Richard Harrington

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Ultimately, it's hard to decide which is more deadly, the action or the dialogue. [26 Dec 1981, p.D5]

The plot stumbles over genre cliches after a promising start and the whole thing becomes lamentable. As an indictment of a techno-society in which too much information is available by computer, it's simply unconvincing.

Also zero, which is the amount of inspiration and achievement in this continuing saga of the little boy who drowned in Crystal Lake 30 years, seven films and approximately 286 teenagers ago (30-7-286)

Child's Play 3 is further proof of the principle of diminishing sequels: The original was actually quite good, the follow-up was lame and now what is hopefully the capper is DOA.

But on the evidence of this twisted, high-tech "Wild Bunch" update, [Hill]'s still just the poor man's Sam Peckinpah. All the ethics and issues have been eliminated from Hill's nuevo western film, leaving only the violence, the spent bullets and the copious slo-mo flow of blood.

Boiling Point is a bad cable movie -- USA as opposed to HBO -- temporarily masquerading as a theatrical release; even the presence of one hot actor, Wesley Snipes, can't elevate it past lukewarm status. Dennis Hopper, here reduced to an unamusing caricature of himself, further cools things down. The end result, if truth-in-titling were in effect: "Tepid Point."

It's an uninspired blend, integrating the boys from "Porky's" and the girls from "Foxes" into a vehicle resembling the worst of "American Graffiti" and the best of "Rock and Roll High School." [13 Aug 1982]

Craven also wrote the script here, based on a news story about California parents who kept their children locked in the basement for many years. That's scary -- and so is how far Craven has fallen.

Charmless, stupid and badly made, No Holds Barred makes Rocky look like Citizen Pain.

This is a surprisingly inept tale about an evil nanny and a killer tree that's right out of Jason's woods. Despite a prologue that aims to excuse subsequent plot deficiencies and a finale that's as absurd as you're likely to find in a modern horror film, The Guardian is simply ludicrous.

They are also bloody and sadistic. There are two basic gore effects: In one, heavy chains fly through the air to impale people with sharp hooks, which then separate those people from their skin, or worse. Elsewhere, flesh crawls and melds with nearby flesh. There are also close-ups of various bloody, flesh-dripping tools and assorted maggots. All this is decidedly gross but not particularly frightening. [9 March 1996, p.H03]

Flowers in the Attic is slow, stiff, stupid and senseless, a film utterly lacking in motivation, development and nuance, and further marred by embarrassingly flat acting and directing.

In the end, it all looks and plays like a $40 million version of a game you're more likely to enjoy on a computer.

All the characters mumble, perhaps out of sympathy for the Dutch Van Damme's ongoing struggle with their native language. As for plot, it unravels more quickly than the mystery facing Van Damme.

Class of 1999 gets a D for dumb, dull and derivative, and so what if director Mark Lester, who made "Class of 1984" eight years ago, is borrowing from himself? The latter was just a punked-up version of the original rock-and-roll high school film, "Blackboard Jungle." For this new venture, Lester has simply tacked on elements of "Westworld," "RoboCop" and "Terminator" in a blatant attempt to enroll the action faction.

Triple the length of its cable television inspiration, Tales From the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood is triple the gore, triple the naked women, but not, alas, triple the fun. Comic takes on vampires have been done better, less bloodily and with more clothing, but always without the benefit of a wildly popular franchise like this HBO series.

What this ill-fated journey is all about are never rationally explained, but then it seems most of the little thought in Galaxy of Terror was put into the special defects, which include a crewmember whose head and tummy snap, crackle and pop; an arm that gets cut off and still manages to spite itself; and a tiny worm that grows and rapes a comely crew member to death. [12 Nov 1981, p.C17]

Spaced Invaders is a slight, obvious sci-fi parody that would like to be in the same league as Spaceballs, but doesn't even deserve the comparison.

The major problem with "For Love or Money" is its leads, since Fox is no Cary Grant and Anwar no Audrey Hepburn. Fox is sweetly engaging at times but he still seems too boyish to be convincing. And though he wheels and deals with flair, no romantic sparks fly between him and Anwar. Of course, as she proved with Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman," it takes two to tango -- and Anwar simply is too vapid an actress, a poor woman's Adrienne Shelly with a flat voice, wan looks and all too little presence.

Scriptwriter Kitty Chalmers really should have called it Replicant, since Cyborg borrows bits and pieces from so many genre films and since it has really no soul of its own.

The script is at once so undernourished and so obvious that you'll be convinced Cohen produced it via telegram: START MANIAC COP KILLS CIVILIANS STOP CLEANCUT GETS BLAME STOP WORLD-WEARY DETECTIVE FIGURES IT OUT STOP BODIES FALL STOP.

A moment past its concept, Fortress settles into a mix of sci-fi and prison cliches that result in predictable and often silly confrontations, including a not-so-great escape. Much of the blame lies with Lambert, as vapid here as he has been in the "Highlander" fiascoes.

There are so many problems with Graffiti Bridge. The major one is that this "contemporary musical drama" stars and was directed by Prince, who also wrote the script and the score. This may be four hats too many.