Jay Scott

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]

The Final Countdown is an action picture, not a thoughtful rumination on time travel, nor even (per Time After Time) a picture with a puzzle - everything is subordinate here to the sweep and grandeur of an awe-inspiring, ocean-going masterpiece of American technology. [02 Aug 1980]

Technically, the picture is a mess, but the ineptitudes in the editing and cinematography actually add to the charm, and the Bushman family is wondrous to watch. The Gods Must Be Crazy II is an old dog sans new tricks, but the friendly mutt's familiar repertoire is varied enough to fill a few hours with undemanding fun. [13 Apr 1990]

The Mosquito Coast is a work of consummate craftsmanship and it's spectacularly acted, down to the smallest roles (Martha Plimpton as a classically obstreperous preacher's daughter, for example), but its field of vision is as narrow and eventually as claustrophobic as Allie's. [28 Nov 1986]

The movie is less a sequel to the original, in fact, than it is a remake - a more energetic, more absurd and possibly more entertaining remake. [17 Dec 1980]

Heavy Metal is a first-class entertainment for the class of people whose eardrums are as strong as the pans of a steel band, whose nerves could be used to conduct electricity and whose fantasies tend to the leathery: it is, in other words, a movie for horny, hell-raising teen- agers. [7 Aug 1981]

Is it worth seeing? Yes. The ability to charm in the modern world is rare, and Ishtar does charm. Essentially, it's a teen film for adults, which is to say, it's mindless but not stupid good fun. And there are at least four times when the audience laughs out loud.

Miss Johnson may not be an actress, but her lack of emotional resources and her bland ingenuousness conspire to give the manipulative, sentimental, unconvincing conceit of Ice Castles a naive force that occasionally approaches the simple pleasures of Rocky. [29 Jan 1979]

So you figure, what the hell, go with it and enjoy it for what it is, which is C-plus, but A-minus for effort and B-plus for honesty, and since you gave the book a D-minus, you decide you're going to tell your friends to skip the book and see the movie. Then you're left with only one nagging question as you walk out of the theatre into the bright lights of whatever big city you happen to be in: how is Pepsi going to feel about Michael J. Fox doing so much coke? [1 Apr 1988]

The ending can be read as conclusively upbeat or as corrosively ironic. Still, Youngblood is never less than fascinating, and it's a bit like the game it explores: the times you don't want to look at it are the times you can't look away. [31 Jan 1986, p.D1]

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]

It's too dumb for adults and too sophisticated for kids. Or vice-versa. [9 June 1993]

The movie blows through the Brat Pack smoke screen - it is superior to Colors in that regard - to reveal the troubled, lonely and sometimes crazy males behind the macho, misogynist posturing of men in groups. You couldn't find a nicer bunch of killers. [12 Aug 1988, p.C3]

It's a pleasant, unprepossessing picture of gliding charm and buoyant silliness, a fragile craft unencumbered by the weighty sophistication of camp, and it's one of the nicest surprises of the season. [17 Dec 1982]

Honorable, instructive, courageous: Fat Man and Little Boy, the true story of the creation of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., is admirable in every respect save one - it's a lousy movie. [20 Oct 1989]

Silly, moronically entertaining horror film. [25 June 1985]

Predictable and maudlin. [14 Oct 1985]

There is something very wrong with the attempt of Nine 1/2 Weeks to excite the sensualists and appease the moralists at the same time. Most of the sex is fairly mild, but there are hints of what Nine 1/2 Weeks must have been before Lyne was forced to recut it. [21 Feb 1986, p.C1]

Sitting through what is so far the worst movie of 1988 is enough to make any cuckoo's nest seem sane. [3 June 1988]

Writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace is not, as can be gathered, a born auteur, but he is crafty at timing the jumpies - despite a silliness that increases as the movie goes on, there are enough left-field shocks to please even the most discriminating fan of what American Film has dubbed the "genre non grata. [25 Oct 1982]

There is no acting to speak of (and to speak of Cruise's performance at all would be embarrassing) but there is a point of view. This is yet another Ramboesque instalment in the current American obsession with might making right. As a movie, Top Gun is negligible and near ridiculous; as a cultural phenomenon, it is sobering and faintly frightening. [16 May 1986, p.C5]

Mostly, Cuba is boring. [24 Dec 1979]

Fort Apache, The Bronx, set primarily in a precinct house, is the S & M Barney Miller... One comes away from the film exhausted, both by the excess of incident in the script and by the reality in which the excess is so obviously grounded. [7 Feb 1981]

