TheRetroCritic

With cinematic superhero crossover universes currently competing, so too it looks like monster universes are about to fight it out with The Mummy possibly being the first of a modern Universal Monsters reboot franchise and Godzilla facing Kong in an upcoming sequel. Kong: Skull Island introduces us to the mighty King Kong in a prequel of sorts where a group approved by the US government travels to the evasive Skull Island with a military escort in the 1970's. Don't expect Kong to get chained up and brought back to New York City where he climbs up the Empire State Building etc. in this one. There are some clever nods to these familiar events throughout the film but it's mercifully not just a straight-up retread and, stylistically, it is very different than Peter Jackson's King Kong from 2005. Kong: Skull Island owes a lot more to the likes of Apocalypse Now , Predators and the more over-the-top classic Kong sequels than the 1933 original or any remake. The ea

For every successful disaster movie, there's a forgotten one and The Core is, unfortunately, the latter. Released in 2003, the film wasn't exactly the lucrative blockbuster it planned to be and critics weren't too thrilled with it. Many have criticised the film for being scientifically inaccurate and preposterous but that's completely missing the point of The Core. This is an homage to old-fashioned disaster movies from The Birds to Journey To The Centre Of The Earth and The Fantastic Voyage with updated technology and slicker visuals, of course. The film is clearly tongue-in-cheek and is not meant to be taken too seriously so the fact it received more scrutiny than Independence Da y or other equally silly releases is frankly unfair. Armed with a solid cast and some genuinely tense set-pieces, The Core is far more fun than critics gave it credit for and it manages to avoid being annoying and over-patriotic like most of Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich's outp

Though it's often forgotten, there was an early attempt at making a film about The Fantastic Four back in 1994 when German producer Bernd Eichinger teamed up with B-movie maestro Roger Corman to make a low-budget film based on the iconic Marvel characters. The film cost about $1M and was never released though it would later resurface on bootleg videos. Stan Lee was not directly involved with the project except for selling the rights temporarily but it still stayed surprisingly true to the comics both in spirit and story-wise which shows that there definitely was a genuine attempt at making the most of that low-budget. The film sees scientist Reed Richards (Alex Hyde-White) gather a team to perform an experiment in space, an experiment which, of course, goes wrong and they crash-land back on Earth unharmed thanks to unusual powers they somehow picked up along the way. An ex-colleague of Richards', Victor Von Doom (an over-the-top Joseph Culp), lives up to his last name and

Here's a blast from the past. If you've ever wondered what Michael Gough was up to before he was making soup for Batman as reliable butler Alfred in Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher's movies, boy are you in for a treat. In Konga , Gough plays a megalomaniac botanist who devises a formula which would allow him to grow plants and animals to ridiculous sizes. We know his research is valid because some of the plants he's brought back from Africa and planted in his greenhouse are huge, penis-shaped and clearly made of papier maché. Think the original Little Shop Of Horrors but in colour and somehow even sillier. Our mad scientist sure gets up to some crazy sh** in this movie but unlike, say, Victor Frankenstein, who more or less seems like a normal enough dude before he loses it and starts digging up bodies for science, this guy is a bonafide creep from start to finish: he treats his assistant like garbage, keeping her quiet about what he's doing with the promise o

And you thought Pacific Rim was a crappy title... Yes, Atlantic Rim is the infamous B-movie-making machine that is The Asylum's own take on the new Robot Jox -style blockbuster. Taking the rough idea of big robots (with people in 'em) versus big reptilian monsters, we are once again given a healthy dose of godawful performances and cheap CGI. The one kinda known actor in this one is Graham Greene, who was most recently seen in The Twilight Saga . He plays an admiral in a movie which, sadly, isn't much of a step up from the teen vampire franchise. After an oil rig gets sunk by something no-one can explain, a group of pilots are sent down underwater inside giant robots to find the wreckage and stop whatever is causing such chaos. Why the army had Transformers in the first place and why they couldn't have just sent cameras down to the ocean floor instead of risking lives and billions of dollars is still beyond me. In any event, we focus on a pilot trio who are all

In the dark, unfriendly future of... 1999, school has become a crime-infested madhouse so the only solution to keep students on the right track, surely, has to be the introduction of unpredictable killer robots into the classroom, right? ...right? Well, Malcolm McDowell thought so. That'll teach him to trust a clearly evil dude who looks like a killer robot himself and put him in charge of the dumbest plan since those aliens invaded Earth in Signs . We follow three kids: NOT Edward Furlong (who looks about 40), NOT James Franco and NOT Corey Feldman, as they clash with the system and eventually bring it down Terminator -style. The film is completely derivative of every other sci-fi film at the time from Mad Max to RoboCop but uses a non-budget to non-impressive effect as most of its practical effects end up coming off as more lol-tastic than actually good. I guess I can't complain about that since they're the most entertaining part of this otherwise mostly dull an

Yes, you are reading this correctly. Mick Jagger, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Hopkins all cast in a movie together. An early 90's sci-fi movie no less! Actually... MUCH less. Freejack may look good on paper (trashy good) but alas, after a promisingly ass first act, this was one silly, low-budget B movie with very little to offer besides some shockingly not-even-trying performances, a lot of smoke, trucks and... night. Our lead is a particularly uncharismatic Emilio Estevez, he plays a racing car driver who is one day "freejacked" (read: teleported) into the future by an unknown mastermind who wants to take over his body... or something like that. Trust me, Freejack is near incomprehensible so reviewing it is like digging for patterns inside a mountain of dirt. Mick Jagger plays some bad dude who is after Estevez for some reason and Rene Russo is the latter's past girlfriend who mysteriously hasn't aged in nearly 20 years after his dramatic disappearance

Ok, so the new-ish Nicolas Cage film is coming out... ...and it's called STOLEN . Remember how TAKEN was essentially a fun B movie? Well this looks like the C movie version of that. After all: Stolen, Taken, same f****in' thing, right? But is it a "Cagey" enough outing to warrant a viewing? Bear lol Big mouth lol Elevator fight lol Fire car lol Well, it looks like we're in safe Cage territory here. Just sayin', could be fun. Ass, no doubt, but fun.