Paul Attanasio

2010 is a one-man tour de fizzle, a yawnfest so plodding it seems to have been made by the famous monolith itself. [7 Dec 1984, p.D1]

Clue is based on the popular Parker Brothers board game in which the players try to guess, well, whodunit, and where, and with what weapon. You leave it with one conviction: stick with the game.

Krush Groove is a kind of "Purple Drizzle," partly because of the story, which is scattershot; mostly because of the music, which isn't music at all, but rap, that tired fad of worn-out rock critics. [1 Nov 1985, p.B4]

Pirates hasn't got an ounce of excitement -- or at least it hasn't excited composer Philippe Sarde, whose score is the symphonic equivalent of Muzak and is rarely wedded to what we see on the screen. So what's left is a pricey playpen for Polanski's sense of perversity. [19 July 1986, p.G1]

There is some magnificent stunt work, which only underscores how inadequate Moore has become. Moore isn't just long in the tooth -- he's got tusks, and what looks like an eye job has given him the pie-eyed blankness of a zombie. He's not believable anymore in the action sequences, even less so in the romantic scenes.

Chong breathes some occasional life into Soul Man, as does Arye Gross, who displays a rich variety of comic attitudes as Mark's roommate. What surrounds them, though, is a black comedy with so little gumption, it ends up a vague shade of gray, composed of a collection of cheap jokes excused by smug platitudes about race -- in short, a movie called Soul Man whose soul, it seems, is quite lost.

The best cartoons recognize the dark side of kids, their penchant for violence, their fearful fantasies. The Care Bears Movie just patronizes them.

So when the movie turns out drab and predictable, it's depressing -- you think Hill has become a stranger to his own sensibility. [24 March 1986, p.C3]

The Boys Next Door is just another exploitation movie about murderous nuts -- exactly what you wouldn't expect from Penelope Spheeris, the director of "Suburbia." [12 Nov 1985, p.B11]

Heckerling seems lost and distracted here -- the framing is careless, and the film moves with a stuttering pace. Why is this talented director being channeled into projects like this?

The movie is one of those can't-miss projects that, uh, misses...Altogether, this is about the most listlessly paced thriller you could imagine: Ashby's penchant for letting his actors improvise just results in endless dithering; and the image is weirdly flat -- the movie's shot almost entirely in profile. Actually, there aren't just 8 million ways to die -- now we know there are 8 million and 1. [25 Apr 1986, p.D2]

You know something's wrong when screen writers James Orr and Jim Cruikshank have to jury-rig a couple of chase plots, involving an over-the-hill hit man (Eli Wallach) and an aging detective (Charles Durning) just to move things along.

Reinhold has a face that is halfway between leading-man handsome and Donald Duck, and a relaxed, drawling confidence with a line -- he seems to float not above the action but on it, like oil on water. And he seems to survive Head Office, a comedy so confused and cowardly it makes television look daring. [4 Jan 1986, p.D4]

From the opening shot, an endless, unmotivated dolly move up a corridor that conveys no information, establishes neither theme nor setting and serves no other purpose, you know that you are in the presence of true film ineptitude, which only deepens as The Decline of the American Empire continues.

Amateurish, emotionally fraudulent. [28 Jan 1986, p.C4]

John Frankenheimer has directed 52 Pick-Up in a style so devoid of nuance, the movie almost watches itself. From the crosscutting between Scheider and Ann-Margret that opens the film (an exchange of glances so portentous you think an earthquake is about to hit Los Angeles) to the way every emotion is underlined with tight close-ups, 52 Pick-Up is so aggressively explicit that it might have been made for an audience of trained apes.

The kids are uniformly godawful, particularly the lamentably named Phoenix; their wooden line readings play in long, flat scenes that look like some 12-year-olds' school project. And talking about the movie's sense of pace is like talking about Pikes Peak's sense of pace. Explorers is a veritable jungle of thematic and story threads that are never picked up. [12 July 1985, p.D6]

The Mission is everything a movie should be -- magnificently produced, epic in scope, serious in theme -- everything, that is, but good. Hamstrung by an unworkable script, the disastrous casting of Robert De Niro and, presumably, the strain of shooting in the Colombian jungle, director Roland Joffe' has come up with an indigestible lump of sanctimony that rarely goes beyond its good intentions.

Extremities pretends to be a serious movie, and in a film culture where women are routinely exploited and revenge is taken blithely, it is, at least, a departure. But we don't learn anything about men and women, or revenge, from "Extremities" -- we just watch people score debating points, to the tune of J.A.C. Redford's stale TV-movie score.

The most elementary requirement of an action movie is that the hero know the score, be in command -- it lends tension to the moments when he's not in command -- a requirement that screen writer Christopher Wood blithely neglects. Aw, forget it -- just tell me when it ends.

In Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, a great deal of engine noise and clanking iron is drowned out by the audience's resounding ho-hum. It's comic books in a Cuisinart, all costumes and cute monikers and no story, a sort of case history of just what's wrong with sequelitis. [10 July 1985]

Golan and Bruner, in other words, have made the Holocaust into just another tear-jerking tool for the Cannon Productions shlockenspiel. This is called "chutzpah." The unoffended will find that the movie doesn't even deliver on its own sordid level. There isn't any action till 70 minutes into the film.

As you watch Howard the Duck, you get the vivid sensation that you're watching not a movie, but a pile of money being poured down the drain. [02 Aug 1986, p.G10]

Summer Rental is the kind of movie that could make you wish you had poison ivy -- at least the scratching would occupy your mind. [10 Aug 1985, p.D7]

Everything about The Heavenly Kid is ripped off, from a sprig of music that apes the Beverly Hills Cop theme to Gedrick, who was obviously cast because he looks like Tom Cruise, but cheaper. [26 July 1985, p.D2]

There are movies that make you want to mince words, and then there's Poltergeist II: The Other Side, a movie so ineffably bad, you can't even find the words to mince. [23 May 1986, p.D2]

Just Police Academy all over again, without laughs.

Nearly unwatchable.