With Halloween II, Zombie shows conclusively that he's not interested in growing, getting better or ever becoming an original. He's just a hack with a made-up name, a cult following and a wife who can't act.

Revenge isn't sweet. It's crude, ugly, pretentious, repulsive, obnoxious and just about unwatchable.

Jackie Earle Haley, the fans' choice to take on the role of Freddy Krueger in the remake of the 1984 boogeyman blockbuster A Nightmare on Elm Street proves stunningly, rousingly…adequate…for the job.

Anna Faris and Chris Evans don't have enough scenes together, don't have enough funny lines and aren't surrounded by enough funny people to give this "Bridesmaids-lite" a shot.

The best you can say about this Yogi Bear is that he's harmless. No animal was harmed in the making of this picture except the one Hanna-Barbera made a bundle on almost 50 years ago.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime fiasco, an epic fail like none we have seen this year, a bad idea by a very bad director and a career-crippling credit for all concerned. You don't want to miss it.

Emilio Estevez (Stakeout, the Young Guns movies) isn't exactly Michael J. Fox, but he qualifies as a sympathetic hero, and Rene Russo (Major League) is fine - if a bit bland - as his girlfriend. Besides, the real fun is in the supporting cast. Mick Jagger plays a sort of bounty hunter, and although he has only about 2 1/2 expressions, they're good ones. Jerry Hall, who appears very briefly, plays a newswoman with only one expression: You've seen it before, and it is plenty. [21 Jan 1982, p.D1]

O’Loughlin is the very definition of comic dead weight. Imagine making Greg Kinnear carry half of "Baby Mama," or sending Tina Fey out with Matthew Fox on "Date Night" and you’ll get the picture.

Although the picture's biggest problems are the lame writing and limp direction, it doesn't help that the main role requires a comedian, which Arnold just is not. [22 Nov 1996, p.20]

Estevez set out to make a movie about garbage and ended up with a movie that actually is garbage. [27 Aug 1990, p.C1]

Director Michael Chapman, an experienced cinematographer, is skilled in conveying ideas through pictures -- quite an advantage in a movie about people who aren't especially verbal. And Chapman's cinematographer, Jan De Bont, has a varied palette that responds to the visual demands of a world in transition.

It’s an American "Love Actually" without the warmth that writer-director Richard Curtis stuffs into his all-star confections, without the wit, without much love, actually.

Even though the new film is an obvious rip-off of It's a Wonderful Life (by way of Back to the Future), and even though much of this material is familiar from Taking Care of Business, Mr. Destiny might have been watchable if director/co-writer James Orr (Tough Guys) had demonstrated any comic timing whatsoever. [12 Oct 1990, p.4]

Brolin is so damned good in the saddle, in the hat and in the part that a half-sober viewer could half forget how half-arsed this movie he's starring in is.

Gasp! And you thought Scream was predictable. [26 Dec 1997, p.11]

None of the current generation of wrestler-actors seem to have the charisma or comic gifts of a Hulk Hogan or Dwayne Johnson.

This movie will finally kill off the series.

The villains are weak and the narrative has little drive to it.

The most epic miscalculation since the Golden Summer of M. Night Shyamalan. An unerotic unthrilling erotic thriller in the video game mold, Sucker Punch is "Last Airbender" with bustiers.

The problems with North go beyond casting, however, way back to the movie's central idea and to the filmmakers' failure to think it through. [22 Jul 1994, p.23]

It’s not a great film, with some edge Sparks put in the novel left out of the script. But there’s real chemistry between the young lovers and an old fashioned virtue to the father-daughter, father-daughter’s boyfriend scenes.

Let's just say that compared to Son-in-Law, Green Acres is Noel Coward.

It's a rarely amusing movie overwhelmed by grating kids, unfunny sidekicks, half-hearted Sandler funny voices and a co-star who seems more fearful of smiling with each passing year.

You gorehounds will enjoy this one. Forty-two dead bodies. Two motor-vehicle chases with one crash-and-burn and one crash-and-plunge. Neck-snapping. Fireballs. Arm-ripping. Skull-drilling. Terminal spanking. Flaming supporting actor. Brutal push-ups. Student cut in half. Puke-a-rama. Six fistfights. Attempted rape. Kung Fu. Junkie Fu. Robot Fu. Forklift Fu. [22 Nov 1991]

The script, by Showgirls' Joe Eszterhas, seems dead-set on evoking a darkly sensuous mood, full, as it is, of sex games, secret sex tapes and even - Lord help us - a fertility mask. But William Friedkin (Blue Chips, The Exorcist) directs in such a stark, threatening style that the combined effect of their efforts is an uninvolving, faintly creepy brooding. [13 Oct 1995, p.25]

The "Made of Honor" screenwriters don't deliver enough jokes or feisty exchanges between the ill-matched traveling companions.

