Assassin's Bullet is strictly '90s-era pay-cable genre-rip-off nostalgia, ripe for ridicule.

No-holds-barred comedy is one thing, hurtful thoughtlessness is something else entirely. An ostensible comedy shouldn't have so many moments that feel so ugly.

[Antoine Fuqua] gives in to terrible instincts here, flirting with overwrought patriotism, one too many laugh lines amid numerous characters being shot in the head, and a general chaos-inspired editing technique all too rampant in today's action cinema.

Girls Against Boys is some odd male fantasy of what female revenge might be like, sexy and enigmatically charged rather than haunting or scary or even just weird.

If nothing else, Gummo does challenge perceptions and presumptions: Is the perspective of youth in this country really so devoid of significance, and their existence so septic? These are good questions, although "Gummo" provides neither answer nor solution, nor even thematic cohesion.

Sequels to big-budget popular hits usually end up super-slick, shallow and inflated. But this one isn't even super-slick; it's shallow and deflated...The overall effect is of a story atomized and dying before our eyes, collapsing into smashed pulp, ground down into big-budget Kryptonite ash. [27 July 1987, p.1]

Ironically, the only thing that makes much sense about the DIY effort Oconomowoc is its baffling title.

Piscopo...isn't just too good for this film, he's too good to be giving it this much effort.

Abandoned Mine is all that its title promises: something generic and empty, with the sense that much has been left behind.

This spectacularly dumb and unfunny film will likely bore even the staunchest fans of the “Hangover” movies, of which “Search” is a kind of distant, fatally impoverished cousin.

It's frustrating that the filmmakers could only think to enrich the characters of one race by demeaning those of another.

A thuddingly unfunny vigilante satire.

An entertainment-free sinkhole of Dramamine-worthy nonsense.

10 Rules for Sleeping Around is a dreadful sex farce with barely an authentic emotion, credible character or plausible plot point in its midst.

The filmmakers forget the fundamentals of B-movie 101: Skin-baring spring breakers make for the most qualified carnage.

[A] slack, dumb prequel.

In spite of a sturdy cast and dazzling production design, Highlander is stultifyingly, jaw-droppingly, achingly awful.[11 Mar 1986, p.5]

Teen Wolf Too embellishes its inane, cookie-cutter plot with remote direction, witless dialogue and charmless characters.

It's a grotesque, deadly dull piece of cinematic upchuck, a horror film minus tension or chills.

Movies with no redeeming qualities are rare, but the execrable Found comes pretty close.

A fatally clueless, painfully overlong sports spoof.

Rather than evincing any expertise or affinity for the genre, Wolsh's effort seems glib and hollow.

This is an equal-opportunity fiasco.

Had Daskaloff found an appropriately campy groove, he might have eked out some sexy-silly fun. As it stands, the film proves a cheesy, half-baked and decidedly retrograde effort.

Even the most talentless and narcissistic fame seekers on reality television are not nearly as vile, reprehensible or worthless as a film that actively wishes harm on them.

It's not every day you get to see a satanic-revenge home-invasion martial-arts thriller, but should another come along that's as laughably cornball as The Cain Complex, you'd best hide until it blows over.

The pedestrian writing and acting prove even more cringe-worthy and dreadful than the special effects.

The repetitively fetishistic camera work and lunatic-asylum sound cues are meant to signify a nod to something psychological and pointed, but all it is is bilious, empty-calorie extremism, and it only ever drags you where you expect.

Seemingly meant for the stage, the film feels unnaturally theatrical with characters stiltedly reciting each line of dialogue even when supposedly conversing. But with Mahoney's pedestrian, shot-reverse-shot direction, these scenes play out like situational skits from an instructional video made for ESL students.

It’s hard to imagine how anything salvageable could have been made out of [Gee Malik Linton's] comically pretentious script with its heavily religious overtones and plotting that grows more ridiculous by the minute.

Rarely has outer space seemed so unexciting.

