TheRetroCritic

And the penultimate Horror Month review is...  The Wicker Man.

Another year, another Nicolas Cage film that passed by almost unnoticed. Recently released on Netflix, Vengeance: A Love Story is a thriller about a woman who is abused by a group of men one night in front of her daughter and the aftermath of that traumatic event. On paper, this sounds like your typical revenge plot where someone is taken or raped or killed and a good cop takes the law into his own hands once all else fails. The film, perhaps aware of how overplayed that subgenre has become, makes a genuine attempt to keep that aspect of the film in the background and focus on everything else. While this was a wise decision as it allows us to spend more time with and feel for Teena (Anna Hutchison), the victim, and her daughter Bethie (excellent newcomer Talitha Bateman), the film is unfortunately not clever enough to really explore the impact of rape on someone or the justice system's failings on the matter in a way that rings true. Vengeance is like a poorly written essay:

The Cagiest moments from the movie Trapped In Paradise .

Even in a film like Guarding Tess , The Cage can't help himself...

Released in 1994, Guarding Tess was a comedy/drama starring Nicolas Cage as Doug Chesnic, a Secret Service agent tasked with protecting stubborn ex-First Lady Tess Carlisle (Shirley MacLaine) despite the fact he desperately wants to quit. The first time we meet Doug, he's genuinely happy to not be Tess' personal bodyguard anymore and he's keen to move his career forward in Washington due to his relationship with Tess having been a tumultuous one as she's constantly disobeying protocol, making spontaneous demands and telling him off. Unfortunately for him, leaving isn't that easy since Tess can just call up the President directly every time and get him to encourage Doug to stay. This doesn't improve the characters' dynamic much as one of them tries to enforce by-the-book rules and the other makes a point of going against said rules. There's a predictability about this whole scenario: two people can't stand each other, they get to know each other

Here's the video version of my The Frozen Ground review.

Another year, another Nicolas Cage film you never knew existed but which somehow got made and was released when you weren't looking. Dog Eat Dog can now be found on Netflix, it co-stars Willem Dafoe and it is, believe it not, pretty good. The opening sequence of the film is arguably one of last year's most brutal scenes, which sets the tone for Dafoe's character, a pathetic yet psychopathic ex-con nicknamed "Mad Dog" who joins his partners in crime Troy (Nicolas Cage) and Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook) for one last job. Directed by veteran filmmaker Paul Schrader, known for co-writing some of Martin Scorsese's very best films and for making off-beat thrillers himself, Dog Eat Dog definitely has a quirky plot that feels like something the Coen Brothers would tackle or have tackled since one of the scenes even involves Cage stealing a baby à la Raising Arizona . There is humour in the film but the several funny lines or moments you'll find are super

Trapped In Paradise was a comedy released in 1994 about two ex-con brothers Dave and Alvin (Jon Lovitz & Dana Carvey) who convince their brother Bill (Nicolas Cage) to rob a bank with them in the small town of Paradise on Christmas Eve. Despite trying desperately to not be like his petty thief brothers, Bill nevertheless agrees to help steal the money from the bank when he believes himself to be a fugitive after an earlier incident involving the kleptomaniac Alvin trying to rob a convenience store. The robbery itself is a bit of a mess but it is successful, it's escaping from Paradise which proves to be the real challenge with bad luck and distractions getting in the way. As they meet more and more of the city's genuinely friendly and caring inhabitants, they start to have second thoughts about keeping the money. The Lovitz, Carvey & Cage team is an unlikely one and, indeed, Nicolas Cage feels very much like the odd one out but this is quite appropriate for the ch

One of the most fascinating unmade Hollywood movies has to be Superman Lives , a 90's Superman movie which would have starred Nicolas Cage as the DC hero and would have been directed by Tim Burton of all people. The Death Of Superman Lives is a crowdfunded documentary which finally gives us a better idea of what that film would have been like. This is, of course, not the first time a documentary has spilled the beans on a film that never was: very recently we had Jodorowsky's Dune and, a while back, Lost In La Mancha which focused on the making of Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote . With interviews from the likes of Kevin Smith, Tim Burton and eccentric producer Jon Peters, director/interviewer Jon Schnepp, through valid questions, nifty animated visuals, previously unseen test footage and artwork, translates a project which was often dismissed as a silly idea and a deserved failure into a comic-book movie epic like no other. After the underwhelming Superman Returns and th

A compilation of some of the "Cagiest" moments from the film Kiss Of Death starring Nicolas Cage and David Caruso.

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Outcast is one of those Nicolas Cage movies which looks like such a half-assed effort it could only be entertaining. The casting of Hayden Christensen as his co-star and yet another ghastly-looking, misleading poster covered in fire being further proof of this. It also seems odd that Cage would take on yet another Crusader flick so soon after Season Of The Witch but heck, why not? It's not like it's an overdone subgenre. Besides, Season Of The Witch was more of a fantasy film and Outcast is like a Zhang Yimou epic minus the budget, the battle scenes or the talent. The plot follows a Chinese prince and his sister, who escape when the prince's warrior brother kills the King. They meet a Crusader-turned-drunk (Christensen) and he helps them take back the throne. On the way (read: an hour into the movie), they meet an old pal of Christensen's (Cage) who also deserted the Crusades. Of course, everyone in China speaks perfect English all the time, even to each other,