Slickly-made parapsychological murder mystery featuring a solid performance by Faye Dunaway as a fashion photographer who sees murders in her mind's eye. [06 Sep 1978]

By removing the delicacy of the technique and the adept use of flashbacks, and by explaining the characters in the lexicon of Psych. 101, what was once an unconventional and unforgettably terrifying thriller has become a conventional, mildly scary melodrama. The Vanishing has gone up in Hollywood smoke. [08 Feb 1993]

Hook's cast is admirably adept at getting across what little boys are made of. [22 Mar 1990]

The script, based by Ephron herself on her own tua culpa memoir of her marriage, is spread wide, but the film never goes deeper into its subject - estrangement and adultery - than a bent dipstick. Heartburn is gentrified Neil Simon. [25 July 1986, p.D1]

The movie, directed by Marek Kanievska (Another Country), does have an ending, but it belongs on a lectern. It mechanically begs a lengthy list of questions in favor of a finger-wagging warning that purports to reveal the fate lying in wait for those who play with snow indoors, along with the rewards assigned to those who study hard back East, where it only snows outdoors. [6 Nov 1987]

John Carpenter, unable to decide what kind of movie he wants, alternates between his thriller-hardware mode (Escape from New York) and his touchy-feelie mode (Starman). The result is that adults may fall asleep in their seats during the dreary chase sequences, while children are going to holler "Ick!" and escape to the candy counters during the mushy stuff. [28 Feb 1992]

Buffy The Vampire Slayer should be a mess, but it's not. It's a mini-comic triumph, and although it's technically a teen movie, it's in the tiny genre of sophisticated, darkly funny teen films such as Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. [4 Aug 1992, p.C1]

Stylistically, the sleek Slamdance, a beautiful yet ominous black lacquer box of a movie, is a U.S. approximation of Diva - every chic frame is aggressive and eye-catching. But it is also what Less Than Zero wanted to be, an expose of the emotional desert at the west end of the U.S. nation. [28 Dec 1987]

In past celluloid lives Eddie Murphy has been responsible for a handful of the most popular movies ever made, which explains why he has been able to bring Coming to America to your neighborhood theatre with its misogyny, technical ineptitude and witlessness intact.

There is a dearth of novelty in Young Guns II, but screenwriter Fusco proceeds as if the material were not familiar and seems to be having a hell of a time exposing it to an audience of teen-agers who wouldn't know John Ford from Ford Fairlane. [03 Aug 1990]

It's got thrills and chills and one of the most elegantly conceived monsters in the history of movies.

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]

National Lampoon's European Vacation is directed by Amy Heckerling, whose career began with the spunky if not inventive Fast Times at Ridgemont High and continued with the inventive if not spunky Johnny Dangerously; this time, she's responsible for a picture that's neither inventive nor spunky. [29 July 1985]

There is precious little story. Instead, there is a promiscuous profusion of images, a rant of optic free association that makes Ken Russell's Tommy appear a marvel of well-rounded narrative... A trip movie, in the old sixties sense, but it's a bad trip, a numero uno bummer. [17 Aug 1982]

Mel Brooks, the writer, director and producer of History of the World, is an ecologically sound filmmaker, a staunch adherent of recycling. If you laugh the second or third time, you defend the repetition as a variation on a theme; if you don't laugh, the charges are self-plagiarism and lack of imagination. [13 June 1981]

The first 20 minutes owe too much - much too much - to Animal House & Co., and the last 20 to The Graduate, but in between there is an uproariously crude and vigorously funny effort to squish the teen genre into the confines of classic French sex farce.[14 June 1985]

Predator 2, an alien-monster movie that is racist and violent, not to mention atrociously acted and ham-handedly directed, has everything going for it a bad movie needs to be dismissed with a quip. But this is too ugly to be funny about. [23 Nov 1990]

Perfect betrays itself in the end, but until it does, it's an unexpectedly thoughtful consideration of "lifestyle" journalism, which by nature allots to the unknown a sudden but ephemeral celebrity, and which too frequently takes advantage of naive subjects eager to lower their defences. [7 June 1985]

In The Dead Pool, Dirty Harry is downright dusty. The erstwhile right-wing San Francisco homicide inspector has mellowed so much in the fifth installment of his adventures that he's become the darling of the liberal Bay Area media and he seems almost bored by blowing people away. [13 Jul 1988, p.C7]

