The folks who served up this formulaic swill seem to think comedy grants you a free pass from credibility. Our lonely hero's artificial Yuletide enthusiasm is more than odd: it's not recognizably human.

It stinks. The movie is so inert -- and Madonna’s performance so starkly amateurish -- that it’s impossible to take it seriously as an allegory about class and gender.

The dialogue is inane, the acting wooden, and Roger Christian's directing choices are a lesson in sci-fi film cliché.

Hilariously incompetent.

The Slugger's Wife isn't remotely provocative -- or even entertaining. It's an example of creative anorexia: the movie is so thin you leave the theater feeling you've watched the outtakes by mistake. [1 Apr 1985, p.87]

The combination of Shandling's button-down TV sensibility and Nichols's good taste produces a film whose tone is out of sync with the simple, ribald conceit and is only mildly amusing at best.

The usually reliable director Michael Caton-Jones hasn't a clue how to freshen up such stale material.

Rent the devastating "The Boys of St. Vincent" to see how slick and hollow Sleepers is, how little it reveals about the real nature and effect of child abuse. [28 October 1996, p. 74]

Like Sherman McCoy, the hero of Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," Brian De Palma makes one fatal choice that leads to disaster. The disaster is the movie The Bonfire of the Vanities. The choice was De Palma's decision to film it as a cartoon -- a broad, black, wannabe savage comedy. Every unfortunate moment of this screechy, heavy-handed movie is a result of that basic misconception, compounded by the fact that the comedy is staged by a man who seems to have temporarily lost his sense of humor. [24 Dec 1990, p.63A]

Matthew Lillard of "Scream," flies like his nickname and tries to bring the film some comic relief not already provided by the stultifying stupidity of the script.

A disappointingly slack, hackneyed comedy.

The best and perhaps only way to enjoy Saturn 3 is to pretend that you're watching a "Saturday Night Live" parody of Saturn 3. Imagine that Harvey Keitel is one of the Coneheads, that Kirk Douglas is the guest host, lampooning his own overemphatic acting style, and that Farrah Fawcett is, well, Farrah Fawcett. Viewed in this light, the unintentionally risible dialogue by Martin Amis becomes sparkling comic repartee. Keitel to Fawcett, with nary a flicker of expression in his voice: "You have a beautiful body. May I use it?" [10 March 1980, p.88H]

Comedy is no laughing matter; when a joke dies, the joker -- as well as the audience -- dies a little, too. At the end of Richard Pryor's latest comedy, The Toy, the viewer may require emergency medical attention. Shapeless, noisy, vulgar, sentimental and amateurish... [13 Dec 1982, p.83]

Every once in a while a film comes along that's so inexplicably ghastly that there's just no point in making nice about it.

If you harbor any fond feelings for the original, stay far away from this mess.