Jack Mathews

Earnestness is the primary appeal of Meng Ong's clumsy melodrama.

It's an old maxim that you can't make a good movie from a bad script. But with the suspense thriller Twisted, Philip Kaufman shows that you can make one that looks like it should be good.

Keaton is so over-the-top, so loud and so physically animated that when Daphne develops a case of laryngitis mid-way through the movie, it's as if a neighbor's car alarm has finally been shut down. However, in those silent moments, when Daphne is communicating with notes, you realize how much you like this actress.

BI2 is packed with as much lust, nudity and sexual depravity as the first. So, why isn't it as much fun? What's lost in any sequel is the freshness of the first film, and was "BI1" ever fresh!

A one-joke idea...wears itself out almost instantly.

September Dawn, written by an evangelical Christian, may be the worst historical drama ever made.

The three actors do their best to breathe life into their caricatured roles.

Dalton, using a Scottish brogue coarse enough to take his tongue with it, is hootably bad, and Kathy Bates, playing Ma James, is pure ham.

The question is, how did the producers get the amiable, talented Jason Lee to Boogie Board down the toilet with (Green)?

If the 10th "Friday" sounds like the first "Alien," it's strictly intentional. Todd Farmer's script rips off that classic sci-fi horror film, replaces the acid-based monster with the hockey-masked Jason, adopts the self-mocking attitude of "Scream" and lets the heads, arms, legs and torsos fall where they may.

A stinker of epic proportions.

Rates an inquisition of its own. It may not be heresy to fill out an ensemble cast of Peruvian and Spanish characters almost exclusively with non-Hispanic actors, but it certainly destroys any sense of authenticity.

Nearly devoid of both dialogue and narrative cohesion, Yongman Kim's first feature - Part 1 of a planned trilogy inspired by Dante's "Inferno" - suggests that the founder of the popular downtown Kim's Video store should not give up his day job.

This particular script is deplorable. It's a pure cribbing of Ron Bass' screenplay for "Sleeping With the Enemy," which was no prize itself.

First-time writer-director Hunter Richards? London is even worse torture than it sounds. It includes flashbacks that actually demonstrate just how miserable a jerk the main character is.

Never graduates above the boneheaded.

Something's wrong with the math here -- the inheritance of the story's small-town hero is enlarged from $20 million to $40 billion, yet the new movie isn't worth the price of a Depression-era ticket.

A postseason basketball comedy that shoots and misses at a rate that would embarrass even the Los Angeles Clippers.

At the half-hour mark, Godsend falls off the edge of reason, veering wildly away from what seems the promising beginning of a drama about the ethics of human cloning and instead becomes the cheesiest of hallucinatory horror movies.

Might have worked as a sex comedy, certainly as porn. But as a suspense thriller, it's creepy for all the wrong reasons.

It's never a good thing to notice that the actors in a movie are having a better time than you are. It's so unfair. They're paid to work, you're paying for fun.

Earnest but practically unwatchable movie. I haven't spent an hour and a half with worse company since high school detention.

There's no story to speak of - three cohabiting bachelors are dragged into adulthood by the simultaneous pregnancies of their girlfriends - but Anderson, Imperioli and Eddie Griffin are amiable company and there's an earned laugh here and there.

Only Emily Mortimer maintains a measure of dignity, playing the slinky assassin named Dakota. Whether her restraint was by her design or the filmmakers', she'll come to appreciate that she all but disappears amid the caterwauling and purging of a story that should have died in Liverpool.

About the only plausible element in the entire movie is bratty Vanessa's loathing of "Aunt" Mona, whom she sees as a vacuous over-reacher.

Not just unromantic, it's unfunny, too.

This will qualify as a spoiler only for those who have never seen a really bad movie before.

The script and the performances are all fine, but it's very slow going.

Derivative to the point of distraction.

Larry offers enough scatological humor to fertilize the wheat fields in the star's home state of Nebraska.

If you liked "Van Wilder," which starred Ryan Reynolds and Tara Reid, be warned: The only person returning from the cast is the boring Indian kid Taj Mahal Badalandabad (Kal Penn).

Showcased in 3,000 Miles are two of the longest, noisiest, bloodiest and most ludicrous shootouts ever staged.

What the filmmakers missed in assuming the mask from the earlier film is that it was Carrey's astonishing physical comedy that made that film a hit, not the animation.

A teen comedy so stupid that a long nose -- perhaps with a red bulb on it -- actually would have helped.

It's nonsense. Even when its big secret is revealed in the final moments, it adds up to nothing more than a dizzy, dark, hysterical waste of time.

There's still time, but for now, Fogler gets my vote for the worst performance of the year.

Here's one for the Sick Voyeurs Club.

The movie's really about the impressions of the original performances by newcomers Eric Christian Olsen and Derek Richardson. Olsen does an uncanny Carrey, and Richardson vaguely resembles Daniels.

Ultraviolet, unscreened for critics, is unfit for consumption.

A shrill, amateurish two-character play that demeans women and leaves men with the quaint notion that the best way to a woman's heart is through enslavement.

You won't hear a better soundtrack on a bad movie this year.

Dreadfully unfunny.

His (Kaminski) first feature is so thoroughly awful, it isn't even interesting to look at.

Deuces Wild is the worst thing to have happened to Brooklyn since the Ice Age severed it from the mainland.

This badly written, badly directed and badly acted little movie about an ordinary guy from Jersey who discovers passion with a fashion plate in Manhattan looks great.

It's fitting that the kangaroo gives the most lifelike performance.

The characters are boring, the violence generic, the suspense nonexistent.

Warner Bros. quietly releases Hiller's latest film, Carpool, without advance critics screenings, without more than a whisper of promotion, without warning or apology to the lost souls who might wander in to see it.

The only good thing about this on-the-fly, low-budget quickie is its Cape Cod setting and the in-focus cinematography of Ernst Kubitza. Very pretty. Otherwise, it is a speechifying bore.

Close call as to who's career has sunk farthest.

The special effects work fine for minor acts of magic, but the climactic aerial dragon fight is lame, and most of the performances are at the level of high school plays.

More than awful, more than dreadful, and easily the worst beach movie ever made.

This is the worst performance by a pop star in a dramatic role since Madonna suited up for "Shanghai Surprise."

Slackers depends on the pathetic Ethan and the flatulent Sam for most of its laughs, and both characters are more revolting than amusing.

Eddie Murphy's latest comedy, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, takes place in the year 2087, which is about the earliest he can hope to be forgiven.

The individual scenes are just random, uninspired riffs by Carvey or awkwardly flat cameos by the likes of Jesse Ventura and Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson.

"Comedy is hard," said Steve Martin. For the writers of Date Movie, it's apparently impossible.

The latest in a numbing series begun in 1978 by John Carpenter, and repeated five times since, with only a few plot and casting changes to detract from the brilliant slice-and-dice work of its masked hero. Mike may be getting older, but he can still sling a knife around like a chef at Benihana. [2 Oct 1995, p.F8]

One of the darkest, ugliest, most uninvolving and incomprehensible major-studio fantasies I've ever seen.

No better than whatever you might pick up while wearing a blindfold at Blockbuster, even if you happen to reach into a trash can.

An early and daunting contender for worst movie of the year, writer-director Irving Schwartz's amateurish melodrama stars a hollow-eyed Piper Perabo as a self-loathing young woman who has every reason to hate herself.

You may need fortification for this astonishingly bad movie.