Michael Wilmington

The movie knocks your eyes out, at the same time it dulls the mind’s eye. Ultimately, it’s one more stop in the arcade, beckoning, waiting to soak up time and money.

Whatever magic the first two movies may have had -- and it wasn't always that apparent to anyone over the age of 10 -- has long since congealed, like stale pizza. Or mock turtle soup. [22 Mar 1993, p.F9]

Instead of coming to a high, flavorful boil, the whole thing quickly overcooks and begins evaporating into hot air.

This is the same dopey save-the-princess-and-kill-everybody revenge plot we always get. The Return of Swamp Thing is enough to drive you back to the comic book stand. Or even the swamp.

Admirers of Rambo III will probably point out that it moves fast. But then, so does a gazelle-and a gazelle has better dialogue and more personality. [25 May 1988, p.1]

This cautionary thriller about an unjustly imprisoned airline mechanic has a chance to be a canny blend of gutsy melodrama and J'Accuse against the prison system. But, by the end, it has gone as slick and corrupt as the crafty old con (F. Murray Abraham) who advises Tom Selleck's framed Jimmie Rainwood on jail survival. On a fundamental moral level, An Innocent Man is guilty as hell.

A movie for people with time to waste, Sniper is about as compelling as a Soldier of Fortune magazine cover set to music.

The movie makers try to revive another day’s genre--the early ’70’s “road” pictures--in today’s terms. And it doesn’t work. The looser, more anarchic feelings they’re going after don’t jibe with the modern packaging, and they wind up with something slicked-up, streamlined and hollow--like “Blowing in the Wind” rearranged as elevator music.

It's an ultra-slick, ultra-flat movie that cuts like a cellophane knife. No edge, no blood.

Hardware isn’t long on ideas, emotions or character; it degenerates into a mindless slaughterhouse crescendo.

Thompson has always had an evil sense of humor, and the movie repeatedly crosses the line between dramatizing a situation and exploiting it, exposing racism or moral rot and almost indulging in it. But the disturbance you feel in watching Kinjite doesn’t just come because it has a sordid subject, some bad scenes or a heavy cargo of shock and sleaze, but because it leaves us, much of the time, with no moral anchor.

This is the same infinitely repeated plot of "Halloweens" 1, 2 and 4 (3 took a slightly deviant turn), with the same unkillable bogyman Michael Myers, wreaking the same programmed havoc, and Donald Pleasence as the same distraught psychiatrist, repeating the same dire warnings to no avail.

The first 15 minutes have some funny bits, but the movie winds up sapping you. It's a kind of whoopee-cushion nightmare, as if you woke up one morning and noticed that everyone on the street was drooling on his or her tie.

A movie to make ninnies whinny, audiences gag and horses hide their heads.

Lean, mean, clean and empty-hearted, Fire Birds is a video-game recruiting poster with a bomb ticking inside--a bomb that never goes off.

Big Trouble in Little China is a try at mock-Oriental movie magic that goes leaden about a third of the way through -- and finally detonates into great, whomping firebombs of overcalculated, underinspired absurdity. [02 July 1986, p.10]

This is a two-sentence movie. In cases like this, you're lucky to get three sentences' worth of dramatic development. Like here.

Director H.S. Miller thinks he's made something broodingly visionary when you're more likely to be aesthetically shaken up by one of Mad magazine's Fold-Ins.

Here is a satire about government and business corruption that's as empty, corrupt and manipulative as everything it attacks: a frantic, jokeless comedy about selling out, that sells out itself constantly. This is another big, dumb, pointless picture, a "high concept" movie that's all concept and no movie.

There's nothing dopier than the crooks in one-against-a-hundred action movies -- except maybe the people who cook them up. [12 Feb 1990, p.F8]

The movie is Rambo crossed with Fraternity Vacation and a bad cartoon version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It's an amazingly senseless movie, done with blood-curdling confidence. Each jaw-dropping howler is staged with such rattling intensity and perfect, seamless idiocy that it becomes weirdly amusing.

If you ignore the script--a good strategy for most recent major studio movies--there’s a lot of talent here. But Cimino’s Hours, instead of getting desperate, gets desperately pretty.

However gaudy its credits, it is one more--and one of the worst written--in an endless line of clenched-up, crashed-out, buddy-buddy L.A. cop star vehicles. A waste of talent and energy on all levels.

With its stylized story-line and almost styleless direction, it sometimes resembles a juggling act with sledgehammers. [13 Jul 1988, p.1]

there's no joy in this movie. It's a safe, compromised, even preachy, fable; a wannabe hip romp that never gets going. [07 Jul 1995]

To say this movie's premise is bonkers is putting it mildly.

