Richard Gabai’s film is too preoccupied corralling all the genre clichés to come up with anything original or compelling.

Faith comes naturally, but complexity does not for Ty Manns’ script, which plays like a first draft, one written from a manual and riddled with two-dimensional characters and on-the-nose dialogue.

The overstuffed production feels as tediously incessant as its endless winter.

Based on the dubious, and occasionally eye-rolling responses from the majority of those being pitched, the plan would appear to be as ill-conceived as Surviving Peace itself.

The end result comes across less as a bona fide, issue-oriented documentary than a package of company profiles.

On the movie's feeble plus side are Richard Gant's acting (as the coroner), Manfredini's music and one funny joke in the last half-minute. On the minus side: ludicrous characters. Garbled nonstop gore. Persistent loud, clanging noises that give you the impression of being trapped inside a malfunctioning radiator. Shadowy lighting that makes you feel as if you're staggering around in the dark. [16 Aug 1993, p.F3]

The self-seriousness of this loony swing-and-a-miss shares a tone with Tommy Wiseau’s outrageously amateurish cult classic “The Room” but isn’t nearly as entertaining.

For all of the mini-melodramas that populate this tale, and the repellent ickiness in the central relationship, the worst part about Almost Friends is how incredibly dull and dramatically inert it is.

The lack of any real imagination makes Attack of the Killer Donuts a chore.

Writer-director Douglas Mueller's tedious drama Repatriation seems unsure of what it wants to say or how to say it — much less how to effectively shoot or edit it.

The Midnight Man would feel like a hodgepodge of other fright flicks even without England and Shaye’s familiar faces.

Spent exhausts the audience’s goodwill within the first few minutes of this bizarre project, and requires the utmost patience to endure.

Despite his attempt to graft an environmental message onto a traditional musical template, there's little about director Danny Baron's feature debut that feels convincingly organic to either the plotting or the characterizations.

The many ridiculous tragedies are just there to slather showy woundedness on a weak, annoying character, leaving The Vanishing of Sidney Hall a mystery-free mystery with an inexhaustible supply of eye-rolling postures.

There's a distinction to be made between old school and old hat, but it's lost on Honor Up, a criminally inept throwback to '90s urban gangsta movie posturing that plays like a stone-faced version of the 1996 Wayans brothers spoof, "Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood."

The cast, including Jason Biggs as a dorky social studies teacher, does what it can with the toothless, painfully unfunny, thoroughly unconvincing material. How some movies get made is truly a mystery.

It wants to be a commentary on the depravity of Hollywood and what people find entertaining, but instead it mostly just mirrors the media's habit of using sexual trauma as a plot device and surviving such horrors as a character trait.

It's a gross parody of its original. And since the original was a gross parody to begin with, the whole thing begins to seem gaseous, overbright, hideously inflated, as if all the bodily function jokes were about to belch it right off the screen.

It is certainly elegant looking , but 15 minutes into the action the thrill is gone and director Bruce Beresford seems to have no clue as to how to find it.

This is a movie whose morality is as banal as its humor--and that's saying something. Basically, it's standard post '80s high-concept drivel, yet another marketing hook in search of comedy, tension, characters, atmosphere, compelling narrative drive--everything we used to see in movies before the hooks and the ad campaigns swallowed them up.

Leatherface is as tasteless as its predecessors, but it reduces fear to a business and blood to a drip. It's a slaughterhouse without any real buzz. [15 Jan 1990, p.F2]

It's a cheap, easy rehash of Spielberg's "Duel" and "The Hitchhiker" (which Red may not have seen)--along with grabs from "Halloween" (the unstoppable fiend), "Jackson County Jail" (the innocent motorist driven outside the law) and "Straw Dogs" (manhood through blood rites). Nothing is original.

It's just another failed movie: a loud, shallow fiasco that leaves you feeling used.

Despite the high body count, consider this a murder of The Crow.

"Gehenna" features impressive gore effects, but the plot's an uninspired hodgepodge of dozens of other "haunted structure" pictures, set at a plodding pace, in a gray, dim location. It peaks in its first five minutes. The remaining 100 go nowhere, slowly.

