Dave Kehr

The details of this Twin Peaks are slight and repetitious, and their meanings are numbingly obvious. Behind small town America's facade of sweetness and light, there exist darkness and evil-news that is a day late and about $7.50 short. [28 Aug 1992]

The film gets in trouble, as most contemporary comedies do, when it runs out of disassociated gags and casts about desperately for a story to tell; here, the lonely guy premise is dropped completely for a series of more-or-less conventional romantic misunderstandings centered on a dull Judith Ivey.

A toothless, pointless remake of King Vidor's searing, epic melodrama of 1937. [2 Feb 1990, p.G2]

Francis Ford Coppola's gang film is as moony about death as "One From the Heart" was over romance; the film is unremitting in its morbid sentimentality, running its teenage characters through a masochistic gamut of beatings, killings, burnings, and suicides.

Adventures in Babysitting not only panders to expectations but also attempts to exploit fears and prejudices. [03 July 1987, p.A]

ROTLD II may be junk, but at least in the hands of director Ken Wiederhorn it's efficient, well-filmed junk. [18 Jan 1988, p.7C]

Like Father Like Son has the cheap, florid look of a rejected television pilot, and the same air of anything-for-a-laugh desperation. [02 Oct 1987, p.J]

Director Colin Higgins plays foul with the audience, constructing some of the most dishonest suspense sequences ever filmed, and ends with a thriller that is obnoxious and manipulative in the extreme. If it were exciting, I suppose it wouldn't matter, but it's not: Higgins can't be bothered to bring the slightest bit of conviction to his plot, which takes nearly two hours to run its unimaginative course.

The Bedroom Window is not at all an unskillful film, but that, in some ways, is what is most discouraging about it: Hanson is more than good enough to do something of his own. In its drive to imitate the past, Hollywood is leaving itself without a present. [16 Jan 1987, p.L]

The action sequences are sleek and strong enough, but the story that chains them together is too ambitious for its own good

Some of the nonstop commotion of Bangkok Dangerous is funny and inventive -- but much more of it is simply irritating and obfuscating.

Good-natured, mildly appealing video feature.

Serreau directs for maximum freneticism, with her actors rushing around and regurgitating great torrents of imperfectly subtitled dialogue (a gratuitous subplot involving drug traffickers seems to have been inserted just to double the hysteria), and while there are more than a few laughs, most of them are laughs of recognition—seeing these gags again is like coming across long-lost (and vaguely embarrassing) relations.

The emotional impact of Shark Skin Man is negligible.

Probably should have stayed on a shelf back in Paris.

A confused and confusing mixture of genres and tones, John Landis' horror comedy Innocent Blood is consistent only in its unpleasantness. [25 Sept 1992, p.B2]

Walking Tall has no more fat on it than the Rock himself, a hulking yet curiously ingratiating presence who seems the most likely candidate to replace Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as America's favorite living comic book character.

The first two are total stinkers, but things pick up with Joe Dante's creepy, claustrophobic, and very funny study of a brattish kid who lives in a cartoon universe, and come slamming home with George Miller's final sketch about a paranoid airline passenger.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a strange concoction - a bad taste comedy with a big, beating heart. [12 May 1989, p.B]

It's a mad whirl, and Rodman his hair changing color like a traffic light seems right at home in it. [4 Apr 1997, p.49]

As the movie slowly slogs along to its dreary, moralistic conclusion, Ryder`s sharp presence seems to recede into a candy-colored fog of sentimentality.

Seems a little too desperate to be liked.

Craven has proven himself a talented director of horror films on several occasions, from Last House on the Left to A Nightmare on Elm Street. But this time he's chosen a project that plays not at all to his abilities, which lie with the creation of isolated, disturbing images rather than with the careful sustaining of suspense through story-telling. [13 Oct 1986, p.5C]

Though Ernest barely exists apart from his trademark catch phrase (Kno- whut-I-mean?) and his propensity for waggling his nose in wide-angle lenses, Varney's energetic mugging is good for a few mild laughs.

If Mr. Ghobadi's dominant theme is the devastation of the Kurds, his subdominant tone is one of strength, resistance and fertility.

A minor addition to the tiny genre of feminist science fiction films

This 1944 Hepburn-Tracy pairing is so undistinguished that it's nearly dropped out of the history books.

It's a deeply, creepily dishonest piece of work. [27 Oct 1989, p.G]

This film, which tries to use chaos creatively-by shaping it and sculpting it-finally seems little more than a well-filmed mess. [4 Dec 1987, p.B]

Chain Reaction never develops a sense of mounting energy. The action sequences are thinly conceived and too spread out by dramatic filler (mainly involving the crises of conscience of Morgan Freeman, as the project's enigmatic chief fund-raiser) to create much momentum. [2 Aug 1996, p.45]

Medicine Man is a sympathetic project that gets done in by an excessively aggressive screenplay - one that keeps manufacturing artificial conflicts and false climaxes where some more relaxed character work would have gracefully done the trick. [07 Feb 1992, p.3]

A sturdy, well-made piece that never quite overcomes its structural flaws.

Perhaps too simple and damply nostalgic to rank with Mulligan’s best work, but still illuminated by an intense identification with adolescent confusion, beautifully communicated by Mulligan’s subjective camera technique.

Held back throughout by the self-conscious, overly explicit dialogue and the judgmental, moralistic undertone that throbs throughout.

Roger Moore is a pastry chef's idea of James Bond; but Christopher Lee as the archetype of the evil antagonist makes this 007 outing just about bearable.

Verhoeven does not explore the dark side, but merely exploits it, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Graciously filmed by Martin Brest and imaginatively performed by Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, the tired concept yields a steady stream of little discoveries and surprising insights that add up to some uncommonly rich comedy. [20 July 1988]

What remain are a few outrageous sight gags built around an unusual glow-in-the-dark device and a nicely conceived encounter with a shy female body-builder (Raye Hollit) that, in its blend of violence and tenderness, recaptures some of the emotional complexity of the Edwards of old. [3 March 1989, p.M]

The film feels too formulaic and too familiar to produce the transgressive thrills of early underground work.

