Desson Thomson

Trapped in Paradise, a heist caper starring Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey, gets lost in a snow flurry of subplots and formulaic run-and-chase -- right around the time you've settled in for a good comedy.

Let's talk about it quickly, because the thumbs of both my hands have gone similarly crazy. They're pointing downward and refuse to budge until I finish this review.

David Gale deserves the chair for its brutal assault on subtlety.

Stumbles mindlessly in all directions.

You judge a movie by its own standards, right? Bulletproof, starring Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler, is rambunctious, crude, ridiculous, violent and -- incidentally -- very funny.

With no real comedy to enjoy, it's torture to watch Diesel undergo a predictable change from emotionless soldier to loving family man. Makes you want to spit out your pacifier in disgust.

It just doesn't work...This isn't a blend of modern and classic so much as a collision.

Here are some of Summer School's favorite things: idiocy, illiteracy, irresponsibility, drunkenness, dumbness and debauchery. Piqued? [24 July 1987]

Although the movie is set in the rock world and, therefore, should be a sort of extended music video, it's devoid of even MTV-caliber originality.

Hampered by Niall Johnson's script, which is often confusing, muddy and ultimately cliche-ridden.

Sadly, this movie is a far cry from the atmospheric, even thoughtfully crafted original, which made you truly scared for the unkempt, everyman victims. But this latest version, though just as grisly, is literally hackwork, and stars a forgettable, airbrushed cast of slaughterees.

This movie is about the worst thing Chan has done in the United States.

It's sheer agony to sit through, and not for the reasons Lee would relish. It's just bad.

Just a few more tweaks and Crossover could have been something special -- a truly terrible movie to savor for the ages. But nooo, this street ball movie -- has to settle for middle-of-the-road badness.

Tries to combine humor with ghostly horror but excels at neither.

She (Madonna) really ought to be tried for impersonating Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Or playing a second-rate Hitchcock mystery blonde -- she's even named Rebecca.

Does a masterful job of building menace until about halfway through.

An adolescent romance that isn't smart enough to mirror "When Harry Met Sally" or crudely amusing enough to get close to "American Pie."

The movie's gentle and friendly, but nowhere close to exciting. It would be hard to believe that anyone involved with this production --considers Snow Dogs anything more than phoned-in business as usual.

Like a wounded yeti, Batman & Robin drags itself through icicle-heavy sets, dry-ice fog and choking jungle vines, before dying in a frozen heap. Unfortunately, that demise occurs about 20 minutes into the movie, which leaves you in the cold for approximately 106 minutes.

The movie that Disney uses to explore this premise drips with so much corporate good-neighbor syrup, you might want to wear something waterproof. And Penn's performance is, at best, ripe for discussion.

The humor works beautifully until Marshall decides to beat the comedy over the head and drum us, once again, with this relentless message: "Mentally challenged people in love say the darndest things!"

You won't feel enlightened, just let down

Don't even consider this when it hits the Blockbuster shelves of shame.

Another product from Industrial Light & Magic, this fire-breathing, soaring creature is a technical wonder to behold. But they've skimped on everything else. The script douses the movie's fiery potential and director Rob Cohen soaks all remaining embers with his cheap, made-for-TV direction.

Screenwriter Lona Williams and director Michael Patrick Jann spare no attempt to show characters at their zaniest, wackiest or most grotesque. The effect is disconcerting. Is this light comedy or dark satire? It ends up being neither.

Avoid this movie unless a) your child has refused to eat until you take him or her, or b) your house is being fumigated to kill an infestation of mosquitoes with the West Nile virus.

Here's my favorite part: It's only 87 minutes long. But for the most part, this movie is just another bland, fair-to-middling vehicle for two emerging, fledgling stars.

Kids who love Pokemon movies are no doubt going to see this movie, and they'll have a blast watching it. Very soon they will become older and more sensible and understand how terrible these movies are.

A front-end collision of a romance.

There's nothing to recommend about this film except its sheer innocuousness. And Bill Murray's off-screen voicing as Garfield adds no "Robin Williams" element to the movie.

This is comic-book coverage. If the strength of the novel was the interplay between Wolfe's dry-white reportage and the sensational, tabloid-tacky humorous events he wrote about, "Vanities"-the-movie just goes for the tacky jugular.

