TheRetroCritic

Produced by Tony Scott, believe it or not,  Get Santa was a British Christmas comedy from 2014 starring Jim Broadbent as Santa Claus who crash-lands in London and ends up being jailed for attempting to steal back his lost reindeer. The film follows Steve (Rafe Spall) and Tom (Kit Connor), a father and son, as they try to help Santa find his reindeer and sleigh before somehow getting him out of prison so he can get ready in time for his yearly Christmas "flight". Steve is a down-and-out ex-con who wants to reconnect with his son and is thrown into this unlikely scenario when Tom insists that the old man in the Santa suit hiding in the garage is the real deal. Steve is forced to make a choice between convincing Tom that none of this is real or believing his son by pursuing this surreal mission thereby risking going back to jail. Get Santa is at its strongest when it focuses on this relationship as its heart really is in the right place and it delivers just the right amount

After finally joining forces on The Expendables and its sequels, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger collaborated again on Escape Plan . Originally titled "The Tomb", this prison escape actioner from 2013 failed to wow critics and audiences alike upon its release. The concept is very much a Tango & Cash meets Escape From Alcatraz meets Fortress type of deal as Ray Breslin (Stallone), an expert who can break out of any prison, is dragged to a state-of-the-art facility that's seemingly unescapable where he befriends fellow inmate Emil Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger). Of course, they decide to help each other out and plan an elaborate escape. The film's concept is instantly ridiculous as the first time we meet Breslin, he breaks out of a jail in the least convincing way possible: think MacGuyver meets Keyser Söze. That said, it's a solid setup for a good old-fashioned, tongue-in-cheek action movie the likes of which both leads would have no doubt bee

Here's the video version of my Stir Crazy review.

After the success of Silver Streak , Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor were cast as the leads in Stir Crazy , a comedy from 1980 about two friends on a road trip across America who are mistaken for bank robbers and sent to prison after a particularly harsh ruling. We follow Skip (Wilder) and Harry (Pryor) as they enter the Southern prison and try to survive as long as possible behind bars while their lawyer attempts to prove their innocence. Skip is the optimistic writer who believes there is good in everyone and Harry is the realist who just wants to keep his head down. Later on, when the warden is testing prisoners to take part in a rodeo competition, Skip proves himself to be a natural and agrees to ride in the hope of somehow using this opportunity to plan some kind of jail break. There's something almost tragic about seeing these two innocent guys being sent to such an unforgiving place and Sidney Poitier's film does have its dark Cool Hand Luke moments but it's also

Remaking genius cult B-movie Death Race 2000 was either going to end up being a very bad idea or a very good idea. The film (think Wacky Races with gore, Sylvester Stallone and boobs) said pretty much all it had to say it seemed. But here we are with a Jason Statham B-side actioner that's... Neither bad or good, really. More the latter than the former, though. The film opens with a cool car chase involving masked driver Frankenstein (played by David Carradine in the original film and rocking a cameo here), a really good start: the cars look great, the action's fine... That is, until the character is killed off! Yeah, then it becomes a prison movie for some reason with Jason Statham getting locked up after being wrongfully accused of killing his own wife. It's like Steven Seagal came in and rewrote the movie! It's not bad but it's not quite what you expect walking in, frankly. Thankfully, though, things finally get down to business and the movie gets bac

Watching this third Alien film after a re-watch of Alien Resurrection certainly offered a contrast. Where one was somewhat reminiscent of Ridley Scott's original vision, the other felt more like a fun, if stupid, cartoon. It is quite a big leap between Alien 3 and Resurrection so lets see how the Alien Trilogy ended before it... began again. From the offset, Alien 3 stylistically pays homage to the first Alien with it's white/greenish tones and clinical feel rather than the bluey, sweaty look of Aliens . We are led to believe that this will be a back-to-basics outing with a focus more on atmosphere and subtle horror with less action but more impact. To a certain extent, this proves to be an accurate assessment: Alien 3 most definitely approaches the horror aspect of the franchise the way Scott went about it. You get several scenes where something thoroughly unpleasant is going on, whether it's gory surgery or an autopsy, and we mostly see the event through the charac