Marc Savlov

Has all the sugar-injected horsepower of a 6-year-old on a Big Wheel.

Just plain dismal, an inexplicable mining of old, mid-level programming that has all the raging excitement of continental drift.

De Palma's film is a mess from its anxious start all the way through to its new-agey end, relying heavily on cribs from Kubrick and Cameron and even the recent "Apollo 13."

Part unfunny sitcom, part post-"Gigli" career resurrection strategy, and all bad.

It’s a history lesson wrapped up in a romance, gallows grim but far too often unnecessarily heavy-handed in a way that drives home the factual historical horrors it portrays while somehow managing to feel like a sizably budgeted but no less maladroit television movie of the week.

The Happening is both too incoherenly weird and too narratively ambitious for its own good.

Blame screenwriters Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, and Nikolaj Arcel (who also directed) for trying too hard to cram so much of King’s original into a film format.

Director Eisner helmed the excellent remake of George R. Romero’s The Crazies back in 2010, but this film shows none of the lunatic flair for the ghastly that the previous film so easily served up.

Herzfeld also wrote the screenplay, and so its leaden and obvious tone and the resulting dearth of delicacy rests squarely on him.

It's hard to give a damn one way or the other about Street Fighter -- it's so thin that an errant sneeze might topple this glossy house of cards.

Beyond a leper’s handful of jokes that actually connect, this might as well be Ferrell’s most abysmal piece of work since the disastrous "Land of the Lost."

With token computer graphics thrown in to pad an already overlong script, Ghost In the Machine gamely tries to hop aboard the Virtual Reality bandwagon and only succeeds in crashing the Net.

Law Abiding Citizen, ultimately and inappropriately, tips the scales in favor of the Man over mankind. Somebody call Charles Bronson.

The only thing that surprises me here is that Roger Clinton isn't signed up for a cameo.

But bad, this film's so bad! To flub the fans' most beloved butcher boy.

This time out, the action is in 3-D, which amounts to a few shots of flaming motorcycle parts comin' at ya, but little else.

The only people who should be peeved enough to raise hell about Year One are the viewers who had to pay to sit through it.

There are some moments of blessed levity to the otherwise mordant melodramatics...That's not enough to sustain interest in the Taylors and their toxic emotional foibles, however.

Go for the gore (there's lots of it), but stay for the immortal line: "Now let's go find the body this arm belongs to."

Unfunny and worse, unpleasant, Jingle All the Way is holiday cheer from the warped psyche of a Scrooge. Even the Grinch wouldn't like this one.

This is a strange movie (it feels like a lost episode of the old Leonard Nimoy chestnut In Search of …) about strange people doing strange things.

We're treated to such a broad panoply of godawful dialogue, righteously shoddy acting, and, worst of all for an action blockbuster of this sort, subpar effects work, that's it's all you can do not to giggle helplessly.

Despite the movie’s lack of anything resembling a narrative center, Testosterone isn't an entire waste of film stock – Sutcliffe, Sabato Jr., and especially the great Braga all act up a storm.

A smallish cast peppered with a pair of bullish performances by both Platt and the lesser-known Gleeson. The two spark some chemistry between them, which is more than can be said for Pullman and Fonda's moribund performances.

It's so unreal it hurts.

Although a slow-burn approach to this sort of creepfest is generally a smart move, Devil’s Due peters out of outright suspense midway through and never fully recovers, despite (or possibly because of) a final reel that may shock some viewers but will leave die-hard genre fans gnashing their teeth and rending their clothes in dismay.

Wan does manage to infuse his film with some of the subtle unsubtleties of classic Euro-horror outings, chief among them the palpable, dreamlike sense of dislocation and the abiding severance from reality that tends to make nongenre fans wonder if someone spiked their popcorn with LSD.

It's all one big blur: sound, fury, and Martin Sheen devouring scenery as if it were going out of style (and in Spawn, it's definitely not).

The only evolution in question here is that of Emmerich's skills as a director of motion pictures.

Collision Course is overstuffed with meandering, unnecessary micro-storylines, far too many new characters, and an obvious lack of focus, none of which should impact the movie’s target demographic, kids under 10.

Bad as it may be, though, the film falls that one precious inch shy of being quite so awful that it achieves cult status; in short, it's just not bad enough to be any good.

As always, there's the combustible band of mismatched survivors.

With plot holes so large you could drive a HumVee through them, this debut film from director Shapiro is little more than a lousy hybrid, one part Fatal Attraction to two parts Lolita, only this time Humbert Humbert writes for trendy Pique! magazine and lives in Seattle (but doesn't everybody these days?).

You could do worse.

Not stupid enough to qualify as good, dumb fun.

It’s big, it’s slick, it’s very, very Hollywood, but it’s just not that good a film. It’s not even as much fun – and monster movies, as opposed to horror movies, should be fun – as the 1999 Brendan Fraser vehicle of the same name.

The resulting film makes Sam Raimi's "The Quick and the Dead" look like a stone cold neo-Western thoroughbred.

