Rita Kempley

Fans of Gere and Roberts may not care about the movie's many implausibilities and other shortcomings because the stars do indeed sparkle like the bubbles in wedding champagne. But the rest of us will find the vintage too sweet.

He's obsessed with the physical details instead of the human emotions. The actors are really just part of the scenery.

The movie's a mixed bag, probably because the script was written by drug-traffic expert Oliver Stone of "Scarface" and "Midnight Express" and David Lee Henry of "The Evil Men Do" on the one hand, and directed by sensitive guy Hal Ashby of "Harold and Maude" and "Coming Home" on the other. It's an unhappy hybrid, a valiant but impractical attempt to upgrade the genre. [25 Apr 1986, p.27]

Depressing as it is dull as it is dumb.

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.

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

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.

Babysitting, the directorial debut of The Goonies and Gremlins writer Chris Columbus, is a sweet-natured, adolescent variation on the big-city black comedy After Hours.

The screen writers have come up with a simple-minded scenario, true, but it is enlivened with enough laughs to make up for the shortcomings.

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.

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

An infectious albeit formulaic game of Cinderella football, this happy athletic romp seems to know just how wheezy it is, but the team grunts "hut, hut," and puts it right on the numbers anyway. It's "Hoosiers" with a pigskin pumpkin and a lot more sis-boom-bah.

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

Belushi is fetching, though he plays a cliche'. But the movie would roll over and play dead without the talented German shepherd. Lassie was classy and Benji beguiling, but Jerry Lee is a four-legged Burt Reynolds, just made for fast cars and chase scenes.

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

The point is well taken, but, basically, Cradle is a long rapturous interlude of baby pictures, now and then reinforced with pointed pro-momma dialogue. Even with the politics, it remains just so much French Pablum. [09 May 1986, p.28]

An endearing comic roundelay about the can't-commits.

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.

Schmaltzy.

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.

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.

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

Adapted from Valerie Martin's psychosexual novel, this maudlin film transforms the legend of Jekyll and Hyde into a talky romantic love triangle. [23 Feb 1996]

An intriguing, visually startling murder mystery that showcases the virtuosity of Samuel L. Jackson.

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]

"Nerds" is erratic -- more gags work than don't, but more situations don't work than do. There are some great throwaway lines. [10 Aug. 1984, p.23]

Cadence might once have been pertinent, revolutionary or politically correct, but it's definitely out of step with the times

Raw Deal is not as reactionary as Cobra but it's just as violent, maybe even bloodier, with its graphic gun fights and bullet-spattered, shattered bodies blasted before our eyes. Still it's also a quality project -- the look and sound of the film are first rate.

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

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

City Slickers II, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, is basically a refresher course. There are couple of good guffaws, but many of the jokes are simply recycled from the prequel.

The elephant, whose last film was Operation Dumbo Drop, steals the three-ring circus with its charming personality and an amazing 50-command repertoire.

"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."

Like many of his recent films, The Mexican would be an independent movie if Pitt, not to mention the queen of popcorn cinema, weren't part of the picture. This is not your typical star vehicle.

Benefits from affecting performances from a gifted cast headed by R&B heartthrob Usher Raymond.

Unfortunately, the filmmaking couple take the fetishistic masquerade far too seriously. They may describe it as a "departure" from traditional fare, but it's simply the same old action-packed guff.

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

Robert Redford does everything but wear a crown of thorns as the selfless war hero of The Last Castle, a heavy-handed military prison melodrama.

Despite its hopeful title and a warm inland location, this dawdling family dramedy proves as sodden as a bed-wetter's mattress.

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

Hardware doesn't make a movie; characters, be they Blawp or human, do. And as so often happens with such outsize undertakings, they are overwhelmed by the gizmos. Technology, one. Astros, naught.

Visually bland, well-meaning salute to the brotherhood of man.

While the plot is thin and there's little action till the big blow some 60 minutes into the film, a volcano offers a greater variety of thrills than your basic cyclone ever could.

Meet Joe Black, with Brad Pitt, is a near-death experience: Time seems to stop as we stiffen in our seats and the actors all whisper as if they're at a wake.

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

True Colors rushes by at a hectic pace, never allowing the story to gain momentum. Despite good performances from the two leads, the film has the feel of a cautionary stampede. While it aspires to lofty heights, it never really goes much beyond the rules of behavior prescribed by the Boy Scout Handbook.

Still of the Night is a red herring all its own. It's a mystery that isn't a mystery, a thriller that isn't a thriller. What's more bothersome, the corpse is the most animated member of the cast. [17 Dec 1982, p.19]

A sloppily structured, snoozily paced psychodrama about living in harmony with nature and all the rest of that tree-hugging hooey.

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

Most of the humor is sophisticated slapstick, which Depardieu mastered in the hilarious trio of Francis Veber comedies he did with Pierre Richard in the '80s.

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]

Tom Schulman's script is on the sloppy side and offers few surprises; still, it's not entirely bereft of laughs.

The story's tired, as are the main characters.

