Jay Carr

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

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]

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]

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

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]

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

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.

Cyborg is cyboring. [07 Apr 1989, p.34]

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

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

Isn't even worth a glance.

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]

A crass, witless knockoff of better films.

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

Takes a vacation from quality.

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

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]

Awful in ways that are just clever enough often enough to make it intermittently watchable.

Jingle All the Way packs into its queasy bag everything we've learned to dread about the so-called holiday season. If it doesn't bring on an attack of Seasonal Affective Disorder, nothing will. [22 Nov 1996, p.E6]

As a film, it's as crass and awful as the house guests from hell to which it so unwarrantedly feels superior. How bad is Madhouse? Bad enough to make a critic think that the similarly themed National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is art, right down to its fried cat. [16 Feb 1990, p.87p]

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.

Meretricious without being entertaining, it's an easy game -- and an easier film -- to sit out.

A fatally insubstantial film.

The flat tire of summer movies.

This one, a comic vacuum, is close to amateurish. [22 May 1992, p.32]

Slides instantly into the realm of the forgettable.

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.

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]