TheRetroCritic

As he took on the very first Star Trek movie, director Robert Wise certainly had his work cut out. Pleasing fans of the original series while translating a somewhat cartoonish 60's show into a legitimate, impressive 70's space opera to rival Star Wars was never going to be easy. How to bring these characters back together? How to update the look of the show without sucking all the iconic charm out of it? Turns out: by making a really long episode :S Yes this Star Trek isn't so much the big, awesome movie you'd expect but rather an extended episode of the original series with different sets, different costumes and better (but still mostly cheesy) effects. Which is not to say it's bad, even if critics and audiences over the years have panned it quite a bit, it's actually very decent (a very decent episode that is). As a movie... Star Wars this isn't. To give you an idea: it takes about 35 minutes for the main crew of The Enterprise to come togeth

"Man Thing"... What WAS I thinking? Here I was picking up a Marvel-approved comic-book monster movie directed by Brett Leonard ( Lawnmower Man ) expecting something a bit like Swamp Thing : kitsch, stupid fun. Perhaps even an underrated, gory action flick? If you haven't guessed yet, I was wrong. Talk about a waste of time...  If you call a movie Man Thing and make it all about some giant swamp creature, I would suggest perhaps showing the character? Because otherwise what you're left with is bad actors playing bland secondary characters going back and forth to some swamp faking you out every time, making you think you're going to see something when in fact you're not. You're just not. I mean, I have no problem with big build-ups but this is hardly The Third Man : this sucks. So when you do finally see Man Thing, 10 minutes from the end, why would you even care? The ending of the film should have happened within the first 20 minutes! This is