"Earwig and the Witch" (2020), by Studio Ghibli in cooperation with NHK.

Let's see what we have here:
- a woman and a baby on a motorbike successfully flee from a yellow 2CV
- the woman abandons the baby (named: Earwig) at an orphanage
- the woman mentions 12 witches, which have to be defeated, before she can return (to, what we now know, is her baby)
- two sinister adoptive "parents" (one a witch, the other a demon) with a yellow 2CV in their garage
- a talking cat

With those ingredients, it should be doable, to create a good, if not even a great, animation movie.

Alas - they've failed. Massively.

10 years have passed and "Earwig" or "Erica Wigg" (as the little baby has been re-named by the matron of the orphanage) is running the show.

To put it in her own words: "everyone here is doing what I want!"

That alone makes our little protagonist unlikeable, already (btw: she is wearing her hair like little devil horns...so, the movie makers really wanted to drive that point home).

But at this point, the story still could have been saved.
If they had given the little girl some redeeming qualities.

Let her have some learning experiences, that help her grow into a better person - done! Good movie.
But they didn't.

Instead, she is angry half of the time and the other half of the time she is planning, on how to make the adoptive parents do whatever she wants - just like everyone did in the orphanage.

During the last third of the movie, we learn why the demon isn't as evil as he could be.
We also learn that the witch isn't quite as bad as she first appered to be.
And - honetly, don't ask me how - the little she-devil gets her wish and both, witch and demon, serve her completely.

And then the movie ends, when the long lost mother knocks at the door on x-mas eve.

Zero explanation as to the connection between the mother, the witch and the demon (and why they were chasing after her and her baby in the beginning of the movie), besides that they all played in a band together, zero explanation about "the 12 witches" that the mother apparently had to defeat...no explanation at all to anything.

It's really rare, that I sit stunned in front of my TV, wondering: "what the hell did I just watch?"

Yesterday was such a rare instance.

And to think that Studio Ghibli was involved in this...incredible. SMH

Sir Rodney of Dangerfiekd in "Back to School"(1986). As Thornton Melon, owner of the Tall and Fat stores, his machine-gun delivery of hilarious PC-incorrect one-liners is simply priceless!

Pound of Flesh, an action film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. The premise is simple: his kidney is stolen by organ traffickers. While it is not his best movie, I found it engaging enough and enjoyed it

Black Crab

With Noomi Rapace.

Creature, the one that only has worth if I pretend it's a Killer Croc origin story; holy shit this was stupid garbage. The big damn hero rolls up to crash Lockjaw's hillbilly rape-party and save his damsel in distress, but 99% of the fight is just getting beat down by a creature that quickly swiped parts off or out of everyone else. He's very lucky though, that a hole randomly opens in the mud and Lockjaw randomly steps backward into it. He pops back up to pull Damsel in, but BDH dives in after them...and resurfaces with the slightly over-sized jawbone, even holding onto it long enough that they throw it out the window while driving away. Isn't that just so exciting, that the monster is defeated completely off-screen? It actually mirrors Lockjaw's transformation, where he cornered an albino gator in a cave and "fought" it by limply laying his belly across the sloped gore underneath and lifted the gator's jaw open, as if their biting force isn't the strongest of all living animals. Supposedly, feasting on both the gator and his sister-bride transformed him into a mediocre Batman villain cosplayer.