As perfectly bad horror movies go, Wrong Turn is something new: a gore-splattered workout flick.

Tries to wring laughs from just about every dusty stereotype about blacks and whites imaginable. But it's all cheap, lazy, and unoriginal.

What a disaster -- a dog.

A supernatural thriller that is neither super, natural, nor thrilling.

There's not much of a script. The direction is the pits, and stars Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore, playing dueling divorce lawyers who fall in love, are lousy, too.

Because the characters in the movie have only stock obsessions and vague personal histories, there's no reason to be interested in them.

There's scant character development, pedestrian dialogue, and an almost complete lack of humor.

Through it all, Rob Schneider comes off as a jackass in The Animal.

The trouble with the movie is basically everything. It's long, sloppy, and -- to both the quantum-physics ignorant and informed -- steadily implausible, never exciting in either its skill or its ludicrousness.

No one on the screen bothers to commit to a character.

Just bland behavioral propaganda, and Holmes makes such a guileless and robotic spokeswoman, it wouldn't be nuts to think the White House was just another mansion in Stepford.

The 6-year-old I went with had the villain pegged in the first 15 minutes. Needless to say, she completely ruined the movie for me. Meddling kid.

Eerily similar in its story line to "In the Cut," the much pasted Meg Ryan sex-and-death thriller that came out last year. Only it's worse.

Another gay movie that luxuriates in emotional implausibility.

Put it this way: National Lampoon's Gold Diggers makes "The Anna Nicole Show" look sophisticated.

The most dumbed-down mob comedy in years. It's the kind of movie you tie around the ankles of a stiff you're tossing into deep water and never want to see again.

By the time I saw poor Tim crushed, head to toe, by a falling sheet of plate glass, I was certain I hadn't signed up for anything this punishing.

Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.

Not as desperate, unfunny, and nonsensical as its title. It's worse. Worse than you can imagine. Unless, of course, you've imagined 90-something minutes of bloopers and outtakes that congeal into a story -- much the way a scab is formed.

The movie is as grim and grave as the comic book. But it lacks atmosphere. It's often illogical and drubs you numb with its single dimension: noisy retribution.

As for Hawke's direction, if there is any, it certainly isn't apparent. The shots are frequently bland and uneven, and the players act as though their only instruction was ''Just show up at the set and remember your lines.'' At least they seem to have gotten that much right.

The kind of comedy that takes the fun out of stupidity.

House of the Dead, sadly, is so bad it's bad.

Any richness in the drawing of the backgrounds only underscores the weirdly flat, affectless renderings of the characters moving through them.

Should have been an inaudible man movie. Every time the characters open their mouths, they hammer it deeper into the ground.

Like criticizing the light fixtures on the Titanic. This ship was going down anyway.

The exact cinematic equivalent of a classic Bob Dylan song. It's also proof that what is towering genius in one medium can go insanely wrong in another.

A video game barely disguised as a movie. Violent, and the monsters are scary for younger children.

It touches on universal themes of love, friendship, and family. Suffice to say it falls dreadfully short.

The flat tire of summer movies.

Gross and tasteless...this high-school romp mixes the gross and tasteless with sentimental mush.

A video game cum movie that substitutes shrieking decibel levels for a coherent plot and any resemblance to originality.

The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.

Mostly, though, Lynch fills the screen with a lot of cynically off-putting and sadistic violence. In place of incident, character and a bemused view of small-town life, corrupt beneath its cherry-pie surface, we are essentially asked to witness torture - mostly of Laura Palmer, as her troubles lead her to self-destruct with drugs and promiscuity, including a couple of side trips to the Canadian bordello known as One-Eyed Jacks. For all the violence in Lynch's "Blue Velvet," that film maintained a comic dimension. The violence in "Wild at Heart," for all its extravagance of gesture, was hollow - stylized, not real...Here, there's no comedy, nothing surreal, just wave after wave of titillation. Except that it doesn't titillate. It depresses. There's no psychic charge on any of it. It proceeds from no artistic conviction, just from a cynical desire to squeeze a few more bucks from the already overworked corpse of Laura Palmer. It shows how quickly a creative impulse can be exhausted - from quirky originality toying with humanity's darker impulses to dispirited quasi-porn. [29 Aug 1992, p.23]

The overall tone is one of mild Sex Pistols excess combined with Monkees-era high jinks.

