[Chris Elliott]'s spoof of a young seaman's apprenticeship seems desperate as he piles special effects willy-nilly atop jibes at stupid old salts. [14 Jan 1994]

Kathy Baker, as Burden's elegantly sodden mother, shows the only sign of interpretive life in this stiff-jointed enterprise. She has about five minutes on screen; she's lucky that way.

This is the third in a hyper-violent and rather stupid series of thrillers about an adult child killer--with knives for fingers--who is burnt to death but now has returned to haunt more teenagers in their sleep. The kids are all patients at a clinic where group therapy fails to stop their nightmares. What you get for your money are scenes with a severed head, the simultaneous injection of 10 hypodermic needles presumably filled with heroin and four long tongues that turn into arm and ankle straps for a sex scene. Whoopee! The film's only blessing? It just may be bad enough to kill off the series.

Will come off as insipid, unfunny and too serious at times for its own good.

The kind of movie that produces a particular series of questions: How the heck did this get made? Who needed a tax shelter? Who had money to burn?

As directed by Daniel Petrie from the slightest excuse for a story by Stephen McPherson and Elizabeth Bradley, Cocoon: The Return amounts to little more than a desperate effort to fill a couple of hours of screen time, to which the commercially potent title can be affixed. [23 Nov 1988, p.C1]

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

This limp, lifeless, one-joke action comedy sequel, directed by David Kerr, comes 15 years after the 2003 "Johnny English," and manages to overstay its welcome, even at a scant 88 minutes, mostly because writer William Davies didn't bother to write anything other than "Johnny English is bad at spying."

Alan Johnson`s direction is so limply amateurish that the entire project quickly descends to the level of a cheesy backlot production. The action lurches along without the slightest regard for logic or pacing, and there are Dominick`s commercials with more sophisticated characterization.

Crummy video-store flick. [28 Dec 1990, p.S2]

It sets a tone, all right. A lot of gamers (sorry, "filmgoers") may well enjoy writer-director Michael Davis' ultraviolent lark. It's not meant to be taken seriously. But films like this are worth taking seriously because they're genuinely cruddy and hollow and, yes, vile.

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

Bewilderingly bad.

All the principals in this cinematic mess have had moments of glory on stage and screen, and one can only hope they got paid well for participating in this comedic embarrassment.

From my vantage point, it doesn't include a single laugh.

"We had fun, didn't we?" asks Prince at the end, just before he goes to heaven. It's nice that somebody did. [04 Jul 1986, p.3C]

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

Unlike Richard Pryor, whose rough language adds an important rhythmic punctuation to his monologues, Murphy uses vulgarity to shock and divide his audience.

What's remarkable is how absolutely every character in the film is a movie cliche.

There's always room for debate, but John Schlesinger's The Believers could be the dullest movie ever made about child sacrifice. [10 Jun 1987, p.4C]

The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.

A limp retelling of the werewolf legend that is about as frightening as a rubbery Richard Nixon mask.

It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest.

A weirdly out-of-scale movie that constantly juxtaposes the trivial and the cosmic, less to comic effect than to a mounting sense of muddle and uncertainty.

Newbie director Richards shoots all the women like slabs of meat, and his self-seriousness throughout London--some of it tries to be funny, a lot of it is funny by accident--borders on the delusional.

Al Pacino has become a self-involved film star, and he`s one of the stars I hate.