Flavours of the Month: July 2015...

Brooding detectives, nerdvana, 'black out years' tunes, darkly comic tales, and a great big thwack in the ribs are just some of what's been flavouring my July 2015...

Click "READ MORE" below for this month's Looks, Sounds, Vibes & Flavours...

Chappie: Mini Review...

What's it about?
In a crime-ridden near-future Johannesburg high tech police robots are put on the streets to clean things up. However, their creator has dreams of developing a truly sentient artificial intelligence, and opts to test his newly developed code on 'bot #22, which has been destined for scrap. Unluckily for him, he's kidnapped by a gang of criminals in-hoc to a crime lord for a hefty sum - and they want to use his skills and his sentient robot to facilitate their final heist.
Who would I recognise in it?
Sharlto Copley (voice and MoCap), Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver, Die Antwoord, and others.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
"Short Circuit" meets "RoboCop" by way of "District 9" ... did you dig those flicks? If you did, chances are you'll dig this too. Far better for a new film to take significant cues from earlier films and apply its own little something to it, than for movie fans to suffer yet another inferior remake. Numerous parallels can be drawn between "Chappie" and "RoboCop" in particular, but this is still unmistakably a Neill Blomkamp film - he even takes a few cues from his break out film "District 9"...

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Ash vs Evil Dead – Comic-Con Trailer Analysis

Watch the Official Trailer HERE and the Comic-Con Panel HERE.

Ash is back, baby! The trailer for the ten-part horror/comedy series from Starz premiered at Comic-Con 2015 and it's whipped up a bit of a fan frenzy – so let's dig into some of the highlights.

Boy Done Good:

So where's Ash gone since we last saw him? Not very far, it seems – if anything he's gone in reverse – living in a trailer hitched to the same car he's always had (just think of the time and money Ash must have spent restoring it after the events of the third film!), and now he's not even working at S-Mart. Now he has – so I presume – slid down the retail ladder to 'Value Stop' where he's still a Stockboy, re-living past glories as he tells his co-worker Pablo of his prior adventures: “I was the only one to escape, but now the evil has found me.” At least he's got himself a new prosthetic hand – a bit more fitting to 21^st Century life than that bulky steel contraption from the last movie … maybe whatever magic that made it function wore off? “You won't see that hand, but that's all I'll say,” teased Raimi in response to a fan question on the matter of Ash's substitute hand at the Comic-Con Panel.

“Ash, even in his prime, would be the wrong guy to save the world – now he's thirty years older and he has to save the world! I'm really worried for the world,” said Campbell of Ash's advancing years. “Crabby old man Ash.” Sam Raimi also noted some of Ash's continued (but loveable) foibles: that the character is “a heel, a coward, and a blow hard” but is also “a great monster hunter”. Still though, while he may be a bit down-at-heel (he's even revealed to be wearing dentures at one point – but could this just be a little joke only for the trailer?), Ash still knows how to wield a stump-mounted chainsaw – a moment in the trailer that pushed all the right buttons!

Click “READ MORE” below to continue this trailer analysis with more screenshots...

The Walking Dead Season 6 Comic-Con Trailer Analysis

Looking for some Walking Dead memes? Click here.

“We both started out in the same place … you can come back from this, I know you can” says Rick, but who is he talking to? Is it Morgan? It likely is, but what could Rick be referring to? Has Morgan done something terribly wrong between when we last saw him in Season 3 and now? “Good people, they always die – I'm a killer, Rick, and you are too,” responds Morgan, supporting Rick's view that you shouldn't take chances – but does this have a loaded meaning? Is Morgan unsure of Rick's intentions – his sanity, even – after the close of Season 5 which saw Rick kill an enraged and beaten Pete right in front of Morgan?

“You get out of here and you don't ever come back,” says Morgan in another part of the trailer, at which point we cut to Rick. Clearly the folks behind The Walking Dead want to give us an idea of Morgan and Rick being potential enemies in Season 6, or at the very least two sides of a contentious argument. The editors of these trailers are notoriously tricksy, and when you look closely you see numerous instances where two different scenes have been stitched together to seemingly form one scene. There will surely be a clash between the two men – but will it be quite as angry as the trailer suggests? Could it even be a double bluff?

Click "READ MORE" below to continue this analysis of the Comic-Con trailer for The Walking Dead Season 6...

Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

Find more giallo reviews here.

“Guaranteed! The 8 greatest shocks ever filmed!” Mario Bava (A Bay Of Blood) established the basic thematic template of the Italian giallo film with the Hitchcock-influenced The Girl Who Knew Too Much in 1963 before laying out – in full-bodied colour – the visual essence of what would become an iconic movement in Italian cinema. Vibrant splashes of pink and blue, red and green, filled the off-kilter frame as the camera glided through shadowy corridors. Bava, a former lighting cameraman, also made full use of the frame in all dimensions, with action frequently taking place throughout the entirety of his meticulous compositions – side-to-side, top-to-bottom, front-to-back. Excess, violence, and sex are common visual and narrative themes in gialli, and here in Blood and Black Lace – essentially the second ever giallo film – Bava unleashed a beast...

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Double Bill Mini Musings: Butt Monsters and Wolf Cops...

Bad Milo:
What's it about?
A stressed-out guy struggles to deal with his problems, so naturally a murderous beast shoots out of his butt and starts killing people!
Who would I recognise in it?
Ken Marino, Gillian Jacobs, Patrick Warburton, Stephen Root, Peter Stormare, and others.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
It's a movie about a monster that comes out of a guy's arse and goes around killing people, what's not to enjoy here? Snappy, gory, and enjoyably silly, fans of dark comedy and practical puppet F/X (sometimes like the sweet/sour mix of Gremlins) will have plenty to chuckle over. Good.

Click "READ MORE" below for WolfCop...