Mike Clark

You can have a better time title-scanning "Johnny" pics in an alphabetical video guide than you can enduring the latest Blade Runner knockoff. [26 May 1995, p.3D]

Long, lumbering, pretentious and for some a possible laff riot. [23 Dec 1994]

Broken Toys is beyond repair [18 Dec 1992, p.6D]

Whether we're talking this go-round, the original or the second sequel the finale seems to promise, I'd rather try standing drunk on a see-saw (though maybe not over dirty syringes) than see Saw.

This movie is a howler as well -- possibly even intentionally -- but if it is a black comedy, the joke is overextended by far too many arms and legs. [19 March 1999, Life, p. 13E]

Almost everyone in this has done better, and those who haven't, like young Ms. Panettiere, have plenty of time to do so.

The movie's opening half-hour is merely dull, but the final hour is brain-damaging. [11 Dec 1998]

Don't put yourself through this hell.

Ten minutes into the picture, you're searching the screen for life-support machines.

This unearthed cheapie and fast-forwarder's delight is redeemed by the dubbed- in cathedral tones (they're vintage gladiator pic) coming from our hero's larnyx. [20 Dec 1991, p.3D]

Except for a nifty climactic biker attack on the Mississippi statehouse, you've seen the rest. You won't however, see Boz on screen for long. A Stone face, yes - but not a great one. [21 May 1991, p.4D]

The worst of '88's major Christmas pics has scientist Dan Aykroyd inadvertently beaming Kim Basinger to Earth in a bum experiment; the result is as tired as its title, though Basinger gives another smooth comic performance. [09 Jun 1989, p.3D]

All you get here for paid admission is a long and terrific avalanche scene -- state of the art, no question. Then it's over and ready to melt away, much like memories of this movie.

A mongrel of a movie.

'Burbs is a messy mix of Gremlins, Neighbors, Rear Window and Arsenic and Old Lace. [17 Feb 1989, p.6D]

Holmes, of Dawson's Creek, will be up the creek if she can't avoid movies like this. And so will you if you see it.

The movie tries to juggle motherly love sentiment with wanna-be snappy ripostes with a violent streak that extends to threatening a grade-schooler with blinding and busted kneecaps. [11 Oct 1996, Pg.03.D]

Michelle Pfeiffer has made a lot of memorable movies, including many that undeservedly failed to connect with the public. Never, until Dangerous Minds, has she had to flail her way through a movie beyond all redemption, including even the prehistoric "Grease 2". [11 Aug 1995, Pg.04.D]

Rambo III is hardly the first Stallone-y baloney to climax with a commie wipeout; it is the first to palm off its star as the product of a Buddhist monastery. Like, whew. Rambo in a monastery is almost as stomach-turning as E.T. in a brothel. [25 May 1988, p.1D]

Goo oozes without mercy in A Walk to Remember.

Prince blows it here by alternately reaching beyond his abilities and sabotaging what he does well. [06 Nov 1990, p.5D]

Burdened with so many poky scenes that it approaches the level of the distributor's "Drowning Mona" and "Whipped," both candidates for the year's worst.

A movie that only a father could love -- father being the late John Cassavetes, credited with Lovely's script. [29 Aug 1997]

The movie goes wrong from the start.

I don't mind that Nights is a potty-mouth benchmark; crude verbiage is appropriate to the leads, as well as the film's subject matter. This is, however, an amazingly mean two hours. Even the funniest gag involves Murphy's fatal shooting of three men. [17 Nov 1989, p.6D]

Waterlogged trip to nowhere. [13 February 1998, p. 3D]

Thunderheart, which concerns tragic in-fighting between factions of the Oglala Sioux, lands with a sound that duplicates the name of the Indian chief who harassed Howdy Doody in less ethnically sensitive times. Thunderthud. The movie is so dramatically stillborn that it may be unfair to single out Val Kilmer, but that is Kilmer's name atop an acting lineup that includes Sam Shepard, Fred Ward and Graham Greene (Dances With Wolves). [3 Apr 1992, p.8D]

You can't accuse this film of bogging down in cheap psychology, yet you come out dissatisfied and without a clue about what made this person tick.

Whatever reason Denzel Washington may have had for deigning to grace a melodrama as scummy as Virtuosity, the actor has wound up with something that is even worse than 1991's Ricochet in his otherwise creditable filmography. [4 Aug 1995, p.4D]

The young Pigeon turks who no doubt think they've made a hip black comedy should be forced to see it in a theater of non-sycophants, where only an occasional exasperated exhale signifies the audience isn't dead yet. [25 Sept 1998]

Can't stars attract better scripts than this?

Kevin Smith shows up briefly as a lab technician in the miserable Daredevil, and that's a pity. This is a movie that desperately needs the presence of Smith's trademark sidekicks Jay and Silent Bob, with Smith as Bob, ragging worse than ever on his old pal Ben Affleck.

Close your eyes during this miserable romantic comedy.

Clumsy, miscast thriller.