Banal performances -- Jim is still not John and Grodin is playing a second-rate variation of the uptight guy in Midnight Express -- combine with derivative plot to tell us that yuppies are too grasping for their own good.

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.)

A corkscrew of a thriller, has more twists than a tarantula with a permanent.

It's not Allen's best film, but fans of the Woodman should not resist. Whether it's the future of Sleeper or the turn-of-the- century of Sex Comedy, Allen plays the same character -- always bewildered, always sex-obsessed, always under-consummated. [23 July 1982, p.11]

Essentially, this is a film about humans as victims of alien abuse, a mediocre look at helplessness.

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.

Sweetly dopey, kid-friendly, if overly contrived comedy.

Adolescents are too grown-up for this blasted nonsense.

It's all as cliche'd as "A Summer Place," a better movie even if it was soap opera. For Keeps is a soapbox opera, and the slats are about to fall through. Writers Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue are as wishy-washy about their issues as they are their heroes. And they serve up the usual "you can have it all" scenario. After the teen-agers suffer with didies and postpartum depression, it's off to college to prepare for future careers. [16 Jan 1988, p.B5]

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.

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

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.

The Perrier of dumb-and-dumber movies, an effervescent idiot's delight that burbles from the wellspring of silliness inside star Adam Sandler's head.

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

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

Sometimes the material's rather too gruesome for a family-oriented film, but as one HVTV intern says to the Devil, "It isn't the blood that bothers me, so much as the lack of subtext."

Attention all units: Slapstick in progress in the vicinity of Police Academy. Suspects wanted for mugging the camera and possession of night shtiks with intent to incite a laugh riot. Please respond to this blues burlesque, a uniformly funny hit sure to have a long run. Its target audience -- those who can take their T&A with a grain of assault. Its plot -- a combo of "Animal House" and "An Officer and a Gentleman." Its stars -- a rainbow coalition of hot newcomers and dependable, unexpendable pros. [23 Mar 1984, p.23]

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.

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]

It is a wonderfully wacko work, sparked with Cook's oomph, Dunaway's cackle and the superstar power of the sensational Slater. What a face! As long as people prevail over effects, Supergirl glitters, she glows. [23 Nov 1984, p.27]

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

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

It's a good ride, briskly paced, well played and vividly photographed by Caleb Deschanel.

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]

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

An absorbing but awkward union of the two-fisted boxing movie with the moist-eyed British memoir...Though rife with worthy intentions and great notions, this populist safari manages to be both patronizing and manipulative.

Reprising the role, Chevy Chase is reliably irreverent as the tangle-footed, many-monikered reporter.

Final Analysis, an implausible psycho thriller with Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman and Richard Gere, has so many twists, turns and backward leaps, the actors tackle their work like trained poodles in a circus act.

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

Stallone will never disappoint his fans intentionally. He cowrote the script (if writing is the right word) with Stirling Silliphant to formula specs, but Over the Top hasn't got the muscle of his Rocky hits. It's Stallone showing his vulnerable side, a sort of Father Knows Best -- But Can't Put It Into Words.

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

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

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]

Despite its herky-jerky pace and aimlessness of plot, Three Fugitives is engaging sport, primarily enjoyable for the hearty teamwork of Nolte and Short -- a comedic contretemps as bruising as a Punch and Judy show.

Baldly manipulative, emotionally counterfeit melodrama.

Ernest Goes to Jail is directed by John Cherry, the adman who created the character. And hard as it is to admit it, Cherry is getting better -- better at making endearing an annoying pea-brained pitchman.

Toys is a misguided missive from director Barry Levinson about an attempted military coup at a whimsically run toy factory.

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]

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

A Ninja turtle soup of computer gimmicks, karate chops and kiddie Confucianism.

The audience hasn't the slightest idea what is going on.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Don't blame the fellas. They're good when they're together, but that doesn't happen nearly often enough in this sporadically amusing script. [07 Dec 1984, p.39]

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

Relentlessly offensive.

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

Nightmares, an anthology of suspense shorts, is about as scary as getting up to face another day. It's teddy-bear terrifying, definitely not for those who're into blood and guts. [09 Sep 1983, 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.

Shamelessly contrived pap.

A live-action cartoon without dramatic focus, a solid structure or discernible theme.

Defiantly sophomoric, often hilarious and crude as all get-out.

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.

Alongside this silly kiddie Halloween comedy, reruns of Hee Haw seem works of great comic sophistication.

A heady blend of beefcake, derring-do and jingoism, their adventure is not merely action-packed, but well-built to boot.

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

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]

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

A riot from start to finish, Carrey's first feature comedy is as cheerfully bawdy as it is idiotically inventive.

A sexless seriocomedy that would be a bust without the support of Burt Reynolds and Ving Rhames. The pair bring a much-needed lift to this tale of a mother at the mercy of the system. Without them, the movie is mostly a showcase for the star's personal trainer.

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

It's an amusing vehicle for Pryor and Candy, amiable partners wallowing in monetary ecstasy. [24 May 1985, p.25]

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.

