TheRetroCritic

Clint Eastwood directs this grim, Oscar-winning thriller from 2003 about an investigation following the death of a young girl in a Boston neighbourhood. It stars Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon as three friends who each have a connection to the case in some way. The film is essentially a murder mystery with Bacon and Laurence Fishburne as the detectives and everyone else as the suspects. We're first introduced to the main characters as children and learn that one of them was abducted and abused by two strangers for four days in a dark basement once, which makes for not exactly the most uplifting start to the proceedings but which becomes an important plot point later. We then catch up with the grown up kids years later: Dave (Robbins), who was abused, is now married and has a child, Jimmy (Penn) is an ex-thief with a family and dodgy connections and Sean (Bacon) is a cop. When Jimmy's daughter is found killed one morning, everyone's world is turned upside down a

Kevin Bacon is the invisible man in a film directed by Paul Verhoeven where Bacon loses it and starts using his newfound power in creepy, disturbing, criminal ways. Why wouldn't you like this movie?! I mean, ok, so as an effects-led flick, Hollow Man was always going to risk looking dated really quickly and, admittedly, whenever we see invisible Bacon surrounded by smoke or water, it looks a little too clean CGI-wise. That said, most of the effects are still pretty cool and do the job so, 14 years on, the film still stands up surprisingly well. After all, Paul Verhoeven has made a career our of movies which really shouldn't work and yet work completely, often becoming instant cult classics. Arnie on Mars? Space bug wars? Robot cops? Really boring Michael Douglas movies? The man can make anything work. Even Showgirls ! Can't deny how hilarious that movie is. Hollow Man takes H.G. Wells' classic invisible man, leaving behind John Carpenter's more light-hearte

Back when Kevin Bacon was still only one degree away from a good movie, he starred in Tremors , a monster movie with more giant worms than Dune and Beetlejuice combined! (that's actually incorrect) Playing one of two losers living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, a town called, ironically, Perfection, Bacon and his pal (played by Fred Ward) finally decide to dump their crappy jobs and their crappy town for a road-trip to the unknown aboard their trusty pick-up truck. Unfortunately, it turns out that some of Perfection's inhabitants are getting killed off in increasingly unusual ways and it might be time to look into what's causing this shocking wave (pun intended) of murderous tremors. As it turns out, several giant worms are sliding around underground and are hunting for people to feast on. They're blind and respond only to sound (see World War Z also) but they're far smarter than they look since they somehow learn from their mistakes and figure o