Don’t let the cartoonlike ads for Reform School Girls fool you. The movie has been billed as an outlandish sendup of the women-behind-bars genre, but that’s just wishful thinking--or part of the movie’s cynical hype. “Girls” is far too feeble to qualify as a raunchy prison parody. It’s more of a brainless homage, in the clunky way that “Rambo” and “Missing in Action” paid tribute to “The Green Berets.”

The movie is disturbingly reckless, needlessly brutal and deeply homophobic. Later attempts to wedge in a few nice moments between James and Kareem fall flat.

But beware: "Hamburger" is the dregs of "Animal House" and "Police Academy" raked over again, with another passel of daffy, goofy, sex-crazed guys; bosomy, moaning sex-starved girls; screaming nerds; yowling dimwits and howling bullies... The script may set a record for misfiring gags and lewd puns. [3 Feb 1986, p.C7]

One of the most atrocious viewing experiences of the year, “The Tax Collector” relies on a trite visual language built on obvious flashbacks and bland imagery that match the unimaginatively dreadful writing where every Latino in sight is a gangster.

Overall pacing is flaccid and too many scenes peter out when they should punch. But perhaps the movie’s biggest infraction is that there’s hardly a chuckle in it.

A collection of flat gags, spiritless action, cornball satire and overbroad or bored-looking performances, it sometimes resembles the draggle-end of a nightmare “Saturday Night Live” show, where the cast has come to despise their own skits.

It’s hard to think of a less satisfying creature feature in recent memory than the simply terrible Split Second, which by the end not only has allowed few glimpses of the beast in question but hasn’t even explained where the big guy came from or what kind of animus, supernatural or otherwise, is responsible for its strange m.o. It’s a monstrous cheat.

Millennium has little to distract you from the obvious phony hair coloring of its stars.

Phrases like terminally stupid and brain dead leap readily to mind.

It’s a rom-com both com-less and rom-less.

Thanks to a relentlessly terrible script by many hands, it's a dumb movie about dumb cops that should have remained on the shelf, where it's been sitting for over two years. [31 Jan 1994, p.F5]

Terrible acting, zero suspense, laughable logic and the promise of another one next year. How can we get this policy canceled?

Even a 15-year-old boy would find this movie to be a chore.

Plunges into an abyss of gruesome imagery so repulsive it precludes further watching.

Running Scared is so desperate and surreally stupid that all you would have to do to see it as a brilliant sendup of everything that is corrupt, vulgar, sad, deluded and bad-for-you about Hollywood is squint.

A conflation of the horror genre's laziest tropes, plot angles and shorthands, this inept creation isn't so much a film as it is a smorgasbord.

Devotes itself to inflicting serious pain upon innocent moviegoers who wander into what is perhaps the single most poorly conceived and ineptly executed movie released to theaters in quite some time.

It's not like Paris Hilton to rise above her material, but The Hottie and the Nottie sinks so low that all she has to do is stand upright.

Just as silly and tedious as the first two unconnected tales of young gay love -- but lots worse.

How feeble a movie is Stolen Summer? So feeble they've just about buried the title on the film's own poster.

Some movies make you sorry you've seen them, and The Cell is one of those. Creepy and horrific, it's a torture chamber film.

Doomed to be inconsequential and forgettable.

It was probably worth every costly cent for Kim Basinger to get out of doing the dreadful Boxing Helena -- but you have to wonder whatever there was about it that persuaded her to do it in the first place. [3 Sept 1993]

The one thing that can be said of Waking Up in Reno is that it's rigorously consistent. Every note rings false.

Lacking the combustible Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas in leading roles, Showgirls descends into incoherent tedium. Though the filmmakers' incessant talk about vision, artistry and honest self-expression lead one to expect a sexually explicit biopic about the Dalai Lama, what is in fact provided is depressing and disappointing as well as dehumanizing.

A limp, predictable less-than-sitcom of a movie. It's a bomb, man, not the bomb.

Those foolhardy enough to place themselves at the mercy of 8MM can expect the following emotions: disgust and revulsion, then anger, followed by a profound and disheartening sadness. There are some films whose existence makes the world a worse place to live, and this is one of them.