Oliver Harper's Retrospectives and Reviews, created by UK-based former movie projectionist and film fan Oliver Harper, is a Web Video series covering various movies, often from the '80s and '90s. He stands out from other reviews thanks to both the 2 minute "Trailers" he has at the beginning & end of his reviews, and his half-documentary, half-review style which often going into great detail on the film's production. He also does special commentary podcasts, usually with one or both of his friends, Richard Jackson and/or actor Duncan Casey. He's also done commentaries with Stuart Ashen.
You can find his main channel here
, and his Let's Play Channel here.
Oliver Harper's Retrospectives and Reviews provide examples of:
- Author Appeal:
- Huge fan of '80s movies. It's why films from that decade make up the majority of his reviews.
- Superman, especially the first two Christopher Reeve films.
- He reviewed Guest House Paradiso due to being a big fan of Bottom.
- Really likes the LaserDisc video format, and will often mention the LD version if the film he's reviewing was released on the format. This is helped by the fact he amassed a huge collection of them in the early 2000s thanks to car-boot sales and thrift stores.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The voice over he did in his earlier videos was quieter, and he tended to play clips from the movie and/or behind the scenes material for longer periods of time.
- He tended to improperly encode the footage of the movies he reviewed early on, resulting in a weird/squashed-looking image at times.
- For a long time, the URL at the bottom of his videos directed to his blip.tv channel. He changed it to his personal site for the videos after his blip.tv page was removed.
- Irony: When he points out how good Highlander II: The Quickening's updated special effects look, despite the film's poor reputation:Oliver Harper: It's funny how a film regarded as one of the worst sequels ever made gets such good treatment later in life.
- Let's Play: He does these for retro games on a separate YouTube channel.
- Re-Cut: He made new versions of his The Shadow, Masters of the Universe, Ghostbusters II, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Superman III, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Predator 2, The Thing (1982) and Dune (1984) reviews that were longer and more detailed.
- Special Effects Failure:
- Oliver cites Alien³ for its obvious matte lines and poor compositing, which especially made most shots with the Xenomorph rod puppet hokey. He said he was surprised they were still nominated for an Oscar. He still empathizes with the effects team who did their best despite being handicapped by the technology of the time.
- In his initial review of Dune, he said that the film was lambasted by critics for this. He was surprised by this, feeling that most of the effects were great, but realized that much of their complaints were due to the film's imperfect compositing effects.
- Take That!: In his Back to the Future Part II review, he notes the similarity between 1985-A Biff Tannen and Donald Trump - "He's not quite as evil as Trump, but close".
- What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: During his Return of the Jedi review, he points out how lenient the UK rating board was at first to the original Star Wars films, giving them all U (Universal) ratings despite the violence and blood.
