Rita Kempley

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.

Should never have been released, not even on video. It should have been placed in a hazardous waste container, encased in concrete and dumped into the Farrelly brothers' septic tank.

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]

Another tediously sanctimonious message movie from Alan Parker.

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]

A noisy, impenetrable and totally nonsensical cogitation on the nature of firefighters and the sizzling "animal" they love...We just wish somebody would call 911 for boredom.

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.

The Wizard is not only tacky and moribund, but it teaches gambling and bad sportsmanship.

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

A soppy songfest about a tubercular pea picker who drives to Nashville, where he hemorrhages and dies. It's unfit for human consumption. [17 Dec 1982, p.20]

Ford's earthy Everyman and Pitt's vengeful youth are probably more interesting than they have any right to be inside these tired macho roles. Of course, Rory and Tom could be bursting with blarney and the movie still wouldn't gather any momentum.

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.

Fast Food Fast Women is "Sex and the City" in Payless shoes. An incoherent jumble of characters and situations.

Cannonball Run II is a real lemon. [29 June 1984, p.19]

If there's an amnesia movie worse than Overboard, it slips my mind.

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.

Shamelessly contrived pap.

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.

Ought to have been called "The Sap Also Rises."

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

Madhouse is excruciating fluff for moviegoing masochists. It's what bad cinephiles can expect in the cineplexes of hell. No, it's probably already on video there.

Steve Barron, who directed "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "Electric Dreams" and a mess of music videos, understandably can't seem to whip up any enthusiasm for the project. Nor is he able to inspire this large, listless cast of zombies.

Smits can't wrench free of this tangle of cliches.

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

Without a doubt, mainstream moviegoers will be revolted by the nastiness of it all.

Firefox may sound bright, hot and racy, but it browns out. Eastwood has an energy crisis as director, producer and star. [18 June 1982, p.15]

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

With its callow cast and playful tone, there is nothing dangerous about Forman's variation on the novelist's schemes.

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.

Director-star Kevin Costner falls head over heels in love with himself in this nihilistic, post-apocalyptic clunker about a loner who becomes a reluctant sperm donor, role model and inevitably a godsend to what's left of America.

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.

Nothing could save this movie. These guys make a fortune off the comedy of cruelty. How dare they climb on a soapbox?

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.

Relentlessly offensive.

If you choose to see this puerile tripe, check your dignity at the door.

A bland, utterly silly, curiously provincial courtroom drama.

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

The current Bat cycle was already tired when Schumacher replaced Tim Burton behind the camera on "Batman Forever." This chapter -- so action-packed, yet so insufferably dull -- makes it clear that there's nowhere else to go.

Arthur Hiller, who last directed the sour "The Babe" -- not the one about that sweet pig -- finds even less to work with in TV veteran Don Rhymer's stupid screenplay.

If there is a Hell, Not Another Teen Movie will be playing for all eternity on every screen there.

Don't go to "Into the Night." It will numb your mind. It will bore your soul. And it will cost you $5. [8 March 1985, p.25]

Puffed up with Mamet's brawny bromides and DeVito's self-indulgent direction, this bio-pic would be an altogether empty load were it not for Nicholson, all snake eyes and snarls as the Teamsters boss.

A smutty, imbecilic farce.

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.

The only good thing you can say about "Rocky V" is that at least Stallone has the sense to throw in the towel.

Paradise is about as romantic as sand in your pants. [07 May 1982, p.13]

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.

Only cognoscenti of things wet and wild could conceivably enjoy this B movie about an Arizona wave pool champion who comes of age by riding on water.

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 big, fat clunker.

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

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.)

Screenwriter and sometime animal trainer Stewart Raffill directs from a screenplay by Ed Rugoff, who also co-wrote "Mannequin." Rugoff is fond of asking and answering the question, what if a mannequin came to life? But judging from "Mannequin Two," Raffill is probably better at sweeping up after elephants. The actors, bless their little wooden heads, would be better off pulling puppet strings.

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.

Hot to Trot is an unbridled disaster, a screwball horseplay so lame you want to put it out of its misery.

Always is an unfulfilled promise, a plummeting dove.

Trash or treat? Halloween II is as dumb as its prequel. The Great Pumpkin isn't going to be pleased with this one. [30 Oct 1981, p.17]

It's exactly like "Star Wars" -- if you subtract a good story, sympathetic characters, intelligence, wit and moral purpose.

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.

The Fast and the Furious is "Rebel Without a Cause" without a cause. The young and the restless with gas fumes. The quick and the dead with skid marks.

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.

It's not that Wayans lacks wit, it's that he's stomped it to death. A sweet-natured performance -- and the fact that he and Tom Cruise probably have the same orthodontist -- doesn't quite make up for the muddle. Don't be a sucka.

An utterly pointless remake of Sam Peckinpah's hair-raising road movie. Updated and dumbed down, this anemic variation on the bloodier 1972 original is primarily an opportunity for those vast legions of Baldwin-Basinger voyeurs. You know who you are.

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

A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth.

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."

See critic run. Oh, for the days of Smell-a-Vision.

Obstreperous, male-bashing pain in the patoot.

Superman IV, except for a glitzy new villain named Nuclear Man, is one of the cheesiest movies ever made. It's so grainy and grossly envisioned, it seems filmed on pulp. Superman's crystalline Arctic palace looks as if it's made of no-deposit-no-return soda bottles, and his suit of primary colors has ring around the collar.

This film is just a coarser, dumber, smuttier remake of the 1983 Eszterhas-penned "Flashdance," throbbing music, working-class Cinderella and all.

Not that much deep thinking went on here.

Legends of the Fall is a magnificent bore: a western saga lolling in its own immensity - its big music, its big scenery and, yes, its big hair

A buddy cop parody of the lowest possible caliber, National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 empties its chamber but only nicks its enormously deserving target. It's a fusillade of tired jokes and cheap shots, primarily meant as a burlesque of "Lethal Weapon," but "Basic Instinct," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "48 Hrs." also come in for some lame bashing from director Gene Quintano.

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.

Howell, a second-string Rob Lowe, has the title role in this embarrassing variation on "Black Like Me," a half-witted collegiate farce guaranteed to offend just about everybody. Blacks are stereotyped as they haven't been in decades, and whites are portrayed as Boston bigots and selfish preppies. But the really pathetic thing about this tired old knee-jerker is not that it's racist, but that it's racist and doesn't even know it.

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

Director Griffin Dunne lacks a clear vision, torn between blithe spirits and brimstone, between madcap and macabre. But then what does it matter when there's so little magic on screen anyhow? That is unless you count making audiences disappear.