To the fan of ’80s slashers, this return to glorious excess is a beautiful thing.

Redundant to the point of being absolutely pointless, a sequel that's almost a note-for-note, beat-for-beat redo of its predecessor, only with all the entertaining stuff left out.

Imagine a feature-length version of the "Large Marge" sequence from "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" and you won't be too far off, only that was scarier.

Sure, it's amusing, but it isn't much more.

Director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day) has a shruggingly action-intensive style, which feels at once heavy-handed and lazy.

For the large-type crowd, one that prefers to have its "dirty" clean and silly.

Sadly, though, the movie as a whole feels blatantly dedicated to fleecin' da kidz.

It's flapping its wings so desperately in pursuit of artistic heights that it nosedives directly into the ground. The relentless exertion makes the film a chore to watch.

Everyone seems more relaxed this time around, including director Harold Ramis, who was presumably less intimidated now that he knows De Niro can be really funny and draw a large audience to a comedy.

What's missing is romance. Despite the engaging friskiness of its two stars, the film is romantically vapid. Watching it is like trying to warm up to a hologram.

Certainly it exists solely to sell a soundtrack; the movie, like most made for teens, is well beside the point.

Deafeningly dull movie.

Merhige is too talented to be dismissed as a wannabe, but here his gifts for clever angles and oogy feelings are tethered to blasé genre redundancies and clunky storytelling. Looks great, less thrilling. I blame the screenwriters.

Snappily directed and edited, and there are moments of funny acting...but the script is all homiletic commonplaces, in quip form, and the wisdom is both stale and dubious.

Director Christopher B. Stokes (House Party 4) shapes up the fabulous dance sequences with undeniable energy, and real-life brothers Houston and Grandberry are two of the most enjoyable musicians to appear onscreen since Sting played a bellboy.

The result is by no means the embarrassment that many such offerings from unjustifiably vain actor-auteurs have been, but nor does it present much of anything new or compelling to demand one's attention.

Comes across as artificial.

It makes for a nice lightweight evening.

A whole lot of something about nothing.

It's a self-satisfied, self-loathing mess that demands you adore and cheer for the very person you come to hate well before its 105 minutes are up. Little Black Book will leave you feeling skuzzy.

Rebound isn't funny.

Kusama offers moments of inspiration, but it frustrates like hell that she couldn't nail it completely.

Ryan never quite convinces us she's seen the inside of a fight gym, much less that she's worthy to be Rocky in a miniskirt. On the other hand, her director here was not Campion but actor Charles S. Dutton, whose behind-the-camera skills, developed via cable TV, tend toward the cartoonish.

Salva directs cheap thrills effectively, but his own apparent desires come off more frightening than any winged demon.

Are there really legions of postboomers out there sighing nostalgically over the happy hours they spent watching Inspector Gadget?

There's no kick to its bag of tricks...It's a mild one among biker pics, a tricycle only pretending to be a Hog.

Standard revenge shenanigans ensue, with more boo-hoo numbers from Vin, who ain't up to it -- he hasn't been this lame since, uh, ever.

This special-effects-crammed action blockbuster is not rocket science. It's more like rocket fun.

Several visual nods to the game are amusing, but it's tough to recommend the movie to anyone who doesn't already own a PlayStation.

The Jackal isn't much--it certainly isn't up to the 1973 Fred Zinnemann Day of the Jackal it loosely adapts and updates--but it does offer the fascination of watching big-ticket actors attempt to spin their images.

Part female revenge flick, part Saturday Night Live skit, part courtroom drama, and part religious tent revival, this movie never congeals into anything worth watching.

Unhampered by imagination and driven solely by libido.

It may be his (Greenaway's) breeziest and kindest-hearted effort to date.

Ultimately, it's the hip cast that keeps things hopping.

Emotionally distressing yet compulsively watchable,

When the movie's not playing stupid, it's aiming for sickly sweet sincerity. It's such a jarring and inevitably juvenile juxtaposition it comes off like a Hallmark card parody written by the staffers at "Cracked."

In his observant, swiftly paced Stardom, Arcand does it all with relentless wit, high style, and a suggestion of tragedy.

It doesn't help that the special effects aren't spectacular, the pace is numbing, and Bierko is an even less mesmerizing presence than Keanu Reeves.

Taken as a whole, the movie seems to be searching for a harmony it never really achieves.

Flecked with delicious malice, and the kids, especially newcomer Coughlin, performs with verve and high energy.

If the Navy is looking for splashy recruiting tools, it could do worse than Stealth, a zillion-dollar action movie stuffed with futuristic jet fighters, glamorous carrier pilots and an overload of explosive, mostly digital derring-do.

Alas, the film has good intentions, but it's a failure. Just try to stay awake.

Stay away: Everything about the movie is rinky-dink, from its phony, lifeless dialogue to its drab, shabby sitcom look to its choppy editing, all of which can wear on you after 95 minutes that come to feel like an eternity.

It's not a movie one feels like hating, but the Hindi musical numbers aren't enough to elevate this over, say, "Pretty Woman."

May steal from the best, but it does it so badly and obviously that it has to depend upon gratuitous shock-cuts and soundtrack stings to elicit any kind of reflex-action fright from the viewer.

It's barely a movie at all, more like a thousand car commercials spliced together in an hour.

At first, Ma Mère is shocking and even alluring, but it doesn't take long for the conceit to wear thin, especially since the characters so rarely act as recognizable humans.

It's too bad, then, that Anderson (whose only other major credit is "Mortal Kombat," but of course) and first-time screenwriter Philip Eisner felt so compelled to do away with suspense and turn Event Horizon into a big-budget slasher film.

This beast is as subtle as a Red Bull enema, but it succeeds magnificently as compulsively watchable spectacle.