Underdrawn and overheated, Cool World will leave you cold. [13 Jul 1992]

Becomes exceedingly disgusting when it wallows in the psychological torture of a child, a no-no under any circumstances.

Feels like an especially grisly Twilight Zone stretched to five times its length, features Das Boot's Jurgen Prochnow as missing author Sutter Cane and such screen-schlock reliables as David Warner, John Glover and Bernie Casey. None remotely remedies Mouth's bad breath. [03 Feb 1995, p.4D]

Coy to a fault, the movie collapses under its own weight with 90 minutes to go, despite Robby Muller's impressive black-and-white photography, which puts the film on a higher artistic plane than other equally unbearable movies. [16 May 1996, Pg.06.D]

If you can't find a more scintillating brand of dirty to enjoy during your own nights (Helena or Hoboken), you're not trying very hard.

Ultimately, it's just too long and redundant, too violent and unpleasant, too stupid and full of itself. But otherwise, lordy. [19 May 1989, p.4D]

Blue Steel is unpleasant and wearily predictable, a near-unbearable 103 minutes even for fanciers of urban cop films. Its one distinction, lead Jamie Lee Curtis aside, is its backhanded bone-toss to feminists: Now we know that women, too, can direct serial-killer crumminess. [16 Mar 1990, p.4D]

If Gooding can't get another "Boyz N the Hood" or "Jerry Maguire" soon, his career will need its own cork.

On paper, this sounded like a winner. In reality? We have met the Enemy at the multiplex, and he's silly. [08 Feb 1991, p.4D]

Is this a comedy, action pic or sensitive Belushi-Harris romance? Director Rod Daniel never establishes a definitive tone, though he comes close in the scene where James Brown's I Feel Good hits the sound track after some canine fornication. You don't need a dog to smell this. [28 Apr 1989, p.4D]

Inventing the Abbotts would be a lot more fun were it a trashy Troy Donahue-Diane McBain vehicle ground out by Warner Bros. in 1960, the year this hormonally motivated high school-college romance mercifully concludes. [4 April 1997, p. 4D]

One of those movies that goes for a jarringly new emotion every 30 seconds or so while the story's foundation is collapsing.

Usually, I'm as slow as the pacing of a movie in figuring out who's done it. If you can't solve this mystery with an hour to go (as I did), better call for a transfusion so a better type of blood will start flowing to your brain.

Life is a crock -- or something like it.

Yet another Alan Alda unoriginal original. [22 Jun 1990, p.2D]

Begins sinking in the shallow end almost at once.

Hollywood must still have some wheezy hacks capable of gleaning a few chuckles out of the hoary Convicts-Disguised-as-Priests movie premise. But to paraphrase Groucho Marx, Someone, please, get us a hack; David Mamet's We're No Angels script can't find them. [15 Dec 1989, p.6D]

There's not a cliché that isn't nailed.

This is by far Kaufman's worst outing since becoming a major filmmaker more than a quarter-century ago, and the fact that his only other stinker from this period is 1993's "Rising Sun" means that maybe he ought to stay away from cop melodramas.

Navy SEALS no doubt fancies itself as being taken from today's headlines, but ''taken from the pages of a Chuck Norris script'' is more like it. [23 July 1990, p.2D]

There's sad news to report about The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D: Put on the cardboard glasses, and you can still see the movie.

Each actor does his own thing for his own audience demographic.

The Package could be the most forgettable movie title since Michael Caine and Richard Gere did Beyond the Limit; with luck, audiences will even forget the film itself was made. And why was it? Possibly to prove that Gene Hackman, at 58, can still survive as many lousy movies as Caine. [25 Aug 1989, p.4D]

I cry for I Spy— or I would if this latest and laziest imaginable of all vintage-TV spinoffs were capable of engendering an emotional response of any kind. Comas are physical, not emotional.

The movie is what it is, a deadeningly literal look at ozone spiritualists and s-&-m purveyors (possibly one and the same) who toss some very spirited pool parties. A better title than the current marquee anonymity might be Naked Brunch. [16 Sept 1994, p.5D]

The only thing a movie this unrefined needs is a vaudevillian in baggy pants and someone hawking peanuts in the aisle.

This one's aimed at those airheads who, like George, have been swinging on a grapevine and slamming into too many trees. [16 July 1997, p. 3D]

For all his talent, Martin Short has been consistently snakebitten in his choice of movies, a streak now extended by Disney's Jungle2 Jungle. Worse, this laugh-numbing venom has been transfused to co-star Tim Allen, until now a consistently successful big bwana in movies and bookstores and on TV. [07 Mar 1997, p.4D]

In Roy Orbison terms, enduring this movie is like working for The Man.

When the most notable thing a film offers is the sight of Dennis Farina in drag, you can't expect much.

Don't buy a ticket for this one, even if the theater is having a fire sale on Raisinets.

Despite Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, a deserving flop about modern-day cattle hucksters; at times here (call the rest home), I think Newman sounds like Wally Cox. [01 Mar 1991, p.3D]

May be a spectacularly awful movie, but it's also spectacularly drenched in color, décor and other visual oh-la-la.

