Rita Kempley

Disney just doesn't know when to give up on a dead project, which is the only thing that accounts for the studio's scene-for-scene remake of Little Indian, Big City, a French farce the corporation dubbed and released exactly one year ago. (It sank faster than a canoe full of Fantasia hippos.)

Brad Silberling, a TV director (Brooklyn Bridge, NYPD Blue) making his feature debut, obviously is out of his element in this grandiose extravaganza of sets and effects. Still, that doesn't explain the inert performances of Moriarty and her henchman, Eric Idle, and sundry other supporting characters. Much of the blame belongs to Sherri Stoner, Deanna Oliver and the many ghost writers who created this ghoulish hash of teen romance, father-and-child reunion and monster mash.

A purgatory of low-budget interplanetary adventure.

Like most plays transferred to screen, Oleanna still bears traces of grease paint. Actually, all the cold cream in the world wouldn't make this verbose material in the least cinematic -- not that Mamet has put much effort into adapting the original anyway. Most of the action takes place in the professor's office. Luckily, it has a window through which we, like bored grade schoolers, can escape from time to time.

Although III claims seven times as much action as ever before, the movie is still so boring that even the love interest (Robyn Lively) leaves early. She's no Kung Fool.

Baby Boom is an '80s fable based on a beer ad philosophy.

Russell is an inoffensive Mel Gibson clone here. But Stallone is an unlovable lummox, preposterous because he takes himself so seriously. Even when he attempts to laugh at himself, his quips fall like clods on coffins. His bravery is braggadocio. Let's hope this will be the last of Tango.

Writer Alan Sharp gets so caught up in the legend and the lush language that he doesn't seem to know he's written "Death Wish" in kilts.

Troop Beverly Hills is a dog of a movie, one of those nasty little yappy dogs with fancy hairdos, pedicures and pedigrees.

Like the mythological creatures it celebrates, the movie appears bound for extinction.

A trite vehicle that lumbers along like its namesake. Clankety-clank. [16 Mar 1984, p.19]

Ninety minutes of Shock Treatment feels like a week in "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," a Quaalude interlude, a quart of Sanka laced with Valium. No jolt...Despite flashy lights, splashy sets and plump girls in tight white corsets, "S.T.'s" a bore -- a blatant try for teeny-punk bucks. It's a lesson for filmmakers: You can't force a cult film, they just happen. [28 May 1982, p.13]

The result is a script so needlessly complicated that it defies comprehension.

Isabelle Huppert and generic Steve Guttenberg prove incompatible costars in The Bedroom Window, a cockamamie mystery that finds these bi-continentals drawn together like, say, refrigerator magnets to styrofoam coolers. Yes, it's magic.

Mr. Whipple squeezing his Charmin is scarier than this phony baloney computer effects-driven anaconda.

The script boasts more writers than the computerized menagerie's got megabytes, but they haven't come up with much variety or humor in what is essentially a string of catastrophes.

Anarchistic, self-indulgent and monumentally self-obsessed.

Less Than Zero, an aptly titled tale of snooty California drug snorters, is dumber and duller than primordial ooze. It's one of those silly speed-bumps-in-the-fast-lane laments, though it does have a significant message: Get off the freeway or take the last exit ramp to the Betty Ford Clinic in the sky.

There's a sense of mystery in this purply palette and one of majesty in the landscapes, but the drama of the drawings is never really echoed by the skimpy and predictable story.

Depressing as it is dull as it is dumb.

Hardly out of the driveway before director Penny Marshall loses control.

About as persuasively ethnic as an episode of "Friends."

It's Mondo Machismo, Hollywood on safari, a self-aggrandizing epic reeking of man scent.

Though it's allegedly a comedy, there is nothing funny about this tasteless, shallow and mean-spirited slam.

The trail is all too familiar and pretty soon we recollect why westerns lost their appeal. [28 June 1985, p.27]

If laughter is the best medicine, Patch Adams is but a sugary, fitfully amusing placebo.

Clan's greatest fault, however, is simply that it is an epic bore. [28 Feb 1986, p.11]

Sans emotional depth or narrative drive, Lee's latest flick is little more than a profane litany punctuated by Oscar-caliber orgasms.

Many of the visual effects are stunning, but others are downright cheesy -- especially an attempt to fuse the Rock's head onto a scorpion's body.

The result is cutesy but harsh, a hybrid of saucer-eyed anime and square-jawed angularity that brings to mind an edgier "Pokemon."

It just isn't a Meg Ryan movie unless she's got male.

So solemnly paced and deliberately performed that it seems to solidify before your very eyes.

VIOLENT CRIME against women is not entertainment. "Star 80" was not entertainment. "Body Double" was not entertainment." And Jagged Edge is not entertainment. It is commercially packaged abuse. And we are supposed to call this anger art.

