TheRetroCritic

I review A Quiet Place for horror month.

Just hanging out, playing some Doom , losing my mind.

Hotel Transylvania being the box-office success that it was, a sequel was pretty much inevitable. The first film was your typical Romeo & Juliet type of scenario except silly and... about a human and a vampire. This sequel continues the story as Mavis and Jonathan welcome their first child. Once again, plot-wise this isn't exactly the most original thing out there but it works as Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) tries to encourage his grandson to become a monster just so his daughter will have to stay at the hotel instead of starting a new life somewhere else. When animated sequels start to bring babies into the mix, you know it's probably the end of that franchise being good ( Shrek Forever After , Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs ) but Hotel Transylvania 2 actually does a decent job at keeping afloat. The animation is, once again, fantastic with all the larger-than-life Tex Avery-style characters constantly doing something random and funny, the voice cast clearly havin

Based on R.L. Stine's popular kid-friendly horror books (and the TV series), Goosebumps was a theatrical feature adaptation released in 2015 starring Jack Black. It did well at the box-office despite a surprisingly healthy budget. I say "surprisingly" because you wouldn't really think that a studio would go all-in for a Goosebumps movie but this is a project that was in development for a long time so I would suspect that a good portion of the dough went into various scripts, casts and crews. In fact, as expensive as it may be, this movie still feels like a TV movie update on the old series. Sure the monsters are huge, detailed CGI creations but they are nowhere near as polished and impressive as you'd expect from a modern day blockbuster. This is a colourful, action-packed adaptation that playfully mixes together several memorable characters from the books including evil garden gnomes, creepy ventriloquist dummies, blobs and abominable snowmen as they are al

Released in 2012, Ultraman Saga was a Japanese superhero movie set in a post-apocalyptic world where cities are being invaded by Godzilla-style monsters as a team of big robot-controlling tough gals and the last remaining giant heroes try to defend what's left. Mixing CGI, colourful anime visuals and dudes in monster/Ultraman costumes, this is a modern precursor to Pacific Rim with a proudly retro look and feel. It is a sequel to Ultraman Zero: The Revenge Of Belial , released two years prior, and stars familiar faces from the series as well as members of the J-pop group AKB48 because pop stars make excellent actors, as we all know. The good thing about this one is you don't need to know anything that happened before because, fear not, the film is packed with flashbacks and exposition so it's all pretty self-explanatory. Hell, even without the subtitles I'm sure any non-Japanese speaker would easily figure out the plot: monsters bad, everyone else good. The afo

Back when Kevin Bacon was still only one degree away from a good movie, he starred in Tremors , a monster movie with more giant worms than Dune and Beetlejuice combined! (that's actually incorrect) Playing one of two losers living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, a town called, ironically, Perfection, Bacon and his pal (played by Fred Ward) finally decide to dump their crappy jobs and their crappy town for a road-trip to the unknown aboard their trusty pick-up truck. Unfortunately, it turns out that some of Perfection's inhabitants are getting killed off in increasingly unusual ways and it might be time to look into what's causing this shocking wave (pun intended) of murderous tremors. As it turns out, several giant worms are sliding around underground and are hunting for people to feast on. They're blind and respond only to sound (see World War Z also) but they're far smarter than they look since they somehow learn from their mistakes and figure o

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

In the early days of Pixar's world domination, this little film about a universe where monsters harness the fear of human children which they frighten at night (through their closets) to use as energy came out and although on paper it sounds like the most terrifying thing you'll ever see, the movie was quite the opposite. Aimed at younger viewers, Monsters Inc. is closer to, say, the likes of A Bug's Life or Cars in terms of its target audience but better than both. Thankfully, it's just about charming enough to keep older viewers' interest there throughout. We follow two monsters, one voiced by John Goodman, the other by Billy Crystal, who mistakenly end up with a kid human transcending the human world into their own. This causes all sorts of shenanigans, as you can imagine, since children are seen as the monsters in this world, and it all builds up to a confrontation with Steve Buscemi's chameleon-style monster (the last part of that phrase sounds a bi