Plays like a bad adolescent revenge fantasy on Ritalin, all jagged editorial edges and silly, pumped-up testosterone.

The game is great fun -- the movie ought to be taken out back and shot.

Stupid, yes, but fun nonetheless.

Americans are befuddled by the inexplicable, and they demand explanations. With The Grudge 2 Shimizu delivers them and thus defangs the horror, leaving us in a well-lit room, pining for the shadows.

A dull, plodding remake.

Not as yummy as it sounds, true, but nowhere near as godawful as "Van Helsing," a small mercy but very much appreciated.

Comedic touches aside (nearly all of which belong to Ben Stiller who's off on another, far more interesting, planet as the genuinely goofy Bwick), If Lucy Fell strives hard to be a serious romantic comedy for the Nineties. It almost succeeds. Schaeffer trips up, though, when he lets his philosophies get the better of him. Nothing stops If Lucy Fell faster than its mordant underpinnings, cute though they may be. It's “The Best Date Movie of the Nineties,” number 224 in a series. Collect 'em all.

Petrie (Richie Rich) has crafted a snuffling dog of a comedy that's far too reliant on less-than-amazing CGI effects.

With a running time of 78 minutes, Awake is relatively painless, playing a little like a lesser story from one of EC Comics Shock SuspenStories – or a lot like Joseph Cotten's "Breakdown" episode of Alfred Hitchock Presents – updated for the Fangoria generation.

In the end, Collide is a cheap genre product produced with an eye on foreign market box office. Wake me when Dominic Toretto torques his way into Havana.

The heist itself is a charm with the kids zipping about in go-karts and eluding klutzy security guards, but the film seems trapped in a strange Twilight Zone somewhere between comedy and drama.

Young kids will likely enjoy watching all the hubbub the gutsy protagonist stirs up and identify with his plight, but most anyone over the age of 14 will find the film alternately too cute for its own good and too blind to quit while it's ahead.

Isn't it time to put Robin Williams out to pasture? There's precious little mirth to be had via RV after the comically nasty opening set-up.

Shapeshifters-lite. Fangs but no fangs.

It's a tonally confused comedy which, for once, doesn't go far enough comedically.

It's not nearly as mediocre a two hours as the trailers would have you think.

Apart from its rushed pacing and occasionally stale dialogue, Thinner suffers even more from the fact that it has no redeemable characters.

This South Korean pseudo-epic is some of the most ambitious cr-- I've ever seen.

Koteas' overearnest performance almost makes The Haunting in Connecticut worth a look, but ultimately even the star of Cronenberg's "Crash" can't salvage what is essentially a substandard rip-off of "The Amityville Horror."

Phoenix Forgotten is borderline generic, desert-set found footage that apes the aforementioned Witchiness and genre constraints to a snooze-worthy T.

There is a line between gallows humor and tastelessness, but Very Bad Things apparently doesn't have a clue where that might be.

Friedkin, to his credit, gives us a nicely compelling car chase through the near-vertical hills of San Francisco, but it's only five minutes long, and this is a 105-minute film. What to do with the other 100 minutes? No one seems to know.

I Dreamed Of Africa...and all I got was this lousy movie.

It's a noble effort, but aficionados and the mildly interested are recommended to seek out VH-1's excellent Studio 54 documentary in lieu of this shallow morality play.

Excruciating in the extreme, this is the nadir of urban comedies thus far: a trashy, crass, and painfully unfunny airline disaster of a film.

A nifty idea that goes everywhere (and nowhere).

This film is unquestionably the most unromantic and downright despairing romcom since "Made of Honor" or, possibly, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

The Punisher is such a bad film that it becomes inadvertently entertaining; it’s enough to make you pine for the original version of the black-clad Marvel Comics’ badass, played to awful imperfection in 1989 by Dolph Lundgren.

Hollow, predictable, and too glitzy for its own good, The Fan never even makes it to first base.

Inexplicable Fantasy Romances for the Harried Modern Gal 101 is a more fitting title for this shameless mediocrity.

As for Legion, well, if you've seen one plague of flies and death and angels at war with each other, you've seen 'em all.

Proving once again that no matter how many times you remake a film it's tough to top the original.

Ends up as little more than a recursive footnote to the infinitely better up-all-night teen comedies of, you guessed it, John Hughes.

Honestly, I could watch Goldblum and Gainsbourg – two of the most quirkily sublime multihypenate artists alive – reading phonebooks to each other and enjoy the experience thoroughly, but sadly even they seem wasted here.

It boggles the mind that Saddam Hussein and assorted cohorts have finally won their rightful place in the global noose while various and sundry villains associated with this third entry in the Santa Claus franchise of flaccidly feel-good, winter nostrums will no doubt be allowed to walk the Earth with nary a qualm nor backward glance.

Least Among Saints is a heartfelt if not exactly heartwarming story of two wounded males, but despite top-notch performances from all the leads, it never really brings anything new to a story that's already overly familiar.