"Prison isn't all that different from a nightclub,'' comments Alig toward the end. Funny; this movie isn't all that different from prison.

Shyer's version is a thing of infinite emptiness and nauseating vanity. It's not funny, alluring, affecting, or erotic, just conceited.

Probably would have worked better as a slamming soundtrack than as a muddle-headed movie.

Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.

A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.

A terribly self-satisfied lecture about the ubiquity of quantum physics in spiritual life, is dishonest enough to suggest that even its cavalcade of scientists and mystics might not know anything about such topics as reality and the sub-atomic world.

We have to endure 93 minutes of this torture, with only a few high points.

Positively reeks of self-importance -- the jokey, ham-fisted, pseudo-socially relevant, punch-pulling kind. It reeks worse of acting -- the Jack-Lemmon-in-a-coma Kevin Spacey kind.

The movie's no good: It's written, directed, performed, photographed, edited, and marketed on a fifth-grade reading level; despite that and its twin stars' saucer eyes and ropy limbs, it's no Muppet movie either.

With its lifeless animation, characterless characters, and plotless plot, Yu-Gi-Oh! is so flat as to make the card game on which it is based seem positively three-dimensional.

Despite all that onscreen turgidness, Anatomy of Hell is itself so much a matter of the mind that it never rises above theory.

Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.

A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.

It has a little something to irritate everybody. People looking for romance will find only cardboard lovers. People looking for a resounding musical will find it odd that the camera runs away from the lip-synching cast. And people looking for opera -- well, shame on you.

French Kiss is a French miss. It's got the settings, but it has little magic, less charm and almost no chemistry between Meg Ryan's heartsick American innocent and Kevin Kline's shady Frenchman. [5 May 1995, p.57]

Van Sant winds up with disconnected, dispirited pieces that never come together and lift off the screen with a whoosh of sly high spirits. [20 May 1994]

Adrian Lyne pulls out more manipulative nonsense than Machiavelli ever thought of. Lyne stops at nothing to provoke artificial sentimental feelings from the audience. Like the movie itself, the audience's reaction is only skin deep. [18 Sep 1987, p.58]

It plays like a crude "Godfather" parody, the sort that might amuse as a 10-minute sketch on "Saturday Night Live," but curdles and collapses as a 143-minute film. [09 Dec 1983]

Staying Alive, the sequel to John Travolta's "Saturday Night Fever," plays like wet cement. [16 Jul 1983]

If you were ever curious how a bad director can destroy the work of two talented actors and a slight, but funny, script, you need look no further than Educating Rita. [28 Oct 1983]

Although the limits on Beverly Hills Cop III are pretty obvious, it's not a total write-off. Still, it's time to stop making movies about Murphy's Motown cop and start making one about Serge. [25 May 1994, p.69]

Its squandering of talent makes Class Action a film that deserves to be disbarred, not reviewed. [15 Mar 1991]

Lethal Weapon 3 is a big, dumb, noisy, comic strip of a movie that begins and ends in flames.

The concept of Air America is refreshing, but its enactment goes nowhere fast. [10 Aug 1990]

Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte are back in Another 48 HRS., and so is some of the chemistry between them. But although this sequel is more amped up than the original "48 HRS.," most of the thrills are gone. [8 Jun 1990, p.35]

Mississippi Burning plays loose with truth, turning the history of the civil rights movement on its head. The filmmakers shamelessly transform what was ultimately a triumph of due process and nonviolent civil disobedience into an ugly might-makes-right spectacle. It's "Dirty Harry" coming at you from the left. [27 Jan 1989, p.72]

It's amazingly suspenseless and devoid of substance. [05 Mar 1993]

Hampton's directorial inexperience shows, and the film remains curiously disjointed and devoid of suspense. [06 Dec 1996]

Nightwatch quickly declines from creepy to silly. [17 Apr 1998]

Johnny Suede is too devoid of content to sustain our interest. [19 Sep 1992]

The only thing that keeps Cool World from imploding is that Bakshi turns it into a series of animator's riffs, with little explosions of toon action erupting like video game novas into the foreground of the story that isn't happening. [10 Jul 1992]

This one is hollow and caves in on itself, growing wearisome and posed, ending in a burst of salvational violence and a coda of sentimentality masquerading as transcendent toughness. [13 Jan 1995]

