First-time directors Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski must have written the script for this comedy when they were about 12--and not changed a word.

The shticky dialogue undercuts the solid genre plotting, which undercuts the humor.

Doesn't do much with its pseudosavvy characters.

The plot exposition gets laborious in spots, the period flavor is only occasional and approximate, and the direction tends to be clunky, yet the strong secondary cast helps to take up some of the slack.

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

This stupidly contrived thriller is all the more disappointing if you admire previous work by Berry and director James Foley (After Dark, My Sweet).

The most subtly revolting aspect of the movie is how it manages to exploit violence for cheap thrills, in part by equating submission with love.

Wastes most of its 110 minutes making impotent jokes about male sexual behavior and the repugnance of old women.

The picture is completely devoid of cinematic interest, adopting instead a tiresome theatrical aesthetic in which showy monologues are filmed in interminable, usually ill-chosen long takes.

This insufferable romance-adventure includes vague comedy as well as unintentional humor, and its target audience seems to be preadolescents who won't notice the calculated enthusiasm with which it sidesteps sexuality.

This multigenre parody is excruciatingly slow and unamusing; a go-go dancer in the opening and closing credits does as much in a few minutes to shake up our perspective on a bygone aesthetic as the entire narrative in between.

I had a pretty good time with this until the end, when I felt so soiled by the filmmakers' cynicism and the characters' gratuitous viciousness that I wanted to take a bath.

Sicko horror film from Australia, whose sadism is topped only by its absurdity.

Painfully unfunny.

Moving in fits and starts, mawkish in its sincerity, and at times disjointed in its lumpy structure.

Nearly all the SF premises are accorded the status of Andrew Dice Clay one-liners - which means that they, along with the characters, keep changing from one scene to the next.

The narrative is murky and ludicrous, the action violent and nihilistic, the contemporary western ethos painfully pretentious.

Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.

I don't know the novel, but judging from the script by Crichton and John Patrick Shanley, this must be scraping the bottom of the Crichton barrel.

Wolfgang Petersen and writer Andrew Marlowe, apparently afraid to really make fun of any American icons, challenge us to take the story straight no matter what, but the only thing this ponderous movie has going for it is its unintentional humor.

Awful light drama.

The elaborate climax set in a Paris bakery is the least boring part of this trained-animal movie.

Craven seems to have set out to make a bad movie, and he's succeeded.

There is hardly any point in discussing the direction of a picture like this, in which almost every shot has been predetermined by the requirements of the special effects, yet director Richard Marquand fluffs the two or three real opportunities he has, rendering the long-delayed character climaxes with a chilly indifference.

The usual Spielberg rhetoric about the sanctity of childhood and the beauty of dreams seems wholly factitious in this crass context, which even includes a commercial--in the form of a rock video--for the tie-in merchandise.

Screenwriters Keith Merryman and David A. Newman interweave four asinine, underdeveloped plot lines, and Tim Story's prosaic direction reduces their script to a shambolic nightmare.

The grasping novelty of the visuals doesn't rival the uncharismatic leads or the hopelessly, unironically banal plot.

This asthma-inducing adventure set on K2 starts out seeming as if its corny storytelling and phony-looking settings were designed to show that it's as much about genre-movie conventions as anything else.