Kevin Thomas

A lame, tedious comedy.

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

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

A trite, incoherent tale.

A campy, hopelessly amateurish vanity production.

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"?

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]

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

Misfires badly as both an entertainment and a message movie.

There's so much ranting and raving, all of it boring and trite.

But even Carvey's protean talent can't dent this ponderously unfunny and uninspired comedy. It's hard to imagine anyone older than 10 being diverted by its broad buffoonery, and kids deserve better than this in the first place.

Thanks to a relentlessly terrible script by many hands, it's a dumb movie about dumb cops that should have remained on the shelf, where it's been sitting for over two years. [31 Jan 1994, p.F5]

The biggest problem is with the kids themselves, which are played by little people with electrically operated fake heads stuck on top of them. The kids have very little expression, and their voices seem disembodied. As a result, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie seems so much cheap fakery at a time when breathtakingly convincing special effects have become the rule rather than the exception.

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.

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.

The result is hopelessly inane, humorless and under-inspired.

Julien Hernandez's Sex, Politics & Cocktails gives all three a bad name.

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.

The attempt to find humor in mean-spiritedness is way beyond Paris and Fejerman's abilities, and their last-reel attempt to portray Sofia as an ultimately liberating force for her daughters is as contrived as My Mother Likes Women is repellent.

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.

The "crime" was that it was made in the first place and the "punishment" is having to watch it.

Just as silly and tedious as the first two unconnected tales of young gay love -- but lots worse.

Good-natured but it's a dud.

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.

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

Way too bleak to be funny, even as a contemporary satire of the battle of the sexes.

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.

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

The Great Outdoors is about as much fun as ants at a picnic for anyone over the age of 10. It's a crass, blah comedy about summer vacation perils that teams Dan Aykroyd and John Candy, but gives them next to nothing to work with. If the prolific and profit-making John Hughes weren't the writer--as well as the co-executive producer--of this scattershot nonsense directed frenetically by Howard Deutch, it's hard to imagine the film getting made, let alone attracting Aykroyd and Candy.

It is an inept, inane Mafia comedy with a gay angle, all the more insufferable because director Kristen Coury and writer Joseph Triebwasser clearly think they're being wonderfully cute and clever.

The actors are game, but their roles lack color and depth, and it's a real struggle to survive Soul Survivors to the finish.

Teen sex comedies don't come more mindless than Joseph A. Pineda's Going Down, a movie so seriously underinspired it's hard to imagine it appealing to anyone but fantasy-prone middle schoolers who can barely wait to live it up like their older brothers and sisters.

Trite and uninvolving.

Even as you feel grateful to be able to laugh off this film, you realize that its humor is really only inuring you to a nonstop series of stabbings, slashings, impalings, stranglings and yet other means of killing. Be warned: For all its laughs, Friday the 13th -- A New Beginning (rightly rated R) is just one more nauseating sick joke. [25 March 1985, p.C6]

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.

[An] inept, incoherent and charmless would-be romantic comedy-thriller.

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.

In comparison to Where the Heart Is, the Wal-Mart commercials seem like cinema verite.

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.

Garmento has nothing going for it. First-time writer-director Michele Maher spent three years working in Manhattan's fashion industry...her attempts at satire are feeble and trite, and her stereotypical characters are without interest.

The only way his (Benigni's) show-off performance could have a prayer of working would be if the film were released as a silent.

Darkness Falls -- with a thud. But it does not go gently into the night, for director Jonathan Liebesman and his large crew cram as much style and energy as they can into a hokey and morbid supernatural thriller plot. It's a downer to see so much effort expended on such junk.

Works against its goals.

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

Degrading, disgusting and depressing.

Has nothing going for it -- and much going against it.

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.

Under Alan Cohn's straight-on direction, the film, written by various hands, huffs and puffs mightily just to keep a strenuously labored plot going.

A total waste of time.

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.

It's a glum, stale soap opera, tediously paced but mercifully running only 75 minutes, its sole virtue.

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.

There's nothing super about Super Troopers except for those deep into the low end of the frat-house mentality that equates smart-alecky with hilarity.

For histrionic wretched excess this movie would be hard to surpass.

The humor in this film is so elementary, so numskull, it defies description or extended discussion.

It is terrible in every aspect -- wretchedly written, directed with a ham fist (by Matthew Levin) and over-acted.

Whitney takes having it both ways to new heights -- depths is perhaps more like it. He satirizes reality TV while showing total nudity and at times carrying sex to the verge of soft-core porn. As titillating and energetic as the film is, it is also rather sad because it reveals what aspiring actors will endure for what they apparently regard as an opportunity.

It's so bad that you have to wonder whether Tom Green was looking for a project to match last year's "Freddy Got Fingered" -- Green didn't direct this turkey, but it surely is a contender for the bottom of the barrel award for 2002.

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.

Millennium has little to distract you from the obvious phony hair coloring of its stars.

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]

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.

Appalling, shamelessly manipulative and contrived, and totally lacking in conviction.

Awkwardly staged and edited and fitted out with an overly intrusive score drawn primarily from classical music, the film consistently subverts the earnest efforts of its cast.

Morbid, silly and ultra-violent, Stephen King's Sleepwalkers is pure trash from the popular horrormeister. It is so bad that surely the only way that it could have been made was to have King's name on it.

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.

Supernova isn't so super.

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

It doesn't seem possible that a film with both the formidable Reno and Waits could be all bad, but The Tiger and the Snow is precisely so.

A lackluster international action adventure.