Milius has nothing to say: this 1982 film only hints at the romantic heroics of "The Wind and the Lion" and has none of the personal quality of "Big Wednesday."

Emerges as just one more formulaic action film as the title character bounces around the globe in a deadly treasure hunt.

What's left is the framework for a graphic, brutal, sickening film (1980), without the violent effects that might have made sense (however illegitimate) out of the conception. Like The Exorcist, it alternates five minutes of shock with ten minutes of dull exposition, plenty of time to watch Al Pacino wrestle with his miserably conceived character.

As usual, blood flows freely and gratuitously, but you could do worse.

Brian De Palma has always been a derivative filmmaker, pilfering indiscriminately from Alfred Hitchcock (Sisters), John Ford (The Untouchables) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Blowout). But his failed new thriller Raising Cain makes him seem a startlingly incompetent one as well. [07 Aug 1992, p.14]

Coscarelli has captured the texture of a disjointed, half-remembered nightmare, full of figures and events that seem to have some symbolic value, but which have lost their precise meaning in the process of floating up from the subconscious.

Renegades steams along very nicely, with more than enough momentum to compensate for the callowness of its stars. [05 Jun 1989, p.3C]

The large number of video jokes in Amazon Women suggests a product principally designed with the home screen in mind, and perhaps it will look sharper there. [18 Sept 1987, p.E]

Little remains of the original but its weakest element - its overelaborate intrigue - and Hackford seems only to scramble it further.

A curdled, unfunny satire made more painful by McGrath’s inappropriately jubilant style.

It isn't hard to take, but Harry and the Hendersons seems a bit familiar.

This 1979 teenage horror film has no redeeming style: it's a straight, pedestrian cop of Halloween, from the opening shock to the climactic battle against the psycho.

The musical sequences are good enough that they make you wish Ross had been willing to leave the surface realism behind and break out into the high stylization and exuberance of the genre's classic days. Despite the hesitations, it's miles above "Flashdance" in technique and intelligence.

It's the premise of Crazy People that what the American public really responds to in advertising is absolute honesty. If that were true, then the ads for the film would proudly point out that "Crazy People" is cloying, derivative and never more than mildly funny. [11 Apr 1990, p.2C]

Cruddy, primal, extremely violent, and fairly entertaining, this 1984 feature from the New York-based exploitation outfit Troma, Inc. (Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz) captures some of the snot-flicking spirit of the old EC comics. How much you'll enjoy its deliberate crudity probably depends on how far you can let yourself regress to surly adolescence.

RoboCop 2 is every bit as sadistic as its 1987 predecessor but considerably less effective.

It's bleak, creepy, and occasionally terrifying. Studio pressure apparently forced Murch to back off from the full fury of his conception, but this is still strong stuff.

Unfortunately the clips themselves are so battered, grainy and sordid that they are more depressing than inspiring.

The messages blend seamlessly into the fantasy and comedy in what is surely one of the best films for older children in quite some time.

The murder-mystery board game becomes a frantic, unfunny spoof (1985) under the direction of British TV writer Jonathan Lynn. The script recycles Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, with six guests invited by a mysterious host to spend the night in a creepy mansion, but instead of parodying the material Lynn simply surrounds it with extraneous pratfalls and wisecracks.

Proof positive of just how mediocre 70s mediocrity could be—any quasicompetent Hollywood hack of the 40s could have gone to town with this story, but under Yates's direction it merely lurches along, from one predictable danger to another.

The film is full of carefully balanced moral proclamations, to the point where it begins to resemble an episode of "Nightline." [15 Jan 1988, p.B]

She`s Having a Baby wants to be everyone`s story, but its hollowness makes it no one`s.

Minnelli's comedy had its serious underpinnings: by the end of the film, a girl had become a woman. By the end of Ms. Gordon's film, the girl is still a girl, but a girl with much cooler stuff, including a stately home, a butler and a cute British boyfriend.

As Angelo, Mr. Kirby has a boyish charm, which is probably the best that can be said for this film as well.

As written by Randy Feldman and produced by the Batman team of Jon Peters and Peter Guber, Tango & Cash clearly wasn't meant to be interesting. It was meant to be Lethal Weapon-that is, a high-tech, ultra- violent, brain-dead buddy cop movie. In Konchalovsky's hands, however, Tango & Cash is more than interesting. It is, in fact, really weird.

The Rookie is a generally enjoyable variation on some extremely familiar themes, filled out with the most spectacular action sequences Eastwood has ever filmed and a good dose of the dyspeptic humor that is becoming the hallmark of his late career as an actor. [07 Dec 1990, p.C]

Hellbound offers a consistent, low-level queasiness, an effect more of revulsion than horror. It's nothing that a good shot of Pepto-Bismol wouldn't take care of.

Following Bollywood's tradition of excessive generosity, Mr. Gupta tosses in too much of just about everything, resulting in a two-and-a-half-hour film that may exhaust some viewers.

This Frankenfilm comes lumbering out of the laboratory of the Danish director Harald Zwart, any trace of personality surgically removed and replaced by a fully road-tested cliché.

In the early scenes, Landis and Goldblum work hard to make the character's depression dramatically real, and this infusion of gravity in a generally weightless genre brings a new meaning to the standard action scenes. But the idea vanishes around the midway mark—at about the point when the sun comes up—and the balance of the film is thin and familiar.

Queasily suspended between drag theatrics (Faye Dunaway and Brenda Vaccaro camping it up on a soundstage replica of a carnival spook house) and Spielbergian wholesomeness (Canadian Helen Slater as a toothy, Aryan Ubermadchen), this is one comic-book feature that doesn't fly.

The problem is that the imagery—as Sadean as Pasolini's Salo—isn't rooted in any story impulse, and so its power dissipates quickly. The real venue for this film is either a grind house or the Whitney Museum.

The plot line quickly becomes incomprehensible, and the movie, directed in sleek music-video style by Michael Bay, comes to suggest a very long night on Fox-TV. [7 April 1995, p.56]

The inconsistencies of Nowhere to Run make it finally unsatisfying, but the film leaves little doubt that Robert Harmon is a major talent, though one still waiting for a project equal to his abilities.

