Dennis Harvey

A sub-Tennessee Williams potboiler triangle between restless sexpot, impotent husband, and hunky handyman ever-so-slowly congeals into a lumpy gumbo of thriller elements in Grand Isle.

Despite retaining the basic narrative architecture of its classic source, Hollywood Seagull too often feels like a trite, sudsy take on privilege, ambition and angst among showbiz players and wannabes — one that seemingly exists mostly to showcase real-life C-listers, aspirants and pals in the tradition of Henry Jaglom’s films.

The referentiality of “Kuso,” its general snark, and even its defensive self-criticism (characters state “I hate this movie!” more than once) fail to make it any more funny or inspired, let alone any less of a shapeless chore to sit through.

A pat, hollow exercises with few tricks (or treats) up its sleeve.

Beyond de rigueur jump scares, Mary has little real atmosphere or suspense, and that is at least partly due to the fact that its supernatural force is so generically ill-defined.

Despite its occasional visual interest, avant-garde package is far from the accessible tortured-artist portrait helmer essayed 15 years ago in "Vincent." Even committed dance and experimental cinema fans are likely to find this rough sledding.

Despite surface polish, this indie feels like a classroom exercise that checks off the basic technical and narrative-beat boxes needed to get a passing grade, yet never develops any real personality of its own or raison d’etre.

Fangs aside, it sticks with the same basic menu of T&A and lowbrow humor.

A disappointingly rote entry in the '70s teen nostalgia sweepstakes.

It’s not a total wash, but the eventually dreary mix of vague religious morality and rather ponderous horror suggests Katagiri should pay more attention to script development next time out.

Uncertain whether to go for straight suspense or gross-out effects, genre in-joking or schlock cinema-of-parodic-excess, Eli Roth's backwoods horror opus Cabin Fever seldom sticks with any one tactic.

This aimless, lifeless time-killer about four teenage girls prepping for their rock-band gig in a school talent show proves entirely the wrong choice.

Ass Backwards proves that no amount of comic talent can shine — or raise a chuckle — in the absence of even halfway decent material.

It all seems slick, intense, and unpleasant in the same hollow way “Martyrs” did, because all the cruelty is so meaningless.

An inauspicious feature debut for director Harv Glazer and all three scenarists, the "Big"-meets-breakdancing comedy will be kickin' it to ancillary by swimsuit season.

Solidly pro in overall packaging yet cliched, pedestrian and indistinct in specific contributions, this thriller never finds (let alone raises) its own pulse.

Reasonably slick but empty, Eloise is no “Session 9” as far as haunted-former-mental-hospital horrors go. Heck, it’s not even a “Grave Encounters 2.”

Even as a luxe fantasy of danger and hotness, the film falls short — though competently assembled in general, real high style is lacking. Too many scenes take place in empty warehouses or obviously dressed sound stages, budgetary concerns apparently hobbling the story’s feinted milieu of decadent haunts of the criminal-rich.

Evan M. Wiener’s screenplay throws in too many disparate elements without developing any of them very effectively, while Grau’s direction is slick but unable to provide the tension or consistency needed.

Though the film ultimately hinges on a “forbidden” Muslim-Christian romance, almost nothing is made of the enormous hurdles that would be present in this time and place.

A decent cast and fast pace make Pixie easy enough to take as disposable entertainment. Yet it also has that annoying edge unique to films that strike an attitude of rakish sophistication while actually serving up lowbrow quips about prison rape, fat people and menstruation.

While the 1984 film has aged, its now-familiar jolts still pack more punch than this pic's recycled ones, which sometimes register so tepidly as to cause snickers.

Vehicle for Dana Carvey as a chameleonic crime-fighting imbecile is noisy, colorful and fart-gag-filled enough to amuse undiscriminating auds under the age of 10.

This generic horror meller would be most at home debuting on Syfy -- perhaps double-billed with "Pinata: Survival Island."

Nobody — not even viewers willing to settle for good, unclean B-movie fun — is done any favors by something as crude as (re)Assignment, which gracelessly mashes together hardboiled crime-melodrama cliches and an unintentionally funny “Oh no! I’m a chick now!!” gender-change narrative hook.

