Rita Kempley

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.

Solemn, earnest and as laboriously paced as a fat Sicilian's funeral procession.

The insane casting: When was the last time Julianne Moore cracked you up?

Schmaltzy.

This character was an abusive swine. Perhaps it would be best to let his art stand on its own.

Aficionados of movies in the so-bad-they're-good category might just revel in this overheated costume melodrama.

There's lots of action, but the director must have had a bag over his head. And the stars are ducking more cliches than bullets. [18 March 1983, p.15]

Running Scared, ha. They ought to call this police story "Re-Running Scared." It's as cliche- riddled as Scarface's limo. [27 June 1986, p.29]

This sloppily made, poky, extra cheesy adventure is virtually a remake of "Armageddon."

An overgrown hybrid of disaster epic, can-do combat adventure and '50s sci-fi movie, this craft has visited our world many times before. And while she's a beaut, the sticker on her titanium bumper reads: "Been There, Done That, Beam Me Up, Scotty."

Fans of the book will despise it, others will just find it tries too hard. If you want to see the masters of the universe chastened, see "Wall Street." This is a story of redeemed white guys.

Director James Bridges and journalist Aaron Latham wrote the shoddy screenplay from Latham's cover story "Looking for Mr. Goodbody" and two other articles, none of which come together sufficiently to comprise a plot. You've got to wonder what they really had in mind with this marriage of ink and sweat. What next -- the "The 60-Minute Workout" with Morley Safer, or Arnold Schwarzenegger and "Meet the Bench Press"? [7 June 1985, p.29]

There's only one thing to do with this "Bottle": Put a cork in it.

The premise is tragically flawed and politically incorrect. In fact, it is blatantly cat-ist.

Directed by the touchy-feely Henry Jaglom, this is film as purgative -- a hens' party from hell, gorged on its own self-importance and damned hard to swallow.

Relentless formulaic fodder for the explosion-starved; it's loud, shallow, sexist and a complete waste of time.

Hurt's horrendous, with his goofy stilted accent. He talks as though he swallowed a bathtub. [16 Dec 1983, p.24]

In the translation from page to film, the life seems to have gone out of the story

What could be more frightening than an indestructible murdering mutant? Consider the unbelievably horrifying performance of Stephen Furst as Charlie, the sheriff's deputy. Couple Furst's incompetence with a scene like this one and you know real fear: Charlie tells Sheriff Dan that he just isn't made for law-enforcement. Not because he's incredibly out of shape and dumb as a post, not because he can't drive a squad car. No, no, no. It's worse. The coquettish Charlie confesses to some pretty grim experimentation of his own. He tells of giving his first puppie a bath by swishing it around in the toilet. Then he put it in the freezer to dry. Voila! the first freeze-dried pupsicle. [2 Apr 1982, p.11]

Annoying.

A vulgar attempt to revamp the undead genre by introducing computer-generated splatter and a casketful of themes from genetic tinkering to conspiracy theories.

Adolescents are too grown-up for this blasted nonsense.

ROBIN WILLIAMS rises above the mediocrity of Harold Ramis' newest comedy, which features the cherubic improv comic as co-owner of a de'classe' Club Med. Even so, Club Paradise is lost. [11 July 1986, p.N31]

Howl and damnation, if this isn't just one long, stomach-turning drool joke.

The Big Town aims to be The Hustler with dice, but it's just a lot of craps -- a laughable, overlong look at a small-town gambler's comeuppance at the hands of Chicago's high rollers.

An inspid comedy about Daddy and Daddy's little girl. It's an irksome, one-dimensional sitcom with smut.

The actors haven't much to do. It looks like everybody needed the work. [10 Jan 1986, p.21]

A more kid-friendly version of "Dumb and Dumber." And there's even a moral: "Yahoo for education," though the movie doesn't really put any muscle behind it.

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]

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]

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

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.

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

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]

There's not much adventure on these high seas. This buccaneering boondoggle is more like a slow voyage aboard the PMS Pinafore. [22 Dec 1995, p.C06]

Bogdanovich, who worked with McMurtry on the Last Picture Show screenplay, adapted this one on his own. It's kinda like he tried to pare down the big ol' Encyclopaedia Britannica and couldn't bear to leave out nothin' -- a lot of Billy Joe Bob types talking guff and hogwash and settin' round the Burger King eating fried eggs. This is purty near the worst movie of the whole year.