Credibility, of course, wouldn't matter if the gags were good enough, which they are not. The film quickly falls back on the gross-out jokes that have made recent American comedies such a challenge to the digestive tract.

Has no local cultural history behind it. Its secondhand imagery and ideas seem to have barely involved its makers; it definitely does not involve its audience.

A shaky, uncertain film that nevertheless touches a few raw nerves.

The visual style--the orange-and-blue color scheme, the elegant 'Scope compositions, the graceful tracking shots, and the shrewd use of shallow focus--has been reproduced almost perfectly from John Carpenter's original, yet the wit and intelligence are gone.

With last week's elections in South Africa finally pointing the way toward a dismantlement of apartheid, it can't be said that the timing of "The Power of One" is particularly astute. But this is a film with no particular relationship to the real world in any case. [27 March 1992, p.M]

It`s patently impossible to maintain the realism required for suspense in such a strained and silly context, though that doesn`t stop Ritchie from trying.

The film runs through most of Leni Riefenstahl's bag of tricks as it builds up a patriotic frenzy, yet the crazed flag-waving would be a lot easier to take if it weren't so clearly a commercial calculation meant to salvage what is otherwise a crass, careless, shamelessly padded film.

What is genuinely chilling about Final Analysis lies not in the foolish plotting but in the completely callous attitude of the director and writer, who are interested in their characters only as compositional elements or, at best, game pieces to be pushed around a board. It`s a cold, distant work of no compassion and, finally, no importance.

Nightwatch is more stylish and well-plotted than your typical slasher film, but it doesn't quite stand out in a world where the horrific has become routine. [17 Apr 1998]

Clifford can muster no interest in the cardboard characters or absurd plot developments, which leaves Gleaming the Cube to limp along listlessly between indifferently filmed skateboard demonstrations.

Over the Top is pretty much like all of the other successful Stallone films, which probably means that it will be a success, too. In fact, it`s considerably better than the ragged, recycled Rocky IV, though it lacks the wild excesses that made Rambo and Cobra campily entertaining.

The French original was a clever Hitchcock homage with a murder at its center. For reasons unknown, the murder plot has been dropped from the remake (though a few confusing traces of it remain), which leaves Wicker Park without much real urgency to drive its extremely contrived plot.

There's always room for debate, but John Schlesinger's The Believers could be the dullest movie ever made about child sacrifice. [10 Jun 1987, p.4C]

It doesn't display an ounce of planning or simple craftsmanship (the Jamaican locations are photographed to look like the banks of Lake Calumet), but with a cast like that, it can't help but have its moments.

A competent, unpretentious entertainment destined to fill the after-school slot at shopping mall theaters across the country.

Franklin J. Shaffner's deadpan adaptation of Ira Levin's silly story about Hitler clones. The plot is less suspenseful than the overacting contest between the two leads, Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck, who spend most of their screen time one-upping each other in affectations.

Called upon to do little more than imitate the mannerisms of their French predecessors, Nolte and Short seem hemmed in and desperately uncomfortable. [27 Jan 1989, p.A]

Relentlessly bright and superficial, even when the subject turns to self-destruction.

Just follows the numbers, plodding from one unimaginative set piece to the next. Even the tony cast of villains—Christopher Walken, Patrick Bauchau, and Grace Jones—can't add any flavor to the grindingly predictable proceedings.

One of the most mawkish films ever made.

A programmer that once upon a time would have played on the bottom half of double bills, Anacondas has no pretensions and gets its little job done effectively, providing some small-scale laughs and chills for the late summer season.

Poltergeist at this point is a brand name without a distinctive product to sell-no vivid characters, no unique situations, no look or meaning of its own.

Plodding, literal and completely lacking in the erotic tension that seems to be essential to the genre. Not much passes between Matt Dillon and Sean Young that could be defined as frisson - there is no ambiguity, no risk, no charge. [26 Apr 1991, p.C2]

It's as if Russ Meyer had made "Death Wish III" with an adenoidal cast, though it isn't that good.

This time Mr. Burns is trying something in the Martin Scorsese street-realist mode, but his self-regarding sentimentality trips him up again.

Boorman deserves credit for trying out some new ideas, even if most of them backfire. Visually, it's fascinating—sort of a blend of Minnellian baroque and Buñuelian absurdity—but the dialogue is childish, the story is incomprehensible, and the metaphysics are ridiculous. Still, an audacious failure is preferable to a chickenhearted success. More than worth a look, if only out of curiosity.

None of the characters has been written with any personality, and none of the actors succeeds in discovering any. [05 Mar 1993]

Fawcett isn`t half bad--she works hard and doesn`t commit any egregious technical faults--but she doesn`t have the resources to give her slimly written character a sufficiently commanding inner life, and it`s difficult to get beyond her sunny, fashion-model good looks. It`s another sad case of the clown who wanted to play Hamlet.

In both Twist and "Idaho," the act of placing a larger-than-life literary figure in a constrained, narrowly naturalistic environment merely strips the characters of their scale and interest.

As a film, "Consenting Adults" has little to distinguish itself from the other entries in the genre, apart from an entertainingly hammy performance from Spacey and the clever production design of Carol Spier, with its emphasis on bold color effects (the interior of the Otis house is painted an infernal red) and complicated architectural spaces. But this, of course, is the kind of filmmaking that defines success by its adherence to the norm, not in dangerous departures from it. [16 Oct 1992, p.C]

Someone had another Hospital in mind, and they even hired Arthur Hiller to direct it, but the attempt to merge black humor and strident social commentary seems even more uncertain this time.

Dr. Giggles strains for the kind of charnel house humor that once was the glory of 1950s horror comics like Tales from the Crypt. But Coto's imagination, like Dr. Giggle's rusty scalpels, isn't all that sharp, and the picture soon peters out into a flat, predictable series of stomach-churning unpleasantries. [26 Oct 1992, p.5C]

For those looking for a vacation from the irony and the cruelty that have invaded so much of American popular culture, this scruffy little Indian film is a delightful getaway.