It's not a terrible premise -- It is, however, terribly executed.

Condensing, paring and shorthanding the story elements can be daunting, and, despite the efforts of Kasdan and Goldman, two masters at wrangling unwieldy source material into shape, there is some awkwardness and confusion in the result.

The heist itself is quite nicely filmed herein, but unfortunately, getting to it requires sitting through a bunch of noisy, fussy crap, from the overly busy soundtrack to the irritating narration of stoned guy Leonardo Nam.

It's too easy, but here goes: This movie's a Loser. Sorry.

Director Marcus Raboy hasn't made a bad movie, exactly -- just one that seems to have forgotten its own jokes, much as those who watch it will forget everything about it a week later, stoned or not.

One can only assume all the, ah, good stuff landed on the cutting-room floor, because it sure as hell didn't make it to Mars.

Visit Red Planet, and you'll boldly go where everyone has gone before.

This hackneyed, hapless and utterly useless redo of an overrated 1960s sitcom is excruciating to sit through for a dozen reasons.

If the first movie played like a midseason TV pilot, its successor comes off like an extended episode of a generic sitcom.

It's a fast, entertaining ride.

This Mansion should satisfy, at least until the disappointing climax.

Like its predecessor, this cartoon adaptation is a bit too all over the place for its own good, never entirely clear on whether to play as parody or homage.

The movie ultimately cops out by culminating in a fistfight between two humans, with nary a cyborg missile-throwing devil in sight.

Nothing worse than a silly movie that takes itself seriously, that bores us to death while we wait for the finale that comes too late.

Everything that happens proves just as predictable as before.

The only genuine surprises on hand are the few moments when the film defies the expectations that have been programmed into our collective neurons by the past 25 years of horror movies.

Basic really brings to mind a Travolta film from 2000, "Battlefield Earth," in that it's so astonishingly awful it becomes a sort of kinky pleasure; just when you think Travolta has fallen to the bottom of the barrel, he pulls out a shovel and dons his miner's helmet to see what lies beneath.

An utter drag, a tepid and sterilized telling of Susann's life.

Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone's first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt.

This is a sequel so bad that even Cedric the Entertainer and Anthony Anderson didn't return for it, let alone Terrence Howard and Paul Giamatti.

If, having seen "Jackass" half a dozen times, you now yearn to watch a pair of identical twins from Texas Tech cavort in the wet T-shirt contest or hear mobs of drunken undergraduates screaming for more margaritas, here's your flick.

Rarely has one movie seemed so predestined to reduce any and all attempted criticism to so many column inches of impotent gibberish.

Initially artsy, then campy, then tense, it would have worked better if writer-directors Peter and Michael Spierig had kept everything serious and let the inherent absurdism of zombie attacks speak for itself without additional ironic comment.

Feels like a quirky sitcom -- "Arrested Development" without the development.

The fights are mostly cool, save the final one with too many quick cuts, and the morphing graffiti and tattoos are nifty. If only the rest of it weren't so stupid.

As by-the-numbers as VCR instructions. And, inexplicably, it's also a blast.

Fame this film ain't.

Equilibrium improves as it rolls along -- either that or, ironically, it wears down the senses until the viewer succumbs.

No doubt Fox wants to tap into those Latina dollars, but you've got to spend money to make money, and this shoddily cheap-looking product ain't gonna do it.

D is for Dreadful. And Duchovny.

Welcome to Mooseport... is intended to be a comedy; that hypothesis is a generous leap of faith, given the fact that "House of Sand and Fog" contains more moments of mirth than this rather joyless exercise in waste and torpor.

As worthless a piece of garbage as we've seen this year.

Lackadaisical feel of the film; Freundlich is unable to generate much suspense.

Yes, there are more cheap shocks this time around, and they're fun to watch, but you'll have forgotten most of them by the time you make it out to your car.

Seems far too familiar for comfort. "About a Boy," anyone?

LaBeouf's got the beef, and his inevitably bright future may be the only reason anyone will ever look back on The Battle of Shaker Heights.

The score sucks and the acting is weak, but there are times when certain moviegoers just feel the need to stare far-fetched, blood-drenched death in the eye and laugh. It's here, so have at it.

Doesn't work as comedy or drama or anything in between.

Is there anything more tedious than the guy who complains and complains about something he knows nothing about? Danish cinema auteur Lars von Trier has never been to the United States because he's afraid of flying, yet he seems determined to keep making movies about how horrible this country is.

As the harried household head in The Out-of-Towners, the thrill is gone. Martin's character is dull, and his performance is fatigued -- Hawn, a trouper, locates all the available giggles and wins applause for her big tantrum scene. And John Cleese is riotously funny.

Think "My Best Friend's Wedding," subtract gay best friend, dorky karaoke scene, charm, and any hint of malice or conflict, and you've got it.

If Big Momma's House isn't as bad as you imagined, then you've no imagination at all.

It poses as an unblinkered look at the hangups and hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie. In reality it's an empty, narcissistic tantrum.

Indeed, this is the very kind of lame-brained folly Levy and his SCTV cohorts used to mock on their old show; now it's how he makes rent.

The movie's so unfunny, it almost appears to be that way on purpose, kind of like an Ingmar Bergman film.

A wobbly Basinger and a feeble screenplay doom I Dreamed of Africa.

In the end narration, Shane gripes that the new corporate owners who took over Studio 54 after Rubell and Schrager's crash made the club "safe and boring." But that's exactly what Christopher has done to 54.

Tethered to screenwriter Gail Parent's adaptation of Dyan Sheldon's novel, plus the demands of bigwig producers, it's a testament to Sugarman's artistry that she sustains her funky playfulness--a hallmark of her earlier work--throughout most of this film.

Overly broad and silly at times, the film also has an "important" message to pass along to its young viewers.