TheRetroCritic

Occasionally a comedy comes along that's just so weird or mean-spirited that studios just don't know how to market it. I'm thinking The Cable Guy , Super or even Neighbors , back in the day. Observe And Report , be warned, isn't the Paul Blart: Mall Cop -style knockabout cartoon comedy it was sold as. In fact, this is the much darker tale of what happens when a deluded, if well-meaning, sociopath goes off his meds. Seth Rogen, in possibly his best role to date, plays Ronnie, head of mall security, who takes his job a little too seriously. When a flasher repeatedly invades the mall, the police are called in and Ray Liotta's cop begins a routine investigation which Ronnie promptly interferes with, thinking he's on some sort of one-man crusade to protect Anna Faris' odious perfume salesgirl. He takes the case into his own hands, which inspires him to try and join the police force and ask Faris out. Both plans, of course, backfire. It's good to see

Killing Them Softly has been sold thusfar as a cool, action packed Brad Pitt-starring gangster flick but I find that it's more of a serious version of Burn After Reading ! Think about it: here's a film that's more about the politics behind criminal goings-on than it is about the events themselves with a hardly seamless plan gone wrong, Pitt himself, some surprise casualties and a clueless puppetmaster keeping it all in check, kind of. If Joel and Ethan Coen had been in a worse mood when penning the infinitely more cartoonish Burn After Reading, this is probably what we would have ended up with. As it stands, I'm quite happy we got both. Killing Them Softly will disappoint those expecting the next gangster epic, there is some action there but it comes in short, out-of-nowhere, effective bursts. Most of the time we follow Brad Pitt's hitman as he goes around trying to organize the appropriate retaliation for a poker game heist set up by one of their own. Bas

Sure cop movies are cool but... you know what else is cool? Freakin' robots that's what. Good thing the 80's knew that, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to enjoy Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop , a film with a premise so awesome it must have taken about a minute to greenlight. Peter Weller, of Buckaroo Banzai "fame", is Murphy, the Detroit cop who gets his ass handed to him in a particularly unfriendly gun-fight. What's left of him is soon turned into a badass robotic crimefighter with an apt for genius one-liners and incredible shooting accuracy. Sadly, his hardware is owned by corrupt company OCP which makes ridding the city of all its scum a bit of a challenge. The "scum" in question includes big cheese Dick Jones (the ever intimidating Ronny Cox), the dad from That 70's Show and... Leland Palmer? Twin Peaks reference. It's funny, go watch the show. So yes, it turns out that having the police owned by a big-ass,

From the director of Invisible Dad and Invisible Mom comes a supernatural horror/comedy starring David Carradine, Dick Miller ( Gremlins ) and a whole bunch of porn stars and strippers. Truly this is recipe for cinematic success. As bums and boobs are thrown at us whenever there's a lull, what we get otherwise is an admittedly so-bad-it's-funny ride complete with some of the worst acting you're likely to witness and one fatal flaw: only ONE evil toon! I know that with all the rubbish a film like Evil Toons has to offer, lines like "Are you the guy with the phone?" for example, I shouldn't be picky about one thing in particular but... I'm sorry, I am. You've got something terrible and the only thing the poor, defenceless victims watching it are waiting for (besides breasts) are toons, evil ones! And all we get is some poorly animated raping demon dog thing for like 5 minutes? How dare you, sir! Worth a look only to see David Carradine c

With a film called Invisible Dad, you know you're in for something special. Director Fred Olen Ray liked his "Invisible" formula so much he even made a carbon copy of this film called Invisible Mom . I sure hope he was paid for both, poor sod. Anyway, Invisible Dad sees some annoying kid finding a wishing machine and with it making idiotic wishes including making his dad disappear. HILARITY ensues as the Dad waits for his computer-savvy son to fix the machine which he destroyed SECONDS after his dad told him to do that. Ok, I think I need to address this specifically because it drove me mad. Mad I tells ya. So you've got a wishing machine. You can wish for ANYTHING. Your dad walks in, finds this out, doesn't bat an eye at your discovery (nothing wrong heeeere) and just tells you to destroy the machine before leaving to go take a shit. What do you do? Oh sure you could do what your dad says (fail), OR you could wish to go back in time to before

As if Invisible Dad wasn't punishment enough, here we have the considerably worse (it IS possible) alternative by Fred Olen Ray whom, I suppose, wanted to chill out on family fare after questionable efforts like Bad Girls From Mars or Scream Cream Hot Tub Party (porn). Olen Ray CLEARLY is the best choice of director for a kids movie :-S Anyway this time instead of a machine, it's a potion which turns the mum (the dog and a lizard) invisible. Whereas the special effects in Invisible Dad were pretty poor, they are nothing short of horrendous here. Of course you can see the strings in every shot and the green screening is a disaster. Plot holes are aplenty and actually too many to mention but the ending will have you tearing your hair off. So the dad gets fired from his lab and leaves the antidote back at work. Sure they could just get the invisible mum to walk in, pick up the antidote and leave but NOOOOOOO, instead the dad and the son try to break into the