It does wonders to a critic to know that [Britney] could be a continuing font of teen and post-teen kitsch for years to come.

It's too manufactured and deliberate to be persuasive.

For about 10 minutes, it works.

It goes down (and comes back up) like a hairball.

So full of creativity, so subversive, so alive.

Much of the movie -- which Murphy wrote with a small posse of collaborators -- is taken up with the torturously dull, not to mention unbelievable, romance between Norbit and Kate (a disappointingly lackluster Newton) and the tedious agenda of Cuba Gooding Jr. as a schemer-manipulator.

A third-rate love story.

There's not much zest here, even with Mike Myers's energetic attempts to steal the movie as a cross-eyed flight instructor.

This movie is so wearying in its mediocrity, the inappropriate Ronica almost registers as dramatic relief.

Although the hallmarks of Rudolph movies can be found everywhere -- they don't add up to the usual magic this time.

Sometimes in horror movies, bad acting is effective, its very woodenness contributing to the sense of robotic horror. That ain't happening here. These guys are just bad actors.

A classic like this deserves to be unearthed! After all, this picture is likely to command a pedestal of its own at the local video store. Just check for shelves marked either "Sharon Stone" or "Staff's Worst Picks of 1999."

The comic equivalent of microwaved leftover food -- and pretty stale at that.

It's a soap opera posing as moral outrage.

Whatever the title of the next installment, this movie is certainly One best forgotten.

There's no escaping the hackneyed plot or Mayfield's conventional hand. So don't go.

I watched Mona. I felt like drowning.

It is horrible. Time curls up and dies while this Hilary Duff vehicle wheels its weary, conventional way along.

Reprises all the tedium of slasher flicks.

After watching this movie, which stars Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Bates and Gabriel Byrne, I was moved only to find my own bridge to leap from.

Cro-Magnon-dumb...Less funny than your own funeral.

Feels patently inauthentic.

This suspense drama, which stars Sally Field, Kiefer Sutherland and Joe Mantegna, tries desperately to press your vigilante buttons. But its manipulative agenda is so transparent, you don't know whether to take exception or laugh it off.

Its main purpose -- and no, you are not experiencing ocular breakdown -- is spiritual.

To take Showgirls that seriously (as either trash-art or appalling pornography) wouldn't be worth the exertion.

In terms of actual social conscience, the movie gets a demagogic, rabble-rousing F. It also gets a failed grade for honest writing.

Ed...is thrown together with such little concern for originality or its audience, it's appalling.

Feckless and crude without any particularly funny redeeming value. If there's anything more to this poor excuse of a movie than immediately meets the eye, I'll get back to you.

More sluggish than a funeral barge, cheaper than a sale at K mart, it's a nerd, it's a shame, it's Superman IV.

As if aware that Congo is the least interesting adventure ever filmed, screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (who once wrote a funny movie called "Moonstruck") tries to inoculate the activities with humor.

If there's one piece of wisdom to be culled from this botched project, it's this: No one gets Carter.

The projectors in the theater practically shut down with boredom.

Why sit through a lesser imitation, when you could just rent "Heathers" and those other movies for a far more enjoyable time? Drop-dead bitchery? Been there, done that.

If this sounds like "Tootsie" with a ball, well, it is. Screenwriter Bradley Allenstein should be hauled up in writer's court for his shameless cribbing of that far superior comedy. Someone call a foul.

Just a few guilty laughs, a predictable resolution and repeated close-ups of that dog jerking its head to one side, doing the cute thing.

The 1994 "Speed," which starred Bullock and Keanu Reeves, was hardly "King Lear" on a bus, but it was an entertaining ride. But this movie is nothing but pain to sit through.

Not just a bad thriller but also a thing of pain.

Stars Samuel L. Jackson in the worst role of his career -- one hopes.

It's hard to imagine an audience that won't break up in laughter at this bewildering mixed message: Enjoy this movie, but you really shouldn't be watching it.

A truly awful and extremely loud scareflick.

Insufferably cloying experience.

