Jay Carr

Mostly, though, Lynch fills the screen with a lot of cynically off-putting and sadistic violence. In place of incident, character and a bemused view of small-town life, corrupt beneath its cherry-pie surface, we are essentially asked to witness torture - mostly of Laura Palmer, as her troubles lead her to self-destruct with drugs and promiscuity, including a couple of side trips to the Canadian bordello known as One-Eyed Jacks. For all the violence in Lynch's "Blue Velvet," that film maintained a comic dimension. The violence in "Wild at Heart," for all its extravagance of gesture, was hollow - stylized, not real...Here, there's no comedy, nothing surreal, just wave after wave of titillation. Except that it doesn't titillate. It depresses. There's no psychic charge on any of it. It proceeds from no artistic conviction, just from a cynical desire to squeeze a few more bucks from the already overworked corpse of Laura Palmer. It shows how quickly a creative impulse can be exhausted - from quirky originality toying with humanity's darker impulses to dispirited quasi-porn. [29 Aug 1992, p.23]

Berlinger has approached Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 with intelligence and even a bit of thematic heft. But, frankly, the cheap thrill is gone.

See Spot Run isn't solely responsible for the dumbing down of movies, but it's part of the dismal phenomenon.

Even an experienced director would have his hands full making anything out of this script. Four screenwriters are credited, and as any movie buff knows, the more writers, the worse the movie. Nowhere Faustian, this one aspires to camp classic status, but lurches lamely into vile gross-out territory. [10 Feb 1989, p.48]

Flirt has its moments, and Ewell and Nikaidoh are auspicious additions to the Hartley rep company. But Flirt will appeal mostly to Hartley completists. [23 Aug 1996]

Mixed Nuts is that cinematic oddity: a film that's pretty awful, yet almost perversely endearing -- despite the tiredness with which it plays out its labored jokes before bringing them together in a gooey Christmas ending. [21 Dec 1994, p.94]

Nightwatch quickly declines from creepy to silly. [17 Apr 1998]

Although the limits on Beverly Hills Cop III are pretty obvious, it's not a total write-off. Still, it's time to stop making movies about Murphy's Motown cop and start making one about Serge. [25 May 1994, p.69]

French Kiss is a French miss. It's got the settings, but it has little magic, less charm and almost no chemistry between Meg Ryan's heartsick American innocent and Kevin Kline's shady Frenchman. [5 May 1995, p.57]

It's two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort. That, and not its unsavory subject matter, is what makes it bummer theater.

An abundance of style and an almost total lack of substance make Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together a visually arresting but ultimately unrewarding excursion. [31 Oct 1997]

Such an utter piece of fluff so conceptually barren it might as well be a music video.

Isn't going to be a contender

Arachnophobia wants to be Jaws or The Birds, with killer spiders. It isn't. The movie lacks the skill really to tap our primal fears, and the spiders are the only things that don't seem mechanical in Arachnophobia. [18 July 1990, p.65P]

Takes a vacation from quality.

It plays like a crude "Godfather" parody, the sort that might amuse as a 10-minute sketch on "Saturday Night Live," but curdles and collapses as a 143-minute film. [09 Dec 1983]

Soapdish should have been a laugher. But this new spoof of TV soaps isn't nearly as funny as the real thing. Soapdish holds only the merest sliver of entertainment. [31 May 1991, p.28]

The more intense it gets, the sillier it looks. The only thing worth watching in this wannabe noir is Christian Clemenson's performance as Spader's permanently bummed-out pot-smoking brother. Clemenson alone fills the screen with the kind of individuality that makes you steadily deepen your belief in his character. But he's not enough to keep Bad Influence from degenerating into a ludicrous turn-off. [09 Mar 1990, p.27]

Isn't as funny as it is crude, and isn't as crude as it is labored.

The script is too eager to rush to the high-concept payoff without providing dramatic or characterizational underpinning. [26 June 1992, p.34]

The New Age plays like "Night of the Living Dead," only with better clothes. [23 Sept 1994, p.52]

Lethal Weapon 3 is a big, dumb, noisy, comic strip of a movie that begins and ends in flames.

Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]

Its squandering of talent makes Class Action a film that deserves to be disbarred, not reviewed. [15 Mar 1991]

Under Siege is dumb formula stuff, sensory jolts by the numbers. [09 Oct 1992, p.89]

You couldn't ask for a better setting for a horror movie. What you could ask for is a better script.

Ultimately, the film's self-censoring will to sweetness and innocence is even more fatal than the flimsiness of the plot. [22 Nov 1991, p.33]

Who's Harry Crumb? has a beginning bright enough to make you hope that John Candy might at last have his first good movie role since Splash. But no. Who's Harry Crumb? crumbles into yet another slack, witless misreading of what makes Candy an appealing performer. [03 Feb 1989, p.43]

The sequel goes down the tubes by spreading itself across four time zones and inviting comparison to the original by spending most of its time back in 1955, where another mess must be set right. [22 Nov 1989, p.35]

A lame little flat liner.

A few of the sequences are bad enough to be funny, especially the ones involving Sheen skulking around alien central in a red jump suit, falling down a lot, as if directed by Ed Wood. [31 May 1996, p.52]

Back to the Future III has no future. The reason is that it never works up much of a past as it sends its gull-winged DeLorean time machine back to the Old West. In effect, it goes back to the Age of Steam and runs out of gas. [25 May 1990, p.45]

By now, Rocky of the drooping eyes and damaged brain has turned guru, emphasizing heart, soul and family ties when the evil promoter starts goading him and playing mind games with his protege. Stallone, said to be following Arnold Schwarzenegger into comedy, is starting earlier than anyone realized. [16 Nov 1990, p.78]

One could argue that ''Lock, Stock'' and Snatch are essentially the same movie - crime comedies marked by an outlandish visual style. Which raises the question of whether Ritchie has the range to do anything else.

Phar Lap wastes its brilliant potential through embarrassingly inept acting, a cloying soundtrack, stereotyped characters and pedestrian direction. [13 Jul 1984]

Occasionally wills itself to rude, crude life. But most of the time it's pretty limp.

A lot of striking pictures in this would-be feminist "Braveheart," but a film that's pretty flat and earthbound because of the limitations of the figure at its center.

What the Hughes brothers have come up with is, to borrow another phrase from that bygone age, a penny dreadful.

Unless you're on its let's-laugh-at-the-loonies wavelength, The Dream Team is singularly unfunny. The writing and direction are smugly vacant, behaving as if the basic concept is so innately hilarious that neither need bother fleshing it out with characterization and inventiveness. The only thing prodigious about The Dream Team is its cheap witlessness. It makes Rain Man look like King Lear. [07 Apr 1989, p.35]

Most of the time Ernest Rides Again is a one-joke - or, rather, one-cannon - movie, enough to raise grave doubts about the importance of seeing - let alone being - Ernest. [12 Nov 1993, p.47]

In the Mouth of Madness is firmly lodged in the armpit of boredom. [03 Feb 1995, p.55]

Johnny Suede is too devoid of content to sustain our interest. [19 Sep 1992]

The Cutting Edge plays like the kind of date movie written by a computer, and not a very smart one...It makes shaved ice look deep. [27 March 1992, p.29]

Hook touches neither fantasy nor soulfulness nor yearning. Mostly, it's benign spectacle in which the actors keep yielding the camera to some expensive playground or other. Hook is neither wistful nor primal. It's film's most expensive wind-up toy. [11 Dec. 1991. p.53]

A supernatural thriller that is neither super, natural, nor thrilling.

Leviathan may be mediocre, unoriginal, boring and nauseating, but it probably won't be the worst sci-fi we'll see this year. [17 Mar 1989, p.46]

The most uncomprehending sequel of the last few years. It shows no awareness at all of what made the first film work so surprisingly well. What little emotion it summons is superficial and sentimental. The rest of the time it falls back on dumb farce and embarrassing Brit-bashing, climaxing with a vacuous chase scene. And this in a film that's supposed to be more mature than its predecessor. [21 Nov 1990, p.37]

It plays like a pilot for what I imagine will be network TV's first all-gay sitcom.

