Leaves us puzzled as to why the term "damned" applies at all, when vampirism is depicted as so cool, fashion-savvy and glamorous.

Could have been a funny movie. There are a few truths about food-service that McKittrick gets right but doesn't fully exploit.

The action is messy, the geography indiscernible, and a few shots seem stitched together with but a single pixel and a prayer.

In White Noise, Hollywood and Michael Keaton try to make a decent thriller out of ghosts in the machine but come up with lousy reception and static.

The movie goes too far on too little motivation - and the middle section, with its maggoty villains, roiling skies and native revolts, seems almost barmy. Yet Exorcist: Beginning does score a small victory. It's not as bad as you'd think.

The villainous creatures are less yucky than their counterparts in the original (the meanest dudes look like overfed lobsters with an epidermal problem), the sets are cheesy and the special effects (supervised by Derek Meddings of Batman) are humdrum. [11 Feb 1991, p.7C]

It stinks from top to bottom. Even Tom Cruise ("Risky Business"), one of the most appealing actors of his generation, can now claim to have made his first truly awful film. And the same goes for director Ridley Scott ("Alien"), who specializes in artful, heartless movies. Legend, however, isn't the least bit artful. [18 Apr 1986, p.N]

Waste in the health care system is deplorable, but waste on the movie screen isn't so great either.

The only people humiliated, really, are older people and heavy people and nerds and vegans and black people and mothers who breast-feed their 4-year-olds. Everybody else gets a pass.

This material is offensive. The film may end with a straight-faced reassurance that "no actual Torah scrolls were destroyed or damaged in the making of this motion picture," but it's perfectly willing to exploit the Holocaust for cheap, weak thrills.

Because Stonewall turns everyone into a sentimental or suffocating "type" instead of a dimensional character, the results are sheer noise.

Not so much character-driven as character-dragged--against its will.

Custom-designed for 13 year-olds, laden with broad sight gags, gross sound effects and a bowlful of potty jokes.

This movie is just not cool or hip or in any way extreme. Sitting through Grind is a real grind.

Kutcher delivers a credibly serious performance as Evan, and he's surrounded by a skilled supporting cast.

Birke's script is plainly straightforward, a simple supernatural chase story. It doesn't plumb the depths of what might make Slender Man scary, so Slender Man isn't scary at all.

A good-natured but trivial Manhattan romantic comedy.

There's nothing original about the father-son conflict that forms the core of the film, nor is there enough suspense and drama.

A movie just begging to go up in the flames of camp. If only somebody had brought a match.

What a letdown! The remake of the 1935 classic ''The Bride of Frankenstein'' with rock star Sting as the doctor and Jennifer Beals as the reconstructed bride is a complete failure in telling its principal story.

Jason Lives is not a good movie. It is as predictable as a City Council vote in the Daley era; a lamely acted film filled with the most contrived slaughter and utterly lacking in suspense. [4 Aug 1986, p.C5]

In Madhouse, writer-director Tom Ropelewski doesn't so much serve up an idea as force-feed it down our gullets. It takes a game bird to sit through the entire movie. [16 Feb 1990, p.K]

This is the laziest kind of filmmaking.

A breakthrough for karate comedy king Chan, but not necessarily the kind we've all been waiting and hoping for. It's an ultra-digitized DreamWorks show crammed with elaborate special effects, the kind that physical-stunt specialist Chan has always avoided.

Never really feels right.

At the end of 83 unmerciful minutes, audiences will be exclaiming, "Dude, I can't believe I sat through that movie!?" Stick to the trailer.

Lofing and Cluff certainly know the found-footage ropes, and the tropes; we'll see if their next project reveals a little more imagination.

A daring, entertaining, but somewhat disappointing affair, something of an overreacher despite Lee's usual pyrotechnics and a brilliant cast.

The reason basketball is such a great spectator sport isn't because of its opportunities for razzle-dazzle editing and direction. It's because the game is kinetic enough without all that swoosh/zap/wham business.

A hit and mostly miss parody. [5 Feb 1993, p.C]

There's nothing classic about Surviving Eden, even if it is better than reality TV.

It's an event film, all about flash and spectacle, even though the movie itself is void of any real substance.

The surreal and silly sequel to the hit 2015 comedy skates on the well-known but still-appealing comic personas of stars Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg and their zany chemistry.

Teenage summer film trash such as The Heavenly Kid makes one root for the leaves to start turning brown.