There's some fun potential here, but Marvin's direction is plodding enough to snuff it fairly quickly. Yet Charlie Sheen, promising in his second-banana appearances in Lucas and Pretty in Pink, emerges with his promise intact. Sheen already has the reserved but powerful manner of a Wayne or an Eastwood; with a little more maturity, he could be a contender.

Under the direction of last-minute replacement Richard Benjamin, the results are insufferable—grotesque, chaotic, demoralized.

A thematic analysis can only scratch the surface of this extraordinarily dense and commanding film, perhaps the most intensely personal movie to emerge from the Hollywood cinema.

Plympton fails to develop compelling personalities for any of his characters.

A decent example of that strange new genre that has arisen to serve the home rental audience-a soft-core porn film directed primarily toward women. [29 Apr 1988, p.L]

There is a crazed, dark poetry here, but Mary Lambert's direction of Pet Sematary captures none of it, and the film falls into a flat, frequently laughable literalism. [24 Apr 1989, p.C2]

Rather than exhilaration, this bilious film offers only entrapment and despair. It's about as much fun as sitting in on an autopsy.

Drab and unenticing.

The tear-jerking is so determined and persistent that your ducts feel as if they'd been worked over with a catheter. But despite its great length, the film never makes sense of its central relationship, between Jon Voight's washed-up prizefighter and Faye Dunaway's chichi fashion designer.

Garris, filming mainly in a bobbing and weaving, hand-held camera style, keeps the scenes pared down to their functional essentials, wisely substituting speed for nuance. Sleepwalkers gets the job done. [13 Apr 1992, p.5C]

Over all, the humor has been sanitized a bit compared with the darker, more grotesque comedy of the French original.

Half the film passes while Pierson fumbles with the exposition—setting up an intricate internecine war for control of a Gypsy clan—and then he fumbles the action. Pointless, messy, rambling; no atmosphere and no energy.

Amazingly arrogant, immoral film.

Once upon a time this was known as "the power of positive thinking," and it didn't involve nearly so much math.

A moderately competent formula film.

As soon as the medallion appears, so do the digital maneuverings -- speeded-up movement, composite images, objects and people morphing into supernatural thingamajigs -- that undercut the genuine thrills of the genuine action.

There is little here to hold the attention of anyone older than 9. For families in search of entertainment, it may be time to find Nemo again.

Amos & Andrew, written and directed by E. Max Frye, relates the intersection of these two different destinies, in a style that ranges from roaring farce to biting satire. [05 Mar 1993, p.C2]

The action sequences, when they arrive, are so poorly staged and absurdly one-sided that they contain no excitement or suspense. Again and again, the film finds the huge, hulking Seagal beating up on flabby middle-aged men - and even then, resorting to such questionable techniques as wrapping a cue ball in a handkerchief and using it as a club. [15 Apr 1991, p.C7]

Neil Diamond's remake of the 1927 Jolson vehicle isn't very good, but neither is it the vacuous, sentimental ego trip it's been painted as.

Like most of Mr. Ferrara's films, The Blackout takes place in a trance state -- events are fuzzy, line readings even fuzzier. There are mysterious ellipses in the plotline and lots of droning electric guitar work on the soundtrack.

The cast is uniformly high spirited and attractive, and Ms. Beyer's direction, apart from a few over-weighted Wellesian camera angles, is functional.

It's hard not to chuckle, and hard, too, not to marvel at the many varieties of human experience.

This aggressively "sincere" movie is without a single authentically lived moment a sense exaggerated by Brian Tufano's overcomposed cinematography, which imitates the glossy hollowness of fashion photographs. [24Oct1997 Pg 51]

A weirdly out-of-scale movie that constantly juxtaposes the trivial and the cosmic, less to comic effect than to a mounting sense of muddle and uncertainty.

It is hard to imagine a world where films such as Child's Play 2 - essentially, a dim excuse for a prolonged, extremely exploitative display of abused and abusive children - can pass as mainstream entertainment. [13 Nov 1990, p.3C]

Starts to seem less like a political documentary than a one-sided "Battle of the Network Stars," with the younger generation clearly winning the charisma challenge.

David Cronenberg's The Fly is that absolute rarity of the '80s: a film that is at once a pure, personal expression and a superbly successful commercial enterprise. [15 Aug 1986]

When Gosnell's script does wander into some emotionally complex territory--in the depths of the jungle, Max encounters an old army buddy from Vietnam (John Rhys-Davies)--Thompson does rouse himself momentarily to provide some sequences of unexpected sensitivity, but he quickly returns to his dull, professional indifference. [21 Nov 1986, p.L]

The sudden, radical change of tone is something far beyond Mr. McKay's nascent abilities as a filmmaker, and Crush never really rights itself.

Disturbingly superficial in its approach to the material.

Will probably keep its core audience of suburban teenagers mildly entertained for the course of its 93 minutes. Urban grumps, however, may be distracted by Mr. Stokes's annoyingly overedited execution of the dance sequences.

It's a wholly passive performance, and one that touches not at all on Pryor's special gifts. This man desperately needs a new agent.

First-rate schlock; overlong and incredibly stupid, but that's part of the formula by now.

Quickly collapses into an overloaded, slow-moving series of predictable jokes and forced situations.

Imagine "Twins" with the Danny DeVito part played by a dog, or "Lethal Weapon" with the mastiff standing in for Mel Gibson. [28 July 1989, p.A]

Crass, shoddy and crudely exploitative of the public's worst instincts, John Badham's Bird on a Wire reflects just about everything that's wrong with American movies right now.

You don't have to be a horror-movie scholar to know that nothing significant is going to happen in any movie with "2" in the title; the creature has to stay around long enough at least to complete a trilogy and fill out a nice boxed set of DVD's.

A series of gun battles follow, none staged with quite enough verve or imagination to break through the pervasive torpor.

This movie is Ms. Davis's fourth film as a director, and she has a bright, chipper style that keeps things moving, while never quite managing to connect her wish-fulfilling characters to the human race. Like someone who smiles too much, Amy's Orgasm seems rather sad at heart.

