Jay Scott

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]

If Electric Dreams is indicative of what MTV alumni are going to do with the big screen, the big screen is going to be in big need of something to keep it from shrinking to the size of a guitar pick. [21 Jul 1984]

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]

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

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]

Stripped of absolutely everything Absolute Beginners has borrowed from absolutely everything else, the entire film would fit absolutely snugly into a cockroach's shoe. [19 Apr 1986]

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]

Not only is it mindless, it is also racist. Not only is it racist, it is also incompetent. Not only is it incompetent, it is also unfunny. [17 Dec 1979]

The performers are powerless to bring life to this moribund courtroom drama...a snoozer.

A shamelessly commercial and determinedly vulgar director, such as Flash Gordon's Mike Hodges, might have made the film work; it might have succeeded on one level instead of failing on many. [13 Dec 1980, p.E7]

More than merely another bad movie, it's the most depressing development yet in Coppola's career. It's a would-be cash cow bred cynically to excrete money, the arty answer to "Child's Play 2" or "Back to the Future III."

The biggest anti-bonus of all, however, is the subject itself: running amok in middle-age. The French have already gnawed that particular turkey meatless. Now it has been passed to North Americans, who are picking the bones. Those bones rattle. [6 Oct 1979]

It don't mean nothin'. [28 Aug 1987]

Perfectly passable kiddie escapism. It has a thrill or two, and a chill or three, but it has no poetry, little sense of wonder, no resonant subtext (Jungian or otherwise), no art... When it's over, it's gone. Extinct.

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

Howard the Duck is the end of the line: any more infantile than this, and the filmmakers are going to vanish into the nearest womb. As a comedy, Howard the Duck is less humorous than that well- known Lucas laugh riot, Return of the Jedi, but it is good at one thing - wasting money. [02 Aug 1986, p.D9]

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

Given Part II's quality, the final sequence, a series of clips from next summer's Part III, may be a major miscalculation. "To be concluded," reads the final title. Sounds more like a threat than a promise. [22 Nov 1989, p.C9]

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]

Farrah Fawcett offers to this corrupt "entertainment" a small measure of the fresh innocence Marilyn Monroe used to bring to her movies; watching her work under these circumstances is like watching a maiden being thrown to Moloch. [22 June 1981]

Deja vu's too kind a term to describe what happens in the latest chapter in the lives of the characters created so long ago in print by Peter Benchley and brought to life - and, eventually, to death - on screen by Steven Spielberg. [22 July 1987]

There must be a musical somewhere in the musty vaults of movie history as bad as The Pirate Movie, but I'm at a loss to recall it - speaking comparatively, this unclean thing imparts to Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu the delicacy and charm of a moment with Fred Astaire. It makes you long for The Blue Lagoon. It encourages you to baste yourself in that masterpiece of oily ennui, Summer Lovers. It makes an evening with Kate Smith look good; hell, it makes an evening with Margaret Trudeau look good. [9 Aug 1982]

In Drowning by Numbers, there is a strange character called Smut, a precocious boy genius fascinated by sex and obsessed with death: his avocation is the compulsive cataloguing of dead animals. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover feels as if it could been made by that child. [31 March 1990]

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]

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]

Would-be horror film has little upstairs. Warped and wilted in the attic. [25 Nov 1987]

Director Joel Schumacher has fashioned a film foul enough to qualify as an inadvertent satire - it's obvious Schumacher (D.C. Cab) wants the audience to care about the septet, but the writing is so rocky, the situations so contrived, the acting so awkward and the characters so self-centred, witless and amoral, it's almost as if St. Elmo's Fire had been conceived as a vicious anti-youth movie, a calculated attempt to destroy en masse the reputations of some of Hollywood's hottest young actors. [28 June 1985]