Category: Movies

2025 At The Movies

November 9, 2025

Time for the annual five-word reviews of all the movies we saw this year.

All but one of these were at drive-ins, about half at the local one where we have a season pass, and the other half at the one with four screens a half hour away. This second drive-in had two festivals this year: a two-month long series of classic fantasy/sci-fi films and the annual horror weekend, hence the large amount of older films in the list this year.

As usual some films have more than one review either because we saw them more than once or because we couldn’t decide on just one review 🙂

Minecraft – Monkeys could make better films.
Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith – “Anakin you’re breaking my heart!”
Captain America Brave New World– He’s not really Captain America.

Thunderbolts* – All Bobs have dark sides.
Sinners – A wonderfully original vampire film.
Lilo & Stitch – Would be better without Lilo.

Karate Kid Legends – The Karate Kid Universes ‘Endgame’.
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning – This film insulted my intelligence.
How To Train Your Dragon – Second best Monster Hunter film.

Megan 2.0 – Good film about bad robots.
Jurassic World Rebirth – A kaiju film in disguise.
Jurassic World Rebirth – Film is a pee break.
Jurassic World Rebirth – Franchise is just fantasy now.
Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman – Five minutes of big lady.

Barbarella – The quintessential ‘space babe’ film!
The Smurfs – A smurfy piece of smurf.
Superman – My least favourite Superman film.
Superman – Where the smurf is Geralt??!

Fantastic Four: First Steps – Should have been more fantastic.
Fantastic Four: First Steps – More enjoyable on second viewing.
Freakier Friday – Funny and full of charm.
Weapons – Well made original horror film.

The Iron Giant – Deserving of all its accolades.
Castle In The Sky – Ghibli films are always entertaining.
Jaws – The best film of 2025?

Hotspring Shark Attack – Made by and for lunatics.
Blade Runner – The greatest ever sci-fi film.
Ghost In The Shell – The animation is just breathtaking.

The Conjuring Last Rites – Forgettable horror about con artists.
The Lost Boys – Somewhat dated but still fun.
Devil Times Five – Incoherent and boring 70’s trash.

Him – A good story told poorly.
Downton Abbey The Grand Finale – Time to end this series.
Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party Of A Showgirl – Guess I’m a ‘Swifty’ now?

Tron Ares – A Tron film without ______?!
Tron Ares – The third best Tron film.
Tron Ares – There’s no bad Tron films.

Ghostbusters – Full of charm and creativity.
Ghostbusters 2 – Not as good as Ghostbusters.
Beetlejuice – Probably stranger than you remember.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show – Let’s Do The Time Warp Again!
The Polar Express – Tom Hanks plays every role.
Night Of The Living Dead – A night of living dead.

The drive-ins are both now closed, and it’s likely we won’t see another film until they reopen next year. Unless there’s something showing when we’re in Japan…

Another Year At The Films

October 24, 2024

Kristin and I saw 30 movies this year, some more than once, and all but one at the drive-in. As with previous years we wrote five-word reviews after each of them, and here they are. Since I couldn’t sometimes pick only one, some films have multiple ‘reviews’ 🙂

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire – Best film of the year!
Ghostbusters Frozen Empire – Time to retire this franchise.
Abigail – Original and fun vampire movie.

The Mummy – A decent bootleg Indy film.
The Mummy – The hero murders many people.
Jumanji – Children imperiled by jungle animals.
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace – Meesa do lika dis film.

Challengers – It’s not really about tennis.
If – Deadpool as an imaginary friend.
Furiosa – Oh what a lovely film!
Furiosa – We didn’t need another hero.

Inside Out 2 – The sequel to Inside Out.
Kingdom of The Planet Of The Apes – What’s with these ape movies?
Kingdom of The Planet Of The Apes – The best character isn’t simian.
Despicable Me 4 – Prequel to Despicable Me 5.

Maxxxine – Mia Goth is a star!
Twisters – Pretty people doing stupid things.
Close Encounters of The Third Kind – Re mi do do sol.

Deadpool & Wolverine – Proof that plot is irrelevant.
It Ends With Us – Unbelievable people living unbelievable lives.
It Ends With Us – It didn’t end fast enough.
Alien Romulus – ‘Goonies with aliens’ doesn’t work.

Grease – The lyrics are so suggestive!
Grease – Sadly it doesn’t include Xanadu.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – What the hell was that?
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – Worst film of the year.
Trap – Just another dumb Shyamalan film.
Trap – Appropriately the title rhymes with…

Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter – What happened to the mum?
The Beyond – Far more style than substance.
Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives– He should have stayed dead.
Evil Dead 2 – A well deserving horror classic.

Transformers One – More than meets the eye.
Joker: Folie A Deux – Should never have been made.
The Wild Robot – Robot Jesus saves furry animals.

The Wolf Man – Spoiler: Lon Chaney’s a werewolf!
Dracula – The bats have left the bell tower
Dracula – The victims have been bled
Dracula – Red velvet lines the black box
Dracula – Bela Lugosi’s dead

(Ok, so I broke my 5 word limit for that last one. I’m sure you forgive me!)

With winter fast approaching the drive-ins are once again closed for the season. It was the end of our 15th year going to our closest local drive-in, and we will again buy a season pass for 2025. I hope they’ll have a lot of good films for us to watch next year!

Bikkuriman Star Wars Complete!

July 15, 2024

Last year in Japan, this happened. This year I succeeded in finding more.

The above is the full set of the second Bikkuriman Star Wars stickers, this time themed around the prequels. I bought this as a set, rather than a box of wafers, and it wasn’t cheap at ¥4500! As with the original set, the stickers are vibrant, cute and very sparkly:

The backs of the stickers are very similar to the first set including the ‘rumours’:

I dearly wish I had more of these since they’d be wonderful to actually use! Wouldn’t you love this on a postcard:

But my success didn’t stop there, since I also found this lone sealed wafer:

This is a from the third (and final) series of Bikkuriman Star Wars, called ‘Special Edition’. Although the wafer expired 8 years ago, I purchased it (for ¥800, or about $5) just for the sticker. And which one did I get…

Nothing! The pack didn’t have a sticker on it! I’ve opened many dozens of these in the past and this is the first time this has happened. I would have been raging if it wasn’t for the fact that I had also found…

The full set of series three as well! As you can see there’s a lot of variety in this third series, including lots of stickers showing character pairs, vehicles and battles. The set also contains four embossed stickers with a gold foil effect:

As with the previous sets these are all very metallic and sparkly and I would have loved to have extras to put on postcards. In fact I was looking forward to using the one that should have been in the empty wafer!

So now I have the full set of 72 Star Wars Bikkuriman stickers. They’re all sleeved and safe in a special chocolate sticker binder 🙂

But the search is not yet over, since there’s certain other sets of stickers I would still like to complete…

Robot Claw