TheRetroCritic

Where to start, where to start... So The Island Of Dr. Moreau was a movie and it happened. Actually, it was several movies and, originally, an H. G. Wells novel but we're looking at the 1996 Marlon Brando/Val Kilmer effort for now, a film only half as entertaining as what happened behind the scenes during the making of it but wildly insane and therefore totally worth seeing nonetheless. As you probably already know, the film sees some guy find his way onto an island where a mad scientist called Dr. Moreau (Marlon Brando) has conducted a whole bunch of morally despicable experiments thereby making an entire community of half-man half-animal people. David Thewlis is Edward Douglas, the unlucky fellow Val Kilmer's dodgy geezer Montgomery introduces to the island. What follows is basically The Wicker Man except with animal/man hybrids and... whatever Brando's doing. Actually, you couldn't have cast the role of Moreau better. I mean, who else but an ageing, portly,

As unique as the original Hellboy looked, there definitely was something missing. Guillermo Del Toro's comic book movie had its moments and visually did the trick but it wasn't quite as fun and entertaining as it could have been. Good thing we got Hellboy II: The Golden Army soon after! Here's a sequel which takes everything you enjoyed about the first film, keeps it, and proudly throws away most of the stuff you didn't care for. This time, we've got a more epic plot involving a dude from a mythical world who is one of the last of his kind and who is planning to revive some army of gold robots in order to take over humanity. Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and co, of course, are hired to stop him but things have become somewhat more complicated since our unlikely hero revealed himself and the others to everyone in town. A lot happens in this movie: we go to some troll-filled realm where they all meet the Angel Of Death, Hellboy battles a giant forest God in the middle

Hellboy 's a weird one... For one thing, I always liked the look of the trailers and always wanted to watch it but somehow never got around to. I would catch glimpses of it on TV every so often and it looked really good to me. Besides, I was a big fan of Pan's Labyrinth and I was really looking forward to checking out another Guillermo Del Toro flick. Having never read the comics, I really had nothing to go on so I had no specific expectations. Finally, post- Pacific Rim , this year, I did it: I watched the entire thing. And, you know what? Was slightly disappointed. Now I know I'm pretty late in the game and I should be happy that they even managed to make a Hellboy movie. I am! And there are a lot of things I like about Del Toro's film. For one, Ron Perlman is perfect for the role and it's literally impossible to picture anyone else playing Hellboy. Spot-on casting there. The combined efforts of Doug Jones and David Hyde Pearce bring fish dude Abe to

You'd think something as simple as big robots and big monsters would be super easy to get right in a movie, but with the likes of the Transformers trilogy and 1998's Godzilla in its back catalogue, that kind of flick badly needed a makeover. Good thing Guillermo Del Toro knows roughly what he's doing! Yes, Pacific Rim is the Hellboy director's take on monster movies and big robot movies: the result? A decidedly fun, brainless mesh of anime-style melodrama, epic nonsense, cartoonish lols and  Robot Jox -type live-action 80's goofiness. It's very retro, very silly but very cool. It's one of those movies you can't take too seriously and demands that you sit down, suspend your disbelief quite a bit and enjoy yourself. Nitpicking Pacific Rim would really be missing the point. Now the reason that some pan the Transformers movies, me included, is that their flaws really are completely distracting and do affect the style the films themselves are going