Rick Groen

Simply put, Touch dies, with nary a resurrective hand in sight. [14 Feb 1997, p.C5]

There are a few laughs at the start of This Is the End, and a couple more at the end of This is the End. As for the endless middle, it’s middling.

This hunk of celluloid flotsam will come back sooner rather than later, washed up on the remote shelves of your local video store. My advice: shred the message, recycle the bottle.

The whole d--- thing can be summed up in three little words: yo ho hum.

Apparently, somebody thought it was time for a remake. Clearly, somebody was dead wrong.

Spun is so hip it hurts.

The film preaches the gospel of unpredictable change, of ironic metamorphosis, of a psychological ebb and flow from love to lust, hope to despair, good to evil. But if the message is fluid, the medium is static at best and chaotic at worst - there's very little controlled motion in this picture. [19 June 1992]

As for the old and graceful Jackie, he's completely missing in action, his supple talents sacrificed on the high altar of movie technology -- that frenetic place where superheroes are a colossal bore and real ones are sadly impotent.

On the whole, the film is content to lumber awkwardly between the condemned man on death row and the intrepid reporter on his save-a-life beat -- there's about as much rhythm in the style as there is sense in the plot.

Dragonfly has more plot than a figure-skating competition, and just about as much credibility.

The Arthurian legend has received a wide variety of treatments over the years, but this safe, sanitized American version drains the juice smack out of a notorious romantic triangle. [07 Jul 1995]

W.E. is a heavily made-up face masquerading as a movie and demanding to be admired – demands that might just leave you with an acute pain in the other end.

The cast is equally strong (especially McDonnell), but the vast subject and the shifting settings force Kasdan all over the map. [10 Jan 1992]

The countdown begins with the first negative integer — an amped-up score that overpowers the proceedings like a bad band at a high-school dance.

Another Nicholas Sparks novel, another cinematic brush with insulin shock.

As for Keitel, he pops up in a brief cameo as a housing contractor, with a dump-truck full of sand, the one that De Niro is standing right behind. The pair engage in a heated argument, as they once did so memorably those many years ago, and then the truck dumps that load exactly where you know it must. An esteemed actor gets buried but, what-the-fock, the franchise laughs on.

A cinematic homage as flawed as its subject. Flawed, yet with a peculiar fascination of its own -- what we have is a genuine artist paying sincere tribute to an unapologetic mediocrity, and stooping awkwardly to the task.

That's the allure of the genre. Succeed, and you're artful, thoughtful, and popular all at the same time. But fail, and you're the King of New York. As failures go, this is typical enough, smugly dividing the world into good gangsters and bad ones. [9 Nov 1990]

The ads give this a Lamborghini label, but under the hood, it's just a clunker that putzes along like a suburban sedan. [26 Aug 1989]

Bad Teacher should be a hoot. But it isn't. Love the theory here, hate the practice.

A few early laughs scattered around a plot as thin as it is repetitious. There's talent in this picture, both before and behind the camera, but virtually none of it gets on the screen.

Made of Honor should come with a bar code and a Wal-Mart display - this isn't a movie, it's a commodity. The generic brand is the romantic comedy, and the manufacturer's material of choice is recycled plastic, smoothly glued together to assure the consumer that the purchase is risk-free and thoroughly predictable.

Runaway is a Dinky Toy of a film: tiny, shiny, and about half as well-made. [15 Dec 1984]

The weak plot means that the picture is governed totally by its gadgetry, the equivalent of those James Bond sequels that limp awkwardly from one showoff sequence to the next. [10 May 1991]

Characters already too wicked to be credible start doing stuff simply too stupid to be believed, with no help from a cast way too overmatched to be useful.

