Michael Rechtshaffen

A generic coming-of-age comedy that feels inextricably stuck in the ’90s, Hickey serves as the feature debut of TV commercial director Alex Grossman and plays like a never aired UPN series pilot.

Easily the worst in a trilogy that has been notable mainly for the presence of its everyman action star, Transporter 3 is a nonsensical, choppily edited bore, with awful dialogue.

An unmitigated B-movie that isn't thrilling enough or cheesy enough to make it worth the trip.

As wannabe Tarantino misfires go, at least one can say that Avary, who in addition to sharing story credit on “Pulp Fiction” also contributed (uncredited) to “True Romance,” comes by the affectation more honestly than most.

Once the initial round of breast-feeding and rectal thermometer bits is fired off, the picture starts to give off the funky whiff of unattended Pampers.

Get past the wince-inducing premise of Helicopter Mom...and you're still stuck with a forced comedy that mines uneasy humor from stale stereotypes.

The unfocused Undrafted ultimately possesses all the dramatic intrigue of an intentional walk.

Sharing its title with a historic Reno hotel that's seen better days (or maybe not), El Cortez is a clumsy lump of ponderous pulp fiction with "Cooler" aspirations.

A committed cast fails to elevate Beneath the Leaves, an otherwise draggy and derivative thriller.

A tepid ghost story filled with all the usual things that go bump in the night minus the somewhat crucial element of suspense, this bland effort from Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's Ghost House Pictures is surprisingly devoid of the creepy, claustrophobic atmospherics that haunt the brothers' Asian work.

In his first feature outing, director Soham Mehta overplays the significance of virtually every aspect of Rajiv Shah’s script, no matter how minor, with painfully slow pans and needlessly lingering establishing shots.

Along comes Elektra to effectively lower the bar for Marvel Comics page-to-screen transitions.

The Adventure Club is a remarkably dull Canadian tween caper about a sought-after magical ancient box with wish-making powers.

Despite the admittedly unique angle, this ambitious drama gets crushed under the considerable weight of its artistic, as well as budgetary, limitations.

Riddled with as many plot holes as those highways and byways have potholes, the heavy-handed writing and direction, with its awkward close-ups and purposeful, sustained takes does its cast few favors.

May have been adapted the 1996 French film "L'Appartement," but pretty much all evidence of what was once an engaging psychodrama has been lost in the translation.

For anyone who's not a Francophone tween girl, the film likely will be a tedious, precious exercise in indulgence.

A misconceived washout of a darkly gothic story of madness, addiction and child abuse made all the more unpleasant by Gilliam's trademark intense visual style.

A disappointingly dreary affair.

A dull, meandering romantic comedy with serious believability issues.

Returning director James McGrath and screenwriter Michael McCullers had an opportunity to build on an entirely workable formula, but instead have settled for a frenetic sugar rush of a retread that rapidly wears out its welcome. Pint-sized viewers might be distracted by the noisy, chaotic result, but most others will be hard-pressed to find the proceedings cute and adorable.

An examination of a sexual relationship that's about as viscerally explicit as hardcore can get...But as satisfying viewing experiences go, the film comes up mighty short in terms of story, interesting characters and technical prowess.

Tripping over soapy subplots and maudlin conventions, it loses its footing just as Abe regains his mojo.

Director Grau seems to be making up the film as he goes along — never a good idea when tackling the sort of genre piece that requires building tension and some semblance of dread to succeed.

One just wishes that the filmmakers had made this a more open debate on religion versus science instead of a documentary that too often feels manipulatively Machiavellian in its presentation of all those "irrefutable" facts and findings.

Presumably a glib attack on sanctimonious small-town religious hypocrisy informed by Black's own strict Mormon upbringing, the film is tonally all over the place, eventually settling in a rut that comes a lot closer to resembling bad camp than edgy satire.

Although the Tarantino influence still is tangible, this time around Duffy reveals himself to also be a big Francis Ford Coppola fan, but the cartoonish end result plays like "Godfather III" meets the Three Stooges.

Few will likely embrace the insufferably chirpy, high-concept rom-com that struggles to stretch a mighty shallow premise into a feature-length proposition.

It might have made for an inspired college paper thesis, but as a documentary, The Gilligan Manifesto, which attempts to draw a direct link between “Gilligan’s Island” and the Communist Manifesto, is conceptually shipwrecked well before completing its one-and-a-half-hour tour.

The back-to-the-beginning approach unimaginatively goes through the motions, offering scant justification for its boring existence, at least from an artistic point of view.

David Hubbard's script is so steeped in sludgy sentimentality that the film's early hints of quirkiness quickly give way to heavy-handed faith healing.

By the time the film reaches a faith-based, third-act crescendo, Bean, Walsh and company, despite their best efforts, look like they know they've been beaten, while the score's mournful strings wring out whatever pathos remains untapped.

