Mike Clark

There are seven 13-year-old sitters in all, and Melanie Mayron (directing her first theatrical feature) doesn't always flub it when any two interact. But the film's nature and even its title peg it as an ensemble work, and Mayron's group footage looks like crude camcording of a ninth-grade picnic. [18 Aug 1995, p.11D]

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]

When the cast starts wondering where the roadkill is, someone says, "Follow the smell." Good tip: That's how you'll know where Wax is playing.

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.

Suspense takes a vacation in sequel. [13 November 1998, p. 6E]

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.

It's one bad apple.

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]

It'll be 30 years this Thanksgiving since Elvis starred in Blue Hawaii. Polynesian kissy-face has been going downhill on screens ever since. [02 Aug 1991, p.5D]

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.

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.

Even by King-movie standards (and there are none lower), the misanthropy, grotesque humor, and all-out ugliness is itself in maximum overdrive. [27 Aug 1993, p.3D]

A pitiful update that saddles poor Cedric the Entertainer with the unenviable task of taking over Jackie Gleason's premier creation, Ralph Kramden.

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.

An air of self-congratulation hangs over the empty tank of gas called Jawbreaker, as if writer-director Darren Stein just can't wait to dazzle us with the gaudy visuals he's soldered onto a standard-issue black-comedy script.

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

Gere has never seemed more squirrelly.

Dead-carcass spinoff of Jay Ward's animated TV favorite.

The movie goes wrong from the start.

Bulletproof is both offensive and depressing, from its sociopathic mix of graphic violence and slapstick to its severe career blighting of the once-formidable Ernest Dickerson. [6 Sept 1996, p.3D]

That sound you hear is from jet engines gassing up, about to zoom Underclassman to DVD-ville.

The word on Rollerball is "troubled," though troubled is what you call a high school junior with 50 snakes under his bed. Catastrophe is more like it.

Vanilla Ice was fairly amusing striking terror into Debbie Gibson when they were perversely cast as co-presenters on the last Grammy telecast. On the big screen, though, he all but exudes irreversible brain damage, as if he's taken too many noggin spills off a motorcycle. [25 Oct 1991, p.4D]

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]

You keep waiting for there to be more, but there never is -- other than the fact that it all gets gorier and uglier as the dyspeptic look on Jones' face progresses from a four- to a six-a-day scotch-and-peppermint schnapps hangover.

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?

MTV addicts may want to check out Shore, whose sound effects (akin to electrical interference) amuse for maybe five minutes. Otherwise, Encino Man is even worse than Medicine Man, which came from the same studio. In a just society, both of them would go the way of Atlantis Man. [22 May 1992, p.12D]

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.

A race-car drama full of flashy but empty images and a soundtrack that makes you feel as if you're being shaken on a motel rumblebed.

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.

This unbearable cross-generational fantasy, with Coreys Haim and Feldman, has one bit that sums up its overall ineptitude. It's a romantic interlude featuring the great Sinatra standard Young at Heart; instead of the 1954 hit version on Capitol, the filmmakers use the 1962 Reprise remake - photographed on a revolving turntable (and with the wrong label) as a 78! A 78 in the era of Gene Pitney? - what preschool did the filmmakers graduate from, anyway? [8 Sept 1989, p.3D]

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]

To crystallize its fundamental flaw, here's a movie about Manhattan that takes 75 minutes just to get to Manhattan - followed by another 15 that could just as easily have been shot (and possibly were) in some East Topeka alley. [31 July 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]

A baseball nostalgia piece all weirded-out by flashes of supernatural horror, this early-'60s remembrance is like sitting through a double bill of Field of Dreams and The Goonies. [7 Apr 1993, p.8D]

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.

As an artsy but minimally bohemian type, Russo maintains her dignity, an extraordinary accomplishment.

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]

Sniper offers slow-motion close-ups of bullet trajectories for action, plodding for nearly two hours. Berenger may wonder if Zane has the stuff to pull his trigger, but I prayed for someone to pull the plug. [29 Jan 1993, p.4D]

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.

Fire Birds may actually be duller than Clint Eastwood's Firefox. It's doing a full-tilt boogie to 3 a.m. cable right now. [25 May 1990, p.4D]

Poor Rutger Hauer - the new decade apparently isn't his. This hearty trouper's latest, Blind Fury, is nobody's swell time at the multiplex. [30 Mar 1990, p.5D]

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.

Wow, dudes. Pu-trid. (1989 February 20, p.4D)

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.

Except for some climactic gunplay in a zoo that looks suspiciously like a set, every plot thread is a retread - 500 layers deep. [18 May 1990, p.4D]

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]

Imagine a movie so broadly conceived that it was written, directed and all parts were played by Charo — billed in her '70s heyday of Love Boat gigs as the "Cuchi-Cuchi Girl." That's what you get here.

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

Fred is DOA, but he and the Diceman will kick up a storm at December's 10- worst time. [24 May 1991, p.7D]

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

Sarah Jessica Parker contributes next to nothing as a work/sack partner who ends up imperiled by a sadist fixated on Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs. The director/co-writer is Rowdy Herrington, who has now surpassed what was his most ludicrous claim to fame: Putting Brian Dennehy into a boxing ring with teen James Marshall in Gladiator. [17 Sept 1993, p.4D]

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]