There's no comic edge at all to Sister Act. It's all Whoopi and the three sisters, battling plastic writing and chintzy production values, convincing you that filmmaking this pedestrian ought to be declared the eighth deadly sin. [29 May 1992, p.34]

One of the big problems with Romeo Is Bleeding is its voiceovers. Gary Oldman, as the crooked cop protagonist, drowns in them like quicksand. [4 Feb 1994, p.54]

Great Balls of Fire is little more than just a whole lotta fakin' goin on. [30 June 1989, p.41]

Although Species benefits from a new generation of computer-generated visuals, it can't hold a tentacle to Alien. Alien was more old dark-house thriller than sci-fi. Species turns into just another day in the LA pest-control biz. [07 July 1995, p.28]

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is yet another factory product that plays more like a marketing strategy than a comedy. Like the other farces bearing the National Lampoon brand label, it's a comedy of obliviousness - family man Chevy Chase refuses to alter his sentimental notions of family rituals despite repeatedly being slammed in the face with evidence of how far short of his expectations they fall. Here, the word "vacation" is a misnomer. The Griswold family, headed by Chase, doesn't go anywhere. Neither does the film.

Blurs the line between black comedy and black hole.

Avalanches are nothing compared to the deadening touch of the stereotyping and audience-insulting simplicities in the scenic but brain-dead Vertical Limit.

Although 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a classier failure than Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, the glum truth is that both are lost at sea. [09 Oct 1992, p.85]

Neil Jordan's High Spirits wants to be a supernatural comedy. But it isn't super, it isn't natural, it isn't high, and it isn't spirited. [18 Nov 1988, p.33]

Pink Cadillac, you might say, is low on gas. [26 May 1989, p.43]

The Dead Pool is not a subtle movie or a bloodless one, although it does manage to put its own twist on the usual car chase sequence. [13 Jul 1988, p.59]

Although we're only two weeks into 1989, we've already got a movie so resoundingly awful that it's bound to stand the test of time and emerge as one of the year's worst. [13 Jan 1989, p.48]

Despite its good looks and expertly turned performances, it trivializes Kafka and his work. The simplistic optimism behind it is more terrifying than anything we actually see on screen. Sitting through Kafka is like watching somebody staff a suicide hotline by telling callers to just lighten up. [21 Feb. 1992, p.28]

It's not boring to watch, but in the end it's too lame and too tame. [21 Apr 1995]

John Patrick Shanley's Joe Versus the Volcano starts out so brilliantly, so hilariously, so imaginatively, that even as it's cracking you up, you begin worrying that the rest of the film can't possibly be that good. Sure enough, it isn't. In fact, it deflates pretty alarmingly. But at least it has that beginning. [9 Mar 1990, p.27]

Alien Nation quickly abandons any possibility of an equivalently fascinating world for the formulas of a routine cop movie. [7 Oct 1988, p.40]

May not emerge as the biggest disaster of the holiday movie season, if only because we haven't yet seen all the other year-end films. But it is a huge high-energy misfire, bringing Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, and Cameron Crowe to earth with a thud.

Strenuously as it tries, and pulse-poundingly successful as the embassy rescue scene is, Rules of Engagement never engages us.

This one is hollow and caves in on itself, growing wearisome and posed, ending in a burst of salvational violence and a coda of sentimentality masquerading as transcendent toughness. [13 Jan 1995]

Even allowing for differences in national styles, Kikujiro sprawls and stumbles. It's a road movie that turns into its own detour.

It's "Beach Blanket Bingo" revisited, but with a Eurocast and more exotic locations.

But Skin Deep hasn't the energy level or the inventiveness to sustain the demands of sex farce. There's only one sight gag as funny, involving glow-in-the-dark prophylactics. There's also only one role that's sympathetic. As usual, it's the Julie Andrews role of long-suffering wife, played by Alyson Reed. One last complaint: In the guise of being unflinching about dancing on the edge of outrage, the film reveals a mean streak involving cruel things done to dogs. Skin Deep spends what seems like a lot of time living up to - or is it down to? - its name. [3 March 1989, p.47]

Sitting through it is like waking up on Christmas morning to find a stockingful of styrofoam.