Longtime World of Warcraft players should and likely will storm the cineplex gates, burn the castle down, and salt the earth (and screenwriters) from whence this abomination sprung. Me, I’m going to chill out and download 1982’s top-notch "The Sword and the Sorcerer."

It's not often you come across a film as unique as this, and while my taste for liver, lights, and sweetbreads isn't what it once was, this is still a fine post-Halloween aperitif, with guts to spare.

I came out of Beyond Borders with the gnawing feeling I'd just been subjected to some sort of ghastly prank, Punk’d by the director of "GoldenEye" with Lara Croft as his willing confederate.

It's all noise and flash and chaos, but it lacks virtually everything that made the original television series so memorable.

Not half as terrifying as Norwegian black metal, but still one of the better found footage-gimmicked sequels in recent memory.

Robin Hood isn’t as awful as all that, really. For one thing, it’s too singularly bizarre to be anything less than head scratchingly entertaining, and the action set-pieces are pulled off with much quivery panache.

The film is a TKO before it even had a chance to get off a decent hook.

This Godzilla is lacking both the awesome spirit of the original and the sublime silliness of the more recent Toho outings.

This was already tired stuff when cult fave "Sleepaway Camp" came out in 1983, and it’s downright comatose by now.

Far from perfect and about as much fun as a holiday in Cambodia, this is lightweight yuletide fluffery, offensive neither in tone nor spirit but entirely unnecessary.

Tepid, borderline offensive cyber-serial killer thriller.

There's precious little to like about the witless and decidedly tedious Black Knight other than the fact that it's unlikely to generate a sequel.

Where has all the fun science-fiction filmmaking gone?

Even the should-have-been-triumphant revelation of the Boogeyman arrives as a CGI letdown of epic proportions.

A film that feels far too familiar for the likes of Wahlberg to juice up, hallucinatory valkyries or no.

This vehicle for hip-hop star Usher is no blinged-out Beamer rough-riding it over to Jay-Z's joint to wallop some cheeba up off'n the Zeezer's haid; it's more of a Yugo, as in "You go to this wannabe straight-to-video tripe, you deserve what you get."

Silent Hill's main attraction, for genre fans, certainly, lies not in its plot nor in its characters (you could place anyone in this particular township and whatever might happen, you could be sure it'd be unnerving), but in its relentlessly nightmarish imagery.

Painfully lame and hamstrung by a viciously unfunny sense of humor.

Genre fans and newcomers alike should skip this monstrosity and go rent "Ginger Snaps" instead.

The set-up, and indeed the entire film, reeks of yawn-inducing boilerplate plotting.

Your Highness is awfully vulgar fun when it works, which is much of the time (although it could've benefited from a few judicious cuts here and there).

The film is a mess, going all over the graveyard but never finding the grave. It's the work of a fan with too much time (and money) on his hands, eagerly awaited but best forgotten.

As far as pronoun horrors go, They can't hold a candle to Them or It, but as an anti-tourism ad for Seattle, it's right up there with The Ring in terms of overcast, glistening panache.

But Pine playing 1960s-era Shatner – sometimes subtly, sometimes not? That's a terrific gag. Really, it is. Totally inspired. It's just not enough to save this otherwise cookie-cutter bromantic comedy from being anything other than what it is: an inoffensive yawn.

Dull and unfunny claptrap.

A storyline that makes less sense than the current state of tech stocks on the Nasdaq.

For masochists only, and hardcore ones at that.

Envy feels like a comedy in search of a drama in search of some sort of lugubrious existential meaning; it never quite seems to know where it's going to head next, and neither will the audience.

How much better this would have been had someone like Brian De Palma stepped behind the camera.

The entire film is curiously soulless, with major characters making their entrances and exits (some of which are unexpectedly final) as if they were breezing in from some other screening next door.

Stupendously dull and infuriatingly obtuse.

The Road deviates from McCarthy's original text via a series of flashbacks to the man's pre-apocalyptic life with the woman (Theron) who both leaves her family behind and is in turn left behind by them.

A solid, intermittently excellent, and extremely exsanguinatory take on what Stephen King famously referred to as the "Spam in a cabin" genre.

An equally tired and wearisome buddy-cop movie that might as well be a forgotten leftover from the era of "Turner and Hooch." Now there's a film with classic Kevin Smith scrawled all over it.

Shue, to her credit, looks like she's trying to crawl out of her skin, but hey, anything to get away from this hell house, right? Right.

The Disappointments Room lives (and dies) up to its name.

It’s not a complete disaster, but even the appearance of Gabriel Byrne, as Lissa’s uncle Victor, fails to make much of a dent in the slapdash proceedings.

Little more than a cluttered, noisy, and unsatisfying thrill ride to nowhere.

Green and Henson make an inspired comic team, Sawa has the befuddled stoner thing down pat, and Alba is, in a word, yummy.

For those who haven’t read the Mark Helprin novel on which Akiva Goldsman’s film is based, prepare to be confused, annoyed, bewildered, and yet more annoyed by the director’s inability to construct even the most basic of narrative fantasy romances.

