Category: Ric Review

Casino Royale ’67 Sometimes in the midst of what can best be called a VERY troubled production, something truly amazing can happen.  The producers can wind up switching gears in midstream, rewrite the entire movie to have an entirely different kind of plot while still retaining all footage already shot, and manage through sheer lack […]

Cast Away I understand that one can accept product placement as a necessary evil in Hollywood movies, but when one movie becomes so obviously obsessed with promoting one particular brand name or product at the artistic expense of the story itself, then something has to be said, as with this 2000 movie that is so […]

Cat People ‘82 As fun as erotic thrillers were in the 1990s with their quasi porn tendencies, the darkness of their tone would be eclipsed eventually by what would be known as erotic horror movies, most of which would be so depraved that only a specialized audience would be willing to seek out and watch […]

Cat’s Eye When is an anthology not an anthology?  Usually it’s when the stories involved are linked not so much by a common theme but rather by a particular main character who somehow manages to play a role in each story before moving on to the next (Tim Roth in Four Rooms comes to mind […]

Catch Me If You Can The evolution of Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting talent can be looked at in a upward curve starting with 1997’s megahit Titanic, a movie with terrible writing, terrible acting and a lead performance by DiCaprio that redefined the terms smug, smarmy, shallow and unlikable, but the movie just so happened to be […]

Chaplin While Robert Downey Jr. is currently one of the Kings Of Hollywood who came back from an awful drug addiction, it’s key for any fan of his to look at his work “before the fall” and see the early potential that has now been fulfilled, most notably this 1992 release that saw him nominated […]

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory This “faithful adaptation” of Roald Dahl’s classic novel, and de facto remake of the 1971 Gene Wilder childen’s favorite (and cult classic for LSD lovers everywhere), brings the unique visionary skills of Tim Burton to life yet again.  As the opening titles began, I mused on how the music scores […]

Cherry Falls As Scream reinvented the slasher movie genre in the late 1990s with an entirely new formula that included pretty young actors both male and female, a goofy irrelevant sense of humor amongst the characters and lots and lots of irony, almost immediately a lower rung of filmmakers rushed to emulate what Wes Craven […]

Child’s Play Certainly a film that electrified horror fans upon its initial release in 1988, Tom Holland’s original killer doll opus is really the tale of two (good) movies: the first being a creepy, atmospheric tale of a boy and his doll where at times you’re just not sure if the boy is telling the […]

Child’s Play 2 One thing should be made clear: The original 1988 Child’s Play was one of the great atmospheric horror films of the decade, building suspense slowly before making its franchise villain truly part of the mix.  Not so the case with its sequel, made two years later.  The filmmakers had already decided that […]