Somehow worse than its ridiculous title, Awaken the Shadowman is sillier than it is scary.

Although the reliable Cooper (taking over the role from Henry Cavill) and the rest of the cast...valiantly do battle against the thunderous score, they’re ultimately unable to pump up a dreary mission that fails to adhere to the most basic rules of audience engagement.

Eddie Murphy's latest is a flabby disappointment. The jokes die, the action curdles. Much of it falls as flat as smashed tinsel.

There’s barely a convincing — or amusing — situation or interaction, including the film’s climactic nuptials, which also turn fatally contrived.

Have I changed so much that I can't find this funny anymore? Nah. Broken Lizard hasn't changed enough to keep up with the times, turning in a badly degraded copy of the original. Stale, unfunny and offensive is quite the hat trick.

While there are some cool creature effects and committed, physical performances by the actors playing the monsters, the movie’s worst sin isn’t the found-footage rules it ignores. Instead it breaks the cardinal rule of the larger horror genre, running 95 minutes without a single scare or moment of dread.

In a wicked mess of unmatched water shots and dreadful interior airplane sequences, the characters outlined in little blue halos, the performances range from the mortifying to the merely immemorable. Against all odds, Lance Guest and Karen Young manage to be warm and credible. Podgy but game, Michael Caine, bravely attempts mouth-to-mouth resusitation on a role which is little more than anecdotes strung together. It is not his finest hour.

There are occasionally atmospheric shots of depopulated boardwalks and streets, but the strain to give the visuals meaning becomes its own clue in the worst crime committed here: the killing of good storytelling.

The director gives the audience a story that takes off in as many directions as the prison corridors, leaving us lost and dazed. But unlike the characters, the viewers never feel a moment of fear.

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.