Richard Harrington

All the redeeming qualities of "Rocky Horror"--naive wit, enthusiastic invention and absurb plotline--have been approximated in Shock Treatment without ever approaching the original. Unlike its inspiration, which fans have returned to time and again, Shock Treatment is hard to sit through once. [28 May 1982, p.C4]

In makeup, Davis is quite evil-looking and, like most good actors facing similar challenges, imbues a weak character with a strong presence. The movie is interesting only when he's wheeling about on screen, but in retrospect this is probably one set of reels Davis wishes he had sat out.

Never Ending Story II is as flat as the pages of its script.

What can you say when a video game is more exciting and entertaining than the big-budget feature film it inspires?

But just as Pee-wee Herman's films are vehicles for his shtick, Elvira is mostly Elvira wisecracking and busting out of her dress. She's fun, a Transylvania Valley Girl grown up into the Queen of the Bs, but after 96 minutes you may start thinking more fondly about those '50s and '60s camp classics she's usually interspersed with.

Martial arts maven Seagal has long been on deadly ground with critics, and this, his directorial debut, is likely to keep him there.

The level of humor, of course, is familiarly low -- with nothing more deadly than the Crypt Keeper's puns ("Frights! Camera! Hack-tion!"). As for the gore, let's just say the demons are slimy, heads do roll and bodies are ripped asunder

Fear of a Black Hat is not brilliant, but it's bright enough.

You're going out with a touch of class: a slam-bang finale in 3-D -- make that Freddyvision; a gaggle of one-liners directed at the final crop of victims and a few in-jokes; some wonderfully bizarre dream sequences; and the possibility that while Freddy may be gone, some of his progeny may live on (we can say no more).

For all the nice turns, this movie can't decide whether to focus on undergraduate fun and fantasy or the tensions of the workaday world. As a result, the film fails to deliver its promised exploration of the last week of summer, when some people find themselves with no way to turn back, and no place to look forward to. [01 Oct 1984, p.B3]

Scriptwise, you'll be left thinking "if it only had a brain." Like last year's "Hardware," this British effort is simply too talky. Those who seek deeper meaning will enjoy the astrological and satanic explanations, even if they make no sense.

A soulless replica of Don Seigel's 1956 model and Philip Kaufman's 1978 update.

While Fishburne is generally riveting -- his facial disguise is basically hardness layered onto strength -- and Goldblum is intriguing -- his wannabe urges are quite curious -- the film itself is only occasionally visceral.

In Born in East L.A., Marin plays it mostly for cheap laughs and only an occasional touch of pathos. In other words, he's taken the easy way out. And the script is so sketchy, the scenes so disconnected and the ideas so vacuous (even for Marin) that Born in East L.A. is in desperate need of a center it never finds in its 75 unfocused minutes. The film is a series of skits, blackouts and punchlines, but finished it's not.

A thrill-an-hour distraction that promises much more than it delivers.

A shameless, uneventful rehash of the classic Western "Shane," "Nowhere to Run" miscasts Jean-Claude Van Damme in the old Alan Ladd role -- an outlaw outsider gradually drawn into both unexpected familial warmth and predictably violent conflict with a greedy land baron...While it boasts better supporting actors and technical credits than other Van Damme projects, the film nonetheless founders, a victim of its own lugubrious pace and misguided efforts at turning the bulging Belgian into a romantic lead.

Some films aspire to B status; some achieve it accidentally. Return of the Swamp Thing does neither. It isn't shocking or entertaining. At best, it is a catalogue of bad acting unredeemed by humor, and it will quickly settle back into the swamp of anonymity accorded most minor comic book heroes. [26 June 1989, p.B8]

A cross between an after-school special and MTV video, melding threadbare plot with colorful visuals and delivering a message, which is, basically, Vanilla Ice is cool, you know?

Romero and his original partners apparently made no money from the original, and Romero admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the reasons for remaking the film were "purely financial." It shows...This Night of the Living Dead is resurrected, but it's never brought to life.

Child's Play 2 is an inevitable sequel that's not as good as its progenitor, but better than most movies with the numbers 2 through 8 in their titles. Thin plot-wise, it caters to an audience apparently amused on the first go-round by the antics of a foul-mouthed doll named Chucky.

As usual, it's the colorful and loquacious Joker who is most riveting. Shirley Walker's orchestral score is also quite powerful.

While it's obvious that Stanley has seen a lot of genre films, he's not yet learned how to make one, though his shortcomings are less visual than dramatic and narrative; things look fast, but happen s-l-o-w. This Hardware needs a grease job.

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects could be the worst Charles Bronson film ever, and that's saying something. If it were any slower, it would be running backward.

You could call it a nightmare but that would be an insult to Elm Street.

It's overly long and it's overly melodramatic, but it's also a perfect example of the kind of film they just don't make anymore, because they can't.

Woodstock captures the spirit of itself quite well, and much of what we take for granted now in music videos and stage performance was shaped not only by the festival but by Wadleigh's film. [17 Aug 1989, p.C7]

Though it boasts a big budget and is indeed busier and more densely populated than Seagal's previous efforts, Out for Justice feels cheap, not only in its production but in its content. It's "Scarface" without a point of view; it's shallow plot cluttered with extreme violence, both verbal and physical.

Genre aficionados looking for chills and thrills will be disappointed; this one could play uncut on television -- network, not cable. The effects and the jokes are equally few and far between, and for all its amiable intentions, House II deserves few boarders.