Kevin Thomas

They never generates any real fear until its last minutes, by which time it is too late to redeem the dull events that preceded them.

It must be said that, stuck with a script full of plot holes, director David Price doesn't flinch. Both he and his key actors are clearly up to better material than Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice.

The film is no more than a tedious, over-long Bollywood soap opera.

It's too labored and ponderous to qualify as a so-bad-it's-good amusement. Original Sin is merely an old-fashioned bore.

Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear” is his most off-putting picture since his unwatchable political films of the ‘70s.

Ready for a singing and dancing "Reservoir Dogs"?

Turns out to be a tedious and under-inspired comedy.

Misfires badly as both an entertainment and a message movie.

Not even a brief appearance by Quentin Tarantino and a ton of references to other movies enlivens the proceedings much.

A trite psychological thriller -- all buildup and no payoff, a mystery that essentially offers only two alternative solutions, which diminishes the element of surprise and strings the viewer along way past caring which possibility proves to be true.

A dreary title for an even drearier picture.

Leaves us with a heightened appreciation of the bold and personal films made by a number of filmmakers of the former Yugoslavia.

Best of the Best is a by-the-numbers martial-arts movie graced by several celebrated actors marking time between more rewarding assignments and crowned by an appallingly brutal Tae Kwan Do competition. There's nothing here except for karate fanatics. [10 Nov 1989, p.F15]

It's too bad this Rollerball veered off-track so swiftly, derailed by bad writing and possibly also by some of that extensive post-production reworking.

Good-natured but it's a dud.

Fandango overreaches badly and sinks under a heavy weight of symbolism, bathos and sheer preposterousness that no amount of humor and incident can redeem.

All strained artifice, inhabited by individuals who either lack dimension or are merely stereotypes. The result is a movie not nearly as amusing as its makers may think.

Pretty dreadful.

Opens and closes on a jaunty note: It's the tedious, relentlessly talky 80 minutes in between that's the problem.

Whatever his intentions, Clark, in his third outing as a director, has come up with a film that is seriously flawed.

Crewson is a game, experienced actress but hasn't sufficient star charisma to lift Suddenly Naked out of the doldrums.

Unfortunately, Jodorowsky is no Bunuel -- nor a Leone, for that matter -- and El Topo’s bloody odyssey, involving endless heavily symbolic encounters with the bizarre and fantastic, expresses the eternal tug of war between the savage and the spiritual in human nature on the most obvious level and in the most ponderous fashion.

Can never rise above the melodrama of a past era, despite a splendid, impassioned portrayal by Willem Dafoe and an affecting one by Luo Yan.

Eventually, Immigration Tango throws away what little credibility it has in going for a finish of total improbability and silliness.

Psycho Beach Party is, from the start, in dire need of the electroshock therapy that Florence ultimately undergoes.

Begins on a mildly entertaining note, with each successive vignette the film grows increasingly tedious.

You can't help but feel that Disney has delivered a turkey for Thanksgiving.

Even more feeble than the 1987 original.

A numbskull comedy about a couple of guys (Rob Morrow, Johnny Depp) on the make at a resort hotel.

If you have the feeling you've already seen Surviving the Game you may very well have, for it's basically the same story as Hard Target. That film may not have been top-drawer John Woo, but alongside Surviving the Game, it's a masterpiece. [18 Apr 1994, p.F3]

The most you can say for Police Academy 3: Back in Training is that it's no worse than "Police Academy 2" -- which was awful. [24 Mar 1986, p.Cal-7]

Love Potion 9 isn't truly terrible, like the recent "Frozen Assets." It even provokes some laughs, but it suffers from terminal mildness.

So uninvolving it scarcely matters what it looks like.

The look of the film is great, the soundtrack glorious, but more often than not the dialogue is atrocious, featuring a lot of long-winded gobbledygook.

Unfunny rather than outrageous as intended.

At once corny and precious, its humor seems too heavily ethnic to travel well.

By the time the heavy-handed Solomon & Gaenor is over, it has become such a punishing exercise in the self-evident that one is left numb and eager for escape.

However visually striking, this Australian film is ultimately as tedious as it is derivative.