The result is a slacker comedy that goes slacker by the second, trying hard to be rude and crude but suggesting an old John Candy-Dan Aykroyd movie with bongs and more swearing.

Simply put, Sherlock Gnomes is a dreadful bore.

Inept on every level, Panic 5 Bravo is a virtually unwatchable, blood-soaked crime drama serving as the writing-directing debut of actor Kuno Becker.

An unholy mess co-produced by Cameron's faith-based Camfam Studios.

Padding Audé’s first-person account — and those hammy dramatizations — with glowing testimonials from family and friends including José Canseco and, distractingly, the director herself, the overlong hodgepodge proves to be an ordeal in and of itself.

An acutely misguided, purported satire dealing with the prickly subject of child molestation.

Despite his attempt to graft an environmental message onto a traditional musical template, there's little about director Danny Baron's feature debut that feels convincingly organic to either the plotting or the characterizations.

The film’s prevailing theme may be that nothing is black and white, but the execution, with its strident lobbyists, salt-of-the-earth farmers and onscreen admonition to “investigate before you donate,” proves spottier than a kennel full of caged Dalmatians.

There's absolutely nothing fantastic or transporting about London, an endlessly ponderous relationship picture that also has zilch to do with the British city.

There's a distinction to be made between old school and old hat, but it's lost on Honor Up, a criminally inept throwback to '90s urban gangsta movie posturing that plays like a stone-faced version of the 1996 Wayans brothers spoof, "Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood."

This lifeless serving of soggy pulp packs all the gritty authenticity of a gummy vitamin.

Based on the dubious, and occasionally eye-rolling responses from the majority of those being pitched, the plan would appear to be as ill-conceived as Surviving Peace itself.

The film adopts a sanctimonious tone that’s anything but subtle.

Every bit as frantic, frenetic, groan-inducing and all around grating as its two predecessors.

The end result comes across less as a bona fide, issue-oriented documentary than a package of company profiles.

A monumentally unfunny time-waster.

This ridiculous thriller would be hard-pressed to last much longer than its title in theaters before doing time on DVD, as is already the case in many overseas territories.

In the absence of a sturdy, plausible foundation on which to hook all those grisly bits, the film, originally a Dimension release, tends to play out more like a protracted "Saw" outtake reel.

Rather than sticking with that entirely workable setup, writer-director Martin keeps distractedly flip-flopping back and forth in time leading up to the big heist, preventing the plotting from building any tangible tension.

D-grade "Running Man" ripoff.

The jumble occupies an unfortunate space situated somewhere between the ponderously pretentious and the just plain ridiculous.

Even if the world had been clamoring for yet another "Step Up"-type hip hop dance movie, it wouldn't be Dancin' It's On!, an inept knockoff that proves every bit as clunky as its punctuation-challenged title.

It's all quite a mess, with awkward performances, worse dialogue and a painfully protracted running time conspiring against any chance of enjoyment, even in a so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure way.

Richard Gabai’s film is too preoccupied corralling all the genre clichés to come up with anything original or compelling.

A crass, sophomoric and, more to the point, offensively unfunny parody that sets out to remake Shaft and his blaxploitation ilk as a Jewish action hero.

Witless, excessive and ultimately boring gore-a-thon.

United Passions, with its clashing, production partner-mandated Europudding of accents, fails to find a unifying voice.

John Henry is a lead-footed revenge thriller that lands with all the subtlety of the mighty steel-driving man’s sledgehammer.

Despite its connotation of sun-drenched sensuality, Rio, I Love You is a dispiritingly dull affair.

By the time one of the gun-toting members of Team Snipes growls “Let’s finish this!” viewers would be hard-pressed to disagree.

The overstuffed production feels as tediously incessant as its endless winter.

While a lot of gunfire ensues, Jesse Gustafson’s mechanical direction and Guy Stevenson’s cut-and-paste script shoot laughably hollow blanks.

Italian writer-director Francesco Cinquemani, in his feature debut, has essentially done a cut-and-paste job, assembling a thoroughly uninvolving, tension-free futuristic sci-fi thriller.

Ghost of New Orleans, by Serbian director Peter (Predrag) Atonijevic, is a laughably pretentious crime caper-supernatural thriller hybrid that comes up woefully lacking on both fronts.

As written, directed and played by Swartzwelder, Clay is such a self-absorbed, judgmental jerk that anyone who would willingly subject themselves to his endless pontificating could rival Anastasia Steele in the masochism department.

A staged kidnapping isn’t the only thing that goes from botched to worse where the tone-deaf black comedy-thriller Get the Girl is concerned.

Loud, mean-spirited and generally obnoxious, Son of the Mask makes the boisterous 1994 original look downright demure and refined.