All the obligatory plot elements are there. Love and loss, anger and forgiveness, illness and death. But they never flow together to make a coherent story. Instead, they just pop up whenever the script is in trouble. Which is all the time.

Led by a trio of dumb, dumber and dumbest, Without a Paddle is a testosterone comedy that might just as well be titled "Without a Brain Cell."

So dark and dirge-like are its first 85 minutes that a few uplifting minutes at the end can't dissipate the somber cloud Noel summons.

As Premonition zigzags toward its solution it loses its head completely, packing a risible final reel with left-field religious disquisitions and heartfelt warnings against infidelity.

I can only hope that this film was a lot of fun to make. That way, someone will have enjoyed the experience.

The first half hour of Hot Chick, before the switch, plays like soft-core porno from the '60s. The rest plays like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch stretched to the breaking point.

There's almost no reason to see the movie, unless you have no qualms about wasting your time.

Johnson Family Vacation is simply a bad trip.

For years now Wilder has been trying to imitate the success of his mentor, director Mel Brooks. But he has repeatedly failed. That's why the biggest mystery in "Haunted Honeymoon" is why anyone would still give Wilder money to make a picture.

While it's fun to watch Garner return to her action roots, the brute force haymaker that is Peppermint is a far cry from the sophisticated thrills of "Alias."

New in Town is "The Pajama Game" without the songs, the laughs or the bare-knuckled realism.

There's something light and insubstantial about this movie. It almost floats away as you watch it.

It's outrageously stereotypical and weirdly personal, so loonily exaggerated it keeps surprising you.

Tries to blend old film noir and new high-tech thriller styles with only sporadic impact.

Plagued by continuity problems, ham-fisted storytelling and a problematic voiceover by Da Brat, Civil Brand feels less like a prison movie than a prison sentence.

There is a good movie here--Strait actually sings the songs that stand on their own, and he's appealing, despite the rock movie cliches.

The fight scenes are staged cleanly enough by Newt Arnold, a veteran assistant director (to Sam Peckinpah, among others) making his debut at the helm. But the contest format is hopelessly repetitive and inert, the characters would seem underdeveloped in a comic book, and the restricted setting ensures that the action will never develop any real scale or velocity. The Chinese may take it on the chin in Bloodsport, but their own movies are infinitely better.

There's no reason to look at this movie unless you're interested in computer graphics. But, if you are, why not wait for the video game? It may not be any better,but at least you can turn it off. [17 Jan 1996, p.7]

Not a remake of the Stewart Granger-Deborah Kerr epic, this film has been made, so obviously and calculatedly, to capitalize on the success of ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' and ''Romancing the Stone,'' seeking their crafty harmony of action, romance and humor. The result is action so ludicrous that it falls consistently between thrilling and amusing and never comes in sufficient amounts of either.

Starts with such promising quirkiness that it's easy to forget for the moment that you are watching a teen comedy.

It's a murky, empty-headed dive into the depths of the Antarctic and the heart of monster movie cliches that leaves you praying for most of the cast to get killed off fast, to put them (and us) out of our misery.

Like Ice Cube's "Friday," How High probably will survive as an underground classic, until it's pushed further underground and forgotten by the next disposable "cult classic" to hit video.

A bizarre, bloody adventure movie.

A movie of good intentions and awful results.

Has a terrific premise but no script.

Scary Movie 2 had seven writers. Seven. That's one writer for every big laugh in its stealthy 82 minutes. More frightening: these jokes are worth waiting for.

A movie that keeps reminding you of its antecedents, all the way back to 1984 and the comic adventure “Romancing the Stone.”

Seyfried's a good actress, but all the art direction in the world can't make this version of events the stuff either of dreams or of nightmares.

Star vehicles this rickety have a way of making the world unsafe for comic democracy.

Presumably, this movie was designed to be a fun romp, and in that it fails.

The animation itself is just OK. And the reworked script, despite some funny one-liners, is pretty much there just to pull the story along to its inevitable conclusion. [19 March 1999, Friday, p. A]

Amiable Gooding still smiles through it all, weathering the cold, physical abuse and implied racism, doing his best to make his audience believe that Snow Dogs isn't offensive mush. But he can't bring it off.

Michael O'Keefe, a likable enough presence, seems wildly miscast as the young slugger. O'Keefe is so likable that we can't really accept him as a heavy in this role. [29 March 1985, p.A]

Although several of her (Breillat's) previous films were intriguing and provocative, this one seems styled more as raw material for satire on "Mad TV" or "Saturday Night Live."

