TheRetroCritic

Review available on the new website .

I honestly wasn't sure what to expect from this movie before watching it. Was it a comedy? Was it a tear-jerker? From Satoshi Kon, the director of Millenium Actress and Perfect Blue , Tokyo Godfathers tells the story of three homeless people who find a baby abandoned on a pile of trash in the street and try to find the baby's parents. It's a simple plot, a simple concept and this leaves a lot of room for subtle character development and mini threads within this overarching storyline. Our main characters are Miyuki, a rebellious young runaway, Gin, an older grumpy, bearded guy and Hana, a gay transvestite who dreams of being a mother. Well, Hana's dream comes true early on when the homeless trio find the lost child and the film, from then on, explores the connections between people, their pasts and their futures as life offers them surprising coincidences. These characters are instantly loveable and are the heart and soul of this movie. You really care about th

Sid's Baby Moment from TheRetroCritic on Vimeo .

Bette Davis playing a killer with an evil twin sister? Sounds amazing, right? Especially when you've seen her in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte , Dead Ringer just sounds like it could just be the best thing out there. And yet director Paul Henreid somehow succeeds in making this one of the least impressive evil Bette movies. So what went wrong? Well, for one thing the twin "effect" works about as well as the green screen in Hitchcock's Family Plot (obscure reference: it doesn't). Bette Davis also seems thrown throughout especially when she has to act alongside herself. There's delays in the conversations and she just doesn't sound natural or convincing. The film also suffers from a slow rhythm with very little actual suspense making this a somewhat dull experience. Visually at least Dead Ringer does well and there are a few Hitchcock-style sequences, most notably the first murder, which are admittedly a treat. One

As far as bad movies go, it's hard to do better than this little nugget. Unless you're Tommy Wiseau. Then again, compared to other equally terrible creations, 666 The Demon Child is actually very entertaining: plastic devil babies, giant eggs, old men with tattoos, archaeologists, still images of the sky, the same annoying sound of like 10 babies all whining in unison repeated A THOUSAND times!!! What's not to like? From the soporific opening in which an old Native American man walks for about 10 minutes before uttering the immortal line: "And now, it begins!" to the genuinely perplexing end "twist" (think the end of Godzilla except you can't actually tell what you're even looking at), The Demon Child is one of those cinematic catastrophes which has to be seen to be believed. Needless to say the acting is beyond terrible, the script and direction are abysmal, the lighting minimalist to say the least (one light?), the sound dis