Obviously a great respecter of rules, John Badham directs with a metronome, here some glossy action, there some witless banter, dispensing the two like different colored Smarties popped from the box. The bird in Bird On A Wire is a turkey. [19 May 1990]

It transforms that bottom line into a saccharine border, framing the picture with enough faux inspiration to keep Hallmark in cards for a month of Mother's Days. [03 Jun 1994]

With the performers given zilch to perform, the result is a picture that's all chassis and no engine, or, in the parlance of the genre, a bunch of pointy hats in search of a transporting broomstick.

Empire is just too intent on living up to its imperial name -- colonizing other defenceless movies, plundering their rich natural resources, and leaving us all to feel rather cruelly violated. A postscript: Somebody here -- I'm not saying who -- dies. And still keeps on talking.

In lieu of a movie, we get a series of car chases rudely interrupted by the occasional smattering of dialogue.

Smith and Lawrence enjoyed some amusing chemistry in the '95 original, but their molecules sure aren't jibing here. It's a full hour into this behemoth before there's anything resembling a belly laugh.

A crashing bore.

Candy and Moranis are real talents, but they're completely wasted, like everyone else here, sacrificed to the grade-school inanities of that self-indulgent script. [26 Jun 1987, p.D6]

While computer games can boast an abundance of nifty graphics and odious villains and plucky protagonists on long journeys, they're invariably a tad wanting in the cinematic essentials -- you know, stuff like plot and characterization and theme.

Some films, like some people, wear their artsy pretensions on their sleeve, and there really isn't much going on beneath – it's just a posturing armband wrapped around a plain arm. Welcome, then, to the emptiness of Mister Lonely, a movie that goes to extraordinary lengths to say ordinary things.

It wants to make an important political statement, which might have been dandy if it had anything remotely cogent to say.

On his own, Dangerfield is still a buoyant presence. But the cliche tells us that movie-making is a collaborative exercise, and the price for Easy Money must be paid. Ultimately, Captain Rodney goes down with his film and sinks without a trace. [20 Aug 1983]

A lightweight flick about a heavy-duty subject, A Dark Truth plays like a TV movie back in the days when TV wasn't worth watching.

Seidelman isn't that exclusive - any cliche will do, the cruder the better. [8 Dec 1989]

Valuable life lessons always come at a steep price, and this one is no exception. Sorry, but you'll have to shell out for The Divide and then suffer through its nearly two hours of bloody inanities. Weigh the balance, make your choice.

[Law] talks straight to the camera like the young Michael Caine, but this time our hunk has got zilch to say. That's because a bastard's candour is off-limits in today's politically correct market — it just wouldn't be polite.

Pretty much what you'd expect -- just another haunted house that happens to float.

By then, the lofty ambitions can't disguise the sad reality - it's long, it's cluttered, and it's trite.

What we have here is a romp, a funny romp at times, with a clear satiric intent and the expected quota of outrageous style - likable enough, yes, but a rather flimsy thing, a zany fest with its mind on cruise control. [17 June 1994]

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make heads or tails of this Byzantine thing. [22 May 1996]

Over on the aliens side, it's hard to make out faces, but there's no doubt about their place of origin: These slimy, growling, bug-eyed and distinctly non-scary things are straight from central casting.

Clint has a script. Actually, Clint has too much script, one of those schematic by-the-number jobs that telegraphs its every pitch.

The net result is a few shaky laughs and one unwavering sensation -- that The Terminal is interminable.

Even the neatness here is borrowed. A Kiss Before Dying isn't a remake; it's a rehash. [27 Apr 1991]

What Happens in Vegas should damn well have stayed in Vegas.

School for Scoundrels suffers from an old-fashioned identity crisis. The poor thing is awfully confused, and so are we. Is it a black comedy that isn't dark enough? Or a dumb comedy that isn't stupid enough, or a gross-out comedy that isn't yucky enough? Or is it really just a romance comedy that isn't sweet enough? Don't have a clue, but this much is certain: It's definitely a failed comedy that isn't funny enough.