The movie feels like a thin excuse to show image after image of women being abused. This Martyrs has the bones of its predecessor, but it's been bled dry.

Even by the shaggy standards of found footage, The Final Project is amateurish.

A wretched waste of time and talent.

From awkward start to merciful finish, Mother's Day is a grim, listless affair that may leave you pining for the relative pep and coherence of its predecessors (both of which were scripted by Katherine Fugate), or at least a few of their incidental pleasures.

A family film no member of the family will enjoy.

Generically directed by Daniel Zirilli, who shares story credit with Tom Sizemore, the listless Asian Connection may be set in Bangkok and Cambodia but it feels about exotic as an order of take-out Thai.

The whole thing has a very seedy, late-night cable feel, which is where you should catch this film — and only if you’re a die-hard UFC fan.

It’s a rare film that can dredge up nostalgic fondness for 2002’s awful “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder,” but Total Frat Movie manages to rise to the dubious occasion.

D’Souza might be preaching to the choir, but at least this voter recruitment tool could have aspired to something more challenging than an amateurishly slapped-together rehash.

Alternately crass and treacly, overbearing and under-finessed, the film, penned by headhunter-turned-screenwriter Bill Dubuque and directed by Mark Williams, is on life support from get-go.

It’s just a listless, routine exercise in religious horror, infused with a whiff of the exotic that tends toward the xenophobic. There might be a shred of entertainment to be found if only it were worse.

Sincerity alone cannot begin to compensate for a clunker of this magnitude, including an abundance of technical issues, bad dialogue and worse performances.

Like a wedding toast gone awry, the movie doesn’t know where to begin or end and is cluttered with factoids and awkward asides.

What is semi-interesting — in a “huh?” kind of way — is how the Ferraras take various paranoid speculation from the darkest reaches of the Internet and weave it all into a barely coherent super-theory.

Chockful of hoary archetypes making hokey observations...leading to a truly laughable big-ending reveal, the film, with its wildly uneven performances, underscores the pitfalls inherent in shifting from the written page to the big screen.

Courier-X is so inscrutable and tediously boring that it will test the patience of even the most tenacious truther.

Kill Ratio is a laughably inept political thriller that would have been right at home on the USA Network lineup circa 1990.

Like “The Big Chill” and “Peter’s Friends” but without a single character you’d want to spend five minutes with, let alone a weekend, The Drama Club makes for a crassly unpleasant ensemble piece.

Under the pretext of offering fun for the whole family, the movie winds up doing almost precisely the opposite; its attempts at grown-up sophistication and cheeky, knowing humor are clueless and hectoring enough to leave any adult in the audience wishing they’d been straight-up ignored.

Despite attracting some top-drawer talent, “Arsenal” is a brutally unpleasant, bottom-of-the-barrel crime drama that unsuccessfully attempts to drown the terrible dialogue and pedestrian direction with buckets of gushing blood.

Aggressive and aggressively unfunny, Hollywood-set comedy Walk of Fame hates its characters and its audience — and the feeling is mutual.

The largely Russian- and Kazakh-speaking cast is so incongruously dubbed into English it evokes an old Japanese monster movie.

Choked with clichés, joyless, and with a suspense meter on empty, this France-set caper about classic-car-thieving half brothers (Scott Eastwood and Freddie Thorp) mixed up with a pair of violent, automobile-collecting crime lords (Simon Abkarian and Clemens Schick) is only for those who think the “Fast and the Furious” movies aren’t white and charmless enough.

Writer-director Dito Montiel, adapting his novel, takes an ill-conceived premise and drives it into the ground with a painful, tone-deaf approach to both social satire and romantic comedy.

It creeps along without providing either scares or an unsettling mood.

The crushing assault that Road House delivers to fun at the movies is enough to send you crawling out of the theater on hands and knees, bloody and bowed. [19 May 1989, p.C1]

The lifeless script and bland performances damn the film and the unlucky viewers who find it.