Its cast struggling against material with little real-world or emotional logic, the attempted “surreal” elements uninspired both conceptually and aesthetically, this is a misfire whose intentions are as murky as its results are hapless.

Juggles three separate time periods -- and is completely formulaic in each one.

A few minutes of good snowboarding footage -- all in the first reel, alas -- after which it's strictly downhill, bunny-slope style.

There are enough formulaic elements, especially teens meeting gory deaths, to keep undiscerning viewers in their seats. But the script (co-written by Erik and sibling Carson) stumbles in its climactic revelations, with an even worse epilogue bound to send patrons out rolling their eyes in unamused disbelief.

Rates a notch below the KISS-centric "Detroit Rock City" and a couple above Jerry Springer's "Ringmaster" -- in other words, closer to stupid-fun than stupid-toxic.

For those who enjoy fashion-model-looking twentysomethings yelling at each other in bathrooms while doing too much cocaine, voila! Heaven is a place called London.

A nail in the coffin if not the heart of teen comedies.

It’s hard to imagine anyone, however, having a “Eureka!” experience watching these lame movies, this latest least of all.

A relatively pain-free, if brain-free, diversion.

Hectic, sketchy and finally dull.

A catchy but irrelevant title is the first of many problems with Excuse Me for Living, which throws together a lot of superficially flashy elements that never gel in any organic way.

Mead’s six Vampire Academy books (there’s also an ongoing spinoff series, “Bloodlines”) are relatively brainy and complex within their young-adult subgenre, but their virtues have been reduced to a derivative hash here.

Making underwhelming use of its not-bad ... conceit, Benson’s sci-fi-tinged script is not at all ingeniously plotted, insists we care about tritely sketched characters, and is never credible enough to transcend an air of escalating silliness.

Raze is a brutally monotonous fight-to-the-death-contest actioner whose novelty element — all-female competitors — is undermined by lack of imagination on every other level.

Tweedy, dreary, and unconvincing. ... It’s dismaying that so little drama is wrung out of the tale, and that what we get too often feels like a cliché-riddled romantic pulp.

Bringing absolutely no fresh angles to a time-tested formula that's seemed particularly overworked of late.

Director Anthony Nardolillo and writer Michael Corcoran’s film strikes a pose of sly ingeniousness throughout that is uncorroborated by any actual cleverness, surprise, wit, tension, thrills or much else you’d hope for in a high-end-heist tale.

Yet the overall look, though derivative ("The Matrix," "Blade Runner," "Waterworld," etc.), rates as Battlefield's one non-guilty pleasure.

A psychological thriller requires some psychology as well as thrills, two things almost entirely absent from Gut. Its title isn't the only terse thing about this monotonous quasi-horror tale, which aims for a minimalist intensity by providing precious little character detailing or location color.

Credit for being offbeat can only do so much to redeem a neither-fish-nor-fowl bore like After the Dark, whose exploitable elements go tastefully unexploited while its gestures toward profundity turn out to be playing air guitar.

Looking good but lacking much in the way of personality or gray matter -- rather like its characters -- Valentine is a straightforward slasher pic that's acceptably scary until a weak finale.

Vanquish isn’t bad so much as inert — nothing here is convincing, tense, kinetic, outrageous, or silly enough to give the movie even fleeting life. The script is so by-the-numbers, the performers can hardly hide their disinterest, a feeling soon to be shared by viewers

It’s a self-canceling combination of the earnest and the clueless, its technical competency shorn of any leavening style or personality.

Misses with its blowhard treatment of a silly, obvious script. Results might hazard "Battlefield Earth" comparison if new pic were a tad more fun.

This dumb, derivative teen slasher movie would be uninspiring coming from any writer-director, let alone one with several genre classics under his belt.

While the movie doesn’t work, it isn’t idiosyncratic enough even to hold attention as a misfired oddity.

It’s an embarrassing vanity showcase that’s deliberately campy without actually being fun, and whose stalled-adolescent “transgression” may only appeal to a few actual adolescents.