There’s scant evidence of any creative spark in Spark: A Space Tail, a thoroughly generic, unremittingly charmless computer-animated adventure.

The film slowly, painfully declines from merely oddball to awful, with vapid dialogue and muddy character motivations, particularly where Woll's unsympathetic Alice is concerned.

A wincingly unfunny comedy caper.

So blatantly not funny that it might as well have been called "National Geographic's Van Wilder 2."

Although the reliable Cooper (taking over the role from Henry Cavill) and the rest of the cast...valiantly do battle against the thunderous score, they’re ultimately unable to pump up a dreary mission that fails to adhere to the most basic rules of audience engagement.

A cliched, talky variation on the 1936 Bogie classic "The Petrified Forest," with scant dramatic tension but gallons of spilled blood on the menu.

Martin and Coffa may bear a strong physical resemblance to their real-life counterparts, but their contemporary-sounding line delivery has all the dramatic heft of a Foster’s beer commercial.

Cursed with obnoxiously broad characters and nonsensical plotting, A Bit of Bad Luck is an intended backwoods satire that runs hopelessly off-course from the outset.

Tediously one-note comedy.

Overlong, over-the-top dirge.

Amounting to two-plus hours of conspiracy theorist porn, The American Media & the Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, directed and narrated by John Barbour, proves to be as long-winded as its accusatory title.

A towering heap of nihilistic nonsense that plays like a cornball "Children of God."

One of those rare instances of a movie being so bad ... it's still really bad.

Chockful of hoary archetypes making hokey observations...leading to a truly laughable big-ending reveal, the film, with its wildly uneven performances, underscores the pitfalls inherent in shifting from the written page to the big screen.

While clearly aiming for R-rated irreverence, the script, penned by former Kevin Smith assistant Knutson, along with Andy Snipes and Dana Snyder, proceeds to hurl a tired barrage of obnoxious sexist/racist/homophobic sludge, with humor that seldom rises above crotch level.

This crass drag of a dud at best manages to elicit just a couple of half-hearted chuckles over the course of its 80-minute allotment.

It's not every day you get to see a satanic-revenge home-invasion martial-arts thriller, but should another come along that's as laughably cornball as The Cain Complex, you'd best hide until it blows over.

A shrill, garish hodgepodge of familiar elements from other animated vehicles (most evidently 2013’s Epic), there’s virtually nothing about this forced, fractured fairy tale that feels remotely fresh or involving.

Resembling something dwelling in the bottom of the remainder bin, The Seventh Dwarf is a garish-looking, slapdash mashup of an animated fairy tale.

Has the crass look and feel of a 90-minute infomercial.

Despite attracting some top-drawer talent, “Arsenal” is a brutally unpleasant, bottom-of-the-barrel crime drama that unsuccessfully attempts to drown the terrible dialogue and pedestrian direction with buckets of gushing blood.

It’s hard to imagine how anything salvageable could have been made out of [Gee Malik Linton's] comically pretentious script with its heavily religious overtones and plotting that grows more ridiculous by the minute.

Sincerity alone cannot begin to compensate for a clunker of this magnitude, including an abundance of technical issues, bad dialogue and worse performances.

D’Souza might be preaching to the choir, but at least this voter recruitment tool could have aspired to something more challenging than an amateurishly slapped-together rehash.

Even ignoring the fact that it was completed back in 2017, Reality Queen! a punishingly shrill, unfunny mockumentary about a social media darling of a Paris Hilton-type celebutante, can’t help but feel totally so yesterday.

It’s a rare film that can dredge up nostalgic fondness for 2002’s awful “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder,” but Total Frat Movie manages to rise to the dubious occasion.

Wafting into theaters after sitting on the back burner for the last decade, Cook Off! is a shrill, gloppy mess of a mockumentary being served up well past its "best before" date — if there ever actually were one.

Kill Ratio is a laughably inept political thriller that would have been right at home on the USA Network lineup circa 1990.

Like “The Big Chill” and “Peter’s Friends” but without a single character you’d want to spend five minutes with, let alone a weekend, The Drama Club makes for a crassly unpleasant ensemble piece.

Generically directed by Daniel Zirilli, who shares story credit with Tom Sizemore, the listless Asian Connection may be set in Bangkok and Cambodia but it feels about exotic as an order of take-out Thai.

There’s howlingly awful and then there’s The Assignment, a thoroughly ridiculous, numbingly slow neo-noir thriller.

Enduring Natural Selection, with its painfully overt themes of good versus evil, absolution and redemption, is the true definition of survival of the fittest.

A risible misfire of a contemporary war drama, the low-budget “Unfallen” stands as an epic fail on all fronts.

There's a fresh candidate in the running for worst movie of 2007 honors.

[A] lethargic, hallucinatory mish-mash with matching dialogue that has all the zing of a Wikipedia entry.