Return is a slow-paced, incompetently directed film with both eyes focused on the box office. [26 Mar 1983]

Phar Lap wastes its brilliant potential through embarrassingly inept acting, a cloying soundtrack, stereotyped characters and pedestrian direction. [13 Jul 1984]

Producer Ray Stark and director John Huston have relied more on the rigid style of the comic strip than on the high-steppin' pizazz of the Broadway show. They've transformed a big-hearted hit that won seven Tonys into a small- minded musical. [18 Jun 1982]

Virtuosity doesn't really compute, but there's going to be more of its kind of cyberaction, not less. [4 Aug 1995, pg. 51]

The characterization couldn't be more flagrant if the soundtrack creaked out an oldie by a certain ancient pop quintet: You're a candy girl.

The film's centerpiece is a massacre at a wet T-shirt contest, which the horror director Alexandre Aja has a good time staging (yes, Eli Roth, we see you with the water gun). But it feels like an imitation of B-movie beach schlock and John Waters. The visual humor lacks wit or nerve.

Just as I was beginning to hope that she’d (Heigl) find a part that called for intelligence and sophistication and backbone, she plays another uptight naif.

Romero's Hatfields-and-McCoys setup feels more random than creative, and the idea that they're all Irish -- or cowboys! -- is more desultory still.

The film was conceived as a youthful tour of all that's wrong with the two-party system, with the likably shambling actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as host, but the breadth of subjects covered precludes any response other than nebulous discontent.

A wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle.

Irene in Time is the initial first-run feature to debut at the Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston’s newest art house cinema. Both the theater and its audiences deserve much better.

Tom Six's movie has the freakiness and sadism of its genre, but it's so heavy with self-appreciation -- Dude, we had the craziest premise for a movie! -- that it can't lift off into the perverse ecstasy of decent exploitation. That was also the problem with "Snakes on a Plane.''

The Last Airbender' is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film "The Golden Compass,'' a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.

Material this banal needs a madman of David Lynch proportions to incinerate it. Hackford leaves it intact, forcing us to regard a car he doesn't have the guts or skill to crash.

Non-"Twilight'' fans would be better off surfing YouTube.

Picture Timberlake in the booth recording his lines and you have the best joke in the movie. Everything else is actively painful, a frenetic, unfunny mix of action, romance, dud dialogue, and icky things popping out of the screen.

So nonchalant is Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth movie in Paul W.S. Anderson's dystopian franchise, that its overarching premise isn't explained.

I watched at least a quarter of My Soul to Take, the worst horror movie Wes Craven's made perhaps ever, with the glasses off. It was shot - and is available - in a standard format, and, like many conversions, the 3-D gimmick is like watching a movie through an ashtray.

The Strauses don't care about how to keep an audience. Their movie has no sense of suspense or dread - Skyline is an apocalypse movie that plods like one of Romero's zombies.

Every boogeyman and slasher cliché this movie borrows was better somewhere else. Although it probably wasn't grosser.

A migraine inducement that you'd think Jack Black had gotten out of his system years ago. Yet he still finds an excuse to wear a blazer and shorts and fling his bodily orb like Angus Young on Guitar Hero night at the neighborhood bar.

Howard never decides on tones that complement each other, and the dissonance is jarring.

It's the latest in the blank-from-hell genre, in which misogyny and entertainment are made to seem indistinguishable while the blank makes life hell for someone who then is cornered into striking back.

Drive Angry is something new for Cage - a movie that feels like it's straight FROM cable.

After a while, the movie tires of the witch business and trots out a plot twist that permits the effects department to spend money. Some moviegoers might find the bait-and-switch funny.

Hop may have taken years to design and animate, but it feels as if minutes were required to compose it.

Never thought we'd say this about a movie, but Bucky Larson probably doesn't wring as much out of recurring bodily-fluid gags as it could.

Fresh or not, creatively merited or not, here it comes: the third installment of Martin Lawrence's big, dopey franchise.

The film is remarkably stunted.

You don't want to think, what would Preston Sturges or Alexander Payne do with this material? But there is a seed of satirical cynicism in this movie that a smart, clear mind could have finessed. Jake Kasdan is not that director. He doesn't appear to know what to do.