TheRetroCritic

Check out my review of classic Game Boy game Kid Dracula  over at retro gaming super-site  1MoreCastle !

Here's another Troma Entertainment vampire film for y'all. Unlike Rockabilly Vampire , though, this is one of those Troma movies that's much more concerned with getting as many boobs on show as possible as it is with telling a humorous little story as cheaply as possible. Now, don't get me wrong, Sucker: The Vampire is, indeed, humorous and incredibly cheap! Just not as enjoyably so as the aforementioned flick. As titillating as you might find the more erotic scenes that this movie has to offer, you'll soon just want to skip to the more plot-driven moments as at least 50% of the film is basically filler. Its look is completely inconsistent in that sometimes it's over-stylised with funky lighting, red filters and dutch angles and sometimes it's just not. It's when the film does resemble a legitimate vampire film somewhat and feels like the usual tongue-in-cheek Troma style you expect that it's at its strongest, of course. Unfortunately, the firs

Based on Richard Matheson's classic novel "I Am Legend", The Last Man On Earth was an early adaptation which starred Vincent Price as a man living in a post-apocalyptic world taken over by vampires. Although the title and Price's presence may suggest an over-the-top sci-fi monster movie, this is in fact a much more serious and surprisingly well thought-out effort which still makes the recent I Am Legend movie look like crap. The vampires in this film are more like zombies with a blood problem than straight-up vampires but the main iconography is, indeed, there so you can either see it as a precursor to Night Of The Living Dead or a completely different type of vampire film. Vincent Price's character is completely isolated and lonely as he spends his days burning vampire bodies and his nights locked up at home, battling monsters who get too close. You're told in an appropriately depressing flashback that, early on, his family fell victim to the vampire &

Don't you just love living in a world where a film called Bonnie And Clyde Vs. Dracula exists? I know I do! Some crossovers are just uncalled for and some are so uncalled for that they become intriguing. The game then becomes to see how the film brings these two completely different worlds together, sit back and judge how clever it was at doing that. Whether the film itself is good or not, that's almost irrelevant. If you call your film something this absurd, you can't be too picky with it as that's missing the point entirely. Technically, no, Bonnie And Clyde Vs Dracula isn't that good. The acting can be wooden from the supporting cast and the budget is near non existent. That said, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't have a ball with this one. I like films that know exactly what they are, what they need to be and do that without breaking your balls. Yes, Escape From Vampire Island , I'm talking about what you didn't do. As cheap as this mov

Based on a manga, Higanjima: Escape From Vampire Island sounded awesome. I mean, first of all that's a great title, second of all the concept of a vampire island is so delightfully trashy that it could have only been good. Well... If you forget that Uwe Boll's House Of The Dead existed and also took place on an island. The bad news is that Escape From Vampire Island isn't good and most definitely doesn't live up to its premise. The film is surprisingly joyless considering that its key idea was so inherently entertaining. That's like calling a film "Look Out! The Dogs Are Taking Over The Planet!" and then taking it seriously. Why would you do that?! After a promising opening scene set on the titular island, we're soon introduced to our main characters who turn out to be a truly one-dimensional bunch: stereotypes you'd find in a manga or an anime series minus the fun. The smart one with glasses, the fat one who eats a lot, the stupid but h

The first in the classic series of Universal monsters/Abbott & Costello crossover comedies, Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein was the duo's first attempt at making a respectful homage to classic horror films while putting together a good, original comedy AND not taking the piss too much of the source material. I mean, this is a film in which Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi reprise their respective roles of The Wolfman and Dracula so making a straight-up spoof would have been a faux-pas to say the least. Somehow I don't see Lugosi making a mockery of Dracula... without Ed Wood, that is. This movie is certainly a crowd-pleaser in that both fans of the old monster movies can enjoy it and fans of Abbott and Costello as well. It walks a fine line between homage and parody but makes it work both ways admirably. Unfortunately, the title is a bit of a lie: they never meet Frankenstein. They meet Frankenstein's Monster, played by Glenn Strange, but never Doctor Frankens

In case you missed it, here's my old review of Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula . Expect a written review of the film this week!

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.

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