A slick one hour and 50 minute version of those political convention hagiographies ("A Man From Hope"), so it's not exactly an objective take on its subject, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Profane, profanely silly and blasphemous to beat the band, Legion begins well before plunging into the abyss of tedium.

Ever since Charles Durning played the governor of Texas in Best Little Whorehouse and danced around the rotunda in a tutu, I've thought he might be my kinda guy. Now he's proved it in Stand Alone, or "Death Wish for Grandpas," the best movie ever made about Medicare patients that decide to bayonet all the South American cocaine dealers in town.

This is not a bad cast, but whatever wit the script aims for is lost in the queasy details director Miguel Sapochnik found more fascinating.

Good looking (it was filmed in Winter Garden) but slow and bland, this faith-based tear-jerker is a depressingly unemotional affair, with writing and some of the acting so flat that even its emotionally loaded situations can’t inspire waterworks.

It's meant to be faintly Pythonesque with a hint of bowdlerized "The Black Adder"...But it's entirely too slow of foot for that comparison to pay off.

Repossessed sounded like a great idea: Leslie Nielsen performs an exorcism on Linda Blair. But it's one of those flicks that can't decide whether it wants to be a pure-dee Naked Gun rip-off with 9,000 sight gags or have a real honest-to-God comedy plot. It's got some horse laughs in it, but you keep going "Shouldn't I be laughing again by now?" [19 Oct 1990, p.13]

Home Alone-style slapstick with occasional (almost random) heart-tugging. [17 Jun 1994, p.27]

The best to be said for the current production is that the editing is refreshingly swift, the cinematography is clear-eyed and the running time is mercifully short. (I clocked it at just under an hour and a half.) But do I recommend Fire Birds? That's a negative. [29 May 1990, p.D1]

Absurdly plotted, ineptly scripted and haplessly acted, Creature is a new variation on the "Creature from the Black Lagoon" theme.

Cop Out is still funnier than the dreadful later Eddie Murphy cop pictures. But it feels like an homage to a period best forgotten.

Its star, Brandon Routh, is just as miscast as a droll, world-weary "investigator of the undead" as he was as a boy-Man of Steel back in 2006.

They're gonna say that it used to be a good movie, but then the Motion Picture Censor Board got on their case and gave it an X rating, and they had to take a chain saw to the movie, and what came out was different. They weenied out on us. They suckered us for five bucks. They profaned the name of the most revered horror movie in film history. And what makes it worse is that the director, Jeff Burr, evidently knew what he was doing. There are a few scenes in this flick that are as scary as anything I've ever seen. [02 Feb 1990, p.12]

A dull but harmless big-screen comedy aimed at the youngest movie goers.

Tedious time-killer of a kiddie comedy.

The irony is that this movie - which fails to emulate such storybook-based virtues as coherent plotting and characterization - is pretty darn empty itself.[15 Feb 1991, p.6]

These guys set out to make a movie where they could crack each other up. At this late date, they can't even manage that.

The slapstick is very small-kid friendly and even the most adult-friendly jokes are pretty mild stuff.

James takes his comic lumps like a man. His Griffin suffers injuries and indignities and lets us laugh at him as he does. No matter where the script wanders and where the direction founders, at some point, James' comic instincts take over. And this time, they don't let him down.

Far more grim than "Grimm," and not nearly as much fun as it should have been.

Disney's effort to turn Kristen Bell into America's Sweetheart reaches its tipping point with You Again, a flat romantic comedy that packages her in a funny setup and surrounds her with funny people.

A dull-witted variation on the themes of the original Blue Lagoon, in which two young people (played by Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins) were stranded on a tropical island.

Lawyer-turned-screenwriter Dylan Schaffer's script is an unhappy combination of genres, tones, too many dead stretches of people in cars and inept dialogue. Rapaport's tiresome patter doesn't allow for the weak laughs to land.

In Howard the Duck, the special effects -- and the Muppety duck jokes -- command so much attention that it's easy to overlook the movie makers' clever narrative touches. It's rather fitting, for example, that Howard is shown to be almost as much of a misfit on the duck world as he is on Earth. And there's a sometimes-touching, sometimes-hilarious Fay Wray-King Kong relationship established between Howard and a sexy, baby-faced rock singer named Beverly (Lea Thompson). The main reason the relationship is so intriguing is that Thompson always keeps you guessing about her character's true feelings for the cantankerous bird. It's hard to fault the tongue-in-bill high spirits of a movie like Howard the Duck.

Crude, adolescent and not very funny.

Stephen King's Graveyard Shift is the 19th Big Steve story to be made into a movie, and it's one of the more decent ones even though the gigantic mutant-slime octopus monster that lives in the basement doesn't really ever appear on screen where you can get a good look at him. [23 Nov 1990, p.15]

Sadly, Immigration Tango is like a slow-dance with your sister - perfunctory, awkward and without a hint of heat.

