TheRetroCritic

Back in the day, Michael Keaton managed to fit this little flick in between Batman movies. One Good Cop isn't quite the big blockbuster you'd expect the man, The Bat-man, to take on but cop movies were in vogue so why not? The film sees Keaton and Anthony LaPaglia as NYPD cops, the former is married (to Rene Russo, typecast as a cop's wife in EVERYTHING back in the day), the latter is father to three kids, they follow various cases which always end up getting pretty messy. One day, Keaton's partner gets killed recklessly and he is left trying to deal with the best way to give his kids a new home. One Good Cop isn't so much a cop movie as it is a rough-edged melodrama with cops in it. A lot of emphasis is put on literally every character around Keaton so it's hard to pin his down, which means that when he finally does something completely out of character it's pretty jarring. The film's trying to tell this emotional story of a cop, a good guy with

Oh dear... I don't know what annoys me most, that this movie was ever made or that people actually really like it and even go as far as saying it surpasses the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre sometimes! Let's call it a draw. Both statements annoy me equally. Michael Bay once again gets one of his music video director friends onboard and, once again, they royally screw it up. Hey, how about getting a real FILM director next time? With all these awful horror remakes, Bay really has revealed himself to be an incompetent producer as well as an incompetent director. The first Friday The 13th I could see being remade so that didn't bother me too much, A Nightmare On Elm Street didn't need a remake, especially a dull one, but Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of those classic horror films you just don't remake. There's just no point. It's like that remake of Psycho or that Stephen King The Shining TV movie. Who asked for THOSE?! Anyway, here we hav

Here's one horror remake I was actually looking forward to. I had heard some negative feedback but also some good things about it so as far as I was concerned it didn't look too bad in the trailer so there was a chance that it might actually be a decent remake. Nope. There was something about the original A Nightmare On Elm Street that made it an easy film to watch and re-watch. It didn't take itself too seriously, its villain was a prankster with a REALLY dark sense of humour, Freddy's dream kills were creative and pretty surreal to the point where you genuinely didn't know what was coming next and you got to see a Johnny Depp in serious trouble. It was a silly flick but it was a lot of fun and introduced us to one of cinema's most iconic killers. Here we have a slick, Michael Bay-produced remake starring the always reliable Jackie Earle Haley ( Watchmen , Dark Shadows ) as Freddy Krueger, a part which had been played for decades by Robert Englund.

So good, I had to post it.

SPOILERS Well, this is it, people. The final chapter of " The Twilight Saga ". ... REALLY?! THIS is it? Wow. After sitting through every single Twilight movie, I can safely say that this new installment is one big disappointment. Not so much in terms of lols, it does deliver a good bunch of those, as ever, but just in terms of sheer drama and cinematic competence. Yes this is meant to be like a cheesy vampire Harlequin romance type thing but it's also meant to be a story worthy of an entire franchise and, most importantly, a movie. As it turns out, this "saga" fails on all accounts. Shame, with Breaking Dawn Part 1 , things were finally starting to get borderline insane and mean-spirited just the way I wanted it to! Ah Part 1... You beautiful bastard. Here we have Bella, finally a red-eyed vamp, complete with super-strength, super-powers, moody doochiness and wood-like posture. FINALLY Bella is resembling a strong female lead and an actua

There is an irony about Teen Wolf Too that, if intentional, is pretty tragically clever in its own way. I mean the film is essentially about how everyone expects Jason Bateman to become the wolf and live up to Michael J. Fox but due to him... not being Michael J. Fox it proves more difficult to accept than it should. Teen Wolf Too is basically Teen Wolf . You've got a sporting event our hero needs to win NOT as the wolf to redeem himself in the end, you've got a stern principal (dean, whatever), you've got a bitch bimbo, a bully, goofy best friends, a sweet father figure, the red eyes scene, the hairy hands scene, the transformation scene.... it's the same movie! But Teen Wolf Too is to Teen Wolf what, say, Big Top Pee-Wee was to Pee-Wee's Big Adventure . The sequel lacks something that made the original film that little bit more enjoyable. It's not bad, some stinker lines aside it's not bad, just... it lacks something . For one thing it takes some ti

Watching Teen Wolf as a kid was a treat. I remember just waiting impatiently every time for the first full transformation scene with the dad showing up looking comically fluffy in the end. A fan of the cartoon series, watching the live-action feature was simply awesome. And you know what? I still love that shit! Is it dated? Of course! But that only adds RetroJoy to my RetroGasm. You've got all the cliches of an 80's sports flick, the typical teen movie metamorphosis-as-puberty thing and, of course, a whole bunch of werewolfy events. Like Fright Night , Once Bitten or The Lost Boys , Teen Wolf was an attempt at taking the monster movie genre and making it teen-friendly, reinventing the old genre in a light-hearted horror/comedy setting rather than handling it in the usual gothic style we all know and love. This, of course, was hit and miss depending on the film but Teen Wolf is one that worked. Michael J. Fox is Scott Howard, a regular kid for whom being what he call

