TheRetroCritic

And then it all went to s***... I realise the true meaning of being whipped as I tackle Stage 10 of Castlevania on NES. Expect foul language and lots of deaths.

I continue to play some classic Castlevania and encounter some new foes. Then I whip them in the face.

I start playing a true NES classic: Castlevania . Time to crack that whip good.

Made in 2000, Blood: The Last Vampire could easily be boiled down to "emo Buffy" but it's actually a little more original and interesting than that. Something of a cult hit, this is one of those rare instances when the anime feature inspired a manga, a game and an anime series as well as a live-action film, not the other way around. The film is set in the late 60's and follows a demon slayer called Saya (voiced by Youki Kudoh) as she goes on a new mission to get rid of a handful of bat-like monsters near a US air base in Japan. The blood-thirsty demons can make themselves look like humans, which is a pain, but luckily she can kind of sense when someone's one of them in disguise. She goes undercover as a high-school student to investigate the potential ghouls and, just as a costumed Halloween party gets underway at the school, she finds and pursues those monsters all around the nearby air base. A witness to the crazy events is the school nurse who is dragged

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

Because BloodRayne was SOOOO good. Here's a sequel for ya. With a new Rayne, about half the budget and an even lesser known cast comes BloodRayne 2: Deliverance , a sequel that I can't imagine anyone was begging for but which nevertheless exists. This time, director Uwe Boll sets things in the Old West where our heroine is made to face off against, wait for it, a vampiric, Eastern European Billy The Kid. See, the problem with the first film, I felt, was that it just wasn't silly enough. Serious lack of vampire cowboys in that movie, frankly. Well, you sure won't be disappointed this time. Initially, I thought this movie was a fan-made thing: the opening titles and the film itself looked so cheap that it took me like 5 minutes to realise that this was an actual movie. That said, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't end up enjoying this movie just a little. It's not good, don't get me wrong, but in terms of cheapo vampire cowboy movies, it de

There was an obvious way to adapt a novel geniusely called "The Space Vampires" : Planet Terror -style, with Grindhouse tongue-in-cheek mayhem and gallons of blood being thrown at you. Director Tobe Hooper, it turns out, was the right man for the job when it came to turning The Space Vampires into Lifeforce , a much more interesting take on a pretty silly premise. The movie sees astronauts reach a planet, fly through its space colon and uncover a bunch of giant bats and three naked people in glass coffins. The plan? Bring all that shit back to Earth, of course! Because war, disease and poverty aren't quite enough: we need space vampires in our lives. Soon enough, one of those alien beings wakes up and causes mayhem. Turns out, those good-looking weirdos from outer space can literally suck the life out of you through intense electrical make-out sessions and turn you into one of them. It becomes up to a total of two dudes with bad haircuts to try and sort out this whol