Bewilderingly bad.

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.

You have to have faith that kids will recognize a bad movie when it's foisted on them -- and they don't get much worse than The New Guy.

The usual bad movie sometimes gives a few chuckles, amuses audiences by making them feel superior. But young director Leonard makes a different kind of bomb. Fascinated with technology, Leonard makes cutting-edge techno-turkeys, with wildly elaborate visuals and ridiculous plots. [4 Aug 1995, pg. I]

That this bit of pustulence is based on a video game of the same name is no surprise. It explains the thin plot, characters and abundant gunplay.

A big techno-dud.

A real stinker. It doesn't have the courage of its own bad taste, or that of its villain.

Jungle 2 Jungle, is a shallow, joyless show, whose family bonding comedy is as touching as its dead-bird jokes, as witty as a bowl of cat urine and as penetrating as its analysis of the Russian Mafia. [07 Mar 1997, p.F]

A movie of good intentions and awful results.

The whole grand tradition of the humor of movie stupidity, from Laurel and Hardy and Mortimer Snerd to Jerry Lewis and Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, seems to crash and burn in this movie, which ends with Payne's idiotic laugh wheezing away over the end-titles. It almost sounds like the beginning of a laugh track-which "Major Payne" could certainly use. [24 March 1995, p.H]

Some movies are a joy. Some are a chore. And some are sheer torture. A good example of the latter is Virus. [17 January 1999, Metro Chicago, p.8]

A soft-core sex comedy that keeps throwing out comic variations on the idea of the line between gay and straight sexuality.

Think about the worst movie ideas you've had in your life, the ones so embarrassing they make you wince. Now imagine this: a modernized version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" titled Scotland, Pa.

In the new wave of kiddie animal movies -- "Babe," "Black Beauty," "Gordy," "Fluke," "Roan Inish" and all the rest -- Dunston Checks In is valuable only as a new standard of screenwriting ineptitude. Don't play it again, Sam, at least not with this bunch.

A wish fulfillment fantasy of staggering silliness, both smirkingly cutesy and gratingly offensive, this is one for the movie ash heap.

It's hard to believe how bad this movie is.

Mind-numbing sequel to "Pokemon the First Movie."

The first half hour of Hot Chick, before the switch, plays like soft-core porno from the '60s. The rest plays like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch stretched to the breaking point.

Serves up horrendous lead acting, murky cinematography, bland atmosphere, unengaging romance, mug-crazy cameo performances, bash-on-the-head satire and ill-timed slapstick gags that look like outtakes from a Bozo the Clown show gone berserk. [20 Oct 1995]

Devotees of awful filmmaking can't go wrong with this one.

This is a movie that boggles the mind: a bad-taste comedy that makes the average effort by the Farrelly Brothers (mysteriously thanked in the credits) look like a Merchant-Ivory film.

A staggeringly bad picture: a shallow, cliche-ridden mess that keeps blowing up on screen.

The political movie satire from hell.

The Neverending Story 2 is a story you may want desperately to end. Soon. [11 Feb 1991, p.F10]

It's a gross parody of its original. And since the original was a gross parody to begin with, the whole thing begins to seem gaseous, overbright, hideously inflated, as if all the bodily function jokes were about to belch it right off the screen.

Sad excuse for a movie. [4 Aug 1986, p.C6]

It's fairly safe to predict that Silent Night, Deadly Night will start making "Worst Movies of All Time" lists almost immediately. It has all the prerequisites. A roaringly bad idea. Derivative scriptwriting. Tastelessness. Naked opportunism. A cast full of actors who mug, gesticulate and savor every rotten line. A general "we're only in this for the money" attitude, visible in every sloppy frame. And, to top it off, that most crucial quality: enough conscious or unconscious humor to keep you watching, and insulting, it. [11 March 1986, p.C5]

Eddie Murphy's latest is a flabby disappointment. The jokes die, the action curdles. Much of it falls as flat as smashed tinsel.

The problem with UHF is that everything in it is a parody. The only logic for anything that happens is that there's some new thing to make fun of-mostly inanely. It's not much of a movie. [21 Jul 1989 p.11]

Warlock is supposedly about the battle between Good and Evil, but movies about the battle between Heckle and Jeckle have more terror or profundity. [17 Jan 1991, p.F12]

It's a cheap, easy rehash of Spielberg's "Duel" and "The Hitchhiker" (which Red may not have seen)--along with grabs from "Halloween" (the unstoppable fiend), "Jackson County Jail" (the innocent motorist driven outside the law) and "Straw Dogs" (manhood through blood rites). Nothing is original.

