TheRetroCritic

Highlights of my encounters with the game Surf Ninjas . Full streams available over on my Twitch , a follow over there would be greatly appreciated!

In the same spirit as the Naked Gun and Airplane! movies, Spy Hard was a joke-a-minute spoof movie starring Leslie Nielsen as a clueless James Bond-style agent. Released in 1996, the film may have done reasonably well at the box-office but it was also critically panned. It's no secret that post-Naked Gun, comedies of that type, not just the ones starring Nielsen, failed to recapture the same quality established by Airplane! back in 1980. Even Airplane II: The Sequel , which came out only a couple of years later, couldn't nail it. There's no denying, however, that no matter how bad the movie was, Leslie Nielsen himself was always charming, likeable and very funny. Along with the underrated Wrongfully Accused and Dracula: Dead and Loving It , Spy Hard was one of the actor's better later efforts as the Bond theme certainly provided a lot of material to work with from over-the-top plots and villains to goofy gadgets, femme fatales and an overly macho lead. The openi

One of the 90's big ideas, among others, was to adapt animated shows into live-action feature films. From The Flintstone s to Inspector Gadget , it didn't matter how obscure or unadaptable the source material was as long as an attempt was made to cash-in on its name somehow. Leslie Nielsen was therefore cast as Mr. Magoo , the old man with poor eyesight who very nearly misses fatal accidents thanks to pure luck. Nielsen, while not really looking much like the character, was a solid choice since, even in the worst movies, he can usually get a laugh. The film opens appropriately by showing you a short Magoo cartoon but as soon as the live-action part starts, you'll be wishing the cartoon had kept playing. This should have been an easy project: give Leslie Nielsen some funny lines, follow him as he goes around causing mayhem all around him. And yet, right off the bat, it's impossible to hear Nielsen's incessant ramblings due to an annoying over-the-top score under

Mel Brooks takes on Bram Stoker's Dracula in this cartoonish 1995 spoof starring the late, great Leslie Nielsen as Dracula and the director himself as vampire hunter Van Helsing. It's very dumb, very silly but is it any good? Hard one to review this one since I do have a soft spot for it. On the one hand, technically the film looks a bit cheap and often feels more like a filmed play than it does a fully put-together movie. Part of the joke is that it does look so trashy, though, so it's hard to fault the film for that. As a straight-up piss-take of Francis Ford Coppola's film, it's pretty spot-on and, in fact, actually misses out on a few more easy jokes it could have made about certain parts of that movie. The idea of Leslie Nielsen as Dracula is hilarious in itself and Nielsen sure doesn't disappoint, clearly having a ball putting on the silliest Transylvanian accent he could come up with and joking around with Brooks, Peter MacNichol and the rest of t