Nominally set in some rural American backwater, The Neon Bible is a hellishly muddled reprint of Davies' personal canon - muddled enough to turn all his past virtues into present transgressions. [19 Apr 1996]

Do we at least perk up during the ol' gunfight at the O.K. Corral, or the vacant lot at Fremont Street, or wherever the hell it did take place? Sorry. Kasdan never was an action director, and he clearly hasn't gone to school for this flick. Bang, bang, I'm dead, you're not, next scene - I've seen livelier shoot-outs at a soccer match. [24 Jun 1994, p.D1]

D.C. Cab is a high-energy comedy in desperate search for the big laugh. So desperate that the film has the manic pace of a sitcom gone bonkers. The score pounds, the cars careen, but the laugh is never found. And a few chuckles are a minor reward for a major assault. [19 Dec 1983]

Watching Attack of the Clones is like getting rapped on the head with a rubber mallet -- no lasting damage (I pray and hope), but bad enough to bring on an acute bout of dizziness and disorientation. Definitely do not operate heavy machinery after viewing -- this behemoth is brutal.

In what is surely a tribute to the dazzling mediocrity of director Luis Llosa, the real jungle looks as bland as the fake jungle.

Oh, it's perfect all right. In fact, The Perfect Score is a flawless example of the classic January movie release -- the kind of studio picture that even the studio loathes, and so consigns to the dumping ground of the year's frosty first month.

With barely a laugh to be found, Confetti takes the "mock" right out of the mockumentary, and you can guess what's left. Yep, a Umentary, a brand new genre best defined by what it's not -- not real like a doc, not funny like a mock, not this thing or that thing or much of anything.

The film sputters and stalls and winds up behaving like the worst sort of oldster – passing gas and pretending to be deep.

Strange Days, then, isn't nearly strange enough. Once the premise has lost its promise, and Fiennes's brave attempts at characterization are sacrificed to pseudo-dazzle, everything appears awfully humdrum and, yes, distinctly dated. So dated that in the crowded and pat climax, as the ball drops on the year 2000, all that's missing is Dick Clark himself - damn, it's out with the old and in with the older. [13 Oct 1995]

Can't find it in your vast collection of Fleming first editions? Not to worry. Seems the producers - a.k.a. the Cubby Broccoli Cottage Industry - have run plumb out of titles. And everything else too. [14 July 1989]

What My Blue Heaven has going for it: one funny premise and two earthly delights, in the comic persons of Steve Martin and Rick Moranis. What My Blue Heaven does not have going for it: anything remotely resembling a cohesive script. [22 Aug 1990, p.C4]

Call me Grumpy, but this seems less an adaptation than a random assault.

As you watch -- no, endure -- this flattened-out spectacle, there's really nothing worth pondering save for a single thought: What a difference a director makes.

With some movies, though, it's just the opposite. Like this one. It's a whole lot easier to forget than to forgive.

You might believe that a movie comedy requires no visual rhythm, and that entire scenes -- especially those big set-pieces -- benefit greatly from a shooting style devoid of imagination and unremittingly flat. If so, A Guy Thing is surely your thing. Enjoy.

In its nearly two-hour running time, in its always lugubrious pace, in its almost complete absence of laughs, The Prince & Me is a comedy that plays like a tragedy. No stricken bodies, though, unless you count the ones in the audience slumped back in their seats -- perchance they slept.

To divulge the plot would spoil the experience -- you'll be shocked to discover, and maybe even surprised to learn, just how lame the damn thing really is.

Falls somewhere on that aesthetic scale between mediocre and flat-out bad.

This is just another generic war movie of the kind that revels in combat's greater glories. You know the type - the camaraderie that never quite rings true, the plot that never once makes sense. In short, the whole bombs-bursting- in-air, truth-through-the-night jive. [21 Oct 1988]

After a great start, Wolfgang Petersen's intelligent medical thriller is infected by some nasty germs, resulting in the all-too-common Actionitis. [10 Mar 1995]

Chetwynd fumbles the job badly. [2 May 1987]

Scrape off its grimy exterior, and it too is a fairy tale, but one with ambitions of realism, one that tries to co-exist in our world, one that pretends to be something it isn't. Frankie & Johnny ends up lost in limboland, stumbling onto a whole new genre - call it kitchen-sink unrealism. [11 Oct 1991]

Barely a chuckle in sight.