Mr. Anderson's screenplay provides a steady series of inventive action situations, and the director, Alexander Witt, makes the most of them. His work is fast, funny, smart and highly satisfying in terms of visceral impact.

For all of his personal familiarity with the material, Mr. Provenzano has turned out a movie that largely owes its tone and style to other movies.

Predictably impersonal and uninspired.

The Secret of My Success is crushingly bland. Bland, yes, but somewhat chilling, too--particularly in the way Ross and his screenwriters (Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr. and A.J. Carothers) zero in on their teenage target audience by indulging in the grubbiest of grubby fantasies.

With style to spare, Hype Williams' gangsta rap epic Belly applies a wide range of MTV techniques slow motion, strobe effects, seemingly more fish-eye shots than there are fish in the sea to tell a confusing, fundamentally undramatic story about two holdup men from Queens (played by rappers DMX and Nas) who graduate to dealing a new kind of superpowered heroin. [06 Nov 1998, p.56]

Perhaps the series is simply getting cynical and tired.

As a movie, this sort-of sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show ain't much—but then neither was the original, and we all know how much difference that made.

The picture is obsessed with strength and the use of physical force, though its attitudes are often slippery.

Even the walls seem to be sweating something viscous and unpleasant.

Weathers turns out to be a disappointingly weak lead whose low-key likability doesn't make up for his lack of anger and drive-crucial attributes for any action hero. And Baxley is surprisingly stingy with his action sequences.

A sweet, sincere labor of love that just isn't very good.

Strains for a jazzy, Oliver Stone-ish look, but at its heart it is a placid and conventional moral tale about the dangers of wandering too far off the pathway.

Beeman and Tolkin drain every trace of real life friction from the story line, pumping it up instead with the standard Hughes synthetics: kids who are preternaturally smart, sophisticated and poised (Haim's best friend, played by Corey Feldman, has a swagger that suggests Robert Mitchum at his cockiest); adults who are monstrous, cretinous and ultimately pathetic. [07 July 1988, p.3C]

Though it looks bright and the young actors have a couple of sweet moments, the picture is almost unremittingly punishing, hammering home its "be yourself" message with all the gentle persuasiveness of a Marine drill sergeant.

The film becomes far too explicit much too quickly, as if Friedkin, frustrated by his inability to build a genuine suspense, had decided to move to the main course as quickly as possible. [27 Apr 1990, p.B]

The film is actually fairly well made, with a brisk tempo pace, a professional look and enough competently staged action.

A surprisingly well-made action movie with a definite directorial personality. [03 Sep 1986, p.7C]

Too predictable to leave much of an impression.

Disappointingly shallow and not terribly funny romantic comedy.

The screenplay for this 1985 feature is so riddled with character inconsistencies and unmotivated behavior that it plays like science fiction: the unsuspected presence of body-snatching aliens is the only conceivable explanation for the bizarre twists of psychology the film proposes.

Mr. Davis has a lot of ideas, but when it comes to dramatizing them, he is unable to give them an engaging form.

It's a great-looking film, filled with wildly imaginative sets and costumes that would have done the Maestro proud, and veteran director Richard Fleischer (The Vikings) rises to the occasion with some sharply staged action scenes. With Nielsen's minimal English rubbing up against the fractured locutions of costar Arnold Schwarzenegger, the dialogue passages don't exactly play like Noel Coward, but this is a movie that succeeds rousingly well on its own humble, Saturday-night terms.

Each time Sheen threatens to take the film to another level, director Noton throws in a pratfall or a car chase to knock it down. Three for the Road" is a film that must struggle to be stupid; unfortunately, it succeeds. [15 Apr 1987, p.5]

A sweet, well-intended picture, but like its title character, it is not quite good enough for the big leagues.

The First Power is nowhere above average for the genre, and frequently far beneath it. [09 Apr 1990, p.2C]

The gags in A Fine Mess aren't particularly inspired (there's a lot of eye-gouging and groin-kicking), but Edwards' stylistic assurance often has enabled him to do a lot more with a lot less. He's off his game in this one --lingering a fraction of a second too long over gags that don't deserve it, cutting up the action into two or three shots when a single image would have expressed the idea more clearly--and the results are pretty grim. [8 Aug 1986, p.AC]

Instantly forgettable film.

A few of the one-liners are snappy and clever, but the project sinks under an overelaborated superciliousness.

Whimsical fluff (1967) that weighs in on the far side of 50 tons; it's so clumsy and pounding that taking a child to it might be grounds for a visit from family services.

Where the "Friday the 13th" movies demand nothing less than virginal purity as a condition of living through the last reel, Deepstar Six, which seems intended for a slightly older crowd, is willing to settle for a firm commitment to monogamy. [13 Jan 1989, p.O]

Combining the sports obsessiveness of "SNL's" venerable "Da Bears" routine with the buddy bonding of Wayne and Garth, Mike and Jimmy might make great sketch material. But as the central characters in a feature film, they wear thin quicker than a cheap suit. [19 Apr 1996, p.65]

Looks like a Saturday morning cartoon (the characters all wear color-coded costumes) and unfortunately feels like one, too, with its thin characterizations, largely arbitrary action and feeble jokes.

A movie about a pair of garbagemen that falls into the general category of refuse. [28 Aug 1990, p.4C]

Mr. Girod is a fish out of water in the after-hours clubs and deserted industrial districts that constitute the sexual underworld of Brussels. His film feels more like what one would see from the top of a double-decker tourist bus than the work of someone who has immersed himself in a sexual subculture and its particular values.

Michael Mann (Miami Vice) produced this exercise in fascist chic, and it plays like a TV pilot filled out with a few cusswords and strokes of excess violence.

Surprisingly dry and dispassionate.

It's to Belushi's credit that, under such severely strained circumstances, he manages to come off as both likable and plausible - qualities that the venal Mr. Destiny otherwise lacks. [12 Oct 1990, p.B]

Soul Man is a slick, frightening piece of work. It's not only because Ron Reagan Jr. has a bit part in it that it seems the definitive Reagan-era film.