It’s tolerable, I suppose, if you don’t have to listen to it. Unfortunately it’s a musical so you have to listen to it.

To call this picture "Hot Pursuit" is false advertising; "Lethargic Pursuit" would be more accurate. [22 May 1987, p.A]

Its jokes aren't funny. Its sloppy direction comes courtesy of Jordan Brady, who made "The Third Wheel," another reportedly failed comedy gathering cobwebs at Miramax.

The role sounds like a sentimental trap, but Penn doesn't fall into it. It's a sensational performance, and he illumines a movie that sometimes seems in danger of descending into modish Hollywood political correctness.

Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage should be ashamed to have written such nonsense.

The film doesn’t begin to know what to do with the reincarnation idea beyond a few sharply edited micro-flashbacks. Is the look on Wahlberg’s face the character thinking What is going on? Or is it the actor thinking Am I in the next ‘Matrix’ or the silliest movie of 2021?

Falls into a familiar trap, resembling a neatly wrapped made-for-TV homily. [26 February 1999, Friday, p.A]

Jovovich and Krause are as photogenic and blandly naive as their predecessors, and their ultimate commingling is, if anything, even tamer than in the original. Veteran television-movie director William A. Graham and screenwriter Leslie Stevens have fashioned a 98-minute tropical vacation ad. [02 Aug 1991, p.B]

Isn't just the weakest of the "Die Hard" pictures; it's a lousy action movie on its own terms.

He's a washout at the car wash, she's a waitress with a dream. Together they motor off to Tinseltown in search of fame, glory and, maybe, Bert Convy. It's a country-western love story that'll tug at those heartstrings, folks, and, no, I'm not making any of this up. [21 June 1985, p.6C]

An adequate horror movie for the Halloween season, but it too easily sinks into haunted-house-film conventions, even if the haunted house is decked out as an Italian luxury liner.

The movie contains its moments, charms and felicities-even its sharp stings of pleasure and pain. [20 May 1994]

I enjoyed Eliza Dushku's mad poetess, probably for the wrong reasons, but with a project this meager, you take your artful sneers and scenic diversions where you can get them.

The story has no center; the duck is not likable, and the costly, overwrought, laser-filled special effects that conclude the movie are less impressive than a sparkler on a birthday cake.

The film, with its wearying gamer-style rounds of death, is routine at best.

For most of its length, Revenge of the Nerds II is pleasantly stupid summer fun, though it does have a nasty way of turning inspirational on you.

The theory seems to be that if you indiscriminately toss in enough familiar ingredients, you get soup. But Graveyard Shift is more like lumpy water. [29 Oct 1990, p.5C]

It's pretty muddle-headed and confusing.

Just Married is what industry people refer to as "January Junk," cinematic flotsam that gets tossed ashore once they have cleared the shelves of Oscar contenders.

Airborne is a fairly shameless little picture, but at least it follows the First Rule of Cinema. It gives us something interesting to watch: the climactic hill race, with the largely unidentifiable racers zooming and hurdling one another on hairpin hillside curves...Unfortunately, Airborne also follows the First Rule of Bad Movies. Instead of telling a story, the filmmakers follow an outline (or, in this case, an in-line).

The jokes are dirty and wildly inappropriate, but are thoughtfully played.

A truly stupid film based on what should have been a surefire hit - a cross-country car race. Too many stars spoil the action, including Burt Reynolds, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. [19 June 1981, p.2-8]

As a period ghost story, it’s pretty pallid.

The movie's own brand of charm has its subset of smarm.

Mind-numbing sequel to "Pokemon the First Movie."

There may be better ways to waste your time than seeing this movie.

Happily was begun as an old-fashioned 2-D "flat" cartoon and then switched by producer John Williams (of "Shrek") and director Paul J. Bolger to 3-D during production. The style finally is an uncomfortable amalgam of both.

LaBeouf's quivering instability creates the impression that his performance is constantly buffering on us. He's never dull — he is, in fact, a compelling actor in any circumstance — but the material ends up cheapening the experiences of so many real-life veterans, which surely was not the filmmakers' intention.

Contains too little of the original's campy spirit and too many whistles, bells, explosions and screams.

This movie is crushingly ordinary in every way, which with Rand I wouldn't have thought possible.