At nearly 100 minutes — way too many for material this flimsy — Followed even has time for a couple clumsily maudlin bits, not excluding brief yet awesomely trite address of “the homeless issue” in downtown L.A. A movie like this doesn’t need to have a social conscience. It ought to have worried first about having a brain, period.

The budget may be low, but the level of scares and imagination are lower still in Along Came the Devil, a feeble indie horror film that sometimes seems like a straight retread and other times feels like a movie aimed specifically at Christian audiences.

The humor misfires painfully even when it just tries to be charming.

The kind of willfully obscure, excessively stylized exercise that's bound to exasperate most viewers while enthralling a few.

The four-years-in-the-making, badly recycled (not to mention awful) sequel might stain the honor of the Lampoon label if it hadn't already produced several even worse films.

Not bad enough to qualify as a memorable dud, multinational production nonetheless misses mark on every level.

This turgid fantasy thriller, boasting scant thrills or imagination, douses a mystic time-travel concept with soap operatic hand-wringing to mawkishly unconvincing effect.

Its intrigue and action neither very well developed nor integrated, Showdown in Manila feels like a checklist of elements typical of such movies — hey, where’s our training montage?!? — with arthritic-level connective tissue.

Billy Boy is the worst kind of grab for “indie cred”: It’s exasperatingly undercooked and arted-up, failing on basic levels of character definition and narrative coherence, too often feeling like a classic indulgence for pretty-boy actors playing tough.

A cheaper, cheesier sequel that's worse than its predecessor on every level (save being a half-hour shorter) and takes no special advantage of the stereoscopic process.

Its content and execution are innocuous to the point of tedium, while the protagonist is no undervalued sweetie but the kind of grating personality that can clear a room.

This tepid comedy-drama is, lamentably, aptly titled.

Bombastically dumb new chiller that probably would have been called "Killer App" if that title hadn't already been used several times.

By turns turgid, embarrassing and plain off-putting.

The greasepaint-by-numbers terror is often so laughably rote, not to mention so poorly written and acted, that some viewers will find considerable entertainment value here — albeit very little of the intentional kind.

It’s bad enough that the film doesn’t have the smarts to actually satirize its inspirational source. But bizarrely, it doesn’t really send up slasher tropes, either, while lacking the skillset to take play them seriously.

Gore and nastiness are plentiful, but they’re just wearyingly gratuitous rather than truly shocking.

The Final Project does feel like a student film, though not in a way that benefits its own found-footage conceit.

Disappointing in every aspect.

Provides scant entertainment value, intentional or otherwise.

Hapless, laughless movie.

Pic's nastiness is so insistent, one-dimensional and excessive it risks self-parody.

This is an unconscionably lazy piece of work, the kind of movie that makes you marvel how people will put months of work into creating a feature film whose script seems to have been written in a few hours’ uninspired haste.

Obvious and exploitative even by low-bar youthpic standards.

Stridently dumb action thriller.

Six just wants to shock, though his imagination is so primitive that the effort is strained and a bit pathetic. Initially abrasive, the whole enterprise grows simply tedious well before the now-epically-scaled titular phenom is unveiled in the prison yard.

This quasi-horror tale of bickering vacationers running afoul of disturbed locals strings together various well-worn clichés with a notable lack of suspense, plausibility and style, while excelling in the realm of characters behaving like complete idiots.

It’s very hard to satirize things that are already inherently ridiculous, and mockumentary Reality Queen! has the misfortune of being even more vacuous — not to mention less funny — than the empty-calorie celebrities it parodies.

A disastrous stab at contemporary farce.

Inexplicably mixing lamer-than-lame "bad taste" comedy with yea worse traumatized-assault-victim histrionics, pic's only entertainment value lies in viewer weighing whether pic is primarily a.) offensive b.) amateurish c.) pathetic or d.) a cry for help.

Paris Hilton has already ushered a remarkable three features into the Internet Movie Database's "Bottom 100." The Hottie and the Nottie will make it an even four.

Bad in ways that sometimes provoke a disbelieving guffaw, but more often stir pained embarrassment.

Just when you think this nothing-burger can’t get any more exasperating, it spends a full 10 post-fadeout minutes on final credits.