Ron Stringer

Still and all, the makeup special effects are as over the top as anything in Hooper and L.M. Kit Carson's 1986 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and -- for those of us without the sense to steer clear of this sort of thing -- that's saying something.

Allusive as all hell, Tuvalu's slapstick allegory of European socioeconomic upheaval in the 20th century opens with a spoof of "Breaking the Waves" lofty coda, then races through a mise en scène that's equal parts Tarkovsky, Méliès and the Brothers Quay.

A fine specimen of clean-cut Mormon family entertainment, but it may also be a step in the wrong direction for the fledgling production company.

Turgid, melodramatic travesty of Thackeray's gimlet-eyed satire.

They have succeeded in establishing conservative ideologue Ken Starr as one of American prosecutorial history's biggest heels and Clinton loyalist Susan McDougal as a bona fide hero and martyr. The problem, of course, is that the president himself was neither, and no amount of hand wringing -- however justified -- can make him one.

The problem for director Keith Gordon is that Potter's script pares down to virtual nothing the very narrative threads that allowed us, in the full-length version, to identify with his prickly protagonist, and knocks us upside the head with a hyperkinetic, disorienting first act from which audiences -- especially those approaching this material cold -- are unlikely to recover.

Unfortunately, fulfilling an apparent need to assert absolute control over his early successes no matter the cost, the director has gone ahead and loused up his 1979 masterpiece of gothic sci-fi horror.

Of course, this is just another teen movie -- with tons of dick jokes that don't know when to quit, and buckets of realistic-looking "excrement" splattered all over its "juvenile" cast, and even a couple of gags that actually fly.

Provides an unfulfilled promise of pleasure (providing one doesn't cave in to the spectacle of bare-chested Elizabeth Hurley sucking on an ice cube) in this heavy-handed exercise in time-vaulting literary pretension.

Occasionally scary, never coherent.

The deliriously deficient new excuse for a comedy.

The fault lies mostly with the writers, who consistently come up short on wit and imagination enough to finish, let alone flesh out or polish, a joke.

Yo momma so fat, when she gets in an elevator, it has to go down. Had enough?

What this turkey produces in the way of hang-ups is a transparently phony class conflict.

Fails in so many respects, even die-hard constituents may have trouble learning to like it.

Bad photography, bad acting and bad dialogue.

Those seeking anything resembling a real discussion of the issues had best seek elsewhere.

A stinker.

Let horses be horses, scrap the tin-eared Lukas Haas narration.