Ever since Spider , we've seen a very different David Cronenberg at work. A slightly more mature Cronenberg perhaps? Or just more grounded? After all, this is the guy who turned Jeff Goldblum into a fly, put a gun inside James Woods' chest, cloned Jeremy Irons and exploded heads on a whim! A film about Freud and Jung hardly comes across as the man's most daring venture. That said, some of his later, non-sci-fi/horror projects have made their mark: from the quietly unsettling gloom of Spider to Viggo Mortensen's towering performance in Eastern Promises , Cronenberg has proven he can still make an impact. I just miss those exploding heads... This time, Mortensen is once again given a meaty role as none other than Sigmund Freud whom, despite being something of a secondary character, certainly stands out as the film's Joker. He is joined by a terrific Michael Fassbender (Jung) and a... (we'll get to that) Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, Jung's troubl

How I missed a film like The Game all these years is beyond me. Ok, I'll admit I rarely flock to Michael Douglas movies but this is one of the good ones. Douglas plays a cold, wealthy financier whose brother's (Sean Penn) birthday present turns out to be one hell of a mind-f***. What follows is a thrilling descent into madness and although the ending doesn't exactly live up to the incredible build-up preceding it, it's all about the ride and David Fincher proves just how brilliant he is at keeping his viewers on the edge of their seat right up until the very last shot. This is a film which does remarkably well when it comes to keeping the viewer guessing throughout whilst always being one step ahead. By the end, Michael Douglas may be understandably emotionally devastated but we're left still expecting one more trick up the movie's sleeve. Like a final mega-twist or something. This doesn't really happen but like I said: it's all about the ride. And

Although many will tell you that this is the best adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' story, those people probably haven't read the book. Yes Richard Lester's film has a lot going for it and gets a lot of things right, it also gets a lot of things wrong not only in terms of staying close to the story but also dramatically. The cast, for the most part, is spot on. Oliver Reed steals the show as Athos and proves to be perfect casting for the role. Heston's Cardinal, Dunaway's Milady and Lee's Rochefort are all brilliant. Unfortunately, Raquel Welch proves to be this film's splinter which refuses to go away no matter how much you try to take it out. Her performance is absolutely abysmal and the director's decision to turn Constance into a bumbling clumsy fool is unnecessary and frankly DUMB. Whatever happened to the Queen's cunning spy maid? You know when you've been Clouseau-ed. Michael York is fine as D'Artagnan although once again Lester makes

"The Bat, The Cat, The Penguin." Best. Tagline. Ever. For a long time, Batman Returns was not only hands down my favourite Batman film but one of my all-time favourites. To a certain extent, this is still true but time has made me a harsher critic so here's me trying to objectively review a film which has been firmly embedded in my DNA for decades. Hell, I could even hum the entire score from start to finish if I was drunk enough! Where Batman took the film noir route and was firmly inspired by detective flicks of the 40's, Batman Returns is pure Tim Burton. The snow, the quirky fairytale feel, the gothic look, the twisted sense of humour... it's a very different Gotham City to the one we were first introduced to. The film almost feels like an opera with the town hall, where most of the action takes place, acting as a kind of grand stage where all the drama and madness can take place. The film's opening is one of my personal favourite sequences of

Horror films are a funny thing. Very often, their ability to influence the overall genre overpowers the quality of the films themselves. The Blair Witch Project may have been an uneven effort but it paved the way for a variety of other films and franchises to this day. Similarly, Halloween reinvented the slasher genre but how does the original film itself fare today? It's fine. Honestly nothing special. Now I'm a big John Carpenter fan myself and the likes of Christine , The Thing , They Live , Starman and countless others are all-time favourites of mine but I really feel like Halloween hasn't dated well at all and is actually one of Carpenter's films I feel least drawn to. It's a decent enough slasher with a terrific concept and a great killer but it really fails to be anything more than watchable. The film is consistently slow which, were the payoffs satisfying, wouldn't be so bad but a lot of the time we either get a loud and confusing kill or a false

It's hard to describe my anticipation for Michael Bay's new attempt at a Transformers live action film. On the one hand, seeing a good Transformers film would blow me away so there's always THAT hope, on the other hand... Transformers 2 ... The prospect of sitting through another 2 and a half hours of moronic, nonsensical, offensive cheese with robots thrown in was a painful one but I just had to know if Bay could sink any lower than Transformers 2 or, god forbid, make something half decent! But Mr Pearl Harbor did not disappoint with a follow-up every bit as childish, stupid and tasteless as its predecessor but minus the fun and 10 more minutes thrown in. Now that said, I should point out that this effort is probably better than the last one if only for some impressive effects, no Megan Fox and no racist robots. Yes the pain is diminished slightly but new pain is introduced through countless stereotypes, macho homophobic humour, rampant sexism, music video-style

The rise and fall of the X-Men films sure went quick and fast. Not that the first two were all that perfect but when the messy third came along that was something of a blow. The lacklustre Wolverine Origins prequel followed and pretty much confirmed that the X magic was well and truly...ex magic, So how do you follow a lifeless X-Men prequel? With another of course! The weird thing is that looking at the reviews the film received so far, people liked it! They lapped it up! And here I was facepalming my way through yet another damp squib X-Men film which not only managed to miss the point entirely but delivered what has to be the least interesting X film so far. Lets forget for one second the overall quality of the film and its hit-and-miss links to the other films and the comics: is this honestly the X-Men film we want to see? Who was this made for? Who demanded yet another prequel starring mostly uninteresting mutants doing mostly uninteresting things in the 60's? Will we