There, in its midst, stands a freeze-dried Arthur -- stripped of his legend, shivering in the cold and wondering, like the rest of us, where in hell the magic went.

It's Footloose Loose In The Third Reich and, even with your expectations kept knee-high to a kindergarten, you might have at least hoped for some finger-poppin' music and a few great dance scenes. Sorry. Here, too, things come up short. [05 Mar 1993]

Not surprisingly, the menage breaks down in the first few frames, depriving us on two counts - we get neither the smart-aleck naivete of yesterday nor the self-conscious slickness of today. [6 July 1990]

From its eccentric score (a mix of spaghetti western and funky blues) to its bizarre casting (ex-wrestlemanaic Roddy Piper in the lead role), the flick leaves us off-balance and guessing. By the time we figure out there's not much to guess at, the credits roll by and the jig is up. [5 Nov 1988]

In the final frames, and the final analysis, Alien gets the worst of both worlds - it's boring and it's messy. The title may be "cubed," but the movie looks awfully square. [22 May 1992]

Narratively, the film strikes all the sentimental chords that audiences typically find so reassuring, but the music grates here, sounding mechanical and flat, lacking the single ingredient indispensable to any uplifting fable - a charming belief in its own sweet nature. [19 Apr 1996, p. C1]

With Things Are Tough All Over their once well-oiled comedy has rusted firmly into place. Now, the erstwhile darlings of the counter-culture seem about as raucously rebellious as a senescent Lucy Ricardo. [2 Aug 1982]

The problem here isn't how the figures look; rather, it's what they do and say -- the story is lame and the dialogue no better.

Unwilling to offend, the scribes have committed the greatest offence of all - they've neglected to tell a story, airbrushing out anything remotely dramatic.

Outrageous Fortune is a genuine waste of talent (Midler, Long and Coyote all have it) and time (the standard 90 minutes' worth). [30 Jan 1987]

Non-existent direction, inane plot, inflated acting. [30 Sep 1987]

Trying to be off-the-wall, Amos & Andrew never gets off the ground. It ends up as politically correct as its title, and that ain't funny. [05 Mar 1993]

A three-hour oration, rambling and familiar and repetitive, during which director Oliver Stone uses the assassination of John Kennedy as an elaborate pretext for delivering a dull sermon. [20 Dec 1991]

View from the Top never gets off the bottom -- comedies don't come much flatter.

Occasionally, Murphy cuts loose with an ad-libbed riff that's almost funny, but then it's back to the slim-fast plot and the stick-on crudities. [03 Jul 1992]

The visual big top is the scourging and the crucifixion -- again and again, Gibson returns to the blood-letting. Again and again, we're exposed to the clinical repetition of a single act, until an alleged act of passion comes to seem boring and passionless. Is that not a definition of pornography?

Don't look for logic here. But if gore is your game, a motherlode awaits.

WITH the russet beauty of New Mexico as the setting, White Sands sports a nice look. With the angular Willem Dafoe in the lead role, White Sands boasts a solid performance. And with director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out) behind the camera, White Sands maintains a brisk pace. Now if it only had a script that made a lick of sense, White Sands might have been a good movie. It doesn't; it isn't. [24 Apr 1992]

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

Quite an artful dissembler. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this clunker has somehow managed to pose as an actual feature movie, the kind that charges full admission and gets hyped on TV and purports to amuse small children and ostensible adults.

Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.

As always in Emmerich's rollicking Armageddons, the cannon speaks with an expensive bang, while the fodder gets afforded nary a whimper. Of course, that's just part of disaster's simple recipe: Blow us up, then blow us off.

