TheRetroCritic

TFW your flowers are ringing. My review of The Ruins .

I take a look at the remake of Cabin Fever .

I talk about Jordan Peele's latest: Us .

Talking about this year's Midsommar .

I review A Quiet Place for horror month.

Reviewing Hereditary today as my horror vlog month continues...

Vvatch this review of The VVitch and stay tuned for another horror review tomorrow!

Day 2 of my month-long horror vlogathon presents... my review of the Suspiria remake.

One horror movie that stood out in 2017, mostly thanks to its silly title, is The Bye Bye Man . Based on a chapter from Robert Damon Schneck's book "The President's Vampire", the film received negative reviews despite its relative box-office success. The Bye Bye Man follows Elliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and best friend John (Lucien Laviscount) as they move into a house near their college. Soon enough, a lot of strange things start happening with Elliot having hallucinations and all three of them becoming increasingly paranoid of each other. The opening sequence, in which a man snaps and starts killing friends and family in an American suburb in the 60's, is genuinely chilling but, sadly, it doesn't set the tone for the rest of the film. The build-up to the titular monster is slow but rather effective as every creak inside the house and something as trivial as a coat hanging on the wall appears spooky. Then Elliot starts to

I talk about... IT . The movie, that is.

Because found-footage surprise hit The Blair Witch Project was made for peanuts back in 1999 and made a ridiculous amount of money at the box-office, it was inevitable that a remake would happen at some point. Finally, in 2016 we got Blair Witch , a sequel/reboot looking to revamp the franchise. Like with most modern horror remakes, this is a thinly veiled reboot dressed up like a sequel but there's really nothing about it that directly connects Blair Witch from the original except for the fact that one of the characters is the brother of the girl from the first movie but it's not like we ever see her so it might as well have been a completely unrelated bunch entering the creepy woods many years later. Amusingly, none of the people involved in this new expedition appear to have learned anything from previous events making these guys far dumber than the last ones. James (James Allen McCune) is the brother looking for his sister even though he doesn't seem too concerned

Good news, everyone! Mel Gibson is no longer the scariest thing to come out of Australia! This Halloween, the likes of Ouija and Annabelle may have competed for the box-office top spot but it's likely to be off-beat Australian entry The Babadook  we'll remember long after as it's very likely to become a cult hit and inevitably should spawn several sequels. Also, its silly title is pretty unforgettable not to mention a lot of fun to say out loud. The movie sees a super stressed-out and frankly worn-out mother (played by Essie Davis) attempt to take care of her hyper, trouble-making young son several years after her husband died in a car accident. Her misery does nothing but increase like crazy throughout the movie as her so-called friends fail to support her emotionally, shunning her and her son, the boy's school comes down on him unfairly and insensitively, plus there's the small matter of a creepy children's book called The Babadook which freaks th

I don't go see horror movies all that often but when I do... they tend to suck. This one didn't suck. Yes, surprisingly The Conjuring does a good enough job at building atmosphere, giving us characters we don't instantly hate and providing the odd scare along the way. Strangely, the film begins as a kinda goofy scary doll movie but soon morphs into a slightly more subtle poltergeist flick until finally reinventing itself as a full-blown exorcism movie. Normally I'd say the film doesn't know what it wants to be but they make it work. I would have just cut the whole doll thing as it's... pretty gosh darn pointless. And far too hilarious to be taken seriously. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play a couple who specialise in the supernatural and are basically ghost busters. The film is set in the 70's and is far more convincing as a period piece than that Evil Dead remake. Parts of it are a call back to The Exorcist , parts of it are basically Paranormal A

Concept movies never really live up to their clever premises. And neither did the "classic" of the reality-horror subgenre The Blair Witch Project . A good start and a good end did not make a great film and the dire sequel failed on all accounts. Since then, countless films have attempted to do it right ( My Little Eye , The Fourth Kind ) but only the first Paranormal Activity managed to be consistent and sneaky enough to pull it off. A sequel with a different director was always going to be a gamble and Paranormal Activity 2 thankfully doesn't tank completely. More is at stake here: a baby, a girl, a couple, a maid, a dog... But somehow you never feel the danger you felt in the original film. Perhaps too many cooks spoil the broth and it feels a bit too crowded to truly isolate the audience accordingly. An attempt is made at linking the story of this instalment with the first film but that also doesn't really work as the back-and-forth through the timeline tend

Gloomy, unsettling, creepy as hell, Ringu was real landmark in horror cinema. Imitated countless times but never equaled, it reinvented Japanese horror and spawned countless ripoffs, sequels, remakes right up until the genre quietly died with retarded fare like Korean horror film The Wig ...about a killer wig. Not that a VHS is much scarier than a wig but if some gnarled monster woman came out of my TV, I would happily shit myself. So why did Ringu work and fare like The Grudge or Premonition didn't...not really? Well, for one thing Ringu was a concept movie: it introduced a new idea, a new template and built a suitably creepy and unsettling atmosphere around it in order to create something fresh and genuinely scary. Other similar films struggled to find something which would match the VHS tape as a starting point: phones, websites...wigs. None of it really worked. Only certain films like Dark Water , The Eye or A Tale of Two Sisters which put more effort into th

Frank Henenlotter, the mad genius behind the Basket Case movies, directs yet another piece of nutty horror/comedy gold. This time, instead of a killer tumour...twin we're introduced to Aylmar: a brain devouring piece of crap with a beautiful singing voice.  As evil brain leech Aylmar slowly takes over Bryan's (anagram for Brayn, geddit?) dependence with his addictive juice, Bryan's world becomes a fertile source of hallucinations and bloody, unmotivated serial killings.  The killings include lots of brain sucking, a deadly blow-job and a kiss of death to name a few. The film is way more polished than, say, the first Basket Case and in terms of randomness this is actually closer to that film's sequel so expect a healthy dose of stop-motion and almost good practical effects. The obvious drug imagery is perhaps hammered in a little to much and some of the film is quite repetitive but on the whole this is an original, very funny and hugely enjoyable  mad ride

Here's one of my earliest Top 10's where I list Gooby 's scariest moments. Be warned: this video needs a bit of a makeover at this point.