Ferrell may well shoulder the blame for Land of the Lost, even if he doesn't deserve it. He did, however, willingly participate in this coarse, sloppy big-screen version of the old Saturday-morning time-warp adventure.

For the record, this movie stars George Burns and Charlie Schlatter, and its one distinguishing feature is a consistent tastelessness, which still doesn't manage to make it much fun. [08 Apr 1988, p.H]

So fast, sleek and riveting it almost makes you expect miracles -- which never materialize.

The film's tone is utterly indistinct, beyond fatuous adoration of its subject.

While it plays fast and loose with loaded political iconography, this Robin Hood brings a whole new dimension to this age-old tale.

A pretty good film, acted powerfully .

It probably would have benefited from a 20- to 30-minute trim and, certainly, a smarter script, but the special effects truly are amazing.

The movie doesn't deserve any of the talent bestowed on it, from Reiner's amiable direction to the occasional grace notes in the performances of Hudson, Marceau and David Paymer.

The sole saving grace of Wrong Turn is its honesty. You get exactly what you expect -- blood, guts and people being taken to the killing floor. But just because it's honest doesn't make it good.

An amiable adventure illuminated at odd moments by some genuine inventiveness. [21 Dec 1986, p.12C]

Strives to be nothing more than easygoing and heartwarming.

Just say no.

Soft and predictable -- which might be OK if there were more laughs and insight.

The film's didactic passages cancel out its dramatic integrity, and the results are strangely neutral and unmoving.

Shelley Long stars in a limp copy of "Private Benjamin" with a location switch from the Army to the Girl Scouts. Long plays a Beverly Hills wife who decides to take over the local troop of spoiled brats. A number of tedious jokes about conspicuous consumption fall flat and Long is no Hawn when it comes to comedy. [24 March 1989, p.A]

Pirates is tedious round after tedious round of mutiny and rescue. Screen people are hanged and stabbed and garroted with great care, but there's nothing to put the audience out of its misery. [22 July 1986, p.5C]

Wish Upon isn't over-the-top wacky or campy, and in fact, feels slightly low-energy at times, but it's the kind of simple filmmaking coupled with absolutely insane writing and plot points that make it an ideal candidate for so-bad-it's-good viewing.

Keith -- a consistent hit-maker who wrote the controversial 9/11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" -- has a future in movies if he wants it. Hopefully, they'll be better ones than this.

I like its devotion to the drab outskirts of Sin City, and Buscemi's performance is right up his alley without being entirely predictable.

Broken Horses raises the question of what is cockamamie, and what is cockamamie and outlandish and ridiculous yet a perfectly swell time for those very reasons. This one's just cockamamie without the swell part.

The latest, Untraceable, owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set Untraceable is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios.

Stylistically, Acrimony has moments of genius — slow camera movements that push in on Melinda, emphasizing Henson’s performance and the building pressure — but it’s also hilariously cheesy, and slightly chintzy, which adds to its schmaltzy charm.

The whole movie seems designed to point out that there are far better things in life than being a ski instructor in Aspen, Colo.

But in the end everything comes down to Lawrence, who has yet to develop a truly distinct comedic sensibility.

A criminal waste of talent.

99 minutes of excruciating "reality."

Some may enjoy the cacophonous, raunchy, lowest-common-denominator dreck that The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard has to offer. To those I say, godspeed. But it’s undeniable that the actors, the audiences and the filmmakers all deserve better.

The cast generates the goodwill. Madison and Quinn bring heart and some shrewd dramatic instincts, while Cook and Sterling settle comfortably into a sincere comic key.

I didn't half-mind Fired Up, but half a mind is more than it deserves.

If the filmmakers wanted to talk so much, they should have just gotten together for a long, anecdote-filled, wine-soaked Spanish dinner party and amused themselves.

It's supposed to be one of those stories of a child's innocence - that means nudity - told in an unfettered way. But the young people in the film who grow up together on a tropical island are dumb-dodo types. As a result all we watch for is the nudity and, it turns out, teen-ager Brooke Shields is doubled in her nude scenes by a 31-year-old model. So much for truth and innocence. [11 July 1980, p.8]

Max Payne offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster--it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie--is the presence of Mark Wahlberg.