The message the movie preaches? The ills of a consumer society, I guess - all those needful things needlessly bought. And the best way to put that preaching into practice? Shut your wallet and pass on this little treat. [27 Aug 1993]

HAT in the name of artsy pretension do we have here? That Arizona Dream is a nightmare is beyond dispute - it's the sort of murky, symbol-laden trap that European directors often fall into when they cross the pond to take on the entire social stratum of the United States. The culprit in question is Emir Kusturica - Yugoslavian born, Czech trained, and now American buffaloed. This thing makes The Red Desert look coherent. [19 Nov 1994]

Sappy and predictable.

This picture breaks through the limits and goes way beyond the pale -- it seems to enjoy irking us for the sheer hell of it.

His take on metaphor is painfully literal, his approach to style is hilariously Hollywood. In lieu of black-and-white realism, we're given visual shtick. [02 May 1995]

There are easily 54 reasons to dis 54, but let's start and finish with the obvious: The script plays like a proud offering from the lead hand at the Cliché Factory.

Where the hell is the movie?

The madness of Madhouse simply eludes me. [16 Feb 1990]

C'mon, in matters of haunted-house inhabitation, settling into an ex-mortuary is like renting above a dentist's office -- ashen faces and ghastly screams come with the territory.

Just when you think it's going to rollick, this lazy movie rolls over and plays dead When Honeymoon's ends, it's not a moment too soon. [28 Aug 1992]

All that's missing are the laughs. In their place, we get wall-to-wall predictability. [13 Aug 1983]

THE PRESIDIO is a formula flick that can't even manage its own simple arithmetic. This is meant to be an action-thriller with comic overtones, the kind where a pair of mismatched cops corral the heavy-duty nasties while treating us to a steady stream of lightweight banter. Because it's a TV premise, brought to half-life by a forgettable script and bland direction, the poor thing seems mighty uncomfortable on the big screen, washed out and embarrassed, eager to abandon the pretense and rush to its rightful home in the movie-of-the-week margins. [10 June 1988]

Imagine, if you dare, the outtakes from all those merely bad romantic comedies. Now further imagine that these discarded bits, the stuff that failed to make even the failures, found their way out of the waste bin and into a splicing machine and onto a projector. Do that and you're inching toward a full appreciation of this particular barrel, and the bottom it so brazenly scrapes.

Dumb and Dumber 'n the hood.

Think of a really bad, uncensored Saturday Night Live comedy sketch. Then make it worse – make it longer.

Fear strikes out in slasher flick This movie is laced with enough gratuitous bloodshed and reactionary zeal to warm the heart of a Montana militiaman. [12 Apr 1996]

Label this one a howler, and add a postscipt to the sequel: shoo Fly II, go forth and don't multiply. [11 Feb 1989]

Film encyclopedias may beg to differ, the Cahiers du Cinéma might correct me, but, as far as your humble correspondent knows, Wanderlust is the first mainstream movie ever to star a Floppy Prosthetic Penis.

The Villain is itself an extended cartoon, a cartoon with live actors as its director Hal Needham redundantly describes it. The result: while we still guffaw once or twice, our suffering increases proportionately as we are made to sit through a full 80 minutes of numbing mindlessness. [25 July 1979]

The film lacks the moronic consistency that graces the Sandlerian oeuvre at its most pristine.

Sure ain't a movie. Nope, it's a product, pure and very simple and carefully tested to sell to the widest possible market.

Steve Miner is no Carpenter. A directing veteran of the Friday the 13th saga (parts II and III, in case you care), he's a plodder who favours long, dull buildups to short, dull climaxes -- it's slaughter by the numbers.

Wisdom lies in taking a pass on Hall Pass, but bravery demands something else, something far more instructive: Watch it, every vacuous frame, if only to measure the precise aesthetic distance from blessing to curse.

