Dave Kehr

Self-conscious camp, the lowest artistic category known to man.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Quickly moves beyond the oppressive into the cruel and unusual.

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.

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

Too campy to work as straight drama and too violent and sordid to function as comedy, Vulgar is, truly and thankfully, a one-of-a-kind work.

Villainy toward the infant class now comes from Jon Voight, descending to the depths of his 37-year-career.