Director Munroe (TMNT) is clearly a fan and attempted his best on an admittedly limited budget, but some things just don't translate that well. Throw this dog a bone? No need, he's already got a closetful.

This rambunctious swords ’n’ sorcerers fantasy flick has grubby, pseudo-medieval CGI style to burn, but precious little in the way of anything new to add to this sort of genre storytelling.

Bonuses all around, but a double one for Perabo, the only cast member to survive this dull-as-dirt Cave with her actorly integrity intact.

It's a courageous but misguided move on Perry's part; he has none of Freeman's soulful, nuanced subtlety, and watching him display the gamut of emotions called for in Marc Moss and Kerry Williamson's script is like watching the Hulk attempt Swan Lake.

As mesmerizing as watching bread toast. Death, be not proud, indeed.

The most expensive South Korean film ever made is also one of the most realistic (read: gory) depictions of the horrors of war, specifically World War II, global cinema has ever produced.

Ultimately, it's a long, incoherent mess of a film, enlivened only by the sure knowledge that the great Will Eisner's original is available to one and all at your nearest comic-book shop.

Indeed, the biggest acting coup here comes by way of Courtney Love, whose cameo as an obliging waitress is the best thing the film has going for it.

For fans, however, Saw VI is, pardon the pun, a cut above the rest but not, sadly, by much.

Dickerson's newest film is an embarrassment of near epic proportions.

Simply put, it’s too much of a good thing, this unreined tumult of chaos.

The whole film suffers from a serious case of overplotting, perhaps inevitable when trying to cram two largish novels into one smallish film.

There's not much more to this poorly scripted thriller than exactly one well-done shock moment and Michael Keaton's eyebrows, but, to be fair, Keaton's brows have carried three Tim Burton films nearly on their own, so don't let this dissuade you from seeing the film.

Sloppy, confusing, and dull as a dented crucifix.

Only good old Leatherface literally mirrors the festering cultural and political corruption of the era, and to the film's vast discredit, this hideous echo is never even noted.

Although it's great fun for the under-8 set and for those of us monitoring the chaos theory that is Nolte's career of late, this film is otherwise mediocre and features some of the most uninvolving 3-D CGI since "Clash of the Titans" earlier this year.

Ultimately a fluffy bit of caper-noir, the success of Where the Money Is rests heavily with Old Blue Eyes.

Grown Ups is exactly, beat for beat, what the previews would have you believe: a depressingly predictable, two-chuckle deconstruction of what Sandler sees as the modern American male.

Calling The Unborn a dull, plodding, exposition-crammed slog through a twilight of barely maintained tedium is like calling "Valkyrie" a yawn. It's too easy.

Mitchell's film would be another example of why former SNL cast members should choose their scripts wisely, except that Schneider wrote this one.

Eager to please, but it’s so lacking in real-world skate politics that it more resembles the chugging PG-13 mediocrity of Top 40 pop-punk-lite than the hard-core Black Flagisms of Peralta’s scathingly real doc.

My advice? Grab Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and recast with Jimmy Dean.

Daltry Calhoun's saving grace comes in the form of a snappy compilation soundtrack that spans from Johnny Cash to Serge Gainsbourg, a feat of all-inclusiveness that renders the film a moot point at best.

I, Frankenstein is nowhere near as garishly, ghoulishly awful as "Van Helsing," Universal’s last attempt to resurrect its classic monsters. It’s a grimly fiendish slog nonetheless, and hardly worth getting up out of the grave for.

Incoherent mashup of previous demonized tyke films and unfailingly inept pseudo-science and the result is about as devoid of suspense, much less genuine horror, as this specific sub-genre can be.

Most indicative of The Tuxedo's mediocrity, however, is the absence of the always entertaining action outtakes that traditionally roll under the end credits of Chan films; here it's all dialogue flubs barely fit for Dick Clark.

Home may be where the heart is, but I kept wishing this poor silly girl would up and move.

Dude, your movie sucks.

While past parodies like Airplane! and the marginally worthwhile Hot Shots filled out down time with slapstick visuals and spastic throwaway gags, Loaded Weapon is content to lumber along at its own boring pace: you end up checking your watch between jokes, and there's nothing funny about that.

Sad, sorry remake.

Still, "The Haunting" these films are not.

The Collector feels like the final, welcome nail in the bizarrely popular torture-porn coffin.

As Timeline so adequately proves, not every bestseller will render a good film.

Sitting through the film was an exercise in confusion.

It's not quite as bad as "Cutthroat Island," I'll grant you, but it's woefully close.

It doesn’t work, however, and the end result is one long yawn of mediocrity, devoid of any genuine suspense, hobbled by incoherent plotting, and ending on a note of goofy what-the-fuckery.

This space invaders stuff is, like, so 1981.

Promises thrills galore but delivers only limp non-frights and predictable yawns.

Bruce Willis shows up, in full Bruce “yippee-ki-yay, mofo” Willis mode, to little effect, and while Hudson’s sassy camp follower is a hoot, there are just too many narratively bizarre subplots falling out all over the place.