A nonstop underscore of Latin pop, as well as several arbitrarily interpolated dream sequences and animated passages don't do nearly enough to make up for the film's unfocused frenzy and lack of genuine comic invention.

Schaeffer thickens the general air of narcissism by directing Parker's Lucy essentially as a female version of himself, with the same puckish sense of humor and undertone of self-pity. Stiller's Bwick is an entertaining invention, an art-world variation on The-Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Prince though he, too, turns out to be mainly a foil to Joe's wonderfulness. Clearly, Eric Schaeffer has at least one really big fan. [8 March 1996, p.40]

A terminally mild attempt to revive the populist political comedy pioneered by Frank Capra in the 1930's.

The confusing screenplay, by John Eskow and Richard Rush, makes a few fumbling attempts to get a plot going (Downey crash-lands and has to be rescued by Gibson; later, their CIA bosses try to frame them for drug smuggling), but mainly the movie tries to get by on attitude, which is a mistake when Mel Gibson is its main perpetrator. [10 Aug 1990]

Starts on a note of relative naturalism and under Mr. La Salle's nuanced direction gradually becomes more and more unhinged until it concludes in an altogether different genre.

Mr. Freundlich's naturalistic sensibility gets in the way of the film's broad fantasy elements, turning what might have been a stylized romp like Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" into something a little too real for comfort.

Finds a few chuckles.

Mr. Guttenberg's direction of "Cat," is competent and unadorned, bringing out whatever qualities the text possesses -- mainly good-naturedness.

Holland's direction is functional, as befits the kind of cable fodder Thinner is destined to be.

The violence of Class of 1999 is so extreme, so redundant and so meaningless that Lester ends by nullifying his own message - it seems that brutality in the name of law and order is wrong, but that brutality in the name of entertainment is just fine. [11 May 1990, p.E]

However poorly the material has aged, Cimino has not come close to tapping its potential. [05 Oct 1990, p.D]

A youth comedy so relentlessly sordid and depressing that it's likely to send its audience straight into the arms of the nearest psycho-pharmacologist.

Modest, mildly engaging film.

Quickly moves beyond the oppressive into the cruel and unusual.

If the setup, with its theme of two radically different brothers drawn to the same woman, recalls Moonstruck, the follow-through of The January Man has none of the earlier film's pleasing symmetry or emotional force. Sarandon seems to get lost in the shuffle (in a way that suggests some last-minute trimming of her role), and the picture eventually trails off into a tangle of unresolved plot threads. [13 Jan 1989, p.K]

Should soon join Mr. Greenaway's last few efforts in obscurity.

It's not, however, a particularly pleasant surprise. Directed by 25-year-old Marc Rocco (son of actor Alex Rocco, who appears in the film), Dream a Little Dream places the usual plot inanities of the genre in the context of a wildly ambitious, baroque-surrealist style. The effect is a little as if the late Russian mystic Andrei Tarkovsky had directed "Police Academy VI." [9 March 1989, p.6]

Fitfully entertaining molehill of a movie.

It becomes hard to tell just what Castaneda was advocating, apart from the liberal use of psychedelic drugs.

Mr. Allen's work is compromised by an apparent inability to match his shots in a spatially coherent fashion. It's never easy to tell who is chasing whom and in which direction, a needless confusion that dampens many of the thrills and scuttles quite a few gags.

For the record, this movie stars George Burns and Charlie Schlatter, and its one distinguishing feature is a consistent tastelessness, which still doesn't manage to make it much fun. [08 Apr 1988, p.H]

In the end, Lisa's revolt seems as predictably programmatic, and as widely abstracted from observable human behavior, as the movie that contains her.

An amiable adventure illuminated at odd moments by some genuine inventiveness. [21 Dec 1986, p.12C]

The film's didactic passages cancel out its dramatic integrity, and the results are strangely neutral and unmoving.

Seemingly endless and punishingly unfunny.

This big-budget bubble-gum musical is appalling but compulsively watchable; it's the perfect crystallization of a 13-year-old girl's taste, circa 1980, complete with roller discos, dreamy boys, fashion shows, and fantasy father figures. Director Robert Greenwald has a lot of ideas, all of them bad: his style could be described as rapid misfire.

An unfocused, overplotted, painfully derivative comic fantasy.

The pretty-pretty visual style is evidence of a close study of Days of Heaven, as well as a complete misunderstanding of it. With Leo McKern and William Daniels; photographed by Nestor Almendros, forced into garish effects far below the level of his talent.

Too fuzzy-headed to rise above the pack.

Lopes along amiably enough, offering a few smiles and the standard bromides about the importance of being yourself and pursuing your dreams. It's tolerable but forgettable.

For the most part, the humor in House II is mild and conventional, and the suspense sequences never amount to much, thanks largely to the film's failure to play by any identifiable rules. In a film in which reality can be bent and rebent, following the director's whim of the moment, it is nearly impossible to establish any real sense of danger. Menace requires integrity, and "House II" doesn't have it.

As much as film buffs might enjoy recognizing references to "Motel Hell" and other drive-in classics, Mr. Zombie's encyclopedic approach to the genre results in a crowded, frenzied film in which no single idea is developed to a satisfying payoff.

The picture isn't bad, really—it's just a little too soft and eager to please, like the family films (circus pictures and suchlike) that John Wayne made in the 60s to soften his image.

It settles uneasily on the back of a verbal comic like Hanks—the movie keeps setting up gags that never quite materialize, and Hanks, unable to fill out his underwritten part with slapstick, is left stranded. Without any big laughs to even out the film's tone, the balance gradually shifts to the grim paranoia of the basic conception, and the movie that emerges seems oddly bleak and melancholic.

It's a movie that doesn't have an original thought in its head, and seems to like it that way.

Reynolds turns the emphasis from the action scenes to the depressed emotional state of his strangely disengaged protagonist, and the result is a film haunted by an unstated, largely undramatized sense of melancholy, very personal but almost completely inarticulate.