Cage gets exactly one meme-able meltdown scene, about two-thirds of the way through the picture. The rest is a waste of time, even for trash cinema connoisseurs.

A great cast cannot save the dramatically inert and totally inept rom-com "Alex & The List," which is short on both the rom and the com.

The humor in this film is so elementary, so numskull, it defies description or extended discussion.

This is writer-director Matt Sivertson’s first film, and he and his cast and crew are able to offer only a maudlin drama that inspires eye rolls rather than tears.

Devotees of Sunset Strip rock decadence may enjoy the general seediness. Horror hounds will likely feel bored, confused and more than a little ripped-off.

Even as you feel grateful to be able to laugh off this film, you realize that its humor is really only inuring you to a nonstop series of stabbings, slashings, impalings, stranglings and yet other means of killing. Be warned: For all its laughs, Friday the 13th -- A New Beginning (rightly rated R) is just one more nauseating sick joke. [25 March 1985, p.C6]

Sad excuse for a movie. [4 Aug 1986, p.C6]

A tedious exploitation picture not even sleazy enough to find offensive.

Unfortunately, Hell Mountain lacks basic cohesiveness in its storytelling, taking strange, unnecessary detours and not fully developing its details.

The movie, based on the novel “Seventy Times Seven,” is so laden with hoary gay stereotypes and references (enough with “The Golden Girls”!), anachronistic name-checks (Charo? Jeff Stryker?), groan-worthy silliness, overplayed emotion and amateurish crafting it never had a prayer.

A meandering, pointless and boring rumination on substances and those who love to abuse them.

Padding Audé’s first-person account — and those hammy dramatizations — with glowing testimonials from family and friends including José Canseco and, distractingly, the director herself, the overlong hodgepodge proves to be an ordeal in and of itself.

While The Storyteller aspires to be a feature-length Hallmark card, it only manages dollar-store sentimentality in its plot and platitudes.

The film adopts a sanctimonious tone that’s anything but subtle.

There’s more sex than dialogue here; it’s a small win because the clunky dialogue and its flat delivery from amateur actors is nigh unwatchable, not that the sex scenes are much better.

It's fairly safe to predict that Silent Night, Deadly Night will start making "Worst Movies of All Time" lists almost immediately. It has all the prerequisites. A roaringly bad idea. Derivative scriptwriting. Tastelessness. Naked opportunism. A cast full of actors who mug, gesticulate and savor every rotten line. A general "we're only in this for the money" attitude, visible in every sloppy frame. And, to top it off, that most crucial quality: enough conscious or unconscious humor to keep you watching, and insulting, it. [11 March 1986, p.C5]

The jumble occupies an unfortunate space situated somewhere between the ponderously pretentious and the just plain ridiculous.

Its incoherent script is packed with more “Star Wars” references than Kevin Smith’s entire oeuvre, but none of the laughs.

It's 80 minutes of frantic mugging, of silly pratfalls and clown fights, of ideas lifted from other children's movies, design schemes from Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and characters from Toys R Us, all patched together without an innovative stitch of its own. [22 Nov 1996, p.F6]

John David Ware’s directorial debut is sloppy in its editing and camera angles, though the script from Bonné Bartron gave him little to work with. Unbridled stumbles further with clumsy product placement, making the film seem less sincere in its efforts despite its good intentions.

The movie is just a big, empty declaration of corporate dominance, a whirling CGI tornado that — like a much stupider Tasmanian Devil — ingests, barely processes and then promptly regurgitates everything in its path. It’s Upchuck Jones.

Made Me Do It shuffles among different visual styles, as it bounces between its villain’s backstory and one desperate night in the lives of the brother and sister he’s targeted. The movie looks ugly and feels uglier, without much sense of a larger intent to mitigate the meanness. Koppin's right that his movie is different from a typical slasher. It’s far, far worse.

Rattlesnakes imagines itself as a neo-noir, but that genre is more evident in its themes of revenge and ambiguous characters rather than in its nondescript style. This is a bland, unpleasant watch, all set to an equally grinding score.

