TheRetroCritic

The Police Academy trilogy being the resounding success that it was, there really was no reason for studios to stop making them. And stop they didn't so Police Academy 4: Citizens On Patrol was released in 1987 and pretty much all the main cast returned. Critics may not have been huge fans of Police Academy 3: Back In Training but this sequel was when they started truly getting tired of the franchise as it didn't perform as well at the box-office and it even scored a Razzie nomination. The plot is pretty much exactly the same as in the third movie so right there it's obvious the writers got lazy and a lot of the predictable jokes reflect that. Bobcat Goldthwait is back as the unintelligible Zed and good old G. W. Bailey shows up again for the first time since the original movie as Captain Harris. David Spade and Sharon Stone both get small roles that, frankly, could have easily been cut out of the film entirely. Apart from the fact it's almost completely a retre

Based on a Michael Crichton novel, Sphere was a 1998 sci-fi film about a team of experts in various fields exploring some crashed underwater spaceship. Directed by Barry Levinson, the film boasts an all-star cast with Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Coyote and Liev Schreiber all being part of the main team. Sphere is a psychological thriller that's a bit like a cross between The Abyss , Event Horizon , The Thing and Alien as the more the selected experts investigate the spaceship, the creepier the tone of the film becomes. Eventually, characters start dropping like flies as various unexpected threats start popping up randomly from killer jellyfish to giant squids. The discovery of a gold alien sphere in the middle of the spaceship leads to growing paranoia among the crew and various twists and turns. There are references here and there to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and, indeed, the film attempts to capture the book's sense of adventure and cla

Soon after the success of Lost In Translation and in between Wes Anderson projects, Bill Murray once again went down the indie route and starred in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers , an odd little movie about a guy on a mysterious quest to find an estranged son he may or may not even have. Upon seeing the film back in 2005, I was hoping for a clever mesh of laughs and quirky goings on but left the cinema feeling way more confused than expected. Yes the film was funny and Murray's deadpan deliveries did bring the occasional lol here and there but this "felt" more serious. Throughout the film there's a nostalgic, passive vibe in the air which increasingly gets more negative in tone. Murray's journey starts off fun enough but by the end you really start to feel the emotional weight of his quest that's being carried on his shoulders. It should have been so straight-forward and yet every time he meets an ex wife to try and find out whether they're the m

Total Recall is one of those movies that should be terrible but somehow manages to be completely enjoyable and completely great. Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, Recall stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a construction worker who dreams of getting his ass to Mars even though a war is breaking out over there and he's had goofy-ass dreams about the place. He's married to Sharon Stone and apparently can afford to go on a mind-holiday through ever-so-slightly dodgy company Rekall so things aren't going too bad for Mr Quaid. However, as Arnie is plugged into Rekall's memory-implanting machine it all starts going pear-shaped pretty darn quick. Suddenly his wife's a murderous spy, he's hunted by a particularly unfriendly Michael Ironside and he's pulling big glowing balls out of his own nose. What a day. He finally gets to Mars where he becomes entangled in a pretty far-fetched but action-packed plot involving Ronny Cox's evil tycoon,

There are infamously bad superhero movies and then there's Catwoman , a film so clueless one wonders if the filmmakers were even aware of the character's existence before making the film. Calling Pitof's movie a Batman spin-off is a stretch, to say the least. Not only does none of the action take place in Gotham City but Halle Berry's character is not Selina Kyle and she doesn't so much dress up as Catwoman to steal jewels and/or fight bad guys as she does have super-powers to use however she pleases, kinda like The Mask but not fun. Looking past the fact that the film is set in New York, Berry's character is actually called Patience and can crawl over walls like Spider-Man (because cats do that?), she becomes Catwoman when an animated cat breathes on her face, said cat being an Ancient Egyptian messenger in charge of choosing Catwomen across the centuries in order to, in this particular case, stop a deadly make-up from being sold all over the world. L