"Steel" isn't offensively exploitative, just awkward, goofy and terminally sluggish. But then, how fast-paced could a movie be whose central character clumps around in 75 pounds of body armor? [15 Aug 1997]

It's not a bad looking movie, with Deco design touches that remind me of the earlier Rand film adaptation, "The Fountainhead." But the acting's flat and the script is absurdly cluttered with characters whose purpose may only truly become clear if they ever are allowed to make the other two films they have planned.

The best you can say about this hooey is that at least he had the King of the Bs, Ron Perlman, along for a few sidekick laughs.

As an evening out: Its many faults notwithstanding, Bonfire does have at least one thing going for it. The movie is a mess, but, like Wise Guys, it's a lively mess.

If “the gals” have to bow out, at least they try to do it in a sprint -- in their Manolo Blahniks. It’s a pity nobody told them you can’t run in heels -- in sand dunes.

Limp and lifeless, this Next Door neighbor should be evicted to DVD.

Paul Weitz ("Cirque du Freak," "American Dreamz") takes over as director, and the film shows all the signs of re-shoots and re-edits designed to bring in more characters and perhaps find a few more laughs.

The action is wan, the laughs hard to come by.

Skyline plays like an effects guru's resume reel, not a movie.

It's only a movie, and not a remotely effective one. And for Zellweger, whose "Miss Potter" and "Appaloosa" were barely seen, with "Leatherheads" and "New in Town" further deflating her A-list clout, that's the real shame here.

I had fun watching Drop Dead Fred, but I want to take special care not to raise expectations unrealistically by overpraising it. The movie is no comic masterpiece, but it is consistently amusing in a way that sometimes reminded me of a kiddie picture and at other times of a more sophisticated comedy.

Bell, a petite, pretty blonde, may or may not have the Meg Ryan-Julia Roberts-Sandra Bullock goods. When in Rome, a leaden variation on that rom-com recipe, fails utterly to make her case.

This waking nightmare from the "Nightmare on Elm Street" creator is a puzzle with no solutions, a tale with a twist that isn't a twist at all.

Abduction puts Lautner in motion and never goes very far wrong as long as he remains in motion.

Whatever merits the production values have, the cheap frights don't deliver, the performers bring no pathos and the gimmick behind Apollo 18 flat out does not work.

Superman IV is cinematic kryptonite. Not only could it kill the Superman series, it might also leave filmgoers feeling weak.

Director Michael W. Watkins, whose decades of TV credits go back to "Quantum Leap," manages one clever visual gag - a bus wreck, observed from the far side of a cornfield. We hear a crunch, see a telephone pole wobble and a little puff of smoke. Then Watkins blows the moment with a fiery overkill.

Any signs of life the series showed in the last installment (Saw VI), a dash of humanity here and there, were premature.

On the sliding critter-comedy scale, Furry Vengeance falls somewhere between the Chipmunks and the Chihuahua (the one from Beverly Hills).

Then there's Pacino, out-of-place and yet somehow right at home. You want big? Al does BIG. And since is as close as we're likely to get to "Don Corleone Does Don Quixote," that alone is worth the price of admission.

A timid thriller that manages a couple of mild jolts and a couple of creepy-cringe-worthy moments in its Variations on a "Single White Female" theme.

I am not going to try to tell you that this one-joke, talking-horse comedy is, in any meaningful sense, a good movie. What I am going to say is that it's a little better than my rock-bottom expectations led me to predict.

Aniston doesn’t bring her old A-game to this. But at least she’s not quiet and reserved and no-energy, her approach to too many roles of late. Butler makes the most of his Neanderthal rut.

A humorless mashup of "White Chicks" and "Glee."

The worst movie of the summer, arriving on the last weekend of the summer.

Off the wall? Friend, you don’t know off the wall until you’ve seen five twelve-year-old girl singer-dancers cover the Tina Turner/Phil Spector epic “River Deep, Mountain High” in the screwball kiddie dance comedy, Standing Ovation.

A typical mad slasher movie, except the slashers are not mad, not even human. They are robots that were supposed to provide security at a shopping mall. But, as usual, their targets are a group of brainless teen-agers. [01 Aug 1991, p.I1]

There’s nobody delivering the laughs in this arid action comedy.

The script is a mad, muddled blitz of one-liners and movie references. Some of the animation is a hoot, and a few voice actors stand out.

This colossal folly, the fiasco of the summer of 2010 - gives us all a ringside seat at the sight of Mr. "I See Dead People's" career gurgling down the drain.

Overlong and entirely too ambitious in the number of “issues” it tries to cover, To Save a Life wanders all over the place before reaching its very predictable conclusions.

Movies like Wild Orchid give sex a bad name...The only thing to be said for this embarrassingly inept film is that, in its own schlocky way, it does intermittently manage to get a libidinous buzz going. This is not an especially tough thing for a movie with sex scenes to do, but