To be blunt, Raising Cain is a thriller that doesn't thrill. [07 Aug 1992, p.30]

Mostly plays like an artificial stupidity experiment. Zappy visuals aside, it's essentially a reactionary take on science, stemming from the movies' traditional belief that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a lot of knowledge is worse. Think of it as Faust Goes to the Lab, with an ambitious doc serving as Mephistopheles. [6 Mar 1992, p.30]

Larceny at its most labored.

By placing all its faith in production design and high-powered computerized effects, and not enough where it really matters, namely character and atmosphere, The Haunting relegates itself to the slag heap of embarrassing claptrap. [23 July 1999, p.D4]

Fire in the Sky, the latest abducted-by-aliens movie, is no Close Encounters. It's hardly any encounter at all. [13 Mar 1993, p.10]

Consumerism is running more amok than ever, but this satire of it isn't.

There's no getting around the fact that it's an uneven exercise that shows signs of having gestated too long. [04 Jun 1999]

The Disney people have taken such obvious care in making Return to Oz that it's a shame it didn't turn out better. It has its moments - mostly visual - but when it isn't a grim downer, it's largely inert. [21 Jun 1985, p.21]

The action is mostly witless and predictable. One measure of its desperation and lack of respect for its audience is the frequency with which it labors to wring humor from flatulence and excrement gags.

Village of the Damned has everything you want in a horror movie but the horror. [28 Apr 1995, p.90]

A fatally insubstantial film.

Fletch Lives isn't a total zero. Three, or maybe four, of Chevy Chase's wisecracks work. But everything else about the film is feeble and poky. Even its tastelessness lacks the coarse energy of vulgarity. It's hard to believe that the world has had to wait five years for this witless, insipid sequel to "Fletch," an original that's easy to top. [17 Mar 1989, p.45]

If you get dizzy watching Final Analysis, it may be because it's such a "Vertigo" wannabe. But director Phil Joanou is no Hitchcock, and Kim Basinger, its star, is no Kim Novak, even though Joanou poses and lights her in a critical lighthouse scene the way Hitchcock posed and lit Novak in that bell tower in "Vertigo." The big problem with "Final Analysis," though, is that Richard Gere's pivotal expert shrink is pretty easy to fool. Not until late in the film does he literally run to a library to learn about one of Freud's classic case histories. You have to suspend a ton of disbelief to buy the assumptions you have to make about him, starting with his gullibility. [7 Feb 1992, p.29]

For all its antic grasping it lies flatter on the screen than its graphic novel source lies on the page.

It's not only the flattest film in which Williams has appeared; it's also the most anemic Levinson has directed. [18 Dec 1992, p.47]

A Kiss Before Dying is another failed remake, never approaching the claustrophobic pressure of the far grittier and more highly charged 1956 version with Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor. [26 Apr 1991, p.72]

Hits mostly flat notes, then a few really sour ones.

It's amazingly suspenseless and devoid of substance. [05 Mar 1993]

The real problem is a script from hell - or at least one of the dingier suburbs of limbo. Some scripts are beyond belief. This one is beneath it. [16 Oct 1992, p.48]

The Bodyguard is a misfire. It's one of those perplexing but complete failures where all the ingredients show up, but somehow manage never to jell into anything convincing. [25 Nov 1992, p.35]

Virtuosity doesn't really compute, but there's going to be more of its kind of cyberaction, not less. [4 Aug 1995, pg. 51]

Starts by cheating death and ends by cheating us.

It's a lame and painfully overextended satire of homophobia.

Part of the reason Pet Sematary is so pedestrian is that its leads - Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby - are uncharismatic. And director Mary Lambert, of Siesta and music video fame, doesn't know how to build and pace her material. [21 Apr 1989, p.46]

This time casting Sharon Stone as the victim instead of the predator, it's both sillier and baser than "Basic Instinct," but not as funny, or even as laughable. And it's certainly not sexy. Essentially, it's an industrial object, badly manufactured, filled not with hot stuff, but with the cold dead air of calculation gone wrong. At least no artistry has been wasted on it, although it does squander a provocative theme under its pile of softcore hardware before struggling to its limp ending. [21 May 1993, p.23]

A sequel whose time has come - and gone.

Trips early and never gets up off the floor.