TheRetroCritic

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

Here's the video version of my Blazing Saddles review.

As far as Western spoofs go, it doesn't get any more classic than Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles . The film, which follows Cleavon Little's black sheriff as he is sent into a small racist town to defend it from bandits, was a big hit back in the day and it's still seen as one of the greatest comedies of all time. As with many other Mel Brooks comedies, Blazing Saddles could have easily backfired and been dismissed as being in poor taste but the writing (Richard Pryor helped with the script) is so clever and so funny that it somehow completely works as a biting parody of Western clichés and the genre's reluctance to acknowledge the unapologetic racism of the times. The plot is set into motion when Harvey Korman's corrupt State Attorney General Hedley Lamarr decides to drive the people of Rock Ridge out of town in order to lower land prices. He appoints an African American sheriff to shock the inhabitants away but when that doesn't work he tries various oth

Gene Wilder writes, directs and stars in "comedy chiller" Haunted Honeymoon , a homage to old horror-themed radio plays. The film was released in 1986 and was a box-office and critical bomb. On paper, this movie sounds like a riot: werewolves, a Hercule Poirot-style setup, Dom DeLuise playing an over-the-top character in drag, Gene Wilder, the whole thing looks like the spiritual successor to Mel Brooks' classic Young Frankenstein . And yet right off the bat there's something not quite right about Haunted Honeymoon. Billing itself as a horror/comedy, it proves to be neither funny nor scary. The plot is initially quite promising as Wilder's radio actor starts randomly acting strange as his shady uncle shows up to suggest scaring him to death in order to cure him. He then shows up with his fiancée (played by Gilda Radner) at the creepy mansion where he grew up for his wedding and we're introduced to various bizarre characters. Unfortunately, from then on, t

10 years after the release of the first Star Wars movie, master spoofer Mel Brooks decided to take on the epic space opera trilogy in the childishly titled Spaceballs which starred the likes of Rick Moranis (as Dark Helmet), John Candy (as Barf) and Brooks himself in multiple roles. In typical Brooksian fashion, Spaceballs was incredibly silly from start to finish and even though not all of its jokes work, it remains something of a cult comedy classic. The plot mostly uses the "save the princess" theme of A New Hope , adds a little Death Star business from Empire Strikes Back and poor old Jabba is reduced to Pizza The Hutt, a talking blob made out of pizza bits and voiced by Dom DeLuise. The film opens with a subtle, pretty clever joke as an absurdly long and intricate spaceship passes by the camera for ages and from then on it gets goofy and never looks back. Candy's Barf is half dog, Joan Rivers voices a C-3PO-style droid, Moranis' Dark Helmet is a bumbling f

Mel Brooks takes on Bram Stoker's Dracula in this cartoonish 1995 spoof starring the late, great Leslie Nielsen as Dracula and the director himself as vampire hunter Van Helsing. It's very dumb, very silly but is it any good? Hard one to review this one since I do have a soft spot for it. On the one hand, technically the film looks a bit cheap and often feels more like a filmed play than it does a fully put-together movie. Part of the joke is that it does look so trashy, though, so it's hard to fault the film for that. As a straight-up piss-take of Francis Ford Coppola's film, it's pretty spot-on and, in fact, actually misses out on a few more easy jokes it could have made about certain parts of that movie. The idea of Leslie Nielsen as Dracula is hilarious in itself and Nielsen sure doesn't disappoint, clearly having a ball putting on the silliest Transylvanian accent he could come up with and joking around with Brooks, Peter MacNichol and the rest of t