At best, it’s an amateurish effort with ill-judged ambitions that surpass both the skill level involved and its budget. At worst, it’s an incoherent collection of brutishly crafted and edited scenes.

With its overly arch dialogue and characterizations, airless gentility and forced period trappings it seems that the harder writer-producer Karen R. Hurd and director Barry Andersson strive for authenticity — on what’s clearly a deeply limited budget — the less convincing the film feels. The often stodgy acting doesn’t help.

Displaying writing barely apt for an outdated sitcom, ludicrously trite dialogue, prosaic execution and overacting galore, this pseudo-romantic all-nighter unsuccessfully attempts to wax poetic in regards to second chances, Catholic guilt and personal reinvention.

Schadt’s dialogue lacks punch, and his cast isn’t charismatic enough to compensate. But the bigger problem is that nothing especially tense or exciting happens after the corpse is found.

A few minutes of this kind of moody existentialism here and there can add flavor to a stylish genre picture. But it’s much less satisfying when the seasoning becomes the main dish.

Johnny Be Good, a would-be satire on the excesses of big-time college football recruiting, is so bad that the NCAA might consider using it as punishment for coaches who violate regulations.

Its so-called audacity smacks of calculation and emotional cowardice.

Save Mailer’s pushy “New Yawk” accent, the leads do what they can with their unconvincing characters and the rusty plot, but it’s a hopeless effort. Nice opening title sequence though.

It also begs for an anarchic-camp approach, or else a deeper exploitation of the very real fears the common citizenry have of men in blue in so many urban climes nowadays.

Jexi is such a dumb, lazy film that it might have even the most ardent cinephile reaching for their device, ready to defend their defection to the dark side when faced with this clunker of a comedy.

Rather than speaking to the moment coherently, the movie communicates its message in loud fits of dull screaming.

It’s the banal dialogue, lack of tension, one-note characterizations and overly earnest acting — even by such veterans as Treat Williams, Bruce Davison and Henry Thomas — that conspire to turn this potentially moving and exciting picture into mush.

This teen musical comedy is set at a girls performing arts camp, but it never convinces the audience of anyone’s talent.

There’s something admirably bravura about Beloved Beast, which just keeps going, hour after hour, grinding through dry, tedious scenes of lousy people misbehaving, with no end in sight. This is a movie about misery, which makes viewers feel every bit of the characters’ ennui.

Awfully bewildering till the end, a final bombshell catapults the persistently nonsensical plot onto a level of implausibility that defies basic logic and ethics.

Even the weakest horror anthology films can be redeemed by one good segment; but alas, the semi-comic compendium Holiday Hell is pretty dire from start to finish.

A poorly produced experiment by writer-director Dae Hoon Kim, also the act’s lead singer on- and offscreen, the film’s mere existence baffles.

John Henry is a lead-footed revenge thriller that lands with all the subtlety of the mighty steel-driving man’s sledgehammer.

A true Golden Turkey starring Willie Aames and Phoebe Cates, who spend the movie in various stages of undress. This Blue Lagoon rip-off finds them playing two young people who find love at a desert oasis. [10 Feb 2000, p.F11]

This ambitiously titled documentary never really makes the reasons for its existence clear.

Hool directs all this so lethargically you might suspect he’s gone missing in action himself.

The jokes grate on you, the buoyancy seems feigned and none of the nonsense is lyrical. The talent involved seems misused. This film is conceived as a vehicle for Madonna and, even as such, it's a rattling failure. The movie diminishes her, the worst thing a vehicle can do. [10 Aug 1987, p.1]

You forgive much due to obvious budgetary constraints. But the excruciatingly slow, soapy storytelling stifles emotional energy. It’s not easy to follow, hampered by severe logical lapses. Character threads abruptly drop. How anyone feels about anyone is unclear at any given moment.

[An] inept, incoherent and charmless would-be romantic comedy-thriller.

