Gregory Weinkauf

Sometimes the 2D and 3D animation doesn't blend, and the heinous pop songs would embarrass Peter Cetera, but there's plenty to like, including a fascinating mechanical contraption and musical score both shamelessly and lovingly stolen from "The Dark Crystal."

Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty.

Moves in fits and starts, with some crafty and credible fight choreography by Xin Xin Xiong on either side of the pretty but boring middle hour.

Smart people will relish its temerariousness, average people will smile awkwardly and comment that it's "kinda different," and dimly lit people may mistake it for the Elmo movie and drool quietly in the back rows. It's a movie for everyone.

A shame, this frenetic mess, as there were loads of reasons to be hopeful.

Happily stuck between a rock and the deep blue sea.

With a sneer and a wink, Drowning Mona plunges us into a fresh deluge of idiotic Americana .

Knockout's heart is in the right place, but it drags because of tedious earnestness and shallow "You go, girl!" feminism.

A happily self-aware body-count flick that's as brutally funny as it is plain-old brutal. A broad slash of scary, sci-fi fun, the project leapfrogs all the Scream and Last Summer junk to carve itself a new, high-tech niche.

Ultimately it's an ugly, insipid rape fantasy, nothing more.

Once the terror ends and the credits roll, we finally get to the best part: a merciful escape.

Director Mick Jackson (L.A. Story) delivers playful and charming teens-turned-30 moxie.

Such a remarkable rift between its charming source material and its heinous cinematic realization that the producers may as well have skipped the hassle of securing licensing rights and simply called this mess Mike Myers: A--hole in Fur.

Exactly as you may expect, this thing is good for a few cheap little laughs and no more.

Thing is, movie's 100 percent mystery-free, but mildly creative, mixing Psych 101 with cynical Hollywood in-jokes with Tylenol-sponsored grainy-cam footage. Best revelation is source of Myers' superhuman strength: eats big rats, apparently.

Wrenches paltry giggles and cheap warmth from a screenplay that makes "Son in Law" seem like Sam Shepard. But wretched Affleck is the real liability.

As in the comparatively quaint original film, there are whiffs of greed, carnage, social upheaval and the triumph of the numskull, but it's all rendered noxious nonsense by zooming hot rods, vague T&A, irritating jump-cuts and a bunch of dipshit Power Ranger wannabes slamming in hell's moshpit.

Mostly this happy train wreck feels like a longer, better movie that was chopped up and reassembled by retarded monkeys; what should have been a rush instead feels rushed.

Inventive and richly researched, it's worth admission just to see Der Führer bickering with Mick Fleetwood as a feisty Pablo Picasso.

As Rikki, Seda is a model of foul duplicity, and the movie itself is a relative rarity: an intelligent showcase of senseless machismo.