It's only when you're leaving the theater that her spell wears off and you realize just how bad the movie, directed by Andy Tennant, really is.

Shot on ugly digital video with Troma-grade special effects, campy humor and frighteningly bad acting, Zombie Strippers should provide many laughs for stoners watching it on video.

It’s all headed for a showdown, of course, and duly delivers, though Crudup and Taylor are the only ones who really seem to have a handle on the New Yawk accent.

Like a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating.

Argentine writer-director Juan Solanas’ fantasy romance Upside Down is such a gorgeous wreck that I could almost sense Terry Gilliam somewhere muttering, “Wait a minute, I should have been the one to screw up this idea.”

When Neeson engages in bare-knuckle fisticuffs at the climax of the cartoonish Taken 2, I honestly couldn't figure out if the 60-year-old actor was actually present at all except for the close-ups.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders looks great and has a promising opening, but this atmospheric Spanish psychological thriller is otherwise pretty underwhelming.

If Wonder Park were a carnival attraction, it would be the merry-go-round. The animated movie has animals, relentless positivity and the most predictable journey ever. You must be no more than 4 feet tall to ride this one.

Detention does have imaginative editing and a stylish, candy-colored look - that is, so long as no one's vomiting, an activity that takes up an ungodly portion of the running time.

Step Up 3D is strictly 1D. Tired choreography and moldy hip-hop gestures accompany insipid characters.

If you go, be sure to stick around through the closing credits. By far the funniest part of the movie is a blackly humorous fantasy sequence starring Merchant.

The movie teaches us that you can flip your car down a mountain 15 times and walk away from it with two Tylenol.

Destined to enchant the slumber parties.

Director Marvin Kren delivers a lot of cheap scares, but the film doesn’t approach the dread-soaked suspense of the 1982 version of “The Thing.”

First-time director Kevin Bacon (Mr. Sedgwick) cleverly maintains a balance of discomfiting and familiar by jumping nimbly around Emily's life.

The fresh-faced Noonan tries very hard to rise above the material, but it defeats her and her fellow cast members.

Has moments that are eerily beautiful and genuinely moving -- and some that are surprisingly vulgar.

Overripe dialogue and a fevered score fail to inject any real tension, and the accentless English spoken throughout a film set entirely in France is ludicrous and jarring.

Mostly, Freak Weather is just pathetic.

Rambling, schmaltzy romantic comedy.

At its best, Shanghai Calling is mildly diverting.

Dividing its loyalties between documentary and fictional narrative, it lacks the advantages of belonging to either side.

Do not see this movie if you like children, dogs, hands or Hungarian folk music. The Prodigy, the latest in a long, increasingly lousy line of bloodthirsty kid movies, might spoil all of the above for you.

Compelling drama it is not.

The considerable charms of Miles Teller and Analeigh Tipton elevate this middling rom-com.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a pretty silly idea. So why on Earth is this movie, based on the satirical book by Seth Grahame-Smith, not having more fun?

Among cheesy sci-fi movies meant to make you think, I'll take Surrogates over "District 9." Both are highly derivative, but in the course of recombining the basic chromosomes of "Blade Runner," "The Matrix" and especially "I, Robot," Surrogates nudges the robo-thriller in an interesting direction.

Stone praises Latin America for turning toward "government of the people" (yet ignores Castro's lack of interest in democracy). But it's no wonder he's in such a sunny mood: We see him grow increasingly giddy while chewing coca leaves with Morales (a coca farmer who wants to make cocaine legal).