TheRetroCritic

While back, I posted short story WWV over at sci-fi joke blog We, The Mindthinkers to coincide with the release of World War Z . And since it's vampire related and it's Vampire Month... Here it is! (click on the pic above)

Mel Brooks takes on Bram Stoker's Dracula in this cartoonish 1995 spoof starring the late, great Leslie Nielsen as Dracula and the director himself as vampire hunter Van Helsing. It's very dumb, very silly but is it any good? Hard one to review this one since I do have a soft spot for it. On the one hand, technically the film looks a bit cheap and often feels more like a filmed play than it does a fully put-together movie. Part of the joke is that it does look so trashy, though, so it's hard to fault the film for that. As a straight-up piss-take of Francis Ford Coppola's film, it's pretty spot-on and, in fact, actually misses out on a few more easy jokes it could have made about certain parts of that movie. The idea of Leslie Nielsen as Dracula is hilarious in itself and Nielsen sure doesn't disappoint, clearly having a ball putting on the silliest Transylvanian accent he could come up with and joking around with Brooks, Peter MacNichol and the rest of t

Check out my review of kickass PC game Blood over at retro gaming super-site 1MoreCastle ! 

Many years after Interview With The Vampire , we got Queen Of The Damned , a movie based on another part of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles . No Tom Cruise this time, sadly, the role of the vampire Lestat instead being played by Stuart Townsend who seems to get the character yet somehow lacks the convincing theatricality and threatening cruelty of Cruise's original performance. Townsend's Lestat is the mischievous, camp killer you'd expect but there's a wooden, overdone delivery to his lines and his voice-overs which tends to distract more than anything. The film sees Lestat wake up from a long slumber in order to, I kid you not, start a goth rock band in order to piss off other vampires who don't necessarily want humans to learn about their existence. This bold move awakes Akasha, the Queen Of The Damned, the mother of all vampires. She is played by the late Aaliyah, this was her second and last performance in a film before her tragic, untimely passing. Bel

In this 18th episode, fellow film buff Jamie and I discuss movie news, review a recent release ( White House Down , this time), and rewind back to more retro cinematic topics. Guess what film was being referenced in this week's brand new segment  "Kneel Before Zog"  segment and get a shout-out in the next episode! You can email your answer here:  bigrewindpodcast@gmail.com Or simply comment below :) Oh and you can also find us on  iTunes  where you can subscribe to the podcast and download every episode thusfar! @TheRetroCritic #VampireMonth retrocriticblog.blogspot.com thebigrewind.blogspot.com youtube.com/TheRetroCritic youtube.com/Cablogula

From Park Chan-wook, director of the Vengeance Trilogy , comes Thirst , a vampire film that's just as grim and demented as you'd expect. We follow a priest (Song Kang-ho) with an inherent wish to help people. He selflessly signs up for a potentially fatal experiment but something goes wrong (well, more wrong than planned) and although he miraculously comes back to life after dying of whatever disease he was injected with, he soon starts craving human blood as he comes to find that without it, the disease kicks in again and he grows weaker and weaker. Unwilling to kill, he instead starts drinking the blood of a man in a coma directly from a tube going into his arm. So far, so weird. He then meets Tae-ju (the beautiful Kim Ok-bin), a Cinderella-style character who lives with a step-mother and a boyfriend she can't stand. She comes off as just moody and a bit emo until, little by little, we start to realise how nuts she truly is. She starts having an affair with our good

In 1970, Hammer wanted to continue making Dracula movies yet reboot somewhat their franchise, so they made Scars Of Dracula . A sort-of follow-up to Taste The Blood Of Dracula and a sort-of re-adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic novel, this movie means well but unfortunately falls pretty flat as a whole. It opens with a plastic bat inexplicably vomiting blood onto Dracula's ashes, thereby resurrecting him once again. I guess it makes more sense a bit later, when you know that Dracula has bats working for him, but if he's nothing but ashes, how can he still have any power over them? Never mind, it's a Hammer film, we're just gonna have to accept it. The plot follows a young couple who are about to be married and a guy called Paul (Christopher Matthews), a cheeky playboy who tries to escape a girl's father when he finds himself being dragged to some creepy village and, ultimately, Dracula's castle. The second scene of the film is actually really good: vi

