There's a moral to the new teen movie Can't Buy Me Love: Money can't buy popularity. But it seems to have been lost on the movie makers themselves. What are they doing here but trying to spend their way to audience approval, success and glory? The plot is another one-sentence gimmick, the jokes juvenile, the morality a sham.

The Monster Squad is such fun, it makes you wish you were a kid again.

The aspirations behind Lady Beware -- a tale of psychological and physical molestation -- are unquestionably earnest, heartfelt and serious. At the same time, what's presented on screen is as vile and tasteless as everything the film makers purport to disdain. [22 Sept 1987, p.6]

If you take it on its own terms -- as a summer teen exploitation film locked into an adolescent vision of life, with no particular ambitions to step out of its class -- it's a movie that works just fine. [14 Aug 1987, p.26]

A misfiring, underdone epic that takes its inspiration not from life or literature, but from a toy line and the cartoon series it inspired.

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]

Aside from an occasional reference to Carroll, The Care Bears' Adventure is just standard 1980s children's fare. The same kind of minimal plot, sappy songs, badly timed gags, limited animation and smarmy message have been used in so many recent cartoons that even small children must be tiring of the pattern. [07 Aug 1987, p.6]

Stakeout is this summer's suntan lotion: It won't linger in the memory any better than it would survive a quick dip in the pool.

Midway through The Lost Boys there's a brief scene that suggests the magic and power it could have had. This scene suggests a fable of seductive evil-but nothing in the movie is ever half as evocative again. It's more lost than the Boys: a glossy fiasco with most of the real blood sucked out of it.

I feel just rotten about this, but I'm afraid I've outgrown James.

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]

There is the music, however, great dollops of '50s songs, and it lifts the movie when the dialogue and the earnest-but-uninspired direction keeps it earthbound.

It's no thigh-slapper like the Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School," but it's exceptionally good-natured and perceptive, and Harmon, in his first starring screen role, is a real charmer. [22 July 1987]

Despite a level of lurid violence that may offend many, this movie has a motor humming inside. It's been assembled with ferocious, gleeful expertise, crammed with humor, cynicism and jolts of energy. In many ways, it's the best action movie of the year. [17 Jul 1987]

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.

The movie’s tone is light, absurd; its sharper comments lie a little below the waterline.

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's one of those movies that, however well it works now, might have been pretty bad with a different cast and director. It doesn't really transcend its genre; it just stretches it in amusing and sometimes surprising ways.

Simply calling Surf Nazis Must Die a bad movie doesn't do it justice. This is a horror-action movie with dull action and horror, feebly done on every level: leaden satire, a repulsive romance, a revenge saga of zero intensity. The actors are often upstaged by the beach graffiti.

Using a twist on the ingenious premise of "Fantastic Voyage" -- miniaturized travel within a human body -- and a pair of very different but equally irresistible leading men, Innerspace is densely inventive and consistently hilarious. [1 July 1987, p.C1]

In a superb cast of mostly unknowns -- with the exception of Matthew Modine and Dorain Harewood -- D'Onofrio, who put on 60 pounds for this pivotal role, and Ermey are exceptional. [26 June 1987]

There are individual moments to remember with affection, but the plot has miles to go before we sleep. [26 June 1987, p.1]

If Spaceballs disappoints you, it isn't because it's unfunny or not entertaining. Brooks at medium pressure is still more amusing than most movie makers. [25 Jun 1987, p.1]

For all the laughter it generates in its confrontations between city and country folk and their ways, Withnail and I has a decidedly dark and subtle undertow. One hilarious incident after another may keep the semiautobiographical Withnail and I perking along, but it is at the same time a ‘60s joy ride about to tailspin into the sobering ‘70s.

I can't think of a current movie in which every element is in such balance: Martin seems unfettered, expansive, utterly at ease, capable of any physical feat (except possibly drinking from a wine glass without a straw). There's a tenderness to him that's magnetic. Daryl Hannah's Roxanne, an astronomer, is smart and sublimely beautiful all at once, her skin apricot-colored in this mountain sun, her face rhapsodic as she talks about muons, gluons and quarks.

It's arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie. There's no need to do a Mad magazine movie parody of this; it's already on the screen.

Under Australian director George Miller ("Mad Max"), The Witches of Eastwick begins so promisingly. It has such smashing separate moments, so succulent a cast and so interesting a premise that watching it crumble into stomach-turning crudeness and "Poltergeist"-scale special effects is deeply painful.

Good as much of John Schlesinger’s The Believers is--and it’s one of the better-produced, more exciting and intelligent thrillers of the year--it’s hard to keep from wondering, as you watch, why he wanted to do it in the first place.