TheRetroCritic

I wonder how many kids growing up reading Dr Seuss' Cat In The Hat ever pictured an overweight Alec Baldwin holding a six-pack of beer in the story let alone Mike Myers in cat drag! Oh well... Initially the film looks appropriately quirky and cartoonish but soon we realise that the story mostly takes place in a living room so goodbye slick CGI suburbia, hello boring pastel-coloured...indoors. Because that's what kids enjoy: Indoors. Anyway, you remember everything that didn't work in Ron Howard's The Grinch ? The noisy, chaotic direction, the messy musical numbers, the intrusive score, the erratic editing, the overacting... Yeah that's all back. The Grinch could be forgiven for being a Christmas movie and for having an ever entertaining Jim Carrey as the titular green grump. Here, however, we're given a rushed, dumb, predictable mess of a kids film with Mike Myers desperately trying to insert some jokes here and there and there's really no re

You know those old B movies where you don't see the monster until the last 10 minutes and until then you're made to sit through a slow-moving narrative and endless shots of people walking around in dark rooms looking perplexed? Well, The Reptile is one of those movies. But is the payoff worth it? Almost. There is fun to be had throughout this Hammer horror thriller: Noel Willman is great as the troubled and decidedly odd Dr Franklyn, the Reptile looks the business and there are enough anomalies in the film itself to keep fans of bad movies nitpicking and entertained. The lighting is all over the place: with a single candle lighting a whole house and day turning to night back and forth without rhyme or reason. The continuity is often questionable, the locations cheap-looking and some scenes are clearly either missing entirely or awkwardly there to fill in a gap. Overall, The Reptile is one for the more patient viewers: it's not particularly exciting and t

So you've got Christopher Lee playing Dracula, an actor with one of the most amazing, most sinister voices in cinema history, so what do you do?  Make him play a wordless, lumbering drone!  Although it was Lee himself who refused to read the lines he was originally given, a rewrite would have probably been a better solution as the lack of lines really takes a lot away from the character. He is still somewhat threatening but just feels altogether pretty bland and lacks the presence and style of Bela Lugosi's original Dracula . Can you imagine if Saruman just walked around saying nothing in the Lord Of The Rings movies? People (and hobbits) would just give him weird looks and ignore him like some crazy hobo wizard. By showing a recap of Dracula (1958) at the beginning of the movie, Dracula: Prince Of Darkness really makes you miss that film which had the ever brilliant Peter Cushing as vampire hunter Van Helsing. The plot is typical: English tourists ignoring vil