TheRetroCritic

For every successful disaster movie, there's a forgotten one and The Core is, unfortunately, the latter. Released in 2003, the film wasn't exactly the lucrative blockbuster it planned to be and critics weren't too thrilled with it. Many have criticised the film for being scientifically inaccurate and preposterous but that's completely missing the point of The Core. This is an homage to old-fashioned disaster movies from The Birds to Journey To The Centre Of The Earth and The Fantastic Voyage with updated technology and slicker visuals, of course. The film is clearly tongue-in-cheek and is not meant to be taken too seriously so the fact it received more scrutiny than Independence Da y or other equally silly releases is frankly unfair. Armed with a solid cast and some genuinely tense set-pieces, The Core is far more fun than critics gave it credit for and it manages to avoid being annoying and over-patriotic like most of Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich's outp

Just when you thought the Lord Of The Rings movies couldn't possibly get any more epic, Return Of The King comes along and blows its predecessors completely out of the water. Which is not to say that the other two films weren't great but in terms of sheer cinematic grandeur, this really raised the bar for the swords and sorcery genre big time. All those plot threads and countless subplots which didn't always feel like they were going anywhere come together and we finally get the epic resolution we deserve. Between those crazy battles involving giant elephants, a Witchking, dragon-type things and about a gazillion people and the more quietly distressing ring-bearer quest, which looks pretty doomed to failure throughout, there's hardly a moment to breathe! It's even a bit hard to list everything that even goes on in this movie. Let's just say that the highlights include John Noble being awesome as crazy old Denethor, Legolas taking down an elephant all by hi

Clive Barker's cult franchise was always going to aim higher and higher. After all, this was a crazy-ass concept with endless possibilities and a lot of potential for creative, far-out developments. The first Hellraiser took place mostly inside this one house but the claustrophobic aspect of the story worked really well. Its sequel, Hellraiser II: Hellbound , followed a slow build-up with some neat sequences taking place inside the demon Box itself. It was a great way to expand that world and I personally couldn't wait to see more of that in the second sequel. So what's all this shit?! You've got Pinhead and co stuck inside some pillar statue, some boring douchebags with problems we really couldn't give two shits about and a first half so dull I felt like putting on the awesome Phantasm quadrilogy instead to balance things out. Granted the first couple of scenes are fun and the second half picks up promptly but it never becomes good: only sillier, more ridi