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."