The marketing weasels over at Disney deserve to have their beady little eyes gouged out with flaming icicles for the fast one they've pulled on audiences with Snow Dogs.

It's a curiously dull Americanization of one of the finest examples of subtle, moody J-horror out there.

Batman & Robin fails to engage the spirit of Batman, Robin, or decent marketing in general, and instead ends up as a limp, excruciatingly shallow knockoff that leaves viewers cringing at the unavoidable one-liners that make up the better part of the script.

The only question audiences are likely to be asking their higher power in the wake of viewing the film is, "What the fuck?"

Meandering, sub-aquatic mess: It's so bad it's good, but only if you slide in on a freebie.

Craven is obviously having a ball here, and it's impossible not to sit back and go grinning into this dark, gory ride.

Perhaps these are dark times, both onscreen and off, but even if they are not, London Has Fallen is an hour-and-a-half of viciously Us vs. Them, Trump-style bad filmmaking on all known levels.

Highlander 3 has an edge over its prequels in that it's so shoddily directed that it's probably a great deal of fun to watch after a couple of six-packs. Actually, that's probably the only time it might be fun to watch, and I'm not going to be the guy to put that theory to the test for you.

Here's hoping someone breaks down and buys Brocka some more toys, if only to distract him from embarking on another flesh-and-blood production.

You’d think the sordid history of the Winchester house would have inspired a more evocative or even entertaining haunted house story but the Spierigs rely far too much on the sort of shock-cut du jour that has become the lazy and boring norm for so many PG-13 “horror” films of the past 15 years.

The cynic in me notes that the whole, dismal enterprise is just a cheap steal from Roger Corman's 1955 film "Day the World Ended." At least that single set-bound cheapie had a three-eyed mutant to enliven the otherwise stagy proceedings.

In all fairness, the sheer, overwhelming mediocrity of everything about Pandorum – Travis Milloy's hackneyed, ultra-derivative script, Alvart's plodding pacing and dull direction, even the eventual crimson tide of gore that duly arrives just in time to keep audience members over the age of 13 from dozing off – may well constitute a new breed of horror: In space, no one can hear you snore.

The first film was near-mythic in its tone and treatment of its characters, while this remake barely serves as a primer in how not to generate suspense.

This biting parody of flyover-state beauty contests feels like a bad made-for-TV movie of the week.

If you really want the kids to see a colorfully cryptic meta fairy tale, be subversive and go rent 'em some Alejandro Jodorowsky. No child deserves Happily N'Ever After.

The real shocker is how hellishly yawn-inducing this utterly pointless and forgettable Haunting turns out to be. It's enough to make you scream.

Unfortunately, this kind of sledgehammer comedy has worn thin over the many years since Mack Sennett first hit on it.

It's all a bit of overkill.

Things do not end well, least of all for the audience.

Kids will revolt, parents will snooze, and I will be downright giddy if I never encounter another Pokémon movie as long as I live. Ack!

Less a Nic Cage movie than a movie with an extended cameo by Nic Cage in a “finely crafted” paper hat (!), this Greek/Cypriot co-production mixes mediocre martial artistry with a sci-fi spin and ends up a puzzlement to both genres.

Get out your handkerchiefs. No, scratch that -- get out a pair of windshield wipers and staple them to your brow. Perhaps they'll obscure the screen.

Delgo is a dud.

Even the youngest members of the audience appeared to be more interested in their dwindling soda supply than anything up on the screen. Yabba dabba doom.

Nearly as much fun as a case of scabies, Beverly Hills Ninja transports the viewer into a mystical realm where pratfall is king and mediocrity is its own reward.

Neither all that scary nor all that hilarious, Vampire in Brooklyn falls directly between the two, into the valley of mediocrity.

As middling comedies go, this is neither as smart as it ought to be nor as dumb as you'd expect.

Utterly devoid of merit, fantastic or otherwise, a more exasperating descent into the feline world is difficult to imagine.

Considerably less of a thrillgasm than playing "Frogger" blindfolded.

This latest entry is simply dumb, dull, and pointless.

This is an unpleasant film, but Argento, whose bloodline positively seethes with unpleasantness, is, in her own right, a master cinematic stylist of the first order.

Nobody of Chan's legendary stature should ever have to play second banana to George Lopez, and certainly not in a film that was already made five years ago with Vin Diesel (see: The Pacifier).

Long distance information? Get me Hollywood, USA: I’ve got a rusty ice pick to bury in the gullet of whoever greenlighted this pointless exercise in masturbatory tedium.

Such a monumentally bad remake of such an exceptionally chilling genre favorite.

The real crime here is that Let's Go to Prison made a daring escape from direct-to-video stir into the relative freedom of your neighborhood multiplex. Consider this one disarmed and extremely pointless.

Very nearly as entertaining as watching a potato bake.

Unspeakably awful.

A dark comedy caught in a white-light washout, it's neither mean enough to be funny, nor funny enough to mean much.

Director Bender has fashioned a film without any surprises, though after the first two films, anyone would be hard-pressed to make audience members jump.