Amounting to two-plus hours of conspiracy theorist porn, The American Media & the Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, directed and narrated by John Barbour, proves to be as long-winded as its accusatory title.

While its predecessor at least pleased his fans, writer-director-star Perry’s latest offers few laughs and embarrassing post-production work.

Morbid, silly and ultra-violent, Stephen King's Sleepwalkers is pure trash from the popular horrormeister. It is so bad that surely the only way that it could have been made was to have King's name on it.

Hooper could have also made at least a token attempt to create one interesting or sympathetic character and shot more than one take per scene--even by horror standards, the acting here is lame. Call it "The Bungler."

"Only Living Boy" fails to convince as a character study, romance or love letter to the CBGB-era New York City. It drops a plot bombshell close to the end of its 88-minute running time, but the filmmakers haven’t laid the track to make it plausible.

Cobra's pretentious emptiness, its dumbness, its two-faced morality make it a movie that begs to be laughed off.

9/11 trades on the emotional weight of its namesake day, manipulating audiences into feelings that have nothing to do with the mess that is actually on screen.

Second-tier airline safety videos are more entertaining than this fourth-rate comedy. Flight attendants on Southwest’s less-traveled routes are far funnier than the cast here. Watching a lonely suitcase circle a baggage claim conveyor belt is more diverting.

What boggles the mind is how this bit of navel lint could have seemed even remotely funny to anyone at any stage along its way. Even as a low moment in high concept, it is inconceivable that someone would undertake to make this into a film.

None of this makes a lick of sense, but it’s fascinatingly asinine. It feels wrong to encourage this kind of misbegotten DIY project, but if you’re a fan of the likes of “The Room” or “Birdemic,” honestly, you can’t miss “Mike Boy.”

This slick and stylish exterior belies a rotting core underneath. Ryde thinks little of its characters or its audience; it's an exercise in misanthropy with a nasty streak of misogyny running through it.

Wafting into theaters after sitting on the back burner for the last decade, Cook Off! is a shrill, gloppy mess of a mockumentary being served up well past its "best before" date — if there ever actually were one.

On a single day, the protagonist of The Truth About Lies is fired from his job, his apartment burns down and his girlfriend dumps him. He has it easy compared to anyone who actually watches this thoroughly unpleasant, unfunny comedy.

There are limits to how much of an edge a movie gets from incompetence — as writer/director/producer Susannah O’Brien’s The Doll proves definitively.

"Bloodline” director Hèctor Hernández Vicens and screenwriters Mark Tonderai and Lars Jacobson, on the other hand, are less stewards of it than schlockmeisters, treating any possible resonance as stale oil in which to fry the usual junk food of gory, hyperkinetic kills. Their side orders are thin characters with dumb dialogue and even dumber behavior.

It is a master class in how not to make a film, beginning with lessons in writing an unfunny script, leaving foundation makeup visible on actors’ faces and sound editing that overemphasizes a bland score.

For all of its incompetency of craft, like a strange bit of outsider art, the film showcases a fascinatingly unrefined look at the very real fear felt by immigrants in Donald Trump's America.

Nibali and Galati deliver their lines in matching monotones, in scenes that are simply deadening. None of the trio of leads has the presence to carry the film, though Mihaljevich displays a flicker as the dangerous sociopath Wendel. Alexander's limited style doesn't help these performances either, nor does the wildly underwritten script.

The Great Outdoors is about as much fun as ants at a picnic for anyone over the age of 10. It's a crass, blah comedy about summer vacation perils that teams Dan Aykroyd and John Candy, but gives them next to nothing to work with. If the prolific and profit-making John Hughes weren't the writer--as well as the co-executive producer--of this scattershot nonsense directed frenetically by Howard Deutch, it's hard to imagine the film getting made, let alone attracting Aykroyd and Candy.

A Lesson in Cruelty tries to affect a dark comedic tone, but fails spectacularly. There's no comedy, despite Lebrun's over-the-top vamping, and the dark elements are far too disturbing and violent.