Leatherface is as tasteless as its predecessors, but it reduces fear to a business and blood to a drip. It's a slaughterhouse without any real buzz. [15 Jan 1990, p.F2]

This is a movie whose morality is as banal as its humor--and that's saying something. Basically, it's standard post '80s high-concept drivel, yet another marketing hook in search of comedy, tension, characters, atmosphere, compelling narrative drive--everything we used to see in movies before the hooks and the ad campaigns swallowed them up.

The jokes grate on you, the buoyancy seems feigned and none of the nonsense is lyrical. The talent involved seems misused. This film is conceived as a vehicle for Madonna and, even as such, it's a rattling failure. The movie diminishes her, the worst thing a vehicle can do. [10 Aug 1987, p.1]

Anyone who goes to Halloween 4 deserves what they get: stale, sordid tricks and no treats. [25 Oct 1988, p.C6]

Blue City has exactly one thing to recommend it: Ry Cooder’s typically funky, steely, hard-edged score. Overall, it’s such a flabbergasting turkey--misfiring in every conceivable direction--that it may actually improve if you watch it with your eyes shut.

It's just another failed movie: a loud, shallow fiasco that leaves you feeling used.

On the movie's feeble plus side are Richard Gant's acting (as the coroner), Manfredini's music and one funny joke in the last half-minute. On the minus side: ludicrous characters. Garbled nonstop gore. Persistent loud, clanging noises that give you the impression of being trapped inside a malfunctioning radiator. Shadowy lighting that makes you feel as if you're staggering around in the dark. [16 Aug 1993, p.F3]

Hool directs all this so lethargically you might suspect he’s gone missing in action himself.

Johnny Be Good, a would-be satire on the excesses of big-time college football recruiting, is so bad that the NCAA might consider using it as punishment for coaches who violate regulations.

They've jacked this loud, lame shrieker of a movie up to the highest decibels, both aural and visual, and rammed it in our faces with almost numbing aplomb.

The Brady Bunch Movie, which was directed and written by at least five people whom we prefer not to embarrass, looks bad, sounds bad and doesn't make any sense. There's even something nightmarish about it. All these bad jokes and vacant sets become almost horrifying, as if the film were on the verge of proving that life itself is a bad joke on a vacant set. [17 Feb 1995, p.J]

Phantoms may have sold like hotcakes as a book. But this movie version is a grotesque fiasco, a confoundingly senseless story told with unexciting visuals, cliched dialogue and ear-bashing sounds... Watching it is a truly hellish experience. [23 Jan 1998]

There are good movies, bad movies and confoundingly bad movies. My Favorite Martian belongs to that rare third category. [12 Feb 1999, p.A]

Simply calling Surf Nazis Must Die a bad movie doesn't do it justice. This is a horror-action movie with dull action and horror, feebly done on every level: leaden satire, a repulsive romance, a revenge saga of zero intensity. The actors are often upstaged by the beach graffiti.

The movie is full of phallic gags about little-bitty guns and crude jokes at physical or emotional infirmities. [17 Nov 1989, p.6]

Sequels to big-budget popular hits usually end up super-slick, shallow and inflated. But this one isn't even super-slick; it's shallow and deflated...The overall effect is of a story atomized and dying before our eyes, collapsing into smashed pulp, ground down into big-budget Kryptonite ash. [27 July 1987, p.1]

A collection of flat gags, spiritless action, cornball satire and overbroad or bored-looking performances, it sometimes resembles the draggle-end of a nightmare “Saturday Night Live” show, where the cast has come to despise their own skits.

It's arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie. There's no need to do a Mad magazine movie parody of this; it's already on the screen.

Teen Wolf Too embellishes its inane, cookie-cutter plot with remote direction, witless dialogue and charmless characters.

This movie makes sexual adventurism seems so ludicrous, that it might have been made by Puritans in disguise, trying to portray hedonists as a pack of fatheads.

But beware: "Hamburger" is the dregs of "Animal House" and "Police Academy" raked over again, with another passel of daffy, goofy, sex-crazed guys; bosomy, moaning sex-starved girls; screaming nerds; yowling dimwits and howling bullies... The script may set a record for misfiring gags and lewd puns. [3 Feb 1986, p.C7]

A loathsome shocker... Watching it almost turned my stomach.

This movie is soooo bad (How bad is it?) that it makes "Caddyshack I" look like "Godfather II."