SWEET DREAMS is like "Coal Miner's Daughter," but without the grit. It's a slow, insensate musical biography, with the unfortunate Jessica Lange miscast as country singer Patsy Cline. The physical and emotional opposite of the coarse Cline, Lange looks like a refugee from a dude ranch in her western gear, her delicate features overwhelmed by a raggedy black wig and a rhinestone cowgirl's hat. She croons into the smokey, liquor-soaked night of a honky- tonk saloon, "I Fall to Piecessss . . . ." [11 Oct 1985, p.29]

The screenplay, by the team of Joe Batteer and John Rice and doctored by Dan Gilroy, is standard issue, as insufferable in its situations as it is in its characterizations. Berenger, who tries to growl some life into his role, sounds as if he's been gargling cat litter, while McNamara shows off the work of his orthodontist a la Tom Cruise. For Eleniak, there's always Hooters.

A bland, utterly silly, curiously provincial courtroom drama.

The ultimate in deja viewing:an overfamiliar and exasperating game of cat-and-mousie.

Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley and Irish director Pat O'Connor are absolutely out of their league, a couple of artists slumming, hoping to bring sensitivity to a genre that could well use it. But all they've done is make you appreciate the true value of the car chase.

British writer-director Bruce Robinson, who won kudos for his screenplay "The Killing Fields" and his novel adaptation "Withnail & I" doesn't have a clue when it comes to this populist genre. What he has are cliches.

Hinton was still a Tulsa teen when she wrote the best seller (4 million copies in seven languages) in the mid-1960s. Her brain wasn't mucked up with adult equivocation, so she didn't get into those confusing gray zones. Great for her, but not for Coppola, who turns this long-awaited story into baffling mush.

A slight, disingenuous script that robs the characters of their histories.

My Blue Heaven puts you in a stupor comparable to the one that comes on after Thanksgiving turkey. Written by Nora Ephron, it makes you long for the awful "Heartburn."

If it's subtle, insightful satire you're after, don't look to this coarse farce. It's simply more vulgar, insidiously homophobic Victor/Victoriana from the sexually confused writer-director.

Always is an unfulfilled promise, a plummeting dove.

Micki & Maude is a pain, laborious and predictable despite the tantalizing nature of the material. [21 Dec 1984, p.29]

I'm pretty sure that the Marquis de Sade would like it. But it's not a movie for everybody. Only those who laugh till they cry when they see a couple of heart attacks. [9 March 1984, p.23]

Two Moon Junction is a soft-porn boudoir thriller with the look of a perfume ad and a spaghetti-strap-thin wisp of a plot...As in the antiseptic "9 1/2 Weeks," there's smut, but no sweat. You get the feeling King would make love wearing not only his socks but a pair of surgical gloves.

Sphere, an unfathomable chowder of recycled science fiction and undersea thrillers, briefly bubbles with promise only to plummet into the murky depths. Weighed down by inconsistencies and pretensions, the tale founders like a stinky beluga.

Body Double twists and turns miserably between the comic and the macabre; it's definitely not dressed to kill.

The story isn’t bright enough or grand enough to contain all of Roberts’s star power.

Recalls those corny Warner Bros. movies about Dead End Kids.

THERE'S Big Trouble in Little China all right, as Kurt Russell wrestles his way through this kung-fu comedy adventure. It might have been a Raiders of the Lost Wok, but instead it's a bad marriage of martial arts and action spoofery, bungled by director John Carpenter working from the world's worst screenplay. [04 July 1986, p.N29]

A punky, futuristic effort by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, it is a tasteless variation on "Sweeney Todd" set geographically near the border of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

Obstreperous, male-bashing pain in the patoot.

A piddling non-adventure with Louis Gossett Jr. as a namby-pamby sidekick. It's Gung-Ho and Gunga Din, in yet another variation on the "Raiders" theme.

Little kids at play have come up with craftier plots, better characterization and conceivably more spectacular effects -- provided their mothers let them play with matches.

Pytka's marginally successful at setting this gambler's fantasy against the Damon Runyonesque aspects of the horsy life.

Mark Childress, who wrote the screenplay based upon his book of the same name, would have been better off leaving this Southern Gothic between two covers.

Nobody hits the jackpot here, certainly not filmmakers Michael and Mark Polish, whose audacious, empathic first film, "Twin Falls Idaho," showed such promise.

Clearly Oz sees Housesitter as a screwball caprice, but the Muppeteer-turned-director delivers a stale couple's counseling movie. The message -- if your partner is a deluded liar, then you might as well be too -- must have been thought up by Pinocchio.

Isn't really a movie, it's only impersonating one.

If we lived in a just universe, Captain Ron, a farce filmed in and around the Devil's Triangle, would simply have vanished into another dimension. But we don't and it didn't.

The only thing that's truly scary about the movie is the escalating vulgarity of the latest in a string of skanky comedies by filmmakers determined to out-gross the other.

The Bodyguard is a classic of show-business hubris, a wondrously trashy belly-flop, proving that no amount of glittering sets and star power can save a story that should have been buried with McQueen.

It's saying something when Tom Arnold's performance is among the movie's highlights.

A pooped, poorly executed buddy-cop comedy with more cliches than expletives.

The picture is not a social satire. It’s a mess.

A convoluted psychosexual thriller that promises the moon and gives us Bruce's butt.

