TheRetroCritic

Here's the video version of my The Core review.

After the widely reviled and mocked 1998 Godzilla gave a classic franchise a bad name, this new reboot was highly anticipated to say the least and, with every trailer preceding it promising nothing but great things, this looked like a winner. And, for a while, it kinda was. The build up for this one certainly takes a page out of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind , teasing us throughout and taking a human focus rather than a purely monstrous one. All the disaster monster movie clichés you want and expect are still present yet they are never played for cheap laughs like in Roland Emmerich's take. Instead, the tone remains serious, even dark, which makes it easier to get into. The whole thing really has a Spielbergian tone to it both visually and in terms of the character dynamics. It's a gorgeous-looking film with more than its share of beautifully put together images and the first full Godzilla reveal is a delight, even if the iconic monster does look a tad chunkier tha

With Zombieland bringing back zombie movies in a big way and spawning not only a TV series but zombie comedies like Warm Bodies , it was only a matter of time before we got our next big, serious zombie epic. Based on a popular novel by Max Brooks, World War Z stars Brad Pitt and boasted an epic scale in its otherwise somewhat underwhelming trailers. As it turns out, the movie failed in a very different way than I thought it would. This is the kind of movie I honestly expect to look fun in the trailers but end up being a bore,  Battle L.A. and Total Recall being prime examples of that. There are many things wrong with this movie but I can't really say I was bored by it as it kept the action going throughout and rarely wasted too much time with unimportant filler. It does slow down quite a bit near the end, though, but even those parts had some form of suspense to them. The film's first half hour really is its biggest turn off. In 3D (avoid the 3D at all costs, by the way

From Richard Pepin, director of the Cyber Tracker movies, comes this ambitious disaster...thriller in which LA is pretty much destroyed by some big-ass earthquake. Is it any good? Lets find out. The film actually starts off as some kind of spy thriller with Gary Daniels stealing some files and microchip off some big company in order to sell it to some bald Russian mobster. But this undercover FBI agent (played by consistently rubbish Traci Lords) manages to arrest him. So far so thriller but then Jeff Fahey shows up and there's an earthquake that NEVER ends! Could this film be getting awesome? No, not quite. The whole thing is pretty clumsy throughout: the acting ranges from awful (Lords) to good (Fahey), the effects range from lame (a sex scene in which obviously the actress refused to be naked so they only show her face and some unknown stunt-boob lady's body) to surprisingly decent (buildings falling apart etc.) making for a pretty uneven affair. The ending is also laug