Coincidentally, this is the second movie in two weeks about a haunted seafaring vessel ("Below" is the other), and if you see just one, this shouldn't be it.

Battleship is a board game for children, so it stands to reason a film adaptation would also be aimed at kids. But did they have to gear it to really dumb kids?

At the very least, Corman would have remembered to make the movie fun.

In The Arrival, Charlie Sheen makes a startling discovery that, sadly, has nothing to do with the suspicion that he should have ended his flagging movie career ages ago. [31 May 1996, p.6G]

Ricochet would be utterly unremarkable (in the small universe of violent and atmospheric cop dramas that make no sense) were it not for the cast, which includes some A players. [07 Oct 1991, p.C1]

For the most part, Tombstone is inept. Some of the performances are wincingly bad: Dana Delany, playing a touring actress with the hots for Wyatt, is particularly embarrassing. Director George P. Cosmatos (Leviathan) firmly cements his hack status: He takes nearly an hour to get things rolling, then fails to build any sort of momentum. [25 Dec 1993, p.F1]

Ballard made The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf, and he's good with spectacle;: His second-unit crew this time found ways to shoot the controlled violence of big sails in good wind that take the breath away. But the rest of Wind is just out there flapping. What a mess. [14 Sep 1992, p.C5]

The performances -- even those by Rosanna Arquette and Jeff Bridges, as Sarah and Scudder -- are simply trashy; they're throwaway stuff. [30 Apr 1986, p.C7]

The set design of Thirteen Ghosts may have been expensive, but its thrills are cheap.

A lobotomized campus comedy. [3 May 1994, p.E6]

The movie's attempts at zaniness are flat, almost embarrassing.

An excruciating and melodramatic comedy.

If this is magic, I'll take "Gigli."

This excruciatingly dumb, formulaic picture, which somehow required the work of four screenwriters but contains not even one single, fleeting moment of wit or humor.

Hot Dog...The Movie! involves soft-core quickies and schoolyard one-liners and is not much fun at all. [14 Jan 1984, p.C7]

Four Christmases is sour to the point of curdling, a satirical look at the holidays a la "Bad Santa" that does exactly what that film avoided: come off as both off-puttingly misanthropic and gloppily sentimental.

Zapped strains for laughs with a few weak attempts at film parody. The references here are to Star Trek, Taxi Driver and The Exorcist (in this context, flying vomit is supposed to be funny). They only make us wish we were watching a different movie. [09 Sep 1982, p.C7]

Even Ben Stiller looks bored out of his mind in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, and he got paid several million dollars to star in it.

Never before has Egoyan made a picture this egregiously, relentlessly bad.

My Favorite Year moves from bad joke to bad joke, but it does move. [08 Oct 1982, p.D9]

Why does The Big Year's trailer intentionally hide what the film is really about? Here's why: Because bird-watching - or birding, as practitioners prefer to call it - makes for a stupefyingly boring movie.

Porky's Revenge is just what you'd think it is, only not as good. And folks, when a filmmaker promises a cheap, quick and dirty sex comedy and can't deliver, that's disappointment. [26 March 1985, p.D5]

The Back-up Plan is about as much fun as 36 hours of labor, only you don't get to go home with a baby at the end. Instead, you leave with a throbbing headache and a lot of questions about why anybody still thinks Jennifer Lopez can anchor a movie.

You expect more from King. The man obviously knows a thing or two about terror, yet Sleepwalkers is a pastiche of old B- movies. Bad B-movies. [16 Apr 1992, p.F3]

The most remarkable failure of the film is that the principals don't seem even to like each other very much, despite their habit of facing the future arm in arm. There's a lot of cute flesh up on the screen, signifying nothing. [28 June 1985, p.D1]

As much as She's Gotta Have It exceeded expectations, School Daze sinks beneath them. This is one low- down flop of a movie. [12 Feb 1988, p.C5]

A Kiss Before Dying is nothing if not devious. But it's also a textbook example of incompetent direction. [29 Apr 1991, p.C5]

(Theron) and Depp give lazy, almost irrelevant performances... resolutely unmoving.