Laughter, tears and Bette Midler: Santa's done a whole lot worse. [23 Dec 1988]

An absurdist comedy such as The End, with the tone teetering from slapstick to sorrow, is quite another matter, requiring a sophistication Reynolds simply doesn't have. [27 May 1978]

A sadly miscalculated affair, a frigidly uninvolving interlude of torpid romanticism: welcome to Shivering Heights. [08 Nov 1982]

White Nights is too ponderous to have the pizzazz of trash and too dumb to have the insight of art - it's a lumbering behemoth of a film in which the extraordinary talent of its one authentic star, Mikhail Baryshnikov, is exploited in a Cold War cartoon that suggests a musical adaptation of Ayn Rand's anti- Soviet novel, We The Living. [22 Nov 1985]

On film, Bennett's bouncing brainchild is Richard Attenborough's Workout Tape, love story attached; the specificity is gone. The 16 auditioning dancers could be any people or all people. [11 Dec 1985]

The kind of schlock that is impervious to criticism. Take it seriously and you look like a fool; evaluate it on its own comic-strip terms and you are reduced to talking about costumes and special effects. [04 Apr 1979]

Says the audience: "Howcum they make movies like this?" [9 Nov 1985]

A slow-moving but otherwise efficient Canadian B-movie that gives the audience what it came for: blood and guts (the title, coincidentally, of Lynch's previous film). It is similar but inferior to Carrie, Halloween and When a Stranger Calls; it is similar but superior to Friday the 13th. [17 Sep 1980]

A two- hour-plus surrealistic bummer - it makes the audience feel as if it is coming down from a virulent drug. (The pacing, the images, the music and the endemic menace recall clinical descriptions of cocaine-induced paranoia.)...A disgusting, misanthropic movie.

Mostly I laughed at the idea that Steve Martin could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy, and that Arthur Hiller, who directed this, or Neil Simon, who adapted it, or Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels, who wrote it, could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy. [28 Jan 1984]

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]

This is an honestly moving, ungainly film. [25 Mar 1983]

Any picture in which Burt Reynolds is a man unable to find a woman willing to have his child is quite clearly a limber farce and, sure enough, the most thoroughly stretched joke in Paternity, written by Charlie Peters and directed by Winnipeg comedian David Steinberg, is how utterly wrong Reynolds is for the role of Buddy Evans. [3 Oct 1981]

When the picture is good, it inspires hope and affection; when it's bad, it calls forth sighs and whispers. Lookin' To Get Out is a failure, but it's the kind of failure you feel sorry for. [11 Oct 1982]

Major surgery has been known to take less time and give more pleasure than this forgettable flick. [13 Oct 1990]

The Loveless is neither trashy nor fun. It's art - or so it thinks, but its self-consciousness is grating and its congratulation of the audience for getting the camp is patronizing. [10 Sep 1982]

Both Cobra and Raw Deal are designed primarily to get the audience off on violence, and both are successful; what makes Raw Deal marginally preferable is not only the bizarre charm of its star, but the fact that the filmmakers are honest about what they're up to and do not unduly exploit the hostility of the audience.

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]

A perverse, lame-brained thriller that is pornographic, misogynist and homophobic. If that makes it sound appealing, I should also add that it's silly, boring and intellectually insulting.

The virtue of Midnight Run is not that it does anything new; the virtue is that it does everything old so well.

An excessively brutal adventure comic book is exactly what it has set out to be - a medieval Heavy Metal. [14 May 1982]

The second film, in which one teen- ager is possessed by the spirit of a murderer - this is a supernatural Jekyll and Hyde - sets horror film fans to laughing and eventually to booing.[20 Nov 1985]

What Cruising does have, then, is a claim to narrow truth and limited verisimilitude. What it does not have is a mind. [15 Feb 1980]

The sadly unable De Palma hasn't raised Cain, he's been buried by him. [08 Aug 1992]

Nowhere in Phantasm II is there the wit of Phantasm the first. [8 July 1988]

Everything about the remake is inferior to the Hitchcock classic. [01 Dec 1980]

The premise - a crazed killer abused years before returns to wreak vengeance on the young - is so familiar that the audience can predict (and does: loudly) every "shock." [15 Oct 1980]

For fans of violent but clever action films, RoboCop 2 may be the sultry season's best bet: you get the gore of Total Recall and the satiric smarts of Gremlins 2 The New Batch in one high-tech package held together by modest B-movie strings. [22 June 1990]