Aimed squarely at adolescents in subconscious search of strong father figures, most of the movie is dull and familiar. [18 Aug 1987, p.C]

It has a lack of ambition and energy that is almost total: It's the most this movie can do to roll over and ask for a little more lotion on its back. [22 July 1987]

Inhabited by a genuine spirit of cruelty, both toward its characters and its audience.

Though the slow, obvious "Two If By Sea" probably won't do much to advance Bullock's standing as America's current sweetheart, it shouldn't do irreparable damage to it, either. [13 Jan 1996, p.21]

The crosscutting between the two plot lines is so feeble and intrusive that it destroys whatever faint narrative momentum the film possesses.

Cary Medoway uses backlighting and spatially distorting lenses to give the film the hyped-up look of a rock video, but his handling of actors is so inept that he must rely on the rock score to make the most basic emotional points.

Though clearly meant as a heartwarmer in the longstanding holiday tradition, the film comes off as strange and sour.

Mr. Piccirillo's direction reflects a basic knowledge of stagecraft but no discernable sense of filmmaking. The dull television-style close-ups march relentlessly across the screen, leaving only the ghostly trails of badly transferred video images behind.

The fight scenes are staged cleanly enough by Newt Arnold, a veteran assistant director (to Sam Peckinpah, among others) making his debut at the helm. But the contest format is hopelessly repetitive and inert, the characters would seem underdeveloped in a comic book, and the restricted setting ensures that the action will never develop any real scale or velocity. The Chinese may take it on the chin in Bloodsport, but their own movies are infinitely better.

On the one hand, the action stuff is surprisingly imaginative and well filmed; on the other, the characters are the usual bunch of self-parodic dodoes that the post-Spielberg action cinema has accustomed us to, so it's impossible to believe in the situations anyway.

Between the Predators' dripping their glow-in-the-dark green blood and the Aliens' getting their rubber cement mucous all over everything, this is certainly a very sticky movie, though not, ultimately, a very frightening or commanding one.

Director Jeannot Szwarc strains hard for spectacular visual effects, though he's barely able to compose a competent close-up.

There's not much for the viewer to do during God, Sex & Apple Pie except check off the obligatory plot points -- taking comfort in the thought that as each cliché appears, the film is one step closer to the blessed relief of its closing credits.

A model French psychological drama in which very little action occurs but feelings and intuitions are documented with precision and discretion.

Fans of the genre -- or "gore hounds" as they are known in fandom -- will find plenty to enjoy in Mr. West's enthusiastic approach to his work.

When the smoke clears, only one thing is certain: Howard the Duck has laid an egg.

For most of its length, Revenge of the Nerds II is pleasantly stupid summer fun, though it does have a nasty way of turning inspirational on you.

He's (Marco Filiberti) his own best audience, and Adored is best left to his own enjoyment.

A tedious, lamebrained horror movie, which begins with the promising premise of a haunted house in the suburbs (poltergeists in the barbecue pit?) and quickly degenerates into a display of pretentious camera angles by director Stuart Rosenberg.

The film is slow-moving, overlong and never more ambitious than a TV feature, though younger kids will probably respond to O'Neal's amiability. [16 Aug 1997, p.24]

Plays more like a catalog than a movie... a tedious, unimaginative affair.

With its general spirit of tabloid scandalmongering and frequent cutaways to an oddly enhanced Melanie Griffith in scanty panties, the point of reference seems less Victorian fiction than Victoria's Secret.

Director Ronald Neame brings his impersonal British craftsmanship to this 1979 feature, so it isn't a complete bust, but it's a long way from the apocalyptic satisfactions of his Poseidon Adventure.

A fatally compromised, half-realized execution. [ 10 Jul 1992]

A bland, half-finished film that seems to have been conceived as off-peak cable fodder.

Dugan can`t find a tone that allows him to preserve the shock of the gags while minimalizing their physical painfulness.

The film dissolves into a series of diminishing anticlimaxes, ending on a note of portentous ambiguity. To the last, Mr. Levin maintains his uneasy balance of reportage and melodrama.

A tedious, not-at-all titillating exploitation film.

George Stevens’s plodding, straitlaced direction takes much of the edge off this 1941 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle.

What's lacking is the sense of structure that might have made Van Wilder more than a meandering succession of random gags.

There hasn`t been a movie quite like Police Academy 4 since, well . . . "Police Academy 3." Make that exactly like, because here are the same characters, the same situations and the same jokes (most of them focused on damage suffered in the genital region) that have served the series since its inauspicious debut in 1984.

Raffill and Steve Feke take credit for the original screenplay, though Steven Spielberg might have a different opinion. [15 Aug 1988, p.2]

It's fast-paced and full of gaudy action, yet it's thoroughly unsatisfying, largely because it's so lazy: once Stallone (also the screenwriter) and director George Pan Cosmatos have sketched out the standard genre archetypes, they leave it at that, not bothering to fill in the niceties of characterization, plausibility, motivation, and suspense.

Even the imaginative gore can't hide the musty scent of Todd Farmer's screenplay.

Directed by John Schlesinger, Eye for an Eye is a repellent, cynical piece of work a movie that exploits violence while pretending to deplore it. [12 Jan 1996, p.33]

Superman IV is a pathetic appendage to the series, a dull, shoddy film that makes the minimal 1950s TV series seem rife with production values by comparison. [27 July 1987, p.10C]

Less interested in politics than in profitably flattering the suspicions and resentments of its intended teenage audience.

The first starring vehicle for shock comic Andrew Dice Clay, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, turns out to be the kind of detective spoof worn out 30 years ago by Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, though refitted with salty language, graphic violence and an attitude toward women that makes the Marquis de Sade look like Phil Donahue. [11 Jul 1990, p.18]

The results, to judge from the examples here, have been stuffy and disappointing, an unholy alliance between Playboy Channel prurience and PBS cultural alibis.

Alan Johnson`s direction is so limply amateurish that the entire project quickly descends to the level of a cheesy backlot production. The action lurches along without the slightest regard for logic or pacing, and there are Dominick`s commercials with more sophisticated characterization.

