Caryn James

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a lame attempt to cash in on her character's success.

The sequel suffers from a lame, saccharine premise and a fatally earnest manner.

When Stoney explains that Milk Duds belong to one of the four major food groups, the dairy group, that's about as funny as things get. For a film that prides itself on throwing around Pauly-isms like fully (meaning yes), and grindage (food), Encino Man is surprisingly not buff (cool).

In Road House, Patrick Swayze has the most laughable role since Tom Cruise juggled a few liquor bottles and danced to ''The Hippy Hippy Shakes'' in Cocktail...Next to Dalton, Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing seems like Hamlet. Mr. Swayze does some dirty fighting here, but mostly the role requires a blank expression. At this point, Road House makes his career look like a bad joke.

The satire of the 50's is more bland than biting, dependent on authentically garish costumes and sets. And when the horror-film scenes begin to intrude on normal life (what is hanging from the cellar ceiling, anyway?) Mr. Balaban can't make the dark elements seem comic enough to mesh with the rest of this nightmarish joke.

Back to the Beach opened yesterday. But if you catch a television commercial for it, or the rock video that's on television, you'll get the joke and see the most this movie has to offer.

Gross-out humor for children, cynically packaged with goody-goody morals that wouldn't convince the most naive parent or child.

This intelligent, revolting, artistically made and entirely empty look at a murderer comes close to a cinema of pure technique. It is profoundly disturbing, even more for the questions it raises about the use of film than for the mutilated bodies that litter the screen.

It is the laziest sort of action comedy, with lumbering chase scenes, a dull-witted script and the charmless pairing of Mr. Eastwood and Bernadette Peters.

Hoop Dreams affirms the role of film as a medium for exploring social issues. And like any important documentary, this one raises crucial questions beyond what is on screen.

Though ''Roxy Carmichael'' is never as fresh or powerful as it might have been, it is a sweetly engaging film in the Barry Levinson school: just when you think it might fall into a bottomless pit of sentimentality, it stops short.

Enormously good-natured - exactly the wrong tone for a comedy that needs all the rambunctious lunacy it can get. Instead, this story of an American mistakenly deported to Mexico as an illegal alien is amiable and plodding, the very last things you'd expect from Cheech, with or without Chong.

The very best I can say is that Witchboard should encourage struggling film makers. Watch it and think, ''I can do better than that!''

With its homogenized flavor, this Body Snatchers seems like a movie made BY pod people, FOR pod people.

Peter Werner, who has directed some stylish television shows (''Moonlighting'' episodes and the mini-series ''L.B.J.: The Early Years'') is competent but dull here. The endless car chases through parking garages and close-ups of the two friends talking seem conceived for a television-size scale and budget, then blown up to fill a larger screen.

In this film, suspense and psychological horror have given way to superhuman strength and resilience...The one effectively handled scene is the last, which promises a sequel with a feminist twist.

Despite a few lighter touches, the film is still a gory waste of time that plays its murders for all the blood and guts they're worth. There are plenty of cliched reaction shots of faces in terror, more than enough frames filled with bloody knives and severed heads. There is not, however, any suspense about Jason or his victims. He stalks, they scream, he kills. None of it is enough to make you jump out of your seat, though it may be enough to make your stomach churn. [2 Aug 1986, p.9]

Like Mr. Wenders's previous film, last year's "Until the End of the World," this one begins as a swirl of dazzling ambition and at midpoint turns into a mess. Even so, and even at 2 hours and 20 minutes, it is one of the more intriguing messes on screen.

Though the story evokes old movie formulas - from Strangers on a Train to the 1952 film The Narrow Margin, which inspired it - this film does not reinvent them. It dully echos their conventions.

This atmospheric, expertly crafted little New England noir has droll dialogue, a female empowerment theme and a sly use of crime elements.

[A] witty, entertaining remake.

Can't Buy Me Love has an identity crisis that's a mirror-image of Ronald's own. He thinks he wants popularity at any price, though he's really a sincere guy. The film thinks it wants to be sincere, when all it truly wants is to be popular, just like the other kids' movies, so it sells off its originality.

There have been worse ideas for innocuous summer films, but not many worse executions. The slapstick is tame and predictable. The characters and their inspirational message are served up as neatly - there's no avoiding this - as if they were in commercials.

It is refreshing to see so much style and life in the old undead tale, and to watch this strong cast with its perfect deadpan attitudes.

Disturbing for all the wrong reasons.

Richard Tuggle's new film wants to be a realistic thriller, but it merely acts out kids' fantasies of heroism and adventure, with drugs and rock music thrown in for a contemporary twist.

Howard the Duck' begins as a mild satire about a duck who fell to earth, but midway through, the star is upstaged by horrifying demons and dazzling light shows.

With a scatter-shot style that includes lengthy, often lame song-and-dance parodies, as well as special effects, slapstick and satire, the film can't begin to sustain its lunatic premise. But during the lulls between witty scenes, there is always something amusing to look at. Mr. Temple and his collaborators create a near-California so cartoonish and crayon-colored that the film comes to seem like Aliens in Toyland.