For the most part, the humor in House II is mild and conventional, and the suspense sequences never amount to much, thanks largely to the film's failure to play by any identifiable rules. In a film in which reality can be bent and rebent, following the director's whim of the moment, it is nearly impossible to establish any real sense of danger. Menace requires integrity, and "House II" doesn't have it.

The films are bad, but they are entertaining. Fifty Shades Freed, the final film of the trilogy, just might be the most competently made yet — which is a shame for those expecting the high camp factor of "Fifty Shades Darker."

The movie suffers from a devastating flaw for a comedy: It isn't very funny.

A comedy of bad manners with many punchy moments and many irritatingly glib ones.

More an uninspired letdown than a flabbergasting turkey... One reason for this lack of bite lies in the werewolves themselves. They're a bit too teddy-bearish, even oddly cuddly, and the fright scenes work better when you don't see much of them.

It lacks the rutting nuttiness of "Basic Instinct," even as it recycles much of that film's kiss-or-kill premise.

An exhaustingly pushy, phallocentric and witlessly smutty spoof of early '80s medieval fantasies such as "Krull" and "The Beastmaster."

Leave it to an American production team to remake the same premise into an inarguably worse movie. And this insufferable remake called The Man with One Red Shoe marks the second time in as many years that producer Victor Drai, a former estate developer, has taken a French movie and turned it into garbage. Last year he took the genuinely amusing ''Pardon Mon Affair'' and reworked it with the help of the increasingly annoying Gene Wilder into ''The Lady in Red,'' one of the year`s worst movies.

Hollywood Knights mock of authority, slob heroes and snob villains, and raunchy, gross-out humor invite comparisons to "Animal House" and "Porky's." [11 May 2000, p.6D]

Pure, witless discombobulation.

Even with 87.5 years to go, the 21st century may never see a stupider comedy than That's My Boy.

Watching Heather Graham, Tom Cavanagh and a stridently adorable Alan Cumming do their wide-eyed, moony thing in the romantic comedy Gray Matters raises the question: Is it possible for a filmgoer to be twinkled to death?

Suffers from an overwhelming sense of teen movie facility and "Murder She Wrote" neatness.

A big techno-dud.

Slow and dragging, Pootie Tang is worse than a below-average sketch-to-screen Saturday Night Live film.

It`s a lamebrained movie, without much sense in its construction.

For a while, director Roth plays this stuff relatively straight, and Willis periodically reminds us he can act (the grieving Kersey cries a fair bit here).

It's a movie that doesn't have an original thought in its head, and seems to like it that way.

Heavily laden with antinuclear messages, bad dubbing and worse dialogue, Godzilla 1985 is a pale imitation of the original film, a calculated bit of cinematic nostalgia that leaves one yawning. [20 Sep 1985, p.J]

Perhaps blackmail isn't an easy subject to warm up to, or robbery the best ground to rebuild a relationship on, but with a little care, some added ingredients and a bit more spice, Getting Even With Dad could have been a satisfying meal and not just an afternoon snack. [17 Jun 1994, p.H]

With this noisy, fast, chaotic "Hellboy," Marshall is at his most cheeky and most unhinged. It's certainly… a lot.

The film is responsible, earnest, well-intentioned and, as it was in Sundance, maddeningly inconsistent.

Envy is a shaggy dog-poop story that'll make you wish you could spray something at the screen to make it disappear.

It would take the dark wit of a Billy Wilder or a Coen brother--or at least a Neil Simon--to put across this kind of material.

Stick is quite awful.

Aimed squarely at adolescents in subconscious search of strong father figures, most of the movie is dull and familiar. [18 Aug 1987, p.C]

It's dispiriting to see Jolie wasting herself (and a good supporting cast) on a story that requires little more than an average pretty actress who can wear clothes well and laugh and cry on cue.

McCarthy’s open-faced performance is reason enough to give it your time, even if nearly everything surrounding her feels unworthy.

