Bill Goodykoontz

By far the scariest thing about director Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein, a terrible would-be horror story that somehow roped in a couple of really good actors, is that the ending seems to suggest the possibility of a sequel. Now that’s horror.

Jenkins is a fantastically adaptable talent. It helps that his character here is supposed to be innately likable (by everyone, evidently, but his girlfriend's family), since Jenkins is so likable as an actor. Good thing, because there is little else to like about Darling Companion.

It strains both credulity and patience in its attempt to be different, and it leaves you feeling creeped out as well.

Paul Schrader, the once-brilliant screenwriter of such films as “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” has fashioned a movie that seems to exist to be repugnant. Maybe that’s the point; it was written by Bret Easton Ellis. Nearly every character in this movie is unlikable.

A relentlessly unfunny comedy, it wastes the talents of Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara as egregiously as one could possibly imagine, resorting to lame jokes, cliches and incompetent storytelling to pass the time.

It’s not clear that the movie has anything to say, new or otherwise. . . . Other than that it’s just blood and guts, and lots of it.

The purpose of San Andreas is not to make us think, but to make us gape, to pummel us with effect and effect until we finally give in. Fair enough. Uncle. I need a Tylenol anyway.

Mean-spirited.

CHIPS is a miserable movie, an exercise in stupidity that takes whatever nostalgia one had for the late-1970s television series – this assumes anyone actually had nostalgia for it — and beats it to death on a bed of idiocy. The action scenes, though, are pretty well-directed.

Without Lohan, Falling for Christmas would be another of the near-anonymous morass of holiday movies so prevalent during the season. Even with her it’s not much more.

It’s hard to get excited about any of the on-screen happenings, because director Justin Lin can’t seem to hit the right notes.

There is nothing about the movie that isn’t utterly predictable. You meet a character, and it’s immediately obvious what’s going to happen to him (or her). And then it happens. Maybe it’s meant to make you feel good about your deductive reasoning skills or something. But mostly it just makes you want to see something else.

Aside from the waste of talent, the frustrating thing about The Lazarus Effect is how it cheats. Good horror movies work on internal logic.

Gomez plays ... well, that’s one of the problems. Her character is so underdeveloped in director Courtney Solomon’s movie that she doesn’t actually have a name.

Josh C. Waller’s movie is just prurient nonsense, a film only a couple of notches up from the women-in-prison films that were popular years and years ago.

What a mess. Its meandering plot draws attention to the alarming lack of laughs — not what you look for in a supposed comedy.

The acting is so poor and the story so badly told that the viewer's feelings about Rand's novel - an epic ode to free-market fundamentalism - are almost immaterial.

Could be fun, you might think. No. Bad acting and worse dialogue quickly put an end to that notion.

A mean-spirited little movie, investing its limited charms in all the wrong characters.

There is something admirable about Fun Size. Not in how it succeeds, because it doesn't. Whoo, boy, it doesn't. Rather, in how bad it is on so many levels, in how it will offend and disappoint different segments of its audience for different reasons. It's an equal-opportunity bad movie. Something to hate for everyone! [25 Oct 2012]

Jonah Hex somehow manages to waste the talents of Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Aidan Quinn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a story that combines vengeance, the occult and an Old West war on terror (really).

It’s all predictable and, despite the best efforts of Turteltaub and screenwriter Dan Fogelman at something a little risky, it’s pretty lame.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a curious mess, a movie that doesn’t really seem to have any reason to exist, other than maybe to give writer and director Roman Coppola and star Charlie Sheen something to do for a few weeks.

Too often the jokes don’t land. Neither does the physical comedy. The story doesn’t really hold. It’s clear that Schneider and his daughter love each other, and this film is a way to express that. But it’s a lot to ask of the rest of us to watch it.

You know it's not working when you don't care about any of them. Sadly, that's the case with Answers to Nothing, Matthew Leutwyler's dud about a revolving cast of characters in Los Angeles.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be swept away — about as much as you would be by artificial roses. Movies like this may look like the real thing, but they're not.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is a movie that didn't need to be made, and certainly doesn't need to be seen — not when you can rent the original and still feel good about yourself afterward.

There's just not a lot to like here, with the exception of what may be one of the all-time best bad movie lines, one Conan utters to Tamara as a kind of personal credo: "I live. I love. I slay. I am content."