No less laughable is the ending, where Ritchie neatly reflects today's prevailing attitude -- that audiences can't be trusted to handle a hint of ambiguity, but can live happily with flat-out stupidity.

The same covey of kids assemble at a summer camp to meet their predictable fate. Once again, their thespian talents defy assessment, since most hang around just long enough to take off the limited clothes of the American teen-ager and take on the limited role of the bloody victim - both acts performed just once, always in that order. [04 May 1981]

Apparently pitched somewhere between a farce and a fable, this flick is neither. Just foolish. And frustrating. And, mostly, damned annoying.

Growing-up films are bad enough without a shameless all-girl rip off of Stand By Me. [20 Oct 1995]

To be fair, the movie is nothing if not consistent -- the idea is every bit as dumb as the execution.

The flames sure look real, but everything else in Backdraft, director Ron Howard's inflatable ode to firefighters, seems about as genuine as a plastic log in an electric hearth. Howard's particular type of schmaltz works well enough in small dabs on comic canvases (Splash, Cocoon, even Parenthood), but pumped up to heroic proportions, the sentimentality is just plain silly - in this case, cheap melodrama on a two-hour jag.

Remember that the director, the renowned Mike Mitchell, is the genius who helmed "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," and be sufficiently generous to accept that such a high level of excellence is hard to sustain.

It's obvious now that the cinematic junk routinely released every Friday can be safely categorized as a mere failure. But this alleged comedy is a whole other species entirely. This is a bona fide, absolute, unmitigated fiasco.

Being risibly bad, The Happening is at least worth a laugh. Exactly one laugh, by my reckoning, and completely unintended but no less full-throated for that.

God forgive me, but I worship the Bad Dialogue Fairy -- he gets me through these endless nights.

Damned if those dual spoilsports, the gladiatorial director Ridley Scott reteamed with his portly star Russell Crowe, haven't drained every drop of merriment right out of the myth.

Even at the abbreviated length of 70 minutes (less feature than featurette), material so maniacal wears very thin very fast. [5 Feb 1993]

I think that the perfect name for the chick in a chick flick is Rebecca Bloomwood. I know that if Charles Dickens had possessed the good sense to write chick flicks, he could not have done better than Rebecca Bloomwood.

Using a kidnapping plot to call up some old-fashioned suspense, it doesn't even get a dial tone.

Writer/director Gus Van Sant, who's built his reputation on the romantic decadence of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," completely misses the poetry and the irony of the book. [20 May 1994]

The movie pretty much blows.

Ready To Wear is certainly a disappointment, if not an outright flop. [27 Dec 1994]

Blind Date is a screwball comedy bereft of both a brain and a heart. Instead, it's all muscle and reflex, the conditioned kind good only for simple movements made in slapstick fashion, over and over and over and out. [27 Mar 1987]

Above The Law is beneath contempt, a movie whose esthetic politics stand somewhere to the right of tyrannosaurus rex. You know the type. Take your standard-issue Vietnam vet, martial-arts-mastering, renegade cop and turn him loose on the mean streets of any photogenic city (Chicago and its El, in this neon-and-sleaze case). [26 Apr 1988]

Meant to be a nodding aside to the film buff, with plenty of in-jokes for the cognoscenti, Crimewave ends up as a random list in dire need of a good file-clerk. [3 July 1987]

Frankly, about 20 minutes into this dud, I was rooting for the alien beasties -- their diagnosis seemed dead-on.

2 Days in New York plays like 2 years in Attica. You don't watch this movie so much as serve it out, a light comedy doled out as a heavy sentence.

THERE'S NO excuse for Her Alibi. A hyphenated hybrid like this - romance- comedy-thriller - demands a lot of stirring; if nothing else (and there rarely is much else), it must at least be smooth, colorful and easy on the palate. Instead, the stuff here goes down like lumpy porridge on a grey morning.[3 Feb 1989]

Blowing up bad guys, swearing, and lots of cliches makes the The Last Boy Scout a must to miss. [16 Dec 1991]

Because the society in Menace II Society is boxed in sociologically, the picture (for all its strengths) is boxed in esthetically. Already, this genre is beginning to seem as much a victim as the victims it portrays.