There are a few early laughs, but the film from first-time director Brody Gusar is a tonal mess with feelings of disgust as its sole constant.

But Deliver Us From Evil has no tonal cohesion, and the amateur editing from Coates only exacerbates the issue.

While clearly aiming for R-rated irreverence, the script, penned by former Kevin Smith assistant Knutson, along with Andy Snipes and Dana Snyder, proceeds to hurl a tired barrage of obnoxious sexist/racist/homophobic sludge, with humor that seldom rises above crotch level.

Stunningly, ponderously bad.

Everything about this movie seems ripped from the ’80s, including the woefully sexist gender politics. But that’s only one of many reasons that this B-movie dreck should have stayed underwater.

This dreadful indie comedy rarely replicates life, instead offering dialogue that someone thought was funny said by awful characters in the midst of inorganic situations.

Material this risky has to be done brilliantly or not at all. "Tootsie" pulled off its gender switch because of its compassion for the discoveries that a man made in a woman's role. "Blazing Saddles" used blazing wit to attack the myths of racism, at full throttle. Though it may have had honest intentions, Soul Man is a mess, at almost every level. Steve Miner's direction stabs at farce, misses; makes a desperate dive at comedy, misses, and settles for sitcom sentimentality. Carol Black, the screenwriter, has a quick, good ear when she's skewering trendy yuppies, but the rest of her satire is mortifyingly callow. And what is set into motion has neither wit nor compassion. [24 Oct 1986, p.C6]

This latest entry in horror’s tradition of sorority-set slashers appears to have been made on a college student’s budget, shot by a horny frat dude and edited by a drunken pledge.

The salt in the wound of this painfully out-of-touch film is the footage of real L.A. homeless camps and people, as if the film were saying something trenchant about the issue. What a gross misunderstanding of this glib story about a rich man who steals stories and inspiration from struggling people.

It's been theorized that the popularity of the "Friday the 13th" movies is because the juxtaposing of scenes of lovemaking and extreme violence somehow eases young people's sexual fears. However, this "Friday the 13th", which was written by Daryl Haney and Manuel Fidello and directed by John Carl Buechler, is so dumb and contrived it's hard to imagine it working up any feelings except boredom. [17 May 1988, p.C3]

Angels on Tap is an ill-conceived comic-fantasy filled with strained and creaky humor, cardboard characters, an inane framing device and, as directed by Trudy Sargent, zero cinematic style.

The story is wildly melodramatic, the execution amateurish, and the line readings from the supporting cast are stilted at best. Traicos is campy and compelling as the gleefully unhinged Jackie, but she’s the only interesting thing in an otherwise dull film.

Funny ad campaign; a real dunghill of a major motion picture.

Billed as a romantic comedy but really a farce, The Perfect Kiss is the perfect example of a movie that is so bad it’s … no, not good, just terrible.

The overwrought script is full of dusty old clichés like this, and Mullins and Co. don’t have the chops to sell them. The supporting cast offers wooden line readings, while Mullins is an uncharismatic performer, with a range that extends from dead-eyed to high-pitched yelling.

Actions and emotions turn on a dime, chuckles are few and it’s clear this predictable film, directed by John Asher, doesn’t quite realize how retrograde and often offensive it is — which makes it all even worse.

Too bad the only thrill you get from all the bloodletting is that you know each cartoony death brings you that much closer to the end credits.

Rarely has a sequel been this listless, this creatively bankrupt, or this unaware of the charm and appeal of its predecessors. Rarely has a film been this craven in appeasing an imaginary audience by mimicking what came before it and refusing to challenge itself in terms of dreaming up a new world, crafting new characters, or fashioning new stakes.

This movie makes sexual adventurism seems so ludicrous, that it might have been made by Puritans in disguise, trying to portray hedonists as a pack of fatheads.

The Lears is a witlessly profane attempt at dark comedy that is beneath the talents of everyone on screen.