Eminently resistible, an unclassifiable cinematic leftover best left untasted.

Steer clear, Friends of Ol’ Marvel!

Ridiculously overwrought.

It's not a great action dust-up by any means.

The amazing thing in Ropelewski's film is just how much of this lowest-common-denominator pabulum has been recycled from the foul spillage of the previous two films. Once again, needlessly, we're treated to lengthy scenes of the family singing and clowning about with treacly plasticity, fantasizing, dreaming, whining, mewling... it's all too much, grating on your nerves and leaving you desperately in need of a healthy dose of cinematic sanity. Or, at the very least, genuine humor.

Go back and re-watch Nick Cassavetes’ vastly superior "The Notebook" and steer clear of director Ross Katz’s grindingly dull, Valentine’s Day folly.

A middling film through and through, despite the occasional shocks it tries to earnestly to achieve.

The laugh-out-loud jokery is in short supply, and Reynolds and Reid's kicky charm only goes so far. Bluto Blutarsky, we miss you.

Stone still dazzles the eye, but this wholly unwarranted sequel is so outrageously preposterous (and so very chockablock with quotable examples of the fine art of bad dialogue) that the end result achieves a basement grandeur of near-epic proportions.

Split Second turns out to be one of those dreaded “so-bad-it's-good” debacles, and a marginal one at that. Ed Wood, where are you when we need you?

Fails to kick start anything other than the urge to giggle.

It's not a total wipeout: Czuchry embodies the Tucker Max(-ims) to a self-obsessed fault, and there are moments of rough comic brilliance scattered throughout, but really, this particular antihero is all anti- and zero hero.

Belongs in the histrionic comedy genre, packed as it is with just plain silly situations that fail to elicit grins, much less guffaws.

Director Chappelle lays on the spook factor heavy in the first 30 minutes or so, but the film quickly devolves into a simplistic slash 'n' bash shoot-'em-up which goes nowhere fast.

At least this excursion into mediocrity is relatively brief, although, as mentioned, a vastly shorter cut would be much preferred.

Innocence certainly has all the right genre conventions to toy with, but the haphazard script by Brougher and Tristine Skyler is a bloody mess.

It’s both too much and not enough, an unsatisfying blood-and-guts B-movie with all the goonish, grindhouse fun eviscerated out of it.

Neither so awful as to be enjoyable nor eerily artful enough to be anything other than a snoozy also-ran in the perpetually poor plotting machine that is the demon-child cinematic subgenre.

The story is a shambles, incoherent throughout, veined with tirelessly wearying flashbacks, hallucinations, and just plain old lousy storytelling.

Instead of true grit and gutshot black-hatters, director Les Mayfield has crafted what may well be the world's first Tommy Hilfiger Western.

If only someone had taken away that disastrous third act we'd have one of the better mainstream films dealing with the impossible societal demands put upon gay parenting yet made. No such luck, though.

Why the Pokémon fad hasn't died off yet is one of the great mysteries of the universe, right up there with the Pyramids of Gaza and the white stuff in Twinkies.

This utterly mediocre forget-me-now could've been crafted by any faceless serial director at all. The shame of it is that the man behind the camera is Wes Craven when, by all rights, it should have been Alan Smithee.

Rings is an unfortunate and often incomprehensible mess that kicks off with a neat premise and then never fully explores it.

Like some sort of evil Hollywood hybrid, Encino Man begs, borrows and steals the worst bits from both Iceman and Fast Times at Ridgemont High and ends up being just as vacuous as you think it is.

It’s really just a tortuous series of blackout sketches hung together with the flimsiest of threads.

Plenty of killings abound, nevertheless the film is a masterful -- albeit warped -- love-story-cum-road-movie that revolves around three of the most invigorating performances of the year.

Regardless, the upside is that Shut In is cinematic Sominex for those in need of a 90-minute nap, a thousand yawns, and zero thrills.

A Sound of Thunder is positively awash in bad hairpieces, leading one to believe that global warming is going to be the least of our problems.

The movie feels mechanical all the way through, leaving Sadek's debut an inauspicious and ill-lubed affair.

I'm beginning to suspect there's some sort of ancient, or at least post-Pearl Harbor, curse in play that stops genre-oriented Asian filmmakers from creating anything of all but the most negligible merit once they hit the California shore.

Brings absolutely nothing new to the autopsy table that wasn't previously covered.

An exercise in unintentional farce.

House has a few moments that ring genuinely eerie, but the cluttered, unconvincing dialogue – not to mention Moseley's ongoing penchant for crazed overacting – make it more of a genre curiousity than anything the "Fangoria" gang would likely want to sit through.

Disappointingly, Piranha 3DD, the inevitable sequel to the remake, has none of Dante's wit, Aja's directorial skills, or Greg Nicotero's grotesqueries.

The film itself is a muddle, all rapid-fire step-edits and grainy, blue-filtered hokum. What is good is Stallone.

