Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
We’re afraid that this week wasn’t particularly fruitful in terms of posts. What can we say – it’s been a busy time, for various reasons. Or perhaps there were more posts, but then some big, mean, purple-chinned alien warlord snapped his fingers and half the posts vanished into thin air? (And here’s a small reminder that we did two podcasts on Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and those haven’t been snapped away.)
There should be more posts to work from next week, but for now, let’s end this week with some choice trailerage – Eric, take it away!
Eric: I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Robert Kirkman or the comics that made him famous. The Walking Dead Season 1 from Telltale Games (that’s right, the video game and not the show) is one of my benchmarks for poignant and powerful storytelling, but it is only incidentally related to the comic books’ plots. Still, Kirkman doing an adult (read: still adolescent, but no longer for kids) superhero yarn made me curious. So: Invincible starts off fairly unpromisingly, with a set of characters that are ludicrous rip-offs (Batman but with a hoverboard, The Flash but he’s Russian, Wonder Woman but she wields a mace, and so on). That the show is tongue-in-cheek about this didn’t particularly win me over. I think the moment it cracked my critical façade a little was when Invincible, the titular hero, is sent to dispatch Doc Seismic, a supervillain capable of causing earthquakes with his gloves. Not because that’s unique character design or anything, but because the mission handler drily notes that one reason for Seismic’s villainy could be because of brain damage from being concussed every time he uses his gloves. For all of the show’s other issues, it knows how to have fun with its setup, and when it does it right, it’s enough for me to crack a smile.
Matt: I’d never heard of La Casa Lobo before the recent CineFix list of Top 10 Animated Films of All Time, but the trailer makes it look like a supremely unsettling slice of animation that’s likely to take up permanent residence in the darker corners of your mind. Chances are it’s the better, vastly more interesting, but also vastly more frightening, film about Colonia Dignidad than Colonia, starring Emma Watson and Daniel Brühl, which looks pretty dire. A word of warning: Do not watch this trailer just before going to bed.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 