TheRetroCritic

Patrick Swayze. In a Mad Max -style post-apocalyptic future. With a sword. In the 80's. Why would you NOT watch that movie?! It almost sounds too good to be true, and it is. The film starts off just like you'd hoped, with a very silly, very cheap-looking sequence involving Swayze being attacked by sand mummies. To give you an idea, the scene ends with Swayze making the SAND bleed. Yup, it is that awesome. Then he meets up with an old friend, some martial arts master and/or sheriff-type dude and just when you expect things to go all Kung-Fu , a bunch of bad leather-wearin' rejects from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome show up to drag the plot down to something resembling a cliched western minus the hats. Which I do like, genre-bending is welcome in most films as far as I'm concerned, but I really wanted Steel Dawn to go all out. Instead of ripping off every Mad Max film and every Sergio Leone flick ever made, why not differentiate from that Mel Gibson-starring

Many have tried before or since the Indy franchise to recapture the magic and the fun of the old adventure serials with efforts like Romancing The Stone , The Phantom , Doc Savage or Alan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold but all have come short of Spielberg's classic trilogy. So what makes Indiana Jones so successful? For one thing you've got the iconic casting of Harrison Ford as the archaeologist-turned-adventurer which feels like the role Ford was born to play: cool, witty, always on-the-ball, occasionally goofy, strong, good-hearted, a ladies' man...he's the ultimate action hero. He's Han Solo with a whip and leather jacket, can't go wrong with that. Then you've got the Lucas/Spielberg/Williams trilogy of movie masterminds, a team which, in the 80's anyway, were at the top of their game. Fresh from Star Wars , Lucas knew how to produce a catchy flick, The Berg could direct a masterpiece in his sleep and John Williams' scores were ab

Skyline is to movies what my dung is to gourmet cooking. I've seen some bad films this year. I mean, for the love of god I saw Furry Vengeance ! But this was BAD. Oh my days...where do I start? I think saying Skyline is derivative is understating things quite a bit: Skyline has nothing new or interesting to offer. Sure there are special effects but they're hardly impressive and it just looks like someone played Crysis on their PC and pasted some alien ships from the game in an otherwise derelict straight-to-video sci-fi turkey. Oh, and the aliens look like vaginas. I kid you not: vaginas. What is it derivative of? Cloverfield , War of the Worlds , every sci-fi film EVER MADE? What is really painful about Skyline, I must say, is the acting. Holy god the acting... Skyline has some of the worst acting I have seen in a very long time. It is shameful that these people were even paid for such horrendous performances. It made The Happening look like A Clockwork

As my endless search for the funniest and best bad movie around continues, I find myself sitting for an hour waiting for some rubbish-looking octopus to show up in a spy movie set in a submarine.  And although the wait is obviously not worth it, there is at least enough silliness involved here to keep me entertained. You've essentially got two movies in one here: a watchable spy TV movie starring a Daniel Craig lookalike as a Russian terrorist and an awfully boring horror B-movie about a giant octopus messing around with a submarine filled with forgettable characters. Putting these two films together, shockingly, doesn't work and you'll soon find yourself not caring about the monster and just wishing you were watching the spy movie instead. Dire special effects, terrible but fun over (and under) acting, evil Daniel Craig dressed-up like an old lady, Carolyn Lowery's slutty "scientist", the line: "She's holding, baby!": there