Jawbreaker has all the heart and soul of last week's mystery loaf (a dish that made the weekly rounds at my alma mater, sadly). And like that unidentifiable bovine by-product, the film is a chilly, messy anti-treat, sweet on the outside, sickly on the in.

Macdonald is unaccountably bland here, which is unexpected since his lo-level, monotone snottiness is usually at least good for a grin or two. With Dirty Work though, he's fashioned an 80-minute harangue out of 10 minutes of material, an SNL sketch gone horribly awry, and one that drags on long after its daily ration of humor has been exhausted.

Do yourself a favor and go rent any Miike film other than this one.

Captivity is the kind of film that gives torture porn a bad name.

Combined with some awfully lazy riffs on Holmes’s fondness for his seven-per-cent solution, Holmes & Watson is not so much a case of whodunit as it is a question why bother.

Not nearly as clever at taxing the audience's knuckles as its forerunner, Speed 2 still manages to stay above board long enough to merit a look-see, if only to relish the once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of Mr. Dafoe and his pet leeches.

Stay Alive has none of the vicarious thrills of, say, "Konami: Silent Hill 2." It's barely even Pong unplugged.

Neither very scary nor very interesting, Godsend is an unresurrectable muddle.

A boisterous, gooey miscue.

Fans of the series, if there are any left and I'm not too certain that there are, will enjoy the usual smorgasbord of lower intestines spilling out from the screen and onto their laps (via the profoundly crappy 3-D) as well as an above-average opening slaughter involving two men, one woman, several buzz saws, and a crowd of gawking onlookers.

Isn't for everyone, obviously; it might not be for anyone, come to think of it.

Despite the game cast and some marvelously atmospheric cinematography from Oscar-winning DP Dion Beebe, The Snowman is a slog.

I'm not sure which is more freakish: the fact that this savagely unfun and relentlessly generic Adam Sandler comedy has spawned its own (infinitely more entertaining) Internet meme or the realization that something has gone seriously awry with the decision-making process of Al Pacino's agent.

It's relentlessly bad in a way that just makes those theatre seats plain uncomfortable.

A muddled mess of bad-lad clichés, and Jackson's obvious talents only serve to point out how godawful everyone else seems to be.

For the majority of filmgoers, Beckinsale is Selene. It’s not the worst legacy for an actor, and she’s managed to keep her character prideful yet vicious, film after backstabbing film. (Did I mention the catsuit? Va va voom!)

You can barely tell what's going on half the time, but what you do see is effective.

Beneath the Darkness has nada on Don Coscarelli's epic "Phantasm" saga or, for that matter, Norman Bates' clear-eyed if psychotic shenanigans. It's strictly a guilty pleasure.

Barely worthy of a legitimate theatrical release.

The comic, his career now apparently in total free fall, tackles the (dual) role(s) so broadly (no pun intended) that it's just plain annoying.

One of the most deadly dull "SNL" spinoffs.

Reaches toward new heights of comic laziness and succeeds beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

The plot mechanics, action set pieces, and characters arcs – or lack thereof – are all dreadfully overfamiliar, resulting in a cream puff of a thriller. It’s a shiny, pretty thing and probably a decent filler flick while the world waits for Mr. Wick’s return.

Do yourself and your kids a favor, parents, and head to "Spy Kids" instead.

This film is an evocative, effective entry into the holiday blood-spray subgenre in its own right. And if it doesn't make your skin crawl ... you probably ate too much Christmas dinner.

Egregiously mediocre and flagrantly ill-conceived in every department, this is, truly, the cinematic equivalent of finding a single solitary Saltine in your stocking and a pair of old tube socks beneath the tree. Humbug!

Weaver and Willis look bored silly while essaying their paint-by-numbers roles, and this film does nothing to make me think Cavill is going to be Zack Snyder's Superman incarnate.

The creature’s big reveal is masterfully handled and a final revelation is exceptionally memorable, but the characters, unsurprisingly, remain interchangeable with those of any number of other teens-in-peril pics.

Works just fine for the first half hour or so, but quickly devolves into a case of too much affection and not enough affliction.

The Indonesian-born brother/sister filmmaking duo of Ken and Livi Zheng scores high points for creating a new take on the undocumented-immigrant badass story (hola, Machete), and for their obvious martial arts skills, but this first feature from the pair is ultimately hobbled by a paucity of credible acting.

It's a dull, unremarkable comedy.

You want REAL terror? If this second outing proves profitable, we'll be looking at Yet Again I Recall the Summer Before the Summer Before Last. Now that's scary.

Granted, the state of the indie hipster and/or Big-Man-on-the-Quad aesthetic has probably skewed a bit since I was a frosh, but good lord, man, it can't be this pale an imitation of campus life. I implore you: Go rent "National Lampoon's Animal House" and leave this flaccid wanker alone.

Not a single character or the jeopardy that they find themselves in – end of the entire human race and all – is likable, canine-in-peril excluded.

Abysmal, unfunny, and ultimately, completely unnecessary.

Prinze, Lillard, and Biel are all pleasant enough to look at, but the film's Romeo and Juliet tropes are shopworn by now, and the movie gives us nothing else.