Many of the original film's booby-trap scenarios are repeated here, but without Milius' grandiosity and nihilism. There's less of both in the new Red Dawn. It's not a disaster. It's just drab.

It's a glossy, well-mounted, slickly done but almost stuporously predictable affair, both formula-bound and utterly illogical.

With her arresting, off-kilter look of bruised desire, Michelle Williams ends up being the most interesting aspect of this somber corn.

The whole thing is a wild concept, hinging on the plausibility of every character's motivations, which are all a bit squishy.

Too bad the movie concentrates on the male point of view because it kicks to life when Zellweger is on screen.

Lawrence and Zahn generate enough comic tension and mayhem to jump-start this mass of action-comedy cliches into a fairly amusing show.

Perhaps if writer-director George Gallo ("29th Street") had tried to simplify this potentially sweet story, instead of mucking it up with all sorts of chases and shtick, it might have worked as a modern Christmas fable, complete with charity, kindness, and Three Not-So-Wise Men. But instead, we are presented with a Christmas buffet of overstuffed fruitcake and overspiked punch. Too stale, too sweet, too much. [02 Dec 1994, p.J]

A buddy cop film in which one of the cops continually quotes dialogue espoused by fictional cops, in everything from "Heat" to "RoboCop," and not once is it funny.

The film is utterly lacking in the campy quality of the World Wrestling Federation telecasts.

The film is not badly made. It is, however, weirdly flat, given the stakes and the wild screaming matches.

Mulcahy has toned down the fancy, self-conscious camerawork of the original, which he also directed, and pushes the story forward with enough flash and pop to divert viewers from the shaky premises. [01 Nov 1991, p.F]

The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over.

It's got the sex. It's got the violence. And, most important, it has an array of pot-centered jokes that might be funny to someone under the influence of an illegal substance. [30 Apr 1999]

By turns brilliant and simplistic, moving and preposterous, the movie takes one of the ultimate hot-button American issues -- the morality of capital punishment -- and dissolves it into a volatile mix of psychological thriller and socio-political fable.

Despite the actors, who at least get some swell clothes to wear, Winter's Tale is a bit of a soul-crusher itself.

It's the highest praise to describe Friend Request as "a hoot" — the kind of midnight movie best seen with a large crowd laughing and screaming along, offering words of advice or encouragement to the naive characters on screen.

The whole endeavor is a naked attempt to cash in on the young adult fantasy trend spearheaded by "Harry Potter." There have been many attempts to snatch the Potter crown (and purse) but Artemis Fowl will not be the hot new kiddie fantasy franchise, based on this utterly charmless first entry.

Never really moves beyond its premise. It never takes us to a place of real understanding.

The sharpest five minutes in Alex Cross, by a considerable margin, belong to Giancarlo Esposito.

The film works a bit better than the 2004 "Punisher" installment, the one starring surly, dislikable Thomas Jane as Frank Castle.

Called upon to blend the fey and the fiendish, the usually fine Cage is reduced to acting like some kind of combination of Dudley Moore and John Carradine. Throughout, though, he seems to be enjoying it; I can't imagine why. [2 June 1989, Friday, p.E]

Only Sarah Paulson, as the Spirit's doctor and sometime lover, seems to be in there playing the scenes as if she were a human being in a comic book superhero scenario, as opposed to a comic book character stuck in a cruddy movie.

A fitfully funny retread of "48 Hours," "Fled" and dozens of others.

The slapstick is crudely executed. And the movie never makes up its mind regarding how nasty the ghost of Kate is going to play her revenge tactics.

Has the unfortunate effect of overtipping the dramatic scales in favor of the Southern generals and turning almost everybody into waxen idols who spout flowery rhetoric.

Outrageously vapid and overdone movie.

Cheerful but mind-numbing.

It has a lack of ambition and energy that is almost total: It's the most this movie can do to roll over and ask for a little more lotion on its back. [22 July 1987]

Director Monteverde, whose previous feature, "Bella," came out nine years ago, clearly meant his film to lift up everyone and condescend to no one, least of all Pepper and Hashimoto. But Little Boy comes off as a picture-postcard fake.