A lame, tedious comedy.

A dialogue polishing by Barker, plus his own direction, might have made a crucial difference. What it got instead was a script inescapably convoluted by the need to justify a third sequel...Like the other sequels, Hellraiser: Bloodline goes in for elaborate special effects and decor, but the film is murky and morbid, laden with a heavy dose of grisly sadomasochism that's more repellent than intriguing.

Good-natured and exuberantly politically - socially is more like it - incorrect, but it is woefully under-inspired and amateurish.

One Night at McCool's is one night too much.

A leaden business from start to finish, and the film's stars, plus Hemsley as Hogan's lively sidekick, David Johansen as the crazed villain of the piece and Mother Love as Pendleton's feisty cook, can't overcome Gottlieb's shortcomings. [11 Oct 1993, p.F3]

A hopelessly callow, leaden-paced attempt at film noir, is of interest only because it was directed and co-written by Francis Coppola's nephew, Christopher, and because it has a far more stellar cast than is usual for low-budget B pictures. [28 Feb 1994, p.F8]

GhettoPhysics undercuts its approach with too much cant, too much rambling and too much that is self-evident.

The whole question of sex blurring deserves an infinitely better film than “It’s Pat.”

Greenaway is a man of distinctive ideas and insights who this time out has expended his abilities and perceptions -- and those of many others -- on an exercise in grossness that depresses rather than enlarges the human spirit. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is sensational, all right, but hardly entertaining. [13 Apr 1990, p.F12]

A tedious comedy... It's not the worst premise for humor dashed with a little wisdom, but the script, written by the film's star Eddie Griffin and others, is less than inspired and tends to blur the line between immaturity and just plain stupidity.

The best the makers of Down to You can hope for is that girls in their early teens--clearly the film's target audience--will be so carried away by its charismatic stars that they'll overlook the film's various flaws.

Melts swiftly...don't expect a shred of credibility.

It's tedious instead of provocative and so unconvincing as to be preposterous.

More travesty than tragedy.

Just the ticket for girls in their early teens.

Has plenty of warmth, affection and conventional wisdom, but too much of the time it plays out in routine fashion with moments of contrivance.

Maybe if "Fluke," which might have been better as an animated feature, weren't such a lavish, big-deal production and closer to the modest level of the recent -- and pleasant little -- pig movie "Gordy," it wouldn't seem so overwhelmingly, at times even laughably, foolish. [02 Jun 1995, p.F6]

Implausible at every turn, it offers a dab of quirkiness and edge from writer-director Finn Taylor, but otherwise has nothing for audiences to embrace.

Feeble and unfunny.

Not even the strong, reflective, world-weary presence of Reno or Cassel's energy can make a dent in a movie in which suspense and tension dissipate quickly, with action sequences not spectacular enough to compensate. All that's left is gratuitous gore.

Looks sensational, moves like lightning. But its script (by Joel Soisson) makes no pretense about being logical or even comprehensible.

This picture, which looks far, far better than it is, is so clunky that you can't be sure just how funny writer John Esposito, in adapting an early King short story, and director Ralph S. Singleton intended it to be.

It holds its audience hostage for an unconscionable 111 minutes with a rambling, unfunny, thickly sentimental comedy that plays like third-rate Frank Capra. [02 Dec 1994, p.F6]

Quickly becomes silly and tedious.

Gets nowhere. Its star Ice Cube remains characteristically amiable, but this thuddingly miscalculated comedy is way beneath him.

Dust is a bust, a big bad movie of the scope, ambition and bravura that could be made only by a talented filmmaker run amok.

Might work on the stage but is merely tedious on the screen.

Begins as a captivating romantic comedy and then, at the very moment it's most involving, takes a wholly gratuitous and disastrous swerve and just keeps on going from bad to worse.

A tedious, frenetic and sour business in which humans and Martians alike are all pretty stupid, except for the local sheriff’s pretty, peace-loving daughter (Ariana Richards). Even the special effects aren’t anything special.

Although Travolta is as smooth as ever, the picture is a bust, a grimly unfunny comedy with no connection to reality, and worst of all, running on and on for two dismal hours.

