Kevin Thomas

A thick and gooey slice of holiday hokum.

The number of clearly talented individuals who committed themselves to the folly of The Living Wake were fearless too.

Tedious and contrived.

A lot of uneven acting is also no small detriment to this frequently awkward film's credibility.

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"?

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

Works against its goals.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A lackluster international action adventure.

Always a welcome presence in any film, Howard, as a simple-minded hick, gives Blackwoods whatever humor and life it has.

A dreary tale of supernatural horror.

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.

A standard issue undergrad gross-out comedy notable only for the showy role it provides Jason Schwartzman, well-remembered as "Rushmore's" geeky high school student Max Fischer.

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.

Smartly shot in digital and transferred to 35 mm, suggests that Evans needs more seasoning to make genre conventions and characters work for him rather than against him.

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

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.

Some movies should never come to light, either, and Darkness, bearing a 2002 copyright, might well have been better left on the shelf.

Maple Palm cannot possibly be seriously recommended to anyone, but a reviewer, sitting through it until the long-awaited finish, cannot but be moved by how Stewart and everyone else involved has hurled themselves into the project with the utmost conviction, sometimes with unintended comical effect.

A grimly unfunny and stupefyingly inept comedy.

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

Relentlessly awful. Not even Terry Kiser’s wandering corpse is funny this time around.

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.

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.

A trite, incoherent tale.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Trite and uninvolving.

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

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.

Degrading, disgusting and depressing.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Supernova isn't so super.

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

Despite a premise that's provocative, to say the least, this one's a dud.

Lapses into an exercise in foolishness.

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

It's been theorized that the popularity of the "Friday the 13th" movies is because the juxtaposing of scenes of lovemaking and extreme violence somehow eases young people's sexual fears. However, this "Friday the 13th", which was written by Daryl Haney and Manuel Fidello and directed by John Carl Buechler, is so dumb and contrived it's hard to imagine it working up any feelings except boredom. [17 May 1988, p.C3]

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.

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

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.

The one thing that can be said of Waking Up in Reno is that it's rigorously consistent. Every note rings false.