While the Nightmare on Elm Street movies possess a sick yet clever surrealism, and the first Halloween was at least well crafted, the Friday the 13th series has always been the cut-rate horror franchise, offering barely functional sex-and-slash pitched straight at the moron brigade. Jason Goes to Hell varies the formula a bit, with ideas swiped from The Terminator, The Hidden, and Alien, but after nine installments the impalements and dismemberments all look the same. So go to hell already, Jason — and take Sean Cunningham, the ”brains” behind this dreck, with you.

Kin is a movie about a child with an all-powerful firearm that makes him feel important and special and powerful. On a one-to-ten scale of moral fecklessness, this ranks about a thousand.

The film is a jokey, nattering fiasco, as awful as Hudson Hawk. And yet, like that famous disaster, it never loses its aura of precocious self-satisfaction.

When a kids’ flick has nothing to offer but cute special effects, it’s easy to think the filmmakers are patting themselves on the backs for their technical ingenuity. That’s not comic fantasy — that’s marketing.

With Mr. Magoo, it’s the filmmakers who seem blind.

A hateful ”family” comedy based on jokey insinuations of incest.

The first movie from the cult television comedy troupe doesn’t have a single good laugh.

It’s an unmitigated nightmare of crude, boorish tripe-and woe unto our nation’s future if kids find it hilarious.

Bilko is a weightless comic creation, and Steve Martin, perhaps sensing this, drifts through the movie with a misplaced balletic goofiness.

Chucky the plastic slasher proves that his novelty value has long worn off.

The Exorcist III has the feel of a nightmare catechism lesson, or a horror movie made by a depressed monk.

What is there to do but laugh in self-defense at such pompous self-regard when blood gushes, fuses pop, and Seagal scowls in a series of snappy, embroidered buckskin jackets?

Navy SEALs isn’t just the most stupidly didactic action movie since The Green Berets. It’s the dullest action movie since The Green Berets.

As the naughty ghost pal of Phoebe Cates, an obnoxious British actor named Rik Mayall is like Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice without the juice. In Drop Dead Fred, all he does is smash and spill things and say many, many potty words.

Inocent Blood is an unbelievably lethargic horror comedy directed by John Landis (An American Werewolf in London). Anne Parillaud, the French star of La Femme Nikita, is less sexy than morose in the role of a modern-day vampire who preys on mafiosi. Why mafiosi? For no good reason other than that it allows Landis to stage a lot of scenes in which cut-rate Italian hoodlums stand around yelling at each other.

It would all be worth getting mad over were the film not so plodding or so obvious in its tactics.

Most of the jokes are so lame that Chevy Chase can’t even be bothered to look nonchalant. A sadder excuse for a movie would be hard to imagine.

Hillbilly Elegy is two movies, one laughably bad and one boringly bad.

There’s plenty of simulation here and not much stimulation.

The original 1989 dead-guy farce maybe had a few laughs if you caught it on cable at one in the morning. Blind drunk. Weekend At Bernie’s II not quite that good.

It’s essential to recognize Uys’ patronization of the Bushmen for what it is: a beguiling form of racism.

Insanely ridiculous.

Samuel L. Jackson, call your agent — and fire him.

The movie actually makes you long for the rockin’ entertainment value of a good catechism session.