Author Archive
Rise: Blood Hunter DVD review
About midway through Sebastian Gutierrez’ entertaining vampire flick Rise: Blood Hunter, the lead bloodsucker asserts something to the effect of “Sex and murder are the only real pleasures man has left.”
But in the world writer/director Gutierrez creates, those are actually the only pleasures left to vampires, much to their cost. They can’t eat [...]
Rosario+Vampire Volume 2
An average student finds himself up to his armpits in monsters in Rosario+Vampire, a charming manga by Akihisa Ikeda from Viz Media’s Shonen Jump Advanced imprint. Of course, this being manga, several of the monsters are in the form of sexy young women vying for his attention. I recently obtained a copy of Volume [...]
Death Trance DVD Review
A supremely skilled fighter wanders the Earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, looking for the ultimate battle in Death Trance, a rip-snorting action film directed by Yuji Shimomura, action director for Versus, and featuring Versus lead Tak Sakaguchi as action director and leading man. The 2005 film is available on DVD in the United [...]
GenCon 2008: Mazinga’s recap
It’s hard to believe it’s been a week already, but I’ve finally caught up on the sleep I missed from the awesome time Musashi and I had at GenCon 2008. As our esteemed editor in chief mentioned, we were joined by occasional contributor Centurion and his charming significant other Lindsey for a weekend of gaming, [...]
Welcome to the Grindhouse: Dragon Princess / Karate Warriors
One of the nice bonuses of 2007’s Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez tribute to low-rent cinema, Grindhouse, was a flurry of DVD releases of exploitation movies. One notable set was a batch of “Welcome to the Grindhouse” double feature DVDs by BCI / Eclipse, which offered similarly themed genre pictures along with a “grindhouse experience” [...]
Golgo 13 #10: Wasteland manga review
One of the first anime and manga titles that caught my attention was the story of Takao Saito’s ruthless hit man who calls himself Duke Togo but is better known by his infamous code name Golgo 13. A world-class marksman, dangerous martial artist and hardy survival expert, G13 sells his deadly skills to whoever will [...]
King Boxer (Five Fingers of Death) DVD review
Here it is – the film that launched the kung fu movie craze in the United States. Before even the rise of Bruce Lee, King Boxer (Tian xia di yi quan, 1972), also known as Five Fingers of Death, was a surprise hit on the drive-in and grindhouse circuit.
In June 2007, Dragon Dynasty released [...]
Linda Linda Linda DVD Review
A number of films, from Light of Day and The Buddy Holly Story to That Thing You Do and The Commitments, have stories revolving around a group of talented and enthusiastic youngsters forming a band. In 2005, director Nobuhiro Yamashita set out to tell this story from a Japanese perspective. The result was the critically [...]
Starter anime suggestions?
A good friend of mine is almost completely unfamiliar with anime, but asked me to recommend some “starter” titles that would provide a good introduction to the genre. Given my two recent reviews, I thought of Evangelion; after all, and the series did attract a following among non-genre fans. Other thoughts include:
Cowboy Bebop (this one’s [...]
End of Evangelion DVD review
Yellow Menace celebrates both its relaunch and the anniversary of Neon Genesis Evangelion with a long-overdue review of the original series’ concluding movie, End of Evangelion, released theatrically in Japan in 1997 and on DVD in the US in 2002. Along with its companion piece, Death and Rebirth, the film represents a second shot at [...]
