I have a lot of things on my backlog. I have a collection of books that I own but haven’t read yet, a collection of games that I either need to play or replay, albums I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to yet and hundreds of movies that I either want to watch or rewatch. But, with so many things to do and so little time, my backlog usually ends up growing rather than shrinking.

In an attempt to chip away at my backlog, I decided to watch three movies on Halloween, and below are the reviews of said films.

The first movie I watched was “Cowboy Bebop: The Movie”. Also known as “Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, this was the only seasonal-movie I watched, with the events of the movie taking place during Halloween. This is the only movie of the triple-header that I had watched with friends, as someone I know watches the movie around this time every year.

“Cowboy Bebop: The Movie” is just more of “Cowboy Bebop”, and that’s a great thing. “Cowboy Bebop” is a series that I consider to be the greatest animated series of all time, so what is essentially a two-hour episode in that world is nothing less than amazing. One thing that sticks out is the art direction of the movie, especially for a series with as great of art direction as “Cowboy Bebop”. The visuals of the tower at the end and of Moroccan Street are amazing and probably top tier in the series, which is already filled with a lot of amazing visuals.

The next movie I watched was “Sapp Time: The Movie”, which is more of a documentary than a movie. It’s about the making of the song “Sapp Time” by former K-1 World Grand Prix winner and IWGP Heavyweight champion Bob Sapp, from its recording to the filming of the music video. I absolutely adore the music video and song that this documentary is about, so it was a fun watch seeing the behind the scenes.

Sapp is a very charismatic man and watching this made me kind of realize the downturn of the gaijin in Japanese wrestling. I could honestly write a whole separate piece on this, but going from Bob Sapp, a country-wide phenomenon that made history by being the first (and, as of this writing, only) Black man to win the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, as the top foreign-wrestler in Japan to Gabe Kidd, a British man who is more known as the butt of a joke rather than making the joke himself, being Japan’s top foreigner, in 20 years is an extremely sharp decline (this is ignoring a Kenny Omega-shaped hole in the mid-2010s, but Kenny is the exception rather than the rule).

But, overall, “Sapp Time: The Movie” is a very fun documentary.

The last movie I watched was “Romeo Must Die”. This is the only rewatch for me out of the three, having watched it with my dad about seven or eight years ago. While I do remember the final minute or so of the movie with Trish (played by Aaliyah) and Han (played by Jet Li), I didn’t remember much of it, so I felt a rewatch was in order.

I felt that this was a very good movie, all things considered. It’s a play on Shaekspeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, so it has to work within the confines of that framework, but I feel like it’s a good modern take on the play. All of the performances in the movie are really good or great, with Aaliyah, Jet Li, and Russell Wong (who played Kai) as standouts, and the movie was shot really well. I do wish the movie was slightly better paced, with Kai and Mac’s subplots getting slightly more development, but it’s overall a very good movie.

While I still have a lot of movies on my backlog, I was able to chip away at the list, getting three of them watched.