From Troma Entertainment comes 1996's  Rockabilly Vampire : truly one of the great rockabilly vampire films of our time. Here's one movie that's simply full of ground-breaking ideas. The concept of rockabilly vampires is a fascinating one, especially in the way it's tackled in this particular creative piece. Rockabilly vampires follow typical vampire lore in that they drink blood, live forever and can die of wooden stakes through the heart but they don't really have fangs and can go out during the day no problem. In this universe, there are different types of vampires. This is just the rockabilly kind. The film follows a young rockabilly vampire called Eddie (Paul Stevenson) who meets Iris (Margaret Lancaster), a woman who happens to be on a quest to find Elvis Presley, who just can't be dead. I mean... he's The King! They could just get together and live happily ever after but there are obstacles including Eddie's brother Wrecks and his gang of

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a weird one. Thinking back to it after having not seen it in a while, I always remember really awesome visual stuff and isolated iconic moments crossed with key silly things like Keanu Reeves' entire performance. Having finally re-watched it, it's just as "varied" as I recalled: stylish and inventive yet wacky and flawed. I probably shouldn't like this movie as much as I do but... There's a charm to it that's almost impossible to ignore. For one thing, director Francis Ford Coppola really went for it, never sugar-coating anything and, in the process, brought to the screen a bold version of Bram Stoker's classic novel no-one else could have possibly made and which certainly leaves its mark when you first see it. The film's main arc involves Vlad The Impaler's (a genial Gary Oldman) undying love for his late bride who happens to have a descendant/lookalike (played by Winona Ryder) in 1897, which is when mos

I remember when this movie came out. The title was so silly that even I, someone who actually likes that type of goofy flick, didn't feel like going to see it. I just didn't see the point of bringing back Dracula as a character and placing him in a modern setting. Why not just make a movie about a new vampire? Now I'm a little older and wiser, I get it. I had it all wrong. The question was not "why bring back Dracula?" but "why NOT bring back Dracula?". And why not indeed! If the film came out today, I'm sure more people would get behind the idea. I mean, in a time where Abraham Lincoln can be a vampire hunter and Pride & Prejudice can be about zombies and shit, Dracula 2000 would have easily been received a little better than it originally was. Not that the Wes Craven-produced film is all that amazing or perfect, far, very far from it, but if there's one thing it's not: it's boring. I had a lot of fun with this movie.

Now I know what you're thinking. People made of wax, in a museum-type setting, coming to life at night: that's some Night At the Museum shit right there. Sure, but we're not talking Robin Williams with a moustache or Ben Stiller slapping monkeys, when this Waxwork comes alive: crazy, disturbing things happen. The film follows a group of friends who are invited to a private night-time showing at a nearby Waxwork, they go there and some of them find that getting too close to the displays makes you actually enter the world presented in said display and unfortunately, each display depicts a monster-related scene. This is a really clever way to bring in the likes of werewolves, vampires, zombies and mummies while still keeping the film original in its approach. This is reminiscent of something like The Cabin In The Woods which seems to have borrowed a lot from this movie. Hell, both films basically end in a monster clusterf***! Expect, of course, thousands of horror movi

Alright, so I'm cheating a little bit. LXG may not technically be a vampire movie but Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's Dracula is in it so I'm still reviewing it, goshdarnit! Based on Alan Moore's cult comic-book series, this famous flop unites a group of classic literary heroes, anti-heroes and villains in an Avengers-style team-up as these new unlikely pals face a powerful foe: the mysterious Phantom who appears to be planning some sort of megalomaniac world-domination plot. The gang includes legendary adventurer Alan Quartermain (Sean Connery), Tom Sawyer (Shane West), Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), The Invisible Man (Tony Curran), Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Jason Flemyng) and Mina Harker (Peta Wilson). Together at last! Not much in terms of information is given to us as to why any of this is going on but I suppose that, similarly to how Watchmen was set on an alternate version of the 1980's, so too was LXG, except in an alt