The fun never stops because it never starts.

It doesn't take extra-sensory perspiration, as Ernest would say, to realize this undertaking is dumber than jaywalking at the Indy 500.

Broadly acted and badly directed, the cast never clicks and the gags fall flat. (Or, they stoop to dog flatulence.) This is a movie made for one-stop shoppers.

Filmmaker Paul Flaherty apparently has never so much as given a friend directions to his home.

North, which co-producer Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman adapted from Zweibel's slight novel, is awkwardly structured -- it's still in chapters -- not to mention mean-spirited and incredibly stupid.

The story is as stale as prison air and so is the star. [25 Mar 1983, p.18]

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

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.

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

Shamelessly contrived pap.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Relentlessly offensive.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A moldy teenage tear-jerker.

A trite, bantamweight "Bull Durham," hasn't a single line, gibe, gesture or twist that hasn't already been chewed up and spat out in many a movie baseball dugout.

These folks are so blase, you'd think that scientists had predicted pennies from Heaven instead of world's end within the year.

What we have here is a movie with not just one, but a family pack of psychos.

Basically "Beaches" without Hershey and the salt water. This insipid suck-face-athon provokes the gag reflex.

Schlocky, sluggish shoot-'em-up.

Jaws 3-D, in which the Amity horror swims south to Florida, looks a lot like a Poligrip commercial, what with its extreme close-ups of the Great White's artificial chompers. [29 July 1983, p.17]

Except for pedophiles, it's hard to imagine who'll be drawn to this irresponsible Little Bo Peep show.

An insufferable, self-important, sloppily made bore.

Ought to be called "Hook, Line and Stinker."

Perhaps Steven Soderbergh's metamorphosis from clever Cajun auteur ("sex, lies, and videotape") to heavy-duty Eastern European angst-master has been altogether too successful. Like authentic Soviet Bloc cinema, Kafka makes its audience suffer along with its heroes.

Your own final destination just might be the box office, to demand your money back.

The characters are as thin as the air at 26,000 feet, and the story as silly as anyone willing to assault K2 in a punishing blizzard.

Bland as a fortune cookie and as trite as the message inside.

Oink. Oink. Porky's II: The Next Day is just swill. But the millions who pigged out on "Porky's" will go hog-wild for No. 2: It's packed with the same old sub-teen smut and subliterate sanctimony. Sex is all talk and dropped britches and one so-so hootchy-kootchy queen's flabby fling. At the same time, it's sexist and sexless, acted by hams and written by bores. [1 July 1983, p.21]

Promises to speed up the pacemakers of grumpy old Republicans with its ruthless indictment of the unzipped presidency.

Piddling spoof.

David Lynch's disastrous film adaptation of Fank Herbert's science-fiction classic turns epic to myopic. [14 Dec 1984, p.31]

Cruise is walking in the footsteps of Troy Donahue and John Travolta here. He does what comes easy. He bumps and grinds and grins till his lips ache. It's a performance with all the integrity of wax fruit. And Cocktail is mud in your eye.

A typical student film with its arty angles, bad lighting and pretentious observations.

Dull and unimaginative, Chetwynd treats his characters with such reverence that they might as well be saints in striped prison pajamas, martyred for the sake of some robotic patriotism. At least, his villains stand out from the host of underdeveloped heroes. Boob journalists, a doofus peacenik actress and a Cuban goon -- Michael Russo, who seems to think he's playing a pimp on "Miami Vice" -- add the unintentional comic relief.

A cynical, sexist and shallow work from cinema's premier misanthrope, Robert Altman, who here shows neither compassion for -- nor insight into -- the human condition.

A bungled screen version of Louis de Bernieres' cult novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin was doomed from the moment Nicolas Cage was cast as the "life-devouring," Puccini-loving hero.

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener's earnest first feature is a low-budget comedy drawn from the pages of her own dear diary. Most women have sense enough to burn theirs.

Wyatt Earp, a bio-pic that lasts more than three hours and moves with the urgency of a grazing buffalo, lacks everything from a coherent dramatic structure to a clearly articulated point of view.

"Star Trek V" is a shambles, a space plodessy, a snoozola of astronomic proportions. The story is uneventful, the effects warmed over from "Star Wars."

It's sheer piffle, a disingenuous romance with Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino that's all sap and no sizzle.

In short, Carrey's got nothing to bounce all that energy off of, not even a solid story line.

