A generic coming-of-age comedy that feels inextricably stuck in the ’90s, Hickey serves as the feature debut of TV commercial director Alex Grossman and plays like a never aired UPN series pilot.

Writer-director C.A. Cooper’s The Snare is admirably artful and oblique in putting its own twist on the haunted-house story, but it’s derivative of much better psychological suspense films and is obnoxiously unpleasant to boot.

There’s more focus on the dull mystery and predictable story twists, and not nearly enough choreographic ecstasy on-screen.

The Trouble With Terkel feels painfully outdated and stale, with rudimentary computer-generated visuals and characters that are potty-mouthed only for the sake of provocation.

Director Gustavo Ron and co-writer Francisco Zegers fill the movie to bursting with plot, turning what might have been a delightfully airy cream puff of a film into a soggy disaster.

While the fake news angle is admittedly a timely one, the film’s ultimate dubious achievement is its remarkable ability to make “Dude, Where’s My Car?” feel like vintage Kubrick.

My Father Die is all provocation and no substance, and therefore completely meaningless.

Just when you think the film has gratefully escaped its most inevitable turn, it goes there, adding one final kernel of corn to this ho-hum horse tale.

With Eloise, Legato and company take a prime location, rich in history, and make it look like a soundstage.

The Adventure Club is a remarkably dull Canadian tween caper about a sought-after magical ancient box with wish-making powers.

Writer-director Park Kwang-hyun certainly keeps the visual energy aloft with its frantic genre-splicing, but the over-the-top approach ultimately plays out like several years’ worth of Super Bowl commercials strung out end to end.

Dagen Merrill’s thriller, made under the Syfy channel’s banner, is strictly cheap-TV genre fare that might have passed muster as an average episode of “The Outer Limits,” but over feature length simply feels slipshod and dull.

With wooden performances and a lack of character development, Below Her Mouth is more X-rated, late-night cable skin flick than trenchant exploration of female sexuality.

Healy is never able to find an absorbing middle ground in Mike Makowsky’s script, vacillating gratingly between shrill farce and murky thriller that flails its way toward an intended twist-ending that really shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Howell’s inept pileup of would-be signifiers — a misty quarry, a family crypt, a philosophical beekeeper — gives way to frisson-free horror and unconvincing romance.

Two tedious hours later, the sensation of doing time is all too tangible.

From the homophobic slurs to the lowest common denominator body humor to the stale gender politics, Pitching Tents is all cutesy retro raunchiness without any innovation or comedic payoff. It might have been excusable back in the day, but now it’s just boring.

The film’s narrative engine remains too choppy and clunky, and the characters too cursorily developed, to hold attention.

The cast is game and the pace blessedly zippy, but everything about this film feels too fake to generate any real suspense.

Utterly dull thriller Drone tries to raise ethical and moral questions about modern warfare, but the audience can only dwell on the illogical plot and unsympathetic characters — if they can engage at all.

Action movies don’t necessarily need logic, but in the absence of entertainment value, tracking what doesn’t make sense is often the only fun.

It’s an illogical, simple-minded mess in which Stevens is primarily a disembodied voice in a first-person-shooter-style video game movie.

For a film about one of the fastest guns in the West, the dramatically lightweight Hickok is mighty slow on the draw.

With its gauzily surreal touches, Woodshock reflects the Mulleavys’ romantic flair for texture and embellishment. But as Theresa’s guilt and self-medication mount, along with the film’s profoundly muddled ideas about assisted suicide, the curated trance grows mind-numbing. It’s a death trip with pretty lingerie.

Despite Donahue’s best efforts in a grand finale sleep session with life-or-death stakes, the premise never lives up to its promise.

Jacobs simply can’t make any of it work.

The Bodyguard isn't a good movie, but it's often enjoyably bad, and that's no small achievement. So many talented people had a hand in it, starting with director Mick Jackson and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, that you stare at the screen in a state of rapt bewilderment. Just about everything that can go wrong with this film does, and yet it's compulsively watchable. (So is a train wreck.) [25 Nov 1992, p.F1]

But rarely has so much animated opulence been wasted on such a thin, badly told story.