Gary Arnold

It's difficult to predict if audiences will be patient enough with Best Defense to allow it the shakedown time necessary to hit a funny stride. But the movie confirms a flair for comedy that may pay dividends when the filmmakers' rapport with the actors is strong enough to discipline and perhaps improve dodgy material. [25 Jul 1984, p.D3]

The Amityville Horror is a feeble excuse for a haunted-house thriller, but given the source, who could ask for more?

Content to pick up where the skid marks from "Smokey and the Bandit II" left off, The Cannonball Run quickly establishes itself as an aggressive shambles, the latest exercise in amateurism from facetious professionals. [20 June 1981, p.B1]

What really compromises Midnight Madness is not inexperience or subsophomoric humor, inconvenient as they frequently are, but derivativeness. This vehicle can't quite build up its own head of steam when it seems to be assembled with spare parts from National Lampoon's Animal House and Scavenger Hunt. [13 Feb 1980, p.B4]

The interludes of terror are strictly functional and literal-minded: If it's not a murder spectacle, it's a tease that anticipates a subsequent atrocity. [25 Nov 1983, p.C2]

Jaws 3-D makes a conclusive case for terminating further sequels to "Jaws," as if one were needed. It also reinforces the impression that 3-D is unlikely to make a sustained comeback until its optical inconveniences and dependence on hokey scare effects can be overcome. [23 July 1983, p.C1]

A round of misfires from title to denouement, the new comedy "Modern Problems" is a modern problem for moviegoers: the latest rummy example of that strange abomination, the unfunny "fun" movie, victimized by utter confusion about its genre, tone and audience. [30 Dec 1981, p.B6]

Miner doesn't linger over the multiple throat-slashings and skull-splittings. Comparatively speaking, he seems less bloodthirsty than the directors of Friday the 13th, The Exterminator or Mother's Day, to name only a few competitors of grosser gruesomeness. [13 May 1981, p.B6]

The title, of course, leads one to expect the long-awaited movie version of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, but the actuality is closer to tattered but dopily diverting remnants from The Karate Kid, Road House and Rocky IV. [14 Nov 1989, p.E3]

Perhaps their quest had a mythic significance in Richard Sale's original novel that has somehow eluded his screenplay in which it's impossible to believe that the movie heros are doing anything more than beating on a dead prop. [03 Jun 1977, p.B1]

The lowest common denominator of smutty amusement [03 Aug 1983, p.B2]

The director, J. Lee Thompson, was once a proficient craftsman. Not all that long ago he and Quinn were associated on the prestigious hit The Guns of Navarone. You can't help wondering what they, along with Mason and Neal, talked about between the takes of this howler. [29 Mar 1979, p.D15]

Unfortunately, all too many paying customers will remember being suckered into the Derek remake of "Tarzan," which shortchanges every feature susceptible moviegoers must assume they'll find: tongue-in-cheek romance, exotic high adventure and generous scrutiny of Bo in the buff. Denying people the forms of amusement, notably erotic amusement, that the publicity suggests, Derek exposes a truly dangerous ineptitude.

Happy Birthday to Me is a cheesy tease from the outset. The opening sequence entraps the first victim, then allows her to escape, then entraps her again and allows her to escape again. By the time the filmmakers get around to making a murder scene stick, you're already fed up with their methodology and wondering why the movie wasn't called something like "The Coed With Nine Lives." [15 May 1981, p.F4]

The Villain is the sort of dumb comedy that never smartens up. [23 July 1979, p.B11]

There's no telling how many sounder, wittier scripts, including stories in the same genre, might have been overlooked or rejected in order to waste time and resources on this feeble in-house imitation.

Some of the jokes are so raucously or goofily low-minded that you may laugh out of a kind of shocked weakness.

Despite formidable competition, Looker makes a persuasive case for Stinker of the Year among suspense thrillers. [30 Oct 1981, p.C6]

In the annals of overcompensatory anal-retentive joking, Rivers may have succeeded in carving out an even lower niche for herself.

The unsavory nature of the concept is softened to a considerable extent by the ridiculous nature of the depiction. The performers are obliged to stumble through such a prolonged, outrageous dance of death that the stupidity of it all tends to obscure the viciousness of it all. [26 Feb 1982, p.D3]

Oxford Blues, the latest refinement in abysmal youth-pandering movies, suffers first and foremost from that modern filmmaking malady: The No Exposition Blues. [01 Sep 1984, p.B2]

A blockheaded travesty that fancies itself a rollicking update of "The Pirates of Penzance."

Although Bostwick is left in the most exposed position by the nonsensical war games invented for Megaforce, it's obviously Needham who deserves the preeminent rap for fabricating a system of illusion so juvenile that the actors can scarcely avoid looking like chumps.

Dismal.

It would be a grim day for the movies if every picture were as dignified as "Gandhi," but that's no excuse for an indignity as craven and amateurish as Spring Break. [30 March 1983, p.B10]

The Toy, starring Richard Pryor, is a coarsened American remake of a deft French comedy of the same title, which starred Pierre Richard and passed this way five or six years ago. Fluctuating wildly between facetiousness and solicitude, the new version never comes close to reproducing the sane, lightweight charms of the original.

If you aren't feeling so generous, it's pretty obvious that the movie is not only a stinker but an inexcusably corrupt stinker, dependent on the indulgence of a public slavish or naive enough to feel honored when old pros content themselves with smugly amateurish shtik. [29 June 1984, p.B5]

Stanley Donen's otherwise witty and diverting science-fiction thriller Saturn 3, a parable of jealousy set on a remote, futuristic Eden suddenly contaminated by insane lust, suffers desperately for the lack of an epilogue. As a result, an hour and a half of tense, funny sexual melodrama is squashed flat by a dud of a fadeout. [18 Feb 1980, p.B1]