Jay Scott

In concert with composer Bill Conti and scriptwriter Larry Gelbart, Neighbors has become a hyper insult festival in which four people pointlessly humiliate each other in a variety of increasingly vicious ways. Sample dialogue: "Leave that warthead alone. C'mon, we've got cesspools to suck." It's enough to make you nostalgic for the Shavian wit of The Gong Show, for the genteel grace of Saturday afternoon wrestling. [19 Dec 1981]

Sad to say, poor old Nightbreed fails even as failure - it's bad, but it's not memorably bad. The odor it emits is less the stench of an eternal hell than the stink of a passing purgatory. If nothing is forgiven by the time you've done your time in the theatre, all is certainly forgotten. [20 Feb 1990]

The picture is an inventory of film noir effects and attitudes, but Wenders has nothing new to say about the style, about the period, about Hammett or about the creative process. The Hammett case can be closed: a case of massive esthetic masturbation. [18 Sep 1982]

Any chance the film might have had is trashed at the outset by Chase's disengaged style of non- acting and blas approach to pants-dropping. [28 Dec 1981]

Overboard is overdrawn and overblown: a lean romantic comedy has been enveloped in obesity. Garry Marshall's direction is worthy of a not very good television sitcom and John A. Alonzo's appalling cinematography gives the picture the appearance of having been shot through a cloud of mosquitoes. [18 Dec 1987]

Had the film version of Pet Sematary, adapted straightforwardly by King himself from the novel, and directed with horrifying ineptitude by Mary Lambert (Siesta), been any good, it would have been a sizzling shockeroonie, in that it deals, to borrow King's italicized style, with things best left undealt with, notably resurrected murderous children and the terrors instilled by terminal illness. [24 Apr 1989]

The Golden Child is certainly not a Michael Ritchie movie - the talented director of Smile and The Candidate is never more than a referee in the war between the special effects and the star. The special effects win, which is no victory, but the star is not knocked out. [13 Dec 1986, p.F5]

The relationships between the characters are designed to climax in the slaughter, but by then the static images, the lack of rhythm and the paucity of intelligence (Heaven's Gate is simultaneously without subtlety or clarity) have taken their toll and the movie is unsalvageable. [21 Nov 1980]

Flashy Talk Radio offers little but babble: A mindless, hollow look at a sad symbiosis. [21 Dec 1988]

The only memorable facet of The Blue Lagoon (at the York) is the visual prowess of the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros - but here the photography, unlike his work in Days of Heaven or Kramer Vs. Kramer, is too great. It's all there is, and its monumental beauty overwhelms the fragile orchids-and-jockstraps pastoral of the narrative, with its faux naif philosophy. [12 July 1980]

This film is all shiny inspirational veneer. It leads you to issues but it won't let you think...It may be good for you, but it's not entertainment. And it may not be good for you: lurking at the penumbra of the film's sunny celebration of brotherhood is the faint but unmistakable shadow of anti-Semitism. [26 Sept 1981]

House of Games is so bad it seems reasonable to conclude that God was out of town and Mamet's muse was in a coma. [16 Oct 1987]

Sadly, 2010 is not going to make it any easier for the uninitiated to grasp the reasons its predecessor thrilled a generation: the only people 2010 is likely to thrill are the agents of the actors in the cast. [7 Dec 1984]

In the end the taste of the brew is inferior to the bouquet, and while it's true that the cauldron is a splendiferous container, the dregs at the bottom are bitter. How 12 years and $25- million could be lavished on a movie with narrative holes big enough to swallow the film's major creation, a prophetic pig, is a conundrum that must have Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic crypt: this is a movie that knows how to do everything but tell a story. [26 July 1985]

This is the kind of pitchur where if somebody gets his foot blowed off (somebody do), it makes everybody laugh, yuk yuk. Rip Torn (he's a sheriff) says, "The only thing worse than a politician is a child molester." It's mighty fine to get that kind of perspective. Makes you realize Extreme Prejudice ain't so bad after all. [24 Apr 1987]

Most of the time the film is simply stupid; not offensive, just silly. [03 May 1983]

There are two movies in Superman III, one a witless and obvious and often cruel comic strip, the other a blithe and subtle and often amusing exercise in middle-brow camp. Not only do the two halves never come together, they are in active opposition. [17 June 1983]

The manipulative Star Wars-style score is the only novelty on tap in Silverado, which has a plot too drearily complicated and arid to summarize and an attitude almost unbearable in its dryly smirky assurance that it knows what you want from a Western, which is to say, action that never quits, emotion that's never felt, characters that are never real and situations that are never sensible. [10 Jul 1985, p.S7]

To report that Always will make you cry is not esthetically saying much; slicing up onions has the same effect. Leslie Halliwell's one-word summation of the forties version applies to Spielberg's update for the nineties: "icky." [26 Dec. 1989]

Casting Eastwood in a friendly, bumbling, light romantic lead is like asking Ethel Merman to sing a lullaby: in the end, nothing is forthcoming but overkill. Clint Eastwood was already famous for that. [16 June 1980]

A slasher movie about gay panic, a nasty piece of homophobic angst for the age of AIDs. [25 Feb 1986]

ROB REINER'S debut as a feature film director with the mock "rockumentary" This Is Spinal Tap was as invigorating as his second film, The Sure Thing, is depressing: not since Michael Cimino followed The Deer Hunter with Heaven's Gate has there been such a dramatic comedown. [1 Mar 1985]

Rocky III, unlike its twin predecessors, is a charmlessly manipulative movie. The magic is kaput. [28 May 1982]

Highlander's flashy style is the cinematic equivalent of a Las Vegas chorus line: always kicking. Without Lambert, who displays an unexpected comic talent along with intensely photogenic passive-aggressive eyes, and Roxanne Hart, whose knowledgeable portrayal of a New York detective is undercut by the symphony of screams extracted from her toward the end, and Connery, who wears a pearl-drop earring and is supposed to be Spanish but still has the burr and brio of James Bond, Highlander would be little more than an everlasting video; it's not much more than that, as it is. [10 Mar 1986, p.C9]

The bad news is that Stella is an unintentionally hilarious mess, handily summed up by what Haskell sees as "the lowest level" of the woman's film - "(It) fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. [2 Feb 1990]

Up the Academy, directed by Robert Downey, combines Little Darlings, Meatballs and Animal House into a crude concoction that holds out the promise of approximating Mad Magazine's cheerful, sophomoric vulgarity. [09 June 1980]

Nighthawks, a cops 'n' robbers thriller with terrorists where the robbers should be and cops as counter-terrorists, has a dirty job to do and does it. That is not an endorsement. Thumbscrews and cattle prods are real good at what they do, too. [11 Apr 1981]

In-jokes for horror-film fans abound (the dog is named Jason, the monster in the Friday the 13th series; a cafe is the Craven Inn - Wes Craven directed the first Nightmare on Elm Street), and it's possible that those fans will be satisfied with the expensive, surreal special effects unleashed by director Renny Harlin. Everyone else is apt to agree with the teen-ager who dismisses Freddy by saying, "We all got better things to dream about." [19 Aug 1988]