The Crush

The Crush is the latest in the growing ''from hell'' genre, about all the fun things that happen when a ferocious, precocious 14-year-old girl develops an intense crush on the nice-guy journalist who rents a guest house from the girl's parents. Things start innocent. Get worse. Get horrible. Get ridiculous. You know the formula. Working within that formula, The Crush isn't bad.

As an unashamed B-movie, The Crush does what it says on the tin and entertains for an hour and a half. Except you feel kind of cheated by the supposed climax, with the build up proving more disturbing. Silverstone is convincingly equal parts Lolita and Norman Bates. Read full review

Yet another variation on the woman-from-hell subgenre, THE CRUSH fails to come up with many new twists beyond casting a teenager as its villain. Dancing around its own salacious possibilities, the movie is only briefly offensive and rarely surprising. Read full review

Unfortunately, Shapiro borrows from too many movies (his climax vaguely recalls "Stranger on a Train") to let his story's potential shine through, and so "The Crush" remains an exercise in diminishing returns. [3 Apr 1993, p.C5]

Viewed as anything but fodder for scares, The Crush is silly business. Its villainess is much less credible than Barrymore's, while its landscaping and decor manifest a lot more thought than its psychology. Nonetheless, the picture manages to sustain an effectively creepy atmosphere for most of its 80-odd minutes, making it tolerable for moviegoers content with nothing more. [8 Apr 1993, p.E10]

A harmless sex-teaser, from a first-time writer/director, which develops into a confused, cynical and third-rate exploitationer. Read full review

With plot holes so large you could drive a HumVee through them, this debut film from director Shapiro is little more than a lousy hybrid, one part Fatal Attraction to two parts Lolita, only this time Humbert Humbert writes for trendy Pique! magazine and lives in Seattle (but doesn't everybody these days?). Read full review

In fact, with its basic shortage of gore and only brief glimpses of nudity, it’s hard to imagine what in the film prompted an R rating, unless it stands for “ridiculous.” Read full review

In a world already corrupted with Amy and Joey, and Woody Allen and Soon Yi, the last thing we need is a movie like "The Crush" masquerading as entertainment. [6 Apr 1993, p.29]

Shapiro has constructed a by-the-numbers script that telegraphs every plot twist with the exertion of its setups. We know that a hive of yellow jackets in the orchard, a carousel in the attic and Darian's fondness for horses will somehow make it into the final minutes of the film. It is hard to work up the curiosity to stick it out and find out how. [6 Apr 1993, p.7]

This is one more "yuppie-in-peril" movie, just as slick and empty, manipulative and crude, as most of the rest: all those paranoid pictures bent on scaring us with insane roommates, murderous baby-sitters and killer temps. [5 Apr 1993, p.F3]

There's something scuzzy about the whole exercise. Read full review

Never succeeds in becoming either torrid or scary. It does generate a few chuckles in its depiction of what are supposedly the workings of a chic and hard-hitting magazine...The Crush is for the most part grindingly predictable and mechanically played. Read full review

There's something innately distasteful about The Crush. Here's a movie that casts a hopelessly lovestruck -- and mentally disturbed -- teenager as a villain. The camera ogles Silverstone's body every chance it gets, then invites you to hiss at her as she goes about her evil deeds. What's more, the movie -- which is nothing more than the latest take on the increasingly routine female-from-hell genre -- takes itself very seriously, giving the proceedings a realism that only serves to heighten the unsavoriness of the thing. [8 Apr 1993, p.F3]

While the material forming the basis for The Crush can't make any claims of originality, there's certainly enough there to craft a decent film around. With a challenging story, a real script, and actors willing to take a few chances, The Crush could have been enjoyable. Essentially, all that would have been necessary for a success is a complete scrapping of the film that was actually produced. Even lovers of formula thrillers will find this picture hard to swallow. Read full review

Is there really a need to make a 14-year-old the sexual object of adults' attention? A coming-of-age movie that tries to sympathize with a teen-ager can be enlightening. A movie that tries to tantalize us with a child is shameful. Second, the stereotype of the treacherous Lolita taking advantage of a man twice her age is not only sexist, it's misogynistic. Take The Crush and can it. [9 Apr 1993, p.3F]