A misbegotten mishmash. [14 March 1986, p.27]

Phillip Noyce, the Australian who directed "Patriot Games" and "Dead Calm," knows from thrillers, but "Sliver" is more of a friller. It's not scary but the decorator was good. Stone, who spends a considerable amount of time biting her lip, chewing her finger, moaning, grunting, writhing and wiggling, also proves that she's a good actress when she is wearing her underpants. It's just that Baldwin can leave no side of Stone unturned and there's so little time to emote.

Unfortunately the cast members are made into symbols themselves, bereft of blood and emotion, under the direction of the great John Huston. It's like a death pageant, grueling and dismal and distant...It is a dreary process at best. And this film is a tedious and time-consuming study of decay and lost values, lost souls and lost empires. [13 July 1984, p.17]

A glittery but dunderheaded murder mystery.

Movies don't come much lamer than Fools Rush In.

Though the comedy falls short of a debacle -- which is what such egocentric projects tend to be -- it isn't as sharp, fast or funny as Rock's stand-up routines.

The sparks don't fly -- they fall down and they can't get up.

There's the scene in which Jacques, the French Canadian proprietor of the Power and Glory, tells Laura, "I am the Great Went," to which she responds, "I am the muffin." Jacques returns, "I'm as blank as a fart." Maybe all Jacques is saying is "I am full of gas." Certainly Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me seems to be.

Well-intentioned but ludicrous tale.

Ironically, the filmmakers don't seem to realize that their movie is even shallower and sillier than its targets.

A tarted-up but tedious reprise of the '70s TV series.

A didactic collegiate farce -- "Animal House" with pan-African politics, and an enormously embarrassing encore. Tell an inexperienced director he's a genius, and you create Dr. Frankenstein. School Daze, with its pompous patchwork plot, is an arrogant, humorless, sexist mess.

The nonsensical screenplay can barely stand-up to the hellzapoppin, Beelzebubbin effects mustered by first-time director Mark Dippe.

Strictly a vanity vehicle with a mess of star babies on board. That would be just fine if it didn't take us down the same old cul-de-sac. But it does, and with a vengeance.

For all their sass, brass and bewitchery, the starring troika can't breathe life into these characters, much less transform them from women scorned into hellbent furies.

A Kiss Before Dying is so wooden, it wouldn't hurt to spray for Dutch elm disease. Adapted from Ira Levin's intricate suspense thriller, it becomes another perfunctory sex-and-death parable in the hands of Fatal Attraction's screenwriter James Dearden, who has dismantled the original plot and turned it on end. Needless to say, it is far less suspenseful when you find out who did it in the first scene. [26 Apr 1991, p.B6]

Passionately anticipated and much ballyhooed, the film, alas, is little more than a foppish, fang de siecle costume drama. Its pulse barely registers.

A morbid and sticky adaptation of James Herbert's best-selling novel, this curious meditation on death, dogs and the afterlife hardly lives up to its billing as family fare.

If you only live twice, spend both lifetimes avoiding it.

Not only dense, dark and deeply introspective, it's also as remote as it's chilly.

A sorry comedy. [31 March 1985, p.21]

It's a clumsy, laughable alarm-ringer from Sidney Lumet, who looks at the power-lunchers and the new right, and shakes his head rather audibly. [31 Jan 1986, p.23]

When it comes to style and sophistication, Walt Disney's live-action "Mr. Magoo" ranks slightly above plastic doggie doo and slightly below rubber chicken. The cartoon Magoo, so memorably voiced by the late Jim Backus, would never have stooped so low for a laugh, yet the visually challenged old gentleman's near mishaps gave you something to smile about. [25 Dec 1997, p.C11]

Brainstorm is like being caught in a Novocaine hurricane -- if you're not a numbskull when you walk in, you will be by the time you walk out. Talk about your brain drain. [30 Sept 1983, p.19]

The Other Sister is sanctimonious, sanitized fare primarily preoccupied with patting its own back and plucking our heartstrings.

This preposterous stalker flick, in fact, has less to do with America's favorite pastime or Gil's psychosis than with Hollywood's own obsession with blood sport. And for all British director Tony Scott knows about baseball, the thing might as well have been set in a cabbage patch.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a pointless and untimely lampoon of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves from the increasingly creaky spoofmeister Mel Brooks. A predictable onslaught of bad taste and worse jokes, it mostly targets not the conventions of action-adventures but the sexual preferences of the merry men, who are variously referred to as pansies, fagalas and fruits. Brooks fills in the spaces with broadsides derogatory to women and the one interest group you can readily afford to offend on film -- blind folks.

Batteries is a strange kids' movie, a queer mix of violence and otherworldly benevolence. It might have been a good idea, a story of the vanishing urban neighborhood and gentrification by tycoon. But half-pint aliens to the rescue? It's time E.T. went home.

Essentially "Death Wish" in pantyhose. Like that earlier inflammatory fable, this blatant button-pusher plays upon our most primal emotions as well as the increasing disdain for the criminal justice system. It's a crude but effective promotion for frontier-style vigilantism.

Frankly, scarier critters have checked into Roach Motels.