Blue City has exactly one thing to recommend it: Ry Cooder’s typically funky, steely, hard-edged score. Overall, it’s such a flabbergasting turkey--misfiring in every conceivable direction--that it may actually improve if you watch it with your eyes shut.

Maybe the whole project should have been junked from the get-go.

Watching Jade is such a hollow experience it’s hard to work up the energy to dismiss it. A movie where the car chases have more personality than the people, its monotone acting and recycled plot make one wonder, not for the first time, how something this tired ever got made.

Soft-core porn dressed up in a silly story about a murder at a sex-therapy clinic. [5 March 1993, p.F20]

The veneer of historical reality is thin on the baldly nativist and manipulative Serbian World War II movie Dara of Jasenovac, a slickly made extermination camp drama about child peril that will test the patience of even the most rigorous students of cultural representations of genocide.

It is excruciating: a combination of Beth Henley’s insistently eccentric screenplay, Bruce Beresford’s frenzied direction and the sight of three singular talents on an acting roller coaster with no one riding the brakes.

Warlock is supposedly about the battle between Good and Evil, but movies about the battle between Heckle and Jeckle have more terror or profundity. [17 Jan 1991, p.F12]

Relentlessly awful. Not even Terry Kiser’s wandering corpse is funny this time around.

The Neverending Story 2 is a story you may want desperately to end. Soon. [11 Feb 1991, p.F10]

Thunder Force is at least an equal-opportunities bummer: It doesn’t work as a superhero adventure or a midlife reclamation movie or a mismatched buddy comedy or a family entertainment unless your aim is to disappoint all members of the family equally.

Renegades, a shamelessly contrived, ultraviolent macho fantasy, stars Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips, who are too talented and too successful to be wasting themselves on such trash.

Scrolling through internet videos is generally regarded as a waste of time, but watching 100 minutes of cute animals on your phone is preferable to sitting through the laughably bad The Wolf and the Lion.

Memory has a decent director in Campbell (“Casino Royale,” “Vertical Limit”) and a great cast (yes, that’s Ray Stevenson as a corrupt cop), but a crippling case of a bad script that can’t manage to make us care about any of these characters.

This movie is mostly just another brisk recounting of a much-scrutinized actor’s tragic life, coupled with some unconvincing and often confusing coverage of the conspiracy theories surrounding Monroe’s death. The results feel tawdry and shallow.

Me Time is less of a movie than it is a bulletin board filled with half-thought-out premises for dirty jokes.

"Implausible" is a mild word for the shenanigans Gang Related expects us to swallow. Writer-director Jim Kouf has loaded a lifetime's worth of ploys and contrivances, feints and jabs, into this unpleasant, interminable, more-than-usually pointless film. [8 Oct 1997, p.F4]

This is a bad time for NBA fans in Boston. Just as their beloved Celtics are about to wrap up a dismal season, with nearly 50 losses and no berth in the playoffs, Hollywood comes out with a comedy about the Celtics that’s even worse than the team. And not half as funny.

The disastrous new version of H.G. Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau" at least affords Marlon Brando a grand entrance and a great comic portrayal. [23 Aug 1996, p.F12]

Not bad in the aggressive, ambitious, over-the-top way that “Showgirls” epitomized. “Two If by Sea” is more like a zero, an inert lump of a movie with so little going on that fidgety viewers can sneak out for a hot dog or some popcorn and return without fear of having missed anything significant.

By the end, Maneater has walked right up to the edge of being a fun, silly, “so bad it’s good” time-killer. But after taking way too long, it never really arrives there.

This is a stifling film about solipsistic people.

The sugary cuteness of the Little Ponies masks a corporate greed as cold and sharp as a razor blade.

it is a boring paint-by-numbers ghost movie, a jumble of tropes borrowed from movies like “The Ring,” and a poor facsimile of its influences.

Argylle has bone-deep structural issues on a fundamental level, but it is also a failure of directorial execution from top to bottom, resulting in what has to be one of the most expensive worst movies ever made. It’s honestly fascinating — something that should be studied in a lab.

If kids can grow out of their pretend pals, so too can horror audiences of cynical snoozes like this.