This is a movie that boggles the mind: a bad-taste comedy that makes the average effort by the Farrelly Brothers (mysteriously thanked in the credits) look like a Merchant-Ivory film.

Band of the Hand does not lack humorous moments. Unfortunately, most of these occur in the first half of the movie as the young criminals play out their primitive conflicts. But this able group of young actors has been given the difficult and insurmountable task of breathing life into a film that cannot decide if it is an after-school television special or a ''Miami Vice'' episode.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, as some Albanian dramatist once said, but Taken 2 isn't good-cold, as in steely and purposeful; it's cold as in "lost the scent."

A staggeringly bad picture: a shallow, cliche-ridden mess that keeps blowing up on screen.

Like Father Like Son has the cheap, florid look of a rejected television pilot, and the same air of anything-for-a-laugh desperation. [02 Oct 1987, p.J]

Buried somewhere in the screenplay are some Robert Altman-esque satirical intentions, in which the wildly corrupt college football recruitment process is offered as a panoramic image of frenzied American venality. But Bud Smith's broad, colorless direction removes whatever sting the material may once have had, edging the action instead toward sub-"Police Academy" slapstick-flying pizzas, exploding fire extinguishers, mass fist- fights that break out for no discernible reason. [25 March 1988, p.D]

It's the sort of film that can only be watched in stunned disbelief, as it lumbers from one misfired, unpleasant sequence to the next. The nicest thing that can be said about Nothing but Trouble is that there is nothing else like it, thank goodness. [19 Feb 1991, p.7C]

Dark Streets lost me early, real early, like still-adjusting-my-eyes-in-a-dark-theater early.

Released in theaters five years after its 1999 Sundance Film Festival premiere, Kalem's film is too precious, too self-conscious and far too enamored with itself to ever have any kind of genuine emotional truth.

Where the original was a serious film with funny moments, this movie isn't sure if it's a drama or comedy, too incompetently rendered to be both. What it accomplishes instead is to be nothing at all. An excessive, stupid, empty-headed nothing.

The movie slogs along in between combat scenes. Only a precious few of the bantering jokes among the green quartet hold any amusement for those over the age of 10.

The Emoji Movie could not be more meh.

Director Arthur Penn (Bonnnie and Clyde) may have intended this to be a campy homage to Hitchcock, but instead he gives us a boring, frustrating and stupid story. [06 Feb 1987, p.A]

RoboCop 2 is every bit as sadistic as its 1987 predecessor but considerably less effective.

Black Moon Rising utilizes every cheap thriller trick in the book. If a lackluster script is going to rely on gadgetry and chase scenes to satisfy its audience, it had better pulse with more suspense and originality than a TV rerun. This one doesn't. [10 Jan 1986, p.34]

A mess of a movie, a no chills nightmare about what happens to a group of rubes at a Carolina truck stop when the machines go nuts. [29 July 1986, p.3]

The movie itself has no edge. It barely has a movie.

The coarse material, from a screenplay by Seth Winston and Michael J. Nathanson, is roughed up even more by Dragoti's abrasive exaggeration, both of performance (there's a terrifying sequence in which Hicks finally gets her long dreamed-of engagement ring and goes into a frenzy of triumph and delight) and of visual style (visits to the office of sinister shrink Wallace Shawn are filmed in weird expressionist off-angles). [14 Apr 1989, p.D]

A rock 'n' roll film should be funny-crazy -- not just a big, dumb promo for some over-the-hill dudes in makeup who are trying to sell today's kids on yesterday's glory by championing deliquency.

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.

The film may as well be titled "Stephenie Meyer's Waiting Around."

A stupid, stylized road picture. [10 Sept 1993]

Has a terrific premise but no script.

In A Thousand Words the camera stays about two inches from Murphy's hyperactive face, and you start to see the strain and desperation in the actor's eyes.

One of the most mawkish films ever made.

The political movie satire from hell.

There hasn`t been a movie quite like Police Academy 4 since, well . . . "Police Academy 3." Make that exactly like, because here are the same characters, the same situations and the same jokes (most of them focused on damage suffered in the genital region) that have served the series since its inauspicious debut in 1984.

Plenty of comedies aren't funny, but this one is more than that. It's wholeheartedly narcissistic in its portrait of male petulance and self-pity.