If plots were people, this obese thing would be cuing up for liposuction. Mr. Brooks may well boast the greediest yarn in the annals of filmdom. One serial killer just doesn't cut it – no fewer than four, actual and potential, pack these frames.

The refined taste insists on risibly bad, on hysterically bad, on poke-your-seatmate-in-the-ribs bad, and this falls well short of that hallowed mark -- it's just routinely bad.

Is this movie so god-awful bad that it's hilariously good? Can't be bothered deciding. Figure that's an answer in itself.

FALLING Down is a nasty bit of business, a two-faced manipulator that condones what it pretends to condemn. Cluttered and often downright silly, it's not much of a movie, but it is a fascinating sign of the times - a litmus test for every prejudice and fear harboured by the white middle class in ailing, urban America. [26 Feb 1993, p.C6]

It's a dumb-ass comedy done strictly for a seriously large paycheque.

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

Barely dusted off, the humourless stuff is served up straight - damned if it isn't a Hillbillies homage. [19 Oct 1993]

Ho, ho, horrible.

Can't have an American Thanksgiving without a turkey.

In the case of When in Rome, oh to do what the Romans used to do: Toss the bloody thing to the lions.

One Star (and only for quoting Knee-Chee).

The plot-turns are mounting by the minute, but they're not making a lick of sense. In fact, they're smacking of desperation, the sort of desperation that incites a writer to pull "taut" so tightly that all logic snaps, the sort that drives the movie on and on and on in search of a convincing third act and a resolving climax. [10 Feb 1992]

Neither boring enough to qualify as pornography nor vital enough to generate a controversy.

And De Bont's effects are wildly over the top, devoid of the stylish cuts and intriguing angles that enriched the original. In fact, there's so little panache in his destructive action that it begins to seem like a weird act of self-destruction.

Yes, Virginia, there is a poop fairy, which is why studio heads persist in tucking the likes of RV under their pillows, confident they'll awaken Monday morning to find all that brown turned straight to green.

Plot ain't where it's at here. An Innocent Man is guilty as charged and innocent as hell. [06 Oct 1989]

Jefferson in Paris isn't merely wooden; it's concrete. Nor is it simply bad; the thing is astonishingly bad. Sure looks pretty though. [08 Apr 1995]

The Love Guru is a comedy like the Leafs are a hockey team.

When animal passion turns into animal stupidity. [1 May 1990]

Here's the title: Couples Retreat. And here's the review: Couples, Retreat. Yep, just find the verb, treat it as a command, and vamoose, unless you harbour an abiding curiosity about how eternally long 100 minutes can feel.

We know to a certainty what will happen. More to the point, the writers know that we know. But here’s the intriguing bit: They don’t care. Rather, their job as diligent Tinseltown hacks is simply to devise ways of filling up the remaining 90 minutes.

Surviving Picasso is flat-out dull, hanging like a K Mart print in a suburban mall - a testament to Merchant-Ivory's blew-it period. [20 Sep 1996]

Soderbergh has bathed the Depression in lovely, golden-brown hues - so lovely, so golden, that the flick seems to be unfolding from inside the delicious core of a burnished bran muffin. [20 August 1993]

Then I remember another law that says fat dumb guys are always likable, so I'm really trying my best, and I pretend to laugh once or twice, but it's hard. [3 Apr 1995]

Adam is back to lining his pockets again.

A horror-less horror flick where the monstrous Thing doesn't even put in an appearance until well past the two-thirds mark. Sorry, ugly guy, but that goes way beyond fashionably late. [18 Jan 1989]

Only read the bottom line of the accountants' review, after your generic masterpiece has gone the distance from theatrical release to video stores to the nethermost regions of the cable dial. If the accountants' judgment proves kind, head to the bank and feel free to enjoy precisely what you've denied so many others – a really good laugh.