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]

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]

It couldn't be any less revolutionary in style. It is straighter than a guitar string.

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

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

Anarchistic, self-indulgent and monumentally self-obsessed.

This belabored charade of mistaken identities is guided by Herbert Ross, who has directed everything from The Sunshine Boys to Footloose. Apparently, he's decided to cater to younger moviegoers with this discordant mix of MTV imagery and classic farce.

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

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.

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 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.

Flexploitation pure and simple -- nothing but savagery, sex and sinew.

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

Rusnak, who was the second-unit director of "Godzilla," brings plenty of style to this ambitious yet utterly anticlimactic thumb-sucker.

The fourth film in the series, the newest installment has a new director, Chris Cain, and a female Kid, Hilary Swank, but otherwise it reprises the formula established by John G. Avildsen in 1984: A troubled teen conquers self-doubt and the local bullies with the help of an enigmatic karate teacher.

A John Hughes movie without Pretty in Pink director John Hughes, sure makes you appreciate the teens' auteur. Frankly, Steve Rash, who directs this copycat comedy, another nerd-gets-the-cheerleader romance, isn't fit to wear Hughes' hightops. Rash only tinkers with adolescent angst, without the progenitor's empathy for his audience.

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.

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."

It's got a little kick to it.

Ricki Lake makes an appealing, though unlikely, fairy tale heroine in the derivative romance Mrs. Winterbourne: If only this stale trifle didn't call for the bewitching or pixilating, for the abracadabra of a Bullock or a Pfeiffer. For a Cinderella story, it's sorely without magic.

Deep, it's not. But it is glossy, funny and well-performed. And like other ensemble movies, it's stronger on character than plot as it shifts from relationship to relationship to draw a picture of the whole. [28 June 1985, p.27]

Schlocky, sluggish shoot-'em-up.

A purgatory of low-budget interplanetary adventure.

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.

The hero's hilarious efforts to become an ROTC commander at a Virginia prep school are more than enough ammunition for this riotous military parody.

Like the jokes, the brothers' rapport seems recycled from childhood. Sheen and Estevez are hardly working.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Bill Forsyth's Being Human, an anthology about the hesitant ascent of man, is a whimsically offbeat, stubbornly upbeat tour of man's progress as seen through the eyes of five guys named Hector. [06 May 1994]

Lacking in both inspiration and ingenuity, it doesn't so much spoof the conventions of the genre as dumb down famous -- and in some cases, forgotten -- scenes from a slew of other movies.

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.

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.

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

Yankovic, an advocate of the Monty Python and Mel Brooks schools of comedy, favors yechy burlesque, and UHF, with its scant plot, is basically a variety show with skits, sight gags and gross stuff. "Weird" reminds us there's nothing quite like a good booger joke for pure entertainment.

As dull as the decor in a Motel 6.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

A trashy Japanese production with special guest Raymond Burr. [27 Sep 1985, p.25]

The fun never stops because it never starts.

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.

The Empire strikes out.

With its fancifully moldering sets and technical effects, Highlander 2 is little more than a barbarous arena, a Conanistic return to paganism for those among us who still laugh at violence.

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]

Another tediously sanctimonious message movie from Alan Parker.

Annoying.

Proud to be junk food, but it still tackles the serious subjects of illiteracy, teen-age pregnancy and young adult alcoholism. [22 July 1987]

Two if by Sea, directed by Australian Bill Bennett, suffers from a symptom common to romantic comedies that begin after the couple have visited the haystack: There's simply no more sexual tension. Without it, you'd better be as good as Tracy and Hepburn.

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.

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 bland, utterly silly, curiously provincial courtroom drama.

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

Redundant, humorless and overlong screenplay.

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 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.

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

Well-intentioned but ludicrous tale.

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

An amiably dopey teen movie.

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

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

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."

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.

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]

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.

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

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

A moldy teenage tear-jerker.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Under the direction of "Die Harder's" Renny Harlin, the movie has a crackling pace and a glossy look. It's all the more pernicious for that, this slick glorification of hate and loathing that portrays women as sexually promiscuous and men as infantile, violent and feeble-minded. Here's one Ford that doesn't have a better idea.

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

With his teddy bear appeal, it's not surprising that there was more magnetism between Selleck and the Baby in "Three Men" than there is between Selleck and grown-up babe Paulina Porizkova (though the two femmes fatales are similarly gifted). And it doesn't help that this high-paid clotheshorse is a chilly beauty whose presence is as spare as her figure. It's hard for Selleck to look deeply into those far-focused mannequin eyes.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A big, fat clunker.

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

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.

Sheer torture, the very definition of unfunniness itself.

A smutty, imbecilic farce.

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]

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

The Toy would improve with a little tinkering. Still, it's surefire family fare. [10 Dec 1982, p.23]

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.

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.

Stinketh like the breath of a dyspeptic dragon.

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

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

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.

Stinks like a cat box that hasn't been changed in a hundred years.

Puerile bluster.

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

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