In short, writer Robert Mark Kamen gave director Avildsen and his cast too little to work with for The Karate Kid Part III to have gone into production in the first place.

Anders Thomas Jensen's Flickering Lights may have been a huge hit in Denmark, but it doesn't travel well. A bleak male-bonding comedy that's a queasy blend of brutal humor and escalating sentimentality, it is overlong, heavy-handed, slow and unpersuasive.

Paul Newman plays a crackerjack demolition man; unfortunately, before even half of this meandering and soggy film is over, Newman, as co-writer, co-producer, director and co-star, has flattened everything in sight, audience included. [29 Nov 1987, p.5]

Cease Fire is no art film but, rather, mainstream fare that's likely to appeal primarily to Farsi-speaking audiences. It is talky, too long at 1 hour, 44 minutes and tends to be preachy and tedious.

A film that means to be seductive but merely progresses from the contrived to the manipulative.

Turns out to be a thudding dud, crammed with clunky dialogue, bad acting and gruesome but unpersuasive gore. Mindhunters will pass muster with only the most undemanding horror fans.

Moving from tragedy to tragedy, the film teeters along unsteadily, showing events we've seen countless times before and then imploding under the weight of its ridiculous ending.

As awful as the original was inspired.

The genitally ambiguous as well as transsexuals and gay people deserve more than XXY's good intentions.

The bleak absurdity of its predicaments cries out for a tone of pitch-dark comedy to stave off the unintended laughter that it is virtually certain to elicit.

An undernourished romantic comedy-drama that's especially short on that most essential ingredient: credibility.

Far from great, and this off-putting French romantic comedy is sure to test severely the indulgence of fans of "Amélie."

Except for that music and a bit of the acting, Swing Kids is unsatisfactory from just about every point of view. [05 Mar 1993]

Not since The Heretic tried to follow up The Exorcist has there been so dismal a sequel as Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment.

A big fast bust.

This heartfelt valentine to the stage leaves no cliché unturned. If it has anything to recommend, it is the loving portrayal of the camaraderie of those who participate in art for art's sake who, to quote Cyrano, "work without one thought of gain or fame."

Eating Out might just make it as an amusing trifle, but on the big screen it's merely tedious and silly.

An elegant tale of romantic obsession weighed down by a needlessly convoluted plot that yields far more confusion than psychological suspense.

This documentary-like realism, alas, only underlines the preposterousness of its plot with its torrent of contrived, credibility-defying cliffhangers.

A dull, routine action-adventure in which the suspense is mechanical at best. Although there are a couple of gory moments, those expecting the jolts director Sean Cunningham brought to the original "Friday the 13th" are sure to be disappointed.

Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy are attractive and skilled performers as the film's newlyweds, but the movie is so mechanical it's like watching Barbie and Ken dolls going through the motions.

No effort has been stinted in polishing this painfully derivative picture as if it were a diamond instead of strictly paste. Director Thomas Carter keeps things moving, Fred Murphy's camera work gleams, but at three minutes short of two hours, "Metro" seems drawn-out and wearying. Well, here's something, at least: It does leave you mildly curious as to why the bad guy is called Michael Korda--the very name of a noted author and editor in his own right.

An L.A. neo-noir raised to an insufferable degree of artiness.

The disastrous new version of H.G. Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau" at least affords Marlon Brando a grand entrance and a great comic portrayal. [23 Aug 1996, p.F12]

A routine shoot-'em-up, with the triteness of Scott Busby and Martin Copeland's script exceeded only by the flatness of Steve Miner's direction.

The picture looks as murky as its story line, the sound is tinny, much of the dialogue is flat or confoundingly technical or merely risible, and most everything on the screen looks patently fake.

Grimly unfunny comedy needs all the help that it can get. It's so bad it doesn't deserve the boost a Hanks nomination for Big may give it.

Asks us to spend 101 minutes with people most of us wouldtake pains to avoid in real life.

Neither acutely suspenseful nor particularly thrilling but instead mainly numbing.

The only element that keeps the film from falling apart entirely is powerful physical presence of Pollio, an experienced, impassioned young actor.