Jennie Punter

Gomez, who turns 20 next year, looks much younger than her age and has the thankless task of playing three roles...It feels like a struggle and the screenplay doesn't help.

Essentially a slapstick movie with no plot or -- as my boyfriend called it after recovering from 1½ hours of side-splitting laughter -- "the ultimate big-screen TV experience."

Classic style over substance, with some gruesome-looking creatures and settings and non-stop shooting and biting (both the vampires and werewolves get their teeth into it). But, alas, at almost two hours, it is much ado about nothing.

An unholy mess.

It's a going-through-the-motions domestic comedy that makes, say, "Cheaper By The Dozen" look like a heart-warming, cutting-edge laugh riot.

Aside from uninspired movie-parody gags, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore suffers from gadget overload.

A noxious PG comedy starring Adam Sandler as a pair of middle-aged male-female twins that should have been separated at birth to spare us from this movie.

Chan's comedic gifts and still-nimble moves are wasted in a string of unimaginative household calamities and practical jokes.

The Wicker Man is one of those "what were they thinking?" movies.

A raunchy, fast-paced comedy that, nevertheless, is as flat as the tires on the old Volvo gathering dust in my garage.

It makes "Little Man," "Scary Movie 3" and "Beerfest" look like comic masterpieces.

At the end of The Comebacks, Coach is offered job with a college basketball team called The Sequels - a joke perhaps, but all too horrifying a prospect after watching this dull fumble.

What ends up on screen is confused storytelling that tries to solve too many social and family problems, sends mixed messages and, even worse, makes you laugh during parts when it's trying to be dead serious.

Just as the book is usually better than the film, one suspects the video game is probably more entertaining and coherent than the movie. In the case of Alone in the Dark, this is a certainty.