Isn't appropriate for any innocent child -- assuming such lovely creatures still exist. But boys and girls who enjoy surprise attacks in their entertainment (of the aforementioned toilet variety) are going to have a blast. Sad but true.

This movie reeks, stinks, smells and destroys life as we know it with one olfactory destructive blast.

Let's accentuate the positive: Saving Silverman really stinks. No, really. It's bad. Awful.

The remake neither pays perceptive tribute to the original nor updates it in anything but hackneyed form.

It's something no one should watch.

A blundering cringefest, thanks to unintentionally laughable dialogue, hackneyed writing and uninspired direction.

This time, the jokes about dead animals, gunk in the hair, incest and all other taboos are flatter than the road kill Gilly finds himself picking up for a living.

In the uncertain zone between dumb and truly twisted lies 8MM, a movie that will baffle and disgust you in one disconcerting experience.

Uninspired baseball romance.

I suggest you think of this movie as another bad sausage from the Warner Bros. meat-packing factory. And you should think of this review as a government health warning. Eat this thing at your peril.

All failed concept and misfired comedy.

It's depressing enough to sit through an unfunny comedy, but it's worse to watch Falk, Penn and Berg having to earn a living like this.

Very young children, it should be said, probably won't have any problem with the movie. It's bright and perky on the surface. But for anyone mature enough to pay closer attention, it's going to fall short of expectations.

The movie spares no effort to reach out to the crudest, youngest audiences it can.

Director Renny Harlin, whose colon-studded credits include "Die Hard 2: Die Harder" and "Exorcist: The Beginning," knows the deal here: Pay homoerotic homage to youth and beauty, crank up the heavy metal on the soundtrack, and spare no effort to backlight the omnipresent rain.

I wouldn't want you to consider even renting this thing. It would only encourage another prequel, this time featuring two dumb toddlers who keep walking into doors and become great pals. Call it "Duh and Duh."

There's something about Orchid that's appealing, at least for the so-bad-it's-good aficionados. It inspires a guilty combination of howling amusement and rubbernecky fascination, aided by the overpowering, Brazil-meets-lounge music, the sultry images supplied by cinematographer Gale Tattersall and the life's-a-decadent-dinner-party sets of art director Carlos Conti.

This movie pulls out so many bad-action-movie cliches, you wonder if this is a how-not-to primer.

Absolutely awesome in its relentless mediocrity.

Guys, I'm telling you: Don't go to this movie! It's "Chasing Amy" with guns! You're walking into a trap! This is for fans of the holy couple, but they already know that.

At no point should anyone mistake this for an actual movie. This is an extended beach video that will leave no one swept away.

As a child, I thought pure hell meant eternal agony in the flames of Satan. Now I know it's looking down at your watch and realizing Serving Sara isn't even halfway through.

The story moves so slowly and obviously, you don't even need to be in the theater very much (or your living room when the video comes out) to follow it.

A pretty dreary affair to sit through. It's not even scary.

The only quandary in this film is in where to begin despising it.

Someone definitely inhaled too much before making this one.

There are two distinctive features to the movie: the mind-numbingly banal plot as one chases another who chases another, and all the offensive material.

We're only a little spooked, only a little amused and, by extension, only a little entertained.

There's more suspense in On Golden Pond. And when the predictable ending comes, it has none of the titanic man-versus-beast struggle of the original. It all happens so quickly, you wonder if you've missed something. But, no you haven't, because there it is -- the familiar calm sea . . . of credits.

It's gotten to the point where Gooding's presence on a marquee practically guarantees we'll be bashing our heads against the seat in front of us. Bonk, bonk, bonk.

In a sense, this is a horror film, worse than anything Andy Kaufman could dream up, in which Green tries to outgross himself.

How bad is it? Let me count just some of the ways.

Date Movie, alas, is here to remind us that slapstick can be just plain bad. These are sight gags best appreciated with a blindfold.

Let's cut to the chase: We're talking "Ishtar of the Apes."

This is definitely for people who 1) love the video game, 2) think Slater and Dorff are eminently watchable, no matter what bad flick they're in and 3) are wearing industrial-strength ear plugs.

Like Nate, we are mere Notties. And we are supposed to feel oh-so privileged for getting to watch Paris through the glass.