Kevin Thomas

Feeble and unfunny.

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

Pretty dreadful.

A trite, incoherent tale.

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

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]

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.

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

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.

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]

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.

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

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

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.

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]

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.

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

More travesty than tragedy.

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

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

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

Paymer and many others in a large cast are well-established players with strong credits, and they do the best they can to pump life into remorselessly glum material.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

It's easy to accuse Morrissette of condescending to a bunch of yokels, but hardly anybody would hold that against him if the result had been hilarious instead of deadly dull.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

A grimly unfunny and stupefyingly inept comedy.

All this sadness becomes so depressing to watch, testing the limits of the patience of even a viewer prepared to take Wang's underlying concerns seriously.

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

Renegades, a shamelessly contrived, ultraviolent macho fantasy, stars Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips, who are too talented and too successful to be wasting themselves on such trash.

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

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

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

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]

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]

Ready for a singing and dancing "Reservoir Dogs"?

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

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.

Unfunny rather than outrageous as intended.

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]

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.

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.

Michael S. Ojeda's film is so relentlessly shallow and excessive that it hardly matters whether Lana is eventually able to turn the tables on Darko. When it rains in Lana's Rain, it pours -- and what comes out is trash.

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

A dreary title for an even drearier picture.

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

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

A broad and stale British crime comedy that wastes the considerable talent and presence of Minnie Driver.

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

Misfires badly as both an entertainment and a message movie.

Works against its goals.

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.

A lame, tedious comedy.

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.

The Specials is an unfortunate name for a film that's anything but.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Degrading, disgusting and depressing.

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

So laughably awful that it begs to have stones thrown at it; it's a wonder it got made at all.

As awful as the original was inspired.

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.

Quickly becomes silly and tedious.

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

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

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

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]

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

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.

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.

A big fast bust.

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.

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.

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

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.

What ensues is so glum and disjointed that the film becomes an even bigger mess.

A painfully anemic variation on John Landis' 1981 winner, "An American Werewolf in London." While the original had both wit and poignancy--and an affectionate and knowing tip-of-the-hat to werewolf movies past--this slapdash, silly new edition is so cut-rate it has Luxembourg and Amsterdam standing in for the City of Light.

Even more feeble than the 1987 original.

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.

A total waste of time.