It all feels like a poorly constructed and overwrought Lifetime drama from a decade ago, albeit one featuring a shaggy dog dubbed “Fuckface.”

This fourth and, presumably, final entry into the ever-deteriorating Hellraiser series is by far the worst of the lot: a jumbled, unsatisfying, and ultimately boring glimpse into the past, present, and future of the notorious cenobite affectionately known as “Pinhead”.

While much of the film is taken over by enormously entertaining dogfight sequences … much of it also rests on the narrative drive, which seems clipped part and parcel from one of those old “Why We Fight” documentaries that Frank Capra doled out to keep our G.I.s in fighting mode.

The end result is overkill en extremis. There is such a thing as too much. And 3KMTG is much too much.

Awash in the obvious and sports a patently predictable outcome. Somewhere, Stanislavsky is shrieking as well.

The film is an ingenious, deranged, bloated, and just plain batshit crazy riff on advertising and the mad men and women it creates and/or consumes. Heady stuff, but it's no "How to Get Ahead in Advertising." This film is absolutely mental, and not in a good way, either.

Truly, the greatest torture of all is boredom.

Make Ben Stein some more money (and get a good, mordant chuckle while you're at it) by checking out this loopy, factually befuddled documentary that should manage the not-inconsiderable feat of insulting Christians, Jews, Muslims, and those nutty sci-guys who go in for Darwin by way of bad teeth and Einsteinian hair styles.

But for anyone who assumed Kennedy's experiment couldn't sink any lower than "Malibu's Most Wanted," there are, it appears, ever deeper depths in the realm of comedic misfires.

Drivel of the purest ray serene.

Mortal plods along for most of its running time with the occasional helicopter chase scene and plenty of CGI fulminology: But ultimately Ovredal’s not-so-deep-dive into Norwegian mythos is a too-obvious let down.

They've taken a classic and they've battered it senseless and, boy, does it stink. It’s so bad it’s amazing it's being released, and box office-goers might soon end up fleeced. And annoyed and bewildered, perhaps even creeped-out by this cacophonous mess which is awful throughout.

It's dead in the water.

Even Amtrak hasn't seen a derailment this godawful in some time.

It's a strictly date-night-rental affair, and if you still get Ryan Reynolds and Dane Cook confused, this will do little to help sort things out.

An inoffensive, eminently forgettable bit of fluff.

Even with its scant running time, this nightmarish travesty barrels along with all the whipcord speed and nimble comedic grace of a loved one’s funeral.

To make a bad movie worse, even Ballistic's fight scenes, which ought to be the film's strong suit, are poorly edited, slice 'n' diced into incomprehensible blurs.

Forget this dreck: Where's that Michael vs. Jason grudge match we've been hearing about for the last decade?

Shoddily plotted and unimaginative, Species II is a slapdash effort at best, creepily unaffecting and minus the T&A this sort of film so desperately hinges on.

Fails chiefly because it's senseless. How it even managed to bypass the straight-to-video route boggles the mind and is a speculative fiction far more engaging than any to be found onscreen.

Valentine succeeds only in boring you to death.

Deadly dull tripe.

Darby and co-screenwriter Michael Cristofer ("Breaking Up") telegraph every available bit of plot seemingly hours before it's necessary, resulting in a tawdry, boring mish-mash of genre clichés and arched eyebrows.

This is exactly the sort of film I wasn't expecting from either Gorak or his producers. In many too-obvious ways this is just a formulaic riff on Spielberg's "War of the Worlds."

The Devil Inside offers proof, if any were needed, that demons run rampant in Hollywood, possessing otherwise intelligent and creative people to make absolutely shitty "gotcha!" mockumonstrosities like this one.

Packs all the spine-tingling punch of a soggy bag of mulch.

It's a mess best left to the nitrate ashes of forgotten film and television history.

You want vampiric satire with actual laughs? Try Mel Brooks' "Dracula: Dead and Loving It," "Love at First Bite," or even Roman Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Killers." Anything is better than Friedberg and Seltzer's endless, bargain-basement, sub-Cracked magazine un-comedy.

Come to think of it, it's a lot like the departed shade of a better, longer movie, hovering in tatters before us, vanishing when we blink. When you look into this abyss, it yawns back at you.

Despite a great 15-second, computer-generated effects scene, Corn II manages to be 90-odd minutes of unrelenting cheese. Like runny Brie with blood all over it, it just makes you want to gag.

Attica! Attica! Everyone involved in the creation of this muddled, joyless, and deadly dull serial killer-meets-forensic psychiatrist snoozefest should be forced to spend – at the very least – 88 minutes behind Attica's bars.

Unlike former porn auteur Gregory Dark's semenal 1985 cumshot opus "New Wave Hookers", this rote exercise in slasher-film tedium holds zero surprises and is about as arousing as Tracy Lords' singing career.

Unforgivably tedious tale.

It boggles the mind that The Legend of Chun-Li is as vapid and dull as it is.