Streaming Reviews

My first encounter with Kraven the Hunter was in an episode of Spiderman And His Amazing Friends which I had on an old video tape from my great grandfather, along side many other old cartoons. In that episode he was a boisterous boastful bruiser of a man wearing a lion vest who commanded dinosaurs and wanted Firestar to help hatch his dinosaur eggs (it makes sense in context trust me). Kraven The Hunter in this movie is quite unlike that.  Aaron Taylor Johnson plays Kraven as a hunter of bad people. He is a vigilante/assassin taking out the most powerful crime bosses around the world with enhanced strength and reflexes that were somehow granted to him through a magic potion and lion’s blood when he was fatally wounded during a hunting accident when he was young. Why does he do this? It is never clear. He says he does because the people he hunts “bring bad things into the world”   As stories go, this one is really shallow which is a pity because it feels like it has a lo...

At first glance, Mobile Suit Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance seems dressed to impress. A gundam co-production done outside of Japan, and meant to appeal first and foremost to the international audience. Its trailer boasts lots of mecha combat action, its synopsis promises a familiar tale the likes of band of Brothers or saving Private Ryan, just set in the Gundam franchise’s universal century timeline. It’s character designs replaces the typical anime aesthetic with a more realistic, looking one. In some measure it delivers, and in others, I feel it falls short.  The animation on the giant war machines are very well done, conveying that sense of mass and inertia befitting their size. Little details like dents, pockmarks, right down to visible rivets all lend a very gritty feel to the show. On the flip side, the character animation suffers.  Characters lack the visual polish of CGI animation contemporaries like Sola Digital Arts (Appleseed Alpha, Starship Troopers Traitor of Mar...

The first ever animated series based in the Terminator Franchise, Terminator Zero is a Japanese/American co-production which tells the story of the Lee Family in Japan, in the days preceding and immediately after Judgement Day.  Dr Malcom Lee is a gifted scientist with knowledge of humanity’s nuclear fate. He has created an AI named Kokoro to act as a potential rival to Skynet which can either stop judgement day or ensure humanity’s survival after the nuclear attack.  As time is running out, Dr Lee now fears that Kokoro might arrive at the same conclusion Skynet would should she come online: that humanity is an existential threat.   In another part of Tokyo, Dr Lee’s children, Kenta, Reika and Hiro, along with their nanny Misaki, are hunted by a new threat from the future; a relentless killing machine clad in human disguise. A Terminator. Hope is not lost though as another time traveller named Eiko arrives to stop the Terminator.  But as mysteries are unraveled...

Tom Hardy’s Venom series of films comes to its conclusion with 2024’s VENOM: THE LAST DANCE. We see lovable loser Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote friend Venom on the run from the authorities following the events of the last movie LET THERE BE CARNAGE. Hunting this duo is also a threat from beyond the stars: a creature known as a xenophage which is the predator of Venom’s species.  Blindingly fast, able to leap into the stratosphere in a single bound and with a literal woodchipper mouth, this CGI mass of teeth and tentacles is only the first in an invading army. Something about venom having something in his genetic code that was never known before, that is needed to free some Knull character who we never heard of before. Which is kind of weird since this Knull is supposed to have been the creator of the symbiotes and Venom helped imprison him.   This is just one of the many frustrations I have with this “trilogy” as a whole. Each new entry was done by a different creati...