Man the critics were rough on this one... Now I'm one of the first to bash whatever new tired kid-friendly animated flicks come out these days: Madagascar 3 , Ice Age 4 , The Lorax ... not for me. That said, there are the occasional ones that slip through the cracks and actually end up being pretty good ( ParaNorman , The Pirates ). Hotel Transylvania I found to be in-between. On the one hand you've got its gorgeous animation, its clever premise, its fun winks to old horror movies, its colorful characters and on the other you have... ...the singing. Actually you have an Adam Sandler Dracula RAP. I'll let that sink in. ... Theeeere it is. Ok, so that sounds like hell but trust me: Hotel Transylvania is worth a go. For one thing it's a lot of fun. It's pretty darn relentless and certainly never wastes any of its time: it's fast, punchy and nuts going for a Tex Avery-style random toon-craziness we haven't seen achieved quite this well sinc

There's no easier target for spoofs than old sci-fi B movies, especially if Ed Wood is somehow involved. With their cheesy effects, cheap costumes and sets, below par actors, ridiculous dialogs and storylines: they're great but of course they're riddled with comedy gold. It is surprising that there aren't more films like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra out there...so lets just be happy this one exists! Where to start? From the offset, it's pretty clear that Larry Blamire's film will not take itself seriously for a second: you get the overuse of the word "science", a material called "atmospherium", aliens in silver jumpsuits, a plastic fish monster, a half-woman half-forest animals character named Animala, obvious, redundant dialogs, unmotivated dancing...and a talking, walking, sarcastic skeleton. What more could you possibly ask for? Fans of Ed Wood and old B movies will be in heaven here as the silliness escalates to a titanic battle be

Alien invasion disaster movies have always been a hit-and-miss affair. From the old Earth vs The Flying Saucers -type B movies to more recent big budget efforts like Independence Day . You'd think such a simple concept would be pretty straight-forward and easy to get right. Not so. Unfortunately Battle: LA, like so many similar films before it, fails to deliver. Instead we are given a kind of B-side cliched war flick with rubbish District 9 -style aliens thrown in. Earlier this year we had the awful Skyline in the same vein and although Battle: LA isn't qute as dire, it's still pretty poor all around. It's like the film contains all the shittest cliches and flaws which made Independence Day so cheesy but minus Jeff Goldblum, Randy Quaid and ANY sense of fun whatsoever. What's left? Not very much alas. Early on we're introduced to the film's main characters: a bunch of Marines, who are about as likeable and interesting as the plastic chair I'm c

Some films are just strange. Not bad, not good: just strange. This is not one of those films. This is bad, really bad AND incredibly strange. This is a kind of bad film subgenre which is always surprising, films which are essentially awful but which have the ability to confuse, gross-out or surprise the viewers nonetheless. The film opens on two identical twins (man and woman) in like the 17th century having sex...with each other. Pretty soon you notice the male twin is played by the same actress as the female twin, but with a moustache. It's at that point that an obligatory frown forms on your brow and you know you're in for something special. But then things get incredibly dull. A whited-up Roy Dupuis is on a boat wearing sunglasses, he has a nosebleed, he is taken in by a group of all-women grave diggers and some alcoholic doctor (Rutger Hauer). Turns out he's looking for the rest of his family (descendants of the sex-twins) etc... Yeah, the plot's absurd. So

Yet another overhyped monster movie in the vein of Cloverfield and Skyline . Thankfully though, Monsters is miles better than both films put together...still overhyped...but very decent nonetheless. The fact the monsters themselves are sidelined in favour of a cute romance and an actually effective and well-paced build up is both refreshing and frustrating. The post-apocalyptic look of the film is spot-on and the leads' perilous journey is pretty gripping throughout. It's just a shame we never actually build up to anything beyond two giant squid aliens making out... No but in all fairness this is a low-budget B movie and for that it's very well made and is admittedly a lot of fun. It certainly puts the odious, intelligence-insulting Skyline to shame and avoids the intensely annoying first act character intros Cloverfield put us through without also ramming the whole home-movie crap into our faces for 2 hours. Overall, well worth a look and one of the bes