This is a disastrously clumsy, heavy-handed movie, one so desperate and exploitative that it resorts to putting a live grenade in the hands of a baby in order to get its message across.

The whole thing feels at least three summers too stale.

18 Again is one for the VCR. On the big screen, there's not enough Burns for your money. [08 Apr 1988, p.C1]

The liveliest and most engaging time killer to come out of Hollywood in a long while. It's junk, to be sure, but it is superbly made junk.

Moves too slowly, running out of gas in the later rounds of the plot.

Watching Wilson and Hudson toil thanklessly through this mess is more laborious than writing the Great American Novel. And a lot less lucrative.

Movies like The Wild Life are softcore porn comics for teenyboppers. It's hard to believe teenagers are really as easily entertained as the makers of this movie seem to expect them to be. What ever happened to introspection and identity crises? [01 Oct 1984, p.C7]

Much of King Kong Lives in fact seems designed by and for invertebrates. It is well known that if you leave a monkey in a room with a typewriter for long enough, the monkey will write an intelligible story. With screenwriters, on the other hand, there's no guarantee. [22 Dec 1986, p.C5]

This movie hypocritically entertains viewers by appealing to the same sadistic qualities it professes to condemn. There is real suffering going on in Latin America -- and this movie has nothing to do with it. [24 Sep 1984, p.C1]

A lot like getting socks for Christmas: Better than finding coal in your stocking but not exactly as thrilling as unwrapping a big-screen HDTV.

An oddly flat, quirky romantic comedy.

Chetwynd's design, to show the POW plight in terms as dreary as its reality, works against the movie at almost every point. [20 May 1987, p.D8]

These are things to keep in mind while the movie lumbers along from retread situation to punchleszs comic setup. Pirates looks cheap and runs long; it moves fast only when it is scrabbling for a shred of charm. [18 July 1986, p.D3]

Curiously (and contrary to what its ads would have you believe), Aspen Extreme is painfully discreet when it comes to sex. Whenever the characters engage in a romantic liaison, Hasburgh nervously cuts away right after the first kiss. It's as erotic -- or even romantic -- as skinny dipping in ice water. The skiing sequences are the movie's saving grace, exquisitely photographed and thrilling to watch. If you go, try to stick around until the avalanche scene near the end: It's impressive, and it's the only thing you'll remember. [26 Jan 1993, p.E2]

No matter how much good will the actors generate, Showtime eventually folds under its own thinness.

The sci-fi thriller Repo Men gets off to a sluggish start. But wait. You have to give the movie time to find its groove and establish its premise.

This is mildly amusing, and the scenes with Niven -- his last, and reportedly dubbed by impressionist Rich Little when Niven's illness had taken the strength from his voice -- are poignant. But there is no restoring the force that made the earlier Panthers work. [12 Aug 1983, p.C5]

What's missing is some faith in the audience's intelligence and, more importantly, the jokes.

Lucky Numbers is like stuff bought at an outlet mall. Sure, it's got the brand names and designer labels, but the color's a little strange, the style a little off, and nothing fits just right.

A rarely suspenseful thriller with a twist ending of the worst kind: It takes too much explanation.

The film will probably play a lot better in dorm rooms with plenty of beer kegs and bongs on hand, but in the confines of a movie theater, it's deadly - the sort of bad comedy Mel Brooks made late in his career, until he finally smartened up and quit.

Fans of the droll style of actor Tom Hanks will chuckle through The Man With One Red Shoe, a story that builds a comic house of cards on a mistaken identity. [20 July 1985, p.4]

The action, which bookends the movie, is atrocious, defying all laws of gravity and physics and machine gun-edited into incomprehensible lunacy.

That's My Boy more than lives up to its R-rating - including one gross-out gag repulsive enough to make you put down your popcorn.

For all of 10 minutes, Gray Matters looks like it might have accomplished the impossible: uncovering a romantic-comedy scenario audiences haven't seen a million times before.

Monumentally silly thriller.

Head Office has fleetingly funny moments -- Don (Father Guido Sarducci) Novello's attempt to lure women into his limo to listen to boring pop tapes, a Don King rap that's almost as funny as his hair -- but overall, this is one movie that's bankrupt. [7 Jan 1986, p.4]

You know a movie's in trouble when the characters babble on about long ago. In The Presidio, they have to. What's happening on-screen is dull and predictable. The movie's highlights, car chases up and down the San Francisco inclines, pale in comparison to those in Bullitt. [10 June 1988, p.D5]