One of the gorier and more witless horror films in recent memory. [19 Apr 1982]

Dorothy's friends are as weird as her enemies, which is faithful to the original Oz books but turns out not to be a virtue on film, where the eerie has a tendency to remain eerie no matter how often we're told it's not. [22 Jun 1985, p.E3]

If you see Clue only once, and it's hard to imagine seeing it more than once, even for the five different minutes, the "A" is by far the best, featuring as it does (this does not give away the identity of the murderer) a splendidly funny shtick from Madeline Kahn. [13 Dec 1985, p.D5]

As a risque children's entertainment, it's better than a street-corner dirty joke, but it's no place for adults to hang around. [17 July 1980]

Every Which Way But Loose is a fists-out-and-up Burt Reynolds movie without Burt Reynolds. I never thought I'd miss the Beverly Hills good ol' boy so much. [22 Dec 1978]

To his credit, writer-director Richard Stanley, a South African native now living in England, brings his own bloody specialties to the banquet, and Hardware, although neither original nor especially thought-provoking, does serve its intended purpose by sending the hungry horror film fan away from the table satiated and nauseated. Compliments to the chefs. [12 Oct 1990]

Clive Barker is not without a sense of humor. And he's certainly not without a sense of what will scare his audiences senseless. [28 Dec 1988]

It's so much like Home Alone, it's the unofficial sequel, Home Alone II: Out on His Own. Career Opportunities shows us what happens when the Macaulay Culkin character grows up. It's not a pretty sight. [1 Apr 1991]

Supergirl is made by people who can make a woman fly halfway around the world and can't get a plot to walk around the block. [22 Dec 1984]

When Dune is not inept, confusing, ridiculous or unpleasant, it's boring. [14 Dec 1984]

When it's good, it's because it's imitating its predecessor (but it suffers from tired spilled blood) and when it's bad, it's because it's imitating its own imitators. [31 Oct 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]

Entertainments like this are what Hollywood is said to be all about: larger than life personalities redeeming material smaller than a breadbox. [23 July 1982]

The first hour of Club Paradise is enjoyable and more or less adult, thanks in large part to the comic contributions of Williams, O'Toole and the SCTV alumni. But he has not learned structure. Toward the end, the island having been tossed into a civil war invented solely to give the movie one of the helter skelter farcical endings Ramis and Reitman regularly affix to their films, Club Paradise falls apart like a piece of cheap luggage. [4 July 1986]

What Death Hunt is a piece of is neither entertaining nor educational. [18 Apr 1981]

As long as it remains within the carefully constructed, peaceful and innocent cosmos of its opening, it's nonpareil. When it goes to war, it goes to hell. [18 Dec 1992]

Even if your idea of a good time is watching a man dressed as a malevolent oak tree extend his branches and literally tear a woman's heart from her chest, I think you ought to pass on The Sword and the Sorcerer. [26 Apr 1982]

Inflated production numbers come lumbering ludicrously onto the screen like so many boozy pink elephants from a demented circus. [26 Nov 1980]

In the end, this musical is not a disgrace - Huston has too much experience to let the thing die. But he cannot summon the magic required to let it live. Watching Annie is like being buried alive in balloons. [21 May 1982]

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]

If Corman productions are lacking originality, ideas and expertise, they are at least devoted to the proposition that the attention span of the modern audience is shorter than the time it takes to soft boil an egg, and they are paced accordingly. Galaxy of Terror is one of the few films in existence that actually moves faster than its trailer. [26 Apr 1982]

Fat and sassless Champ a loser on all counts. [09 Apr 1979]

In Scrooged, a sub-Saturday Night Live re-make parody of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Ghostbuster Bill Murray busts up two of the festive ghosts (Christmas Past and Future) and mugs more than Mr. Magoo. [24 Nov 1988, p.C19]

What Porky's II has gained in sophistication from its "expanded view" it has lost in raunchy, anarchistic energy. Who wants a socially respectable pig out? [25 June 1983]

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]

His first visit was bad, this is worse. [09 Nov 1990]

The Fly is a mass-market, horror- film masterpiece that is also a work of art; it is the very movie the timorous feared "Aliens" would be - a gruesome, disturbing, fundamentally uncompromising shocker that accesses the subconscious. [15 Aug 1986]

Miss Fonda has thought to make a thriller out of that unthrilling process. [12 Dec 1981]