TheRetroCritic

I rant about The Oscars for... far too long.

Despite the relatively unkind feedback Robert Zemeckis received after experimenting with CG animation in The Polar Express , he persevered and, in 2009, he delivered his own version of A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey as Ebeneezer Scrooge... and the three ghosts. While the animation in Polar Express gave an unwanted creepy puppet quality to the child characters, here the visuals are much more polished and the actors' expressions are captured perfectly. It's fascinating to see Jim Carrey being turned into, not only an old man, but a younger Scrooge, a candle ghost and a big bearded spirit dude. The rest of the cast, which includes Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Bob Hoskins, are also beautifully rendered into their CGI characters. There are still creepy visuals but this time it's very much on purpose as Zemeckis appears to have picked the scariest aspects of Polar Express and Beowulf in order to give every kid watching this movie nightmares throughout the holiday se

The Lost In Space movie finally gets its own review.

I narrow it down to 20 hilariously bad  Lost In Space  lines.

CLICK HERE for the review, which was posted for the first instalment of Review A Bad Movie Day on September 8th.

After the resounding success of Twilight , director Catherine Hardwicke went on to direct a more teen-friendly, melodramatic take on a classic Grimm tale with Red Riding Hood . The film, it turned out, had very little to do with Little Red Riding Hood and was mostly just a thinly-disguised excuse to have yet another supernatural love triangle plot involving werewolves and young girls with mixed emotions. Oh, and Billy Burke. Gotta have Billy Burke. Amanda Seyfried is Valerie, the red hood-wearing gal who falls for a woodcutter when her family decides to set her up with another young man who is much more well-off. This is all mostly irrelevant and uninteresting and the movie itself seems more interested in its "whodunit" plot which involves a telepathic werewolf (don't ask) who is terrorising the village and some nonsense about how Mars, when aligned with the Moon, can affect the werewolf's bite or whatever. The big question throughout the film being who cou

Why is America so reboot-phobic? Because some stories just don't need to be retold, especially when they were told extremely well the first time and are beloved by all just the way they are. Over the years, we've had so many awful horror remakes, from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Evil Dead , and with the criminally boring, unnecessary Total Recall remake still fresh in our minds, a RoboCop reboot just sounded like a bad idea. The idea of a more earnest RoboCop movie grounded in reality, with a grittier, more down-to-Earth feel and a mostly CGI hero with more self-awareness and an inexplicable human hand was missing the point of the original film entirely and, after watching the film, I can confirm that it has, indeed, missed the point on various levels. That said, unlike Total Recall, this is, miraculously, not a complete disaster. Where some changes either don't really work or simply backfire, some make sense in the new world introduced within the movie and ther

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a weird one. Thinking back to it after having not seen it in a while, I always remember really awesome visual stuff and isolated iconic moments crossed with key silly things like Keanu Reeves' entire performance. Having finally re-watched it, it's just as "varied" as I recalled: stylish and inventive yet wacky and flawed. I probably shouldn't like this movie as much as I do but... There's a charm to it that's almost impossible to ignore. For one thing, director Francis Ford Coppola really went for it, never sugar-coating anything and, in the process, brought to the screen a bold version of Bram Stoker's classic novel no-one else could have possibly made and which certainly leaves its mark when you first see it. The film's main arc involves Vlad The Impaler's (a genial Gary Oldman) undying love for his late bride who happens to have a descendant/lookalike (played by Winona Ryder) in 1897, which is when mos