After all the cyberspace chat is over, after all the cyberpunk sets are unveiled, what we are left with is a tired theme afforded a banal treatment. [26 May 1995]

The same studio has aimed a remake at the same family market. Translation: The once-modest piece has been redesigned as a vehicle (a lumbering SUV) for Steve Martin, stripped of any vestigial charm, and then thrown into neutral, where its manic engine does nothing but roar loudly and pointlessly for the duration.

But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star. It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.

You will die at the hands of Zed's unborn son. Shucks, those wicked witches sure had a way of taking the fun out of life. Luckily for scheming kings, sadly for blameless movie-goers, such party-pooping prophecies are now mainly confined to formulaic flicks like The Beastmaster. [23 Aug 1982]

Consequently, as star vehicles go, Ford Fairlane runs straight over the very guy it's meant to transport. Some will see that as the movie's greatest fault, others as its only virtue. Take your pick, and come out swinging. [13 Jul 1990, p.C1]

An actual film of unrelenting silliness. Far from being a "miracle of rare device" (yes, the movie even quotes Coleridge), this is a disaster of common occurrence - a poorly directed, ineptly edited, badly photographed bundle of celluloid. [14 Aug 1980]

It's not a bomb at all. A dud is more like it - Last Action Hero isn't interesting enough to be explosively bad. For all the inflated pyrotechnics on the screen, the picture seems consistently grey and almost pitiably small. [18 Jun 1993, p.D1]

There's obviously a huge appetite for humour this broad, and I wish I shared it. Instead, like a picky vegetarian at a Texas barbecue, I felt out of place, hungry, and a little sad. Not altogether different, perhaps, from a certain British actor on a seedy Sunset Strip. [14 July 1995]

[Pitof's] managed to create an entire digitalized city that has all the allure of an underground parking garage. And his action, it's cluttered; his editing, it's confused. The result: blandness butchered, hamburger chopped, kitty littered.

Judging by Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham is not a great, not a good, not even a barely competent director. He has said that "a filmmaker must be part magician, part gypsy and part huckster." On the basis of this effort, Cunningham has conveniently overlooked the first two components and settled for a complete mastery of the third. [14 May 1980]

The movie degenerates from the merely farcical to the appallingly tasteless...As the end draws mercifully near, one character proclaims: "This ship needs blood to survive." A film needs more than that. [22 May 1980]

Obviously, commercial film has a proud history of appealing to our less noble instincts. But why does this particular thing fail so provocatively, going beyond mere stupidity into downright offensive? #2. Not just because it is charmless, humorless, cynical and mean- minded. Lots of movies are that. Yet Garbage Pail crosses the fine line where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. In fact, it invents a brand new genre: kiddie nihilism, a callow theatre of disgust. Antonin Artaud, meet Mr. Dressup. [26 Aug 1987]

It's just a shrunken case of large-screen aspirations wedded to a small-screen mentality. [22 May 1992]

The plot makes the casting look inspired. More than inane, it's offensive. [14 Dec 1982]

The incomprehensible leads to the inexplicable which ends in the indecipherable.

A 0-star Comedy that is nonetheless guaranteed to rake in multimillions.

A sustained if wildly uncoordinated assault on our senses, complementing those feverish jump cuts with a cliché of equally stunning proportions

Not just bad, but weirdly, fascinatingly bad.

Watching inept American actors and wishing they were badly dubbed into Japanese isn't any fun at all.

There's nothing even mildly intriguing, or remotely galvanizing, about Showgirls.

Calls itself a movie. It has words and pictures like a movie, and will appear in theatres like a movie, and will damn sure charge admission like a movie. But, truth be told, that's pretty much where the resemblance stops.

Bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.