Peter Stack

It's both amazing and depressing how much talent goes to waste in the lame adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s 1973 absurdist novel.

Kids probably will enjoy portions of Return to Oz, but at best, it's a mechanical movie that never finds a real heart to engage an audience. [21 Jun 1985, p.79]

The least they could have done with the sequel Candyman : Farewell to the Flesh is make it scary. How they managed to give us a killer with a bloody hook going around eviscerating people and have him come off as mild as a butterfly is boggling.

Strains through buckets of verbiage and muddled plot to seize only a few dopey laughs.

A forced, tedious but stupidly amusing police action comedy starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell as undercover cops who dislike one another but are forced to do some male bonding to save their hides. High-minded people who eschew violence, harsh language and meatball humor just might want to skip this one. [22 Dec 1989, p.22]

A skillfully observed but never quite satisfying lesbian romantic drama.

As a movie, it's far from compelling. As a thrill ride, though, it's a rampaging special effects and animatronics extravaganza that will make small children cringe behind their seats.

An unabashed wallow in the moronic humor of Adam Sandler.

Curiously mellow for a John Carpenter thriller, Village of the Damned, a full-color, cornball special-effects remake of the 1960 sci-fi favorite, is a trip to a village of the darned tedious.

This wacky buddy road film... has a brilliant glow of intelligence behind the stupidness. It's easily the funniest movie of the year.

This thick, leaden production starring Bob Hoskins and Patricia Arquette - and an uncredited Robin Williams - has a sophomoric air, even though it faithfully follows the book.

A convoluted mess, but there have been worse.

RoboCop 3 ought to be a lot more mean and harrowing a sci- fi thriller than it is. Yet it still has a wicked humor underneath its prophetic grin. [05 Nov 1993, p.C3]

Jack Frost starts out with sweet promise, then loses steam and gets a little too strange for its own good. It also gets cloyingly manipulative, but its heart is in the right place.

The film, "suggested by" John Irving's novel "A Prayer for Owen Meany," is so unabashedly manipulative -- and implausible -- that even while crying, many viewers may also feel abused.

Yet for all its faults and limitations, Swing Kids is not necessarily easy to forget. [05 Mar 1993]

It's going to be easy for some to dismiss the new Touchstone Pictures comedy, Captain Ron, as a leaky boatload of predictable gags. But it's what you can't predict that keeps this stupidly amusing seafaring tale afloat, making it surprisingly fun. [18 Sep 1992, p.C3]

The greatest sexual suspense drama ever made has come to be regarded by many Hitchcock admirers as his most accomplished film. It is certainly his most forlorn, and easily his most mesmerizing. [Restored]

A surprisingly clever lunatic comedy that may prompt some sniping from liberal fussbudgets, but has undeniable comic vitality. [15 Oct 1993, p.C1]

Child's Play 2, stupid as it is, is a surprisingly tight low-budget production, making effective use of dark settings and rainy nights, and a handful of in-yer-face scare tactics that keep the action pumped up. [10 Nov 1990, p.C3]

The Island of Dr. Moreau ought to have been a great film in these times of gene splicing and DNA research and all the moral, ethical and practical questions those developments raise. But director John Frankenheimer and screenwriters Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson's attempt to update Wells yields only a maddening mess of empty gestures.

It's a swashbuckling extravaganza, but Davis is not convincing. And before anyone objects, it's not because she's a woman. Get out already! This is the '90s, and women can do anything. But they can't escape from a lousy movie any better than a man can.

3 Ninjas is shoddy, violent and numbingly pointless, an action comedy in which three brothers spend their summer practicing martial arts under their grandfather's tutelage. [07 Aug 1992, p.C4]

The new comedy is screechingly inane and skitters in nine directions at once.

The Next Karate Kid' has all the makings of a terrible movie, but it never quite becomes one. One reason might be that cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs just loves a beautiful picture. [10 Sep 1994, p.E6]

Bordello of Blood easily could have been called "Bore- dello of Blood." This gory vampire spoof is remarkably free of jolts, hardly registering as a fright film, with a series of weak special effects involving many globs of guts...The big themes in this lackluster second feature under the "Tales From the Crypt" banner are sex and religion. Both are presented with painfully sophomoric irreverence.

It's the kind of movie that crumbles into trash -- non-recyclable -- if you spend more than 10 minutes thinking about it. It's designed for dumb fun, and delivers some. [10 July 1992, p.D3]

It's not a great film, but Event Horizon produces an intense sense of visual involvement. The hallucinatory, almost 3-D-like scenes stick in the mind.