One year post- Aliens , a good chunk of the cast of that movie agreed to star in then relative newcomer Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark : a vampire film with a difference. For one thing, the word "vampire" is never uttered during the movie. Near Dark follows a normal dude, played by a young Adrian Pasdar (yes, Nathan from Heroes ), who meets Jenny Wright's adorable Mae one night and what starts off as an innocent-enough impromptu date soon turns to disaster when it's revealed that not only is Mae a vampire but night is quickly turning to day. Caleb (Pasdar) is bitten and stumbles home in the burning daylight before finally being captured by Mae's vampire pals/family which happens to consist of a dangerously mischievous Bill Paxton, an intense Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein sporting a badass blonde poofy haircut and Joshua John Miller, an adult stuck in a child's body. As scary as they can be, they're also charming as hell and Caleb, despite not

In this 17th episode, fellow film buff Jamie and I discuss movie news, review a recent release ( Prisoners , this time), and rewind back to more retro cinematic topics. Guess what film was being referenced in this week's brand new segment  "Kneel Before Zog"  segment and get a shout-out in the next episode! You can email your answer here:  bigrewindpodcast@gmail.com Or simply comment below :) Oh and you can also find us on  iTunes  where you can subscribe to the podcast and download every episode thusfar! @TheRetroCritic #VampireMonth retrocriticblog.blogspot.com thebigrewind.blogspot.com youtube.com/TheRetroCritic youtube.com/Cablogula

Back when Marvel was still getting ready to resurface properly with big movies, big franchises and big plans, two years before X-Men , Blade showed up in his first movie and gave us hope that modern comic-book movies didn't have to suck! Pun intended. Wesley Snipes, of course, is Blade and comfortably leads an action flick with a very simple premise: badass day-walking vampire kills other vampires because other vampires are kinda douchebags. The film opens with a truly awesome sequence in which a human is being led into a dance club which turns out to be a veritable snake-pit of vampires as blood sprinklers are turned on and we're introduced to our leather trenchcoat, dark sunglasses-wearing, katana-wielding hero and we're off to a kickass start. The film continues on that path and remains a solid, entertaining blockbuster from start to finish. The good thing about Blade, as a movie, is that it knows it needs to be action-packed and relentless but also never forgets

Whoever said that vampire movies needed to be fun? Not Abel Ferrara, that's for sure. The Addiction is many things but fun isn't one of them. This is a vampire film that's as dark as night and miserable as hell, it's not there to entertain or sugar-coat anything: it's there to be mostly unsettling. The whole vampires-as-junkies metaphor lacks some subtlety throughout the whole film, to be honest, but it's an interesting approach and you do want to stick around and see in which direction they take it. Personally, I much prefer Near Dark 's more subtle take on that but The Addiction's monochrome, bleak-as-can-be attitude provides a slightly more brutal and raw outlook which you don't see very often in that type of film. The plot follows a philosophy student, played by Lili Taylor who, long before she lost her shit in The Conjuring , was already a pro at looking wounded and just plain depressed. She gets bitten by vampire and slowly starts to t

Well that was a bizarre experience. I didn't know what to expect when finally sitting down to watch Vamp but I gotta say that Grace Jones in full white make-up, with a Bozo The Clown haircut stripping and fondling a chair before revealing a cheap Princess Leia outfit was pretty low on my list of things I thought this movie would include. Yes, that happens and, as ridiculous as it is, it both lost me and made the movie for me. I'll elaborate. The film sees two dudes going out into the bad part of town with a Ken Jeong-style comic-relief geek in order to find a stripper so they can finally be part of some fraternity. They find the "After Dark Club" and, in true From Dusk Till Dawn fashion, they soon realise that the place is infested with really unfriendly vampires. Vamp opens really well by breaking the tension of a potentially dark scene with some good jokes before seemingly settling on goofy teen comedy and eventually, post-Grace Jones stripping, taking

Back when Jim Carrey was still a relative unknown, he starred in this 1985 vampire comedy about a high-school kid who falls for the charms of an older woman who just happens to be a vampire thirsting for the taste of his delicious virgin blood. Mmmmm... It's a bit weird to think that I watched this film several times as a young kid and liked it seeing as I don't think I even knew what the hell a virgin was at that time. I guess I must have just focused on the vampire stuff and the goofy jokes and somehow the film still made some sort of sense even without all the sexual undertones and... overtones. As a comedy, Once Bitten 's actually pretty fun. You've got Jim Carrey playing a surprisingly more restrained type of role than we're used to seeing him play these days yet still providing the odd burst of trademark physical rubberiness. The film itself is a typical 80's teen comedy about a group of guys going out to get laid when things go zanily wrong. It'