Better yet, just throw the whole thing in front of a subway and hope it gets dragged a couple of miles.

As dull as the decor in a Motel 6.

An ill-conceived and unsuccessful romantic adventure set in jolly, collegiate England. [24 Aug 1984, p.20]

Teen Wolf Too is nothing a jar of Nair wouldn't cure.

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.

Another tediously sanctimonious message movie from Alan Parker.

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.

Blame It on Rio, ha. Rio is innocent. Let's put the blame on executive producer Gelbart along with Caine and Bologna. Unlike the starlettes they've taken in tow, these three guys are old enough to know better.

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

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

A smutty, imbecilic farce.

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

A big, fat clunker.

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.

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.

A gooey romantic comedy that sticks to everything except its principles.

We should be asking ourselves why so noble a nation would produce swill like Joe Dirt.

Puerile bluster.

Take the "dle" out of "poodle" and you've pretty much got the leitmotif of Look Who's Talking Now, a crude and mawkish film in which dogs attempt to communicate with Kirstie Alley and John Travolta.

Bewildering, tediously violent.

It's stingy at heart. Burton, who collaborated with British screenwriter Jonathan Gems, brings nothing of "Edward Scissorhands's" magic or "Beetlejuice's" wacky fun to this sadly empty exercise. Aimlessly plotted and blandly written.

Stinketh like the breath of a dyspeptic dragon.

Chris Farley walks into walls, trips over invisible banana peels and otherwise makes a fat ass of himself in this imbecilic, slapstick adventure from the producers of "Dumb and Dumber."

Caddyshack II, a feeble follow-up to the 1980 laff riot, is lamer than a duck with bunions, and dumber than grubs. It's patronizing and clumsily manipulative, and top banana Jackie Mason is upstaged by the gopher puppet.

The rare film that is capable of offending both Trent Lott and Al Sharpton.

The most surprising thing about the movie is that somebody bothered to make it in the first place.

An abominable, abdominal comedy. Aside from its tastelessness and dawdling pace, the movie’s chief problem is the lackluster chemistry between leading lummoxes Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.

Lame jokes, dull cast, stale plot. Ski Patrol, ski-daddle.

Redundant, humorless and overlong screenplay.

The scariest thing about this hokey bombast is that it got made in the first place.

The fat cats of Hollywood have coughed up a hairball.

The mind will be starved for subtlety, wit and substance.

It's foul, with so little left to the imagination that we get a look between his toes. [13 May 1983, p.19]

Those bumbling boys and girls in blue are back on the streets in Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach. And they're more moronic than ever -- '80s Keystone Kops dropping their pants, breaking wind and parading their big American "mangoes." Nothing is too degrading for these troupers. Gradually the more employable members of the original squad, such as Steve Guttenberg (not that he's so great), have gone on to better assignments. But the desperate have returned to reprise their roles in this fifth-rate rehash of the rather wonderful original. "5" is a comic assault, batteries not included, an insufferable collage of coarse slapstick vignettes.

It's a moralistic muddle with only one message: If Disney wants to make movies about Germans, it should restrict its efforts to German shepherds.

Nielsen earns a few giggles with his big entrance and later on his even bigger belly, but he can't overcome the lousy material.

Another cheesy, overdrawn and witless "Saturday Night Live" takeoff.

Ought to be the subject of an obituary, not a review. A creepy film noir modeled on Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," it was a stinking stiff on arrival.

Size vanquishes both substance and subtlety in the overhyped, half-cocked and humorless resurrection of dear old "Godzilla."

The slogging melodrama that emerged still more closely resembles the daily musings of an infatuated teenager than a well-crafted, thoughtful story. [14 Aug 1998]

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.

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

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

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

The overall effect is like wading through hospital waste. Verhoeven, who also directed the maliciously stylistic "Robocop," disappoints with this appalling onslaught of blood and boredom.

Broken Arrow, a deafening, brain-deadening action thriller, takes a mighty blase approach to nuking Denver.

Sheer torture, the very definition of unfunniness itself.

A gruesome tale of obsessive love and mutilation, it's less a work of art, however, than a luridly stylish expression of female self-loathing...A prettied-up snuff movie.

Atrocious. It's also pretentious, superfluous, superficial, shallow, dated and bilious. I'd pay money not to have seen this jumble of gooey special effects, sappy symbolism and out-of-it animation. [17 Sept 1982, p.13]