Even for John Hughes, who writes movies in less time than most people write postcards, The Great Outdoors seems unusually slapdash.

Selleck's persona can seem coherent and mildly pleasant in the airless, miniature world of series television, but when he walks into the larger, more physical world of movies he melts away. There's too great a disparity between his bulk and his whining delivery, and he carries himself awkwardly on screen, as if he knew he was taking up too much space. [3 Feb 1989, p.A]

A feature-length commercial for the Nintendo electronic games system, so thinly disguised that it wouldn't even fool a Reagan-appointed FCC commissioner. [15 Dec 1989, p.G]

If Make a Wish is meant to be a parody, it lacks one essential element: humor. If it's meant to be a horror movie, it lacks the corresponding qualities of shock and suspense. It's almost enough to make "Friday the 13th" look like a masterpiece. Almost.

A loose but often amusing collection of gags.

The material is nothing but a mass of programmed emotions and bumptious rabble rousing, but that isn't enough for Clark—he's got to make it even dumber by filling it with gross caricatures, incoherent action, and Irish music. And what this man does to actors, I wouldn't do to cockroaches.

It's true that there has been a shocking dearth of talking-horse pictures lately, but even so, Hot to Trot has few pleasures to offer.

Remains a sadly earthbound thing, mired in a dismal realism that lies far from its natural environment.

The crude technique of director Sean Cunningham borrows whatever sophistication it has from Halloween's precise and elegant point-of-view shots of the killer, though Cunningham often cheats by using the ploy inconsistently. For all its shoddiness, the film manages, just barely, to achieve its ignoble goals--it delivers what it promises.

Landis never bothers to account for the friendship that springs up spontaneously between these two antipathetic types, but then he never bothers to account for anything in this loose progression of recycled Abbott and Costello riffs and fumbled Strangelovean satire.

Instead of deepening the material, however, the narrative twists feel like purely formal interventions, intended to keep the film moving toward its foregone, heavily moralistic conclusion. Mr. Smith Gets a Hustler is faultlessly professional but finally slight.

A ski party movie in which the clothes are a little more revealing than they were 35 years ago, the practical jokes are a little more tasteless, and the uncertainty over sex is pretty much nonexistent.

The question remains: why work so hard to make something deliberately bad, when the world is hardly running a shortage of mediocre movies?

As silly as it sounds, but strangely dull.

Though Mr. Hayata seems convinced that he is a colorful, romantic figure, the movie itself is crushingly mundane and unlikely to attract any audience beyond close relatives.

As a movie, Controlled Chaos is often bumpy, naïve and erratically acted.

There's some solid talent here, but Gottlieb's overemphatic direction reduces them all to broad caricature--the kind of crazed mugging that isn't often seen outside the boundaries of Saturday morning kiddie shows. [13 Feb 1987, p.A]

The film strains mightily to be flashy and hip but finishes more in the realm of the merely distasteful.

The coarse material, from a screenplay by Seth Winston and Michael J. Nathanson, is roughed up even more by Dragoti's abrasive exaggeration, both of performance (there's a terrifying sequence in which Hicks finally gets her long dreamed-of engagement ring and goes into a frenzy of triumph and delight) and of visual style (visits to the office of sinister shrink Wallace Shawn are filmed in weird expressionist off-angles). [14 Apr 1989, p.D]

As Corky, Mr. Kattan never finds an appealing perspective on his character. Sweetness is not this gifted comedian's strong suit, and in its place Mr. Kattan offers a desperate eagerness to please, a far less charming quality.

While "Dumb and Dumber" possessed a bracing, genuine vulgarity, this new film is more often merely disgusting as it piles up jokes involving various bodily discharges and the unpleasant things that can be done with them.

The silliness still outweighs the steaminess. [1 May 1990, p.2]

Spectators will indeed sit open-mouthed before the screen, not screaming but yawning.

Kinjite is clearly the work of dedicated industry veterans, all of whom decided to go home after lunch. [03 Mar 1989, p.P]

At 70 minutes, Cupid's Mistake is short, but then, so is our time on this planet.

Comedy doesn't have to be refined or original to be entertaining, but it ought to have a little flair. The gags of this "Academy" are blunt and literal, delivered without the careful set-ups or rhythms that, in the hands of a Laurel and Hardy, can make physical comedy into its own kind of poetry. [22 Mar 1988, p.C3]

CRUSHingly unfunny. [24 Dec 1997, p.34]

The performers never find the right spin on the dialogue, and DeSimone never finds the right rhythm in his pacing, to make these deliberate cliches take off into comedy. A stodgy literalness in DeSimone`s approach suffocates the joke.

Armed and Dangerous is an extremely violent, often mean-spirited comedy in which most of the gags depend on the absurdly excessive use of force. Jokes like these are designed to appeal to adolescent power fantasies, and while kids may love them, adults are likely to be bored by their repetitiousness and senselessness.

Ottman doesn't have the firm grasp of tone necessary to make his deliberate ambiguities seem other than simple confusion, nor the sense of humor necessary to turn the deliberate clichés into effective satire.

In Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy continues his one-man war against the female gender. Those women he doesn't kill outright are punched, maimed and slugged with garbage cans. But apparently they deserve it-there isn't a single female character in the film who isn't a prostitute. [17 Nov 1989, p.A]

The main problem here is less a lack of competence than a lack of conviction. No one involved in the film believes for a second in the story that's being told, and so there is no real sense of danger, no suspense, and no warmth in the romantic interludes. Shanghai Surprise must have been meant to be a light-hearted romp, but even a romp requires a touch of substance. [31 Aug 1986, p.8]

Desperately, depressingly in thrall to the Farrelly formula.

The character designs are flat and derivative, the backgrounds crude and uninviting, and the movements jerky and minimal. It's a sad excuse for a movie, but then, it isn't really meant to be one. It's a commercial with a ticket price.

Jaws is looking a bit long in the tooth these days. As the venerable series (b. 1975) sets off on its fourth paddle around the pool, Jaws the Revenge is definitely dragging its tail fins. Give a poor fish a break.