One of the two films Nicolas Cage starred in last year was Pay The Ghost , a supernatural thriller about a father whose son disappears all of a sudden on Halloween night. Of course, the film then doesn't try to say anything about loss or neglect like, say, The Orphanage , instead going for a ludicrous horror mystery plot you'd have to be pretty darn high to even consider believing. The film's first mistake, really, was to have Cage running around frantically looking for his son dressed up like a cowboy. If that doesn't suck all the potential drama out of the scene, I don't know what could. Oh sure it's a riot and as a fan of the actor's wackier efforts I'm loving it! But silly stuff like this doesn't help the film much, unless giving us an early hint that it builds up to a truly absurd ending counts as helping. Now, you could have easily told an interesting, heartfelt story here about a bad father who loses everything but tries to make up for

Left Behind was sold to us as a disaster movie with only a soupçon of religion included in it to benefit the film's big concept. We were promised mostly CGI destruction with some Nicolas Cage thrown in and that didn't sound too bad, even if the film itself looked ridiculous. And ridiculous it is! Ah if only that was this movie's biggest flaw... If you don't already know, the film follows a pilot (Cage) fly a plane while, everywhere, the Rapture is taking place: people are disappearing out of their clothes leaving chaos to settle on the Earth. While that may sound entertainingly apocalyptic, Left Behind makes it feel about as plausible and threatening as that event did in Seth Rogen comedy This Is The End , a far superior film in every single way, I should point out. The disaster part of the movie doesn't kick off until half an hour of mostly Cage-less exposition where the pilot's daughter Chloe (a godawful Cassi Thomson) has sleep-inducing discussions

This thriller from 2011 sees Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman play a couple who are taken hostage in their own home by a group of thieves. Most of the action takes place in one location in a somewhat gimmicky outing from director Joel Schumacher. This isn't the first time Schumacher has worked with Cage as they collaborated on 8MM some time back and the actor is given a decent challenge with Trespass since he is portraying a victim but one who is a smug rich dude on the surface while in fact being a rather brave father and husband and a loser a little bit on top of it. That's actually the interesting thing about this film: it seems like the usual predictable home invasion B-movie with bland, clichéd characters but it does go out of its way to flesh out those family members (and their captors) as the story develops. Both the diamond-dealing husband Kyle (Cage) and his wife Sarah (Kidman) seem to be hiding something from each other, their daughter Avery (Liana Liberato) has

Nicolas Cage is many things: amazing, awful, hilarious, dull, entertaining, unique, talented, fascinating and, most importantly, completely out of his freakin' mind. He also has some weird obsession with fire. Somehow, a huge chunk of his films seem to have "fire" as a main motif, especially where the posters are concerned. Whether fire is actually an important part of the film depicted or not, you can be sure that there'll be some spark here or there regardless. Which is why I thought I'd list some of my favourite fire-related Nicolas Cage posters because it's frankly odd that this is a thing AND most of these posters are so bad, so ridiculous, they're in fact beautiful, awesome and perfect in every way. Let's do this. 15 BANGKOK DANGEROUS Who knows what the hell's going on in this poster?! Cage's oversized left arm is clearly dislocated and he looks more like he's scratching the back of his right shoulder than he looks

Nicolas Cage faces off against John Cusack in The Frozen Ground , a dark Alaska-set thriller in the vein of Insomnia in which a cop tries desperately to arrest a serial killer but struggles due to the people around him being unhelpful douchebags. The main focus of the story (which is based on real events) is Vanessa Hudgens' prostitute Cindy who manages to escape Robert Hansen (a chilling John Cusack), claiming he kidnapped her, raped her and tried to kill her. Though she is being truthful, the police refuse to buy her story because of her background, which leaves Nicolas Cage's good cop in a tricky position seeing as he believes her, literally all the evidence points to the same suspect and there's a loose psychopathic killer lurking around, ready to strike again at any moment. This is one of those tense, serious movies that relies heavily on atmosphere and strong performances rather than action and artifice so if you're looking for balls-to-the-wall gun fights,

Pretty much every Nicolas Cage movie these days is packed with little glorious Cagisms so you'd expect a film by Joel Schumacher, the man behind Batman & Robin  (and other, admittedly better films) to offer us a good bunch of those and yet 8MM is actually disappointingly low on Cage lols. This is quite probably because it's a decent flick with a darker plot and a Roman Polanski-esque tone throughout making it difficult to burst out laughing constantly Wicker Man -style. The plot follows Tom Welles (Cage), a private investigator, as he investigates a snuff film in which a young girl could have been killed for real. This search takes him down a sleazy road he's obviously not used to and to a grim underworld he never knew existed. On the way, he gets the help of a sex shop clerk with the hard-to-forget name of Max California (the ever brilliant Joaquin Phoenix) and has to deal with a good bunch of dodgy, twisted characters. It's one of those descent-into-hell typ

The late nineties were a weird time. Nicolas Cage kept being cast in ridiculously overblown action movies ( Con Air , Face/Off ), Michael Bay was about to work with J.J. Abrams on Armageddon , dogs and cats living together: mass hysteria. Back in 1996, The Rock came out and combined the acting talents of Mr Cage and Mr Sean Connery in what seemed like an odd pairing, and, I suppose, in what  was an odd pairing, but which also worked surprisingly well. Knowing what we now know about Bay, The Rock is an interesting film to revisit because it's both very much his style and yet nowhere near as irritating or cheesy as the likes of Armageddon and Transformers 2 . I mean, of course you still get soldiers marching in slow-mo at sundown, insulting comic-relief stereotypes (look out for a gay hairdresser more concerned about hair than he is about bullets), perplexing one-liners ("How do you like how that shit works?") and ludicrous art direction but there's just somet