Nothing works in this over-elaborate let's-kidnap-a-kid melodrama. [24 Aug 1990]

A movie that has neither dramatic focus nor a single memorable performance, aside from one or two that are memorable for the wrong reasons?

To be charitable, the film's point of view is consistent, and there's a clever bit (very late) involving construction equipment. There isn't however, even a fourth-cousin to a laugh in this very strange public suicide. [29 July 1991, p.4D]

When movies have degraded to the point that Tyson is acting more than Quentin Tarantino is directing, maybe it is time for an industry shutdown, strike-induced or otherwise.

OK, Time Warner, a joke is a joke, but the time of tolerance has passed. Get your creatures out of our faces unless you're willing to regale us by afflicting them with Mad Pokémon Disease.

Actor John Corbett, so clean-cut in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "Raising Helen," goes surprisingly scruffy here as someone who apparently studied music under Grizzly Adams.

Myopic Whitey, continually passed over for a lifetime achievement athletic award, bears a passing resemblance to Columbia's all-time No. 1 animated star, the nearsighted Mr. Magoo. It's nice to think that if he ever went to this movie, he wouldn't be able to see it.

Appallingly mean-spirited.

Clumsy urban thriller.

Costner, allegedly smitten with his client, had more chemistry with the Warren Commission in JFK. [25 Nov 1992, p.1D]

Earth to Earth's young director, Mark Piznarksi : It's tough turning straw into gold, isn't it?

There's no substitute for bad taste. And this one has it double-barreled, both in the timing of its release and as a movie, one said to be loosely based on fact.

The movie runs just 80 minutes, but it's enough time for doldrums to set in when nifty special effects and funny verbal exchanges are out grabbing a smoke. [19 Feb 1993, Life, p.5D]

Kris Kristofferson, as a scaled-down old gray mentor to Blade, still looks like the visual equivalent of your five worst college hangovers.

There's so little action or suspense that this Cell isn't too likely to multiply itself into a sequel.

Sometimes laughably incoherent.

Mortal Thoughts is a mystery that any halfway-OK hack might turn into a halfway-OK movie by bagging all pretense to art and simply telling a story. But that isn't the style of Alan Rudolph, whose last space shot was Love at Large; the result is a quirky boo-boo I suspect is already halfway out of theaters. [19 Apr 1991, p.2D]

Couldn't be murkier or less emotionally involving if it were "The Matrix 8," a natural observation because Keanu Reeves stars in both.

It's a mess with sporadic flashes of creativity. Someone should have gone back to the drawing board. [19 July 1996, p.13D]

Frequent Disney scripter Tom Schulman won an Oscar for Dead Poets Society. His latest, Medicine Man, ought to be in the Dead Movies Society. [07 Feb 1992, p.5D]

The director is Rowdy Herrington , whose penchant for the silly in Patrick Swayze's Road House will serve as able cross-reference. Among the capable actors wasted are Dennehy, Robert Loggia, Ossie Davis and Cuba Gooding Jr. from Boyz N the Hood. Soft-spoken Heard is supposedly an ace traveling salesman, but won't be doing Music Man revivals soon. [6 March 1992, p.4D]

Unless it becomes a camp classic, Cain will soon go the way of Abel. [07 Aug 1992, p.2D]

Given its complete lack of suspense, eroticism, ensemble acting, and other mere tangibles, Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers (with a Harold Pinter script) is destined to wind up lacking even a modest theatrical run. [29 Mar 1991, p.5D]

The desperately titled Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man takes place in 1996, an apparent ploy to sugarcoat a script that would be unswallowable set today. Of course, even if it were set in 3996, this film still would be one helluva tight cram down the old esophagus. [23 Aug 1991, p.4D]

There's no buildup (hence, no suspense) and no combustion between the leads. Dillon and Young are both better than their reps, and Dearden orchestrated the sizzle between Michael Douglas and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Something must have gone terribly awry here. [26 Apr 1991, p.4D]

A Disney Thanksgiving movie that plays like a Halloween holdover is odd enough. Even so, it wouldn't be that bad if you stuck your hand into the trick-or-treat bag and found a hefty, succulently dressed and edible turkey instead of the other kind.

There are only so many times you can see a slow-motion kickboxing scene or a figure sail off a skyscraper before you want to spend a nice, cozy evening with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of word processors, and one of them may indeed write War and Peace, as the old theory goes. But more likely, they'll come up with something like David Mickey Evans' screenplay for Ed. [15 Mar 1996, p.5D]

A potential howler done in by a tendency to wear too much body tissue on its sleeve.

The movie is so uninvolving that it inspires renewed respect for Broken Arrow, which was equally stupid but excitingly filmed. Though its sound effects will shake up your marrow, you can experience the same effect by plunking $ 100 worth of change into a rumbling bed at the nearest seedy motel. [2 Aug 1996]

Steven Seagal's acting style is so minimal that we can almost believe a script that tells us that his character's near-death experience left him flatlined for 22 minutes.