Full Moon scraped up enough money to shoot in eastern Europe again (this time in Croatia rather than Romania), with original writer/director Ted Nicolaou back at the helm.
It’s a pity that it seems so unnecessary. There isn’t much of a story here; rather, it’s episodes, which fans will recognize as leading to one or another of the situations that appeared in the first four movies.
And the biggest disappointment for me is that it would have been REALLY easy to include a scene of the subspecies finger-creatures as realized these days with CGI. Honestly, the series title hasn’t really been justified since the original movie in 1991, and even that mostly shoehorned them in. Couldn’t we have had just a taste of those crimson cow-faced mini-demons running around?
Island Escape (2023) – Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A crack commando team is assembled to find out what happened on an isolated island where a mysterious facility doing military research has suddenly gone silent…
Yes, but there are a few differences. For one thing, this fictitious island is somewhere in northeast Canada. Novel, huh? (Or “eh?”)
Also, the “research facility” is a few large tents. (I didn’t say they were necessarily good differences.)
And after spending any time on the island, everyone ends up becoming the bloodthirsty Neanderthal version of themselves, with hilariously massive muscles and a lowering latex brow. Because military research.
But wait — what’s really going on here is that there’s a time loop, which is why one of this team remembers having been here before, and why they meet either the Neanderthaled versions of themselves or their own remains. They’re perpetual guinea pigs! (I would think that the military contractor should abandoned the research into making solider uncontrollably violent and concentrate on being able to deploy an impenetrable temporal wormhole on demand, but there’s a reason I don’t get awarded the military contracts.)
I really wanted to suspend my disbelief for this, but I guess I don’t think even the Neanderthaled version of me is that strong.
Godzilla Minus One (2023) – The very premise of this movie — a period Godzilla flick, set in immediate post-war Japan — has had me giddy since I first heard of it. Then having it in wide release in America (which hasn’t happened since Godzilla 2000), and having it shown in Japanese with subtitles…
But the best plus of all is that not only is it a very good Godzilla movie, it’s just plain a good movie. Which happens to feature Godzilla. (My wife never thought she’d cry at a Godzilla movie.)
The main characters — especially the central protagonist, a haunted former kamikaze pilot who survived the war by chickening out — are full and rich people, dealing with the immediate aftermath of American bombings and occupation, trying to figure out how to live with a war they lost. And on top of a premise which provides for poignant drama, there’s this prehistoric reptile which grows to massive size when exposed to atomic bomb tests and…
If I had the power to change anything about this movie, the only tweak that would tempt me is to make Godzilla’s face slightly less traditional (perhaps more in line with the wide-mouth design of Godzilla 2000). The familiarity of the traditional face (very close to what is seen in some early Heisei movies such as Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah) connotes Godzilla as a general force for good (or at the very least an antihero) compared to other kaiju, rather than the completely destructive force of nature portrayed here.