Here's a movie without an ounce of human kindness, a sour and mean-spirited enterprise so desperate to please, it tries to be a yukky comedy and a hard-boiled action picture at the same time.

These actors, alas, are at the service of a submoronic script and special effects that look like a video game writ large.

The satire is broad and forced and unfunny, there’s no cadence to the setups and visual punch lines, and the likable cast is hopelessly lost. Some disasters should remain forgotten.

If The Informers doesn't sound to you like a pleasant time at the movies, you are right. To repeat: dread, despair and doom. It is often however repulsively fascinating and has been directed by Gregor Jordan as a soap opera from hell, with good sets and costumes.

What we basically have here is a license for the filmmakers to do whatever they want to do with the special effects, while the plot, like Wile E. Coyote, keeps running into the wall.

The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.

Joe Dirt is so obviously a construction that it is impossible to find anything human about him; he is a concept, not a person.

It involves teenagers who have never existed, doing things no teenager has ever done, for reasons no teenager would understand. Of course, it's aimed at the teenage market.

She's Out of Control is simultaneously so bizarre and so banal that it's a first: the first movie fabricated entirely from sitcom cliches and plastic lifestyles, without reference to any known plane of reality.

What happens next is a cross between "Night of the Living Dead," "The Birds" and a disaster movie, if you follow me.

Situations aren't explored, characters aren't developed, timing is ignored, but every 30 seconds there's a would-be laugh. Because all we're supposed to do is laugh, the movie is deadening.

A dead zone of comedy. The concept is exhausted, the ideas are tired, the physical gags are routine, the story is labored, the actors look like they can barely contain their doubts about the project.

It's another overwrought clunker like "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," all effects and stunts and CGI and prosthetics, with no room for lightness and joy.

An inept assembly of ill-matched plot points, meandering through a production that has attractive art direction (despite the immobile mouths).

A perfectly good idea for a comedy, but it just plain doesn't work. It's dead in the water. I can imagine it working well in a different time, with a different cast, in black and white instead of color--but I can't imagine it working like this.

"Deep Rising" was one of the worst movies of 1998. Virus is easily worse.

Underclassman doesn't even try to be good. It knows that it doesn't have to be. It stars Nick Cannon, who has a popular MTV show, and it's a combo cop movie, romance, thriller and high school comedy. That makes the TV ads a slam dunk; they'll generate a Pavlovian response in viewers conditioned to react to their sales triggers (smartass young cop, basketball, sexy babes, fast cars, mockery of adults).

It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life.

Stupefying dimwitted.

Here is the dirty movie of the year, slimy and scummy, and among its casualties is poor Jessica Alba, who is a cutie and shouldn't have been let out to play with these boys.

In asking us to believe David Spade as a romantic lead, it miscalculates beyond all reason.

An average Adam Sandler comedy, which, sadly, means it’s a below-average comedy — because whatever comedic fire and bursts of genuinely inspired humor Sandler once possessed have long ago burnt out.

The sideshows in Gummo offer no particular form -- or even formlessness -- despite the visual momentum created by Jean Yves Escoffier's arresting camera work. [6 March 1998, p.40]

Wild Orchid is an erotic film, plain and simple. It cannot be read any other way. There is no other purpose for its existence. Its story is absurd, and even its locale was chosen primarily for its travelogue value...What is relevant is that I did not find the movie erotic.

The movie is a chaotic mess, overloaded with special effects and explosions, light on continuity, sanity and coherence.

Pulling off a premise this creepy and cockamamie would require a lot of skill, far more than can be found in the director of "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" and the writers of "A Very Brady Sequel."

An odd, well-made and thoroughly unpleasant thriller.

This may be one of the least artful holiday films ever made. Even devout born-again Christians will find this hard to stomach.

It's an arch, awkward, ill-timed, forced political comedy set in 1959 and seemingly stranded there.

Lopez and Affleck are sweet and appealing in their performances; the buzz said they didn't have chemistry, but the buzz was wrong. What they don't have is conviction.

A deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one.

The kind of movie where you walk in, watch the first 10 minutes, know exactly where it's going, and hope devoutly that you're wrong.

McHale's Navy is an astonishingly bad film. Even if you never saw the early '60s TV series on which it is loosely based, you'll hate it. [18 Apr 1997, p.39]

Hulk Hogan can hoist 400-pound wrestlers over his head, but the former heavyweight champ still can't carry a movie in the hero's role. [11 Oct 1993, p.30]

Pesci has a lot of scenes that strike just the right note.

The action, direction and special effects are all better than the last time around, which isn't saying much, since Death Wish II was so ineptly directed and edited that it was an insult even to audiences that were looking for a bad movie.

There's camp-fun bad and interestingly horrible bad, and then there's just awful. Movie 43 is the "Citizen Kane" of awful.

Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive.

Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted.

The Ridiculous Six is sunk by a terrible script by Sandler and Tim Herlihy and some truly cringe-inducing work by a few of the players.

From what dark night of the soul emerged the wretched idea for The Nutcracker in 3D? Who considered it even remotely a plausible idea for a movie?

Very seriously confused in its objectives.

Nothing could have prepared us for the offensively stupid, shamelessly manipulative, ridiculously predictable and hopelessly dated crapfest that is Mother’s Day.

The movie is set up as a valentine to Vardalos. She should try sending herself flowers.

A loud, dopey chase film filled with substandard shootouts.

The film is reprehensible, dismaying, ugly, artless and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency.

The lockstep mentalities who made this movie tell their story entirely from a boring male point of view, supply us with male wimps and studs who are equally uninteresting, and view women only as wet T-shirt finalists. What a letdown for horny movie critics.

Not that anyone expected logic, but no one expected the series to so completely abandon much of what was familiar to the audience and become an amalgam of countless other horror-fantasies and pop culture media. [16 Aug 1993, p.24]

The screenplay by Kim Barker requires Bullock to behave in an essentially disturbing way that began to wear on me. It begins as merely peculiar, moves on to miscalculation and becomes seriously annoying.

Has an intriguing cast, a director who knows how to use his camera and a lot of sly humor. Shame about the story. When you see this many of the right elements in a lame movie, you wonder how close they came to making a better one.

Possesses the art and craft of a good movie, but not the story.

This is an astonishingly uninvolving and at times almost laughably melodramatic effort, marred by overwrought voice-over narration from Theron, a relentless barrage of scenes depicting horrific human suffering and a love story featuring one-dimensional characters we don’t particularly care about.

Absolutely nothing in this film suggests wit or talent; much of it suggests very easy money on the video aftermarket. [12 July 1993, p.27]

Has slick production credits and performances that are quite adequate given the (narrow) opportunities of the genre.

Strange, how good feardotcom is, and how bad. The screenplay is a mess, and yet the visuals are so creative this is one of the rare bad films you might actually want to see.

People may go to see Eddie Murphy once, twice, three or even six times in disposable movies like Harlem Nights, but if he wants to realize his potential he needs to work with a better writer and director than himself.

There is a bright spot. He (Poirier) used up all his doggy-do-do ideas in the first picture "See Spot Run."

It's a muddled, sometimes-atmospheric effort.

Jaws the Revenge is not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one - a ripoff.

Yes, it is a movie. But just barely so. I’d say it’s more like an excruciating, embarrassing, profoundly unfunny, poorly shot and astonishingly tone-deaf screech-fest featuring some of the least charismatic performances this side of one of those dreadful “reality” shows.

Maybe there's too much talent. Every character shines with such dazzling intensity and such inexhaustible comic invention that the movie becomes tiresome, like too many clowns.

An incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense.

And above all, the film is lacking in joy. It never seems like it's fun to be Billie Frank.

Dungeons & Dragons looks like they threw away the game and photographed the box it came in.

Let's face it. Nobody is going to Bolero for the plot anyway. They're going for the Good Parts.

Fair Game works as a thriller for anyone who lives entirely in the present.

This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

Cannonball Run II is one of the laziest insults to the intelligence of moviegoers that I can remember. Sheer arrogance made this picture.

This movie indicates that Charles Bronson just doesn't care any more, and is just going through the motions for the money. I admired his strong, simple talent once. What is he doing in a garbage disposal like this?

The more you think about what really happens in Cocktail, the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is.

Everything about this film feels forced, clunky and overwrought.

A dirty movie. Not a sexy, erotic, steamy or even smutty movie, but a just plain dirty movie. It made me feel unclean, and I'm the guy who liked "There's Something About Mary" and both "American Pie" movies.

Pants and wheezes and hurls itself exhausted across the finish line after barely 65 minutes of movie, and then follows it with 15 minutes of end credits in an attempt to clock in as a feature film.

The title gives fair warning. If you watch this movie, you’re in for an absolute, unmitigated, cringe-inducing, “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME WERE THEY THINKING?” disaster.

What's most shocking about Death Wish II is the lack of artistry and skill in the filmmaking. The movie is underwritten and desperately underplotted, so that its witless action scenes alternate with lobotomized dialogue passages. The movie doesn't contain an ounce of life. It slinks onto the screen and squirms for a while, and is over.

You've seen it all before, ad nauseum: Myers' face reflected in a windowpane, Myers appearing in deep focus over the shoulder of an oblivious victim, a strung-up body swinging from an overhang into the path of a screaming character (the Shape has a flair for the dramatic) and lots and lots of screaming characters. [4 Oct 1995, p.51]

The screenplay for this movie bears every sign of being a first draft - a quick and dirty one. The movie doesn’t feel written, it feels dictated. Three authors are listed, and from the way their movie plays, they must have sat around in an office somewhere trying to get all of their cliches in a row.

This movie has nothing to do with the song and the 1960 movie whose name it appropriates. It isn't a sequel and isn't a remake and isn't, in fact, much of anything.

The level of intelligence of the screenplay of "Saturn 3" is shockingly low - the story is so dumb it would be laughed out of any junior high school class in the country - and yet the movie was financed. Why?

Awful in so many different ways.

You can laugh at lines like: "Hey, everybody, let's go inside and eat some cake"; "Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!"; "Man, I just can't figure women out. Sometimes they're just too smart. Sometimes they're flat out stupid. Other times they're just evil." In Wiseau's worldview, if "The Room" were a woman, she wouldn't be "evil" or "too smart." That leaves "flat-out stupid." [12 Feb 2012, p.B2]

Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent.

Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses' achieves a kind of grandeur.

It’s just an awful and ridiculous and clumsily edited B-movie mostly of interest because of the name cast, an insanely horrible concert within the film — and the incredible back story about the making of “Grizzly II,” which could be great material for a fictional adaptation a la “Argo” or “The Big Short” or “American Hustle.”

This movie should have been struck by a lightning bolt.

The question, of course, of why anybody of any age would possibly want to see this film remains without an answer.

Chaos is ugly, nihilistic, and cruel -- a film I regret having seen. I urge you to avoid it.

Watching it, you feel like an eyewitness to injustice.

The acting is effective, the direction by Alexandre Franchi is confident, and the cinematography by Claudine Sauve could hardly look more assured.

Munger Road does an efficient, skillful job of audience manipulation using the techniques of darkness and vulnerability, and the truth that a horror not seen is almost always scarier than one you can see.

The film's value is in its portrait of Ruth, and her independence as a solo outsider in a vast, uncaring city.

You've seen houses with pumpkins in the windows and skeletons hanging from the trees, but you may never have seen such elaborate displays as the ones constructed by Victor Bariteau, Manny Souza, and Matthew and Richard Brodeur.

Yes, it’s another sports movie about underdogs reaching for the stars and winning, but what makes it unique is Starks’ interesting story and the fact that it’s about golf.

The Perfect Wave is aimed at a certain audience that will appreciate its message and let slide its deficiencies.

Hogtown is the most original film made in Chicago about Chicago to date.

Michael Caplan’s Algren is a beguiling appreciation of the novelist, reporter and essayist.

Algren admirer Kurt Vonnegut, a novelist and a Long Island neighbor, called the Chicago exile ”the loneliest man I ever knew.” Caplan and Mueller invite viewers to befriend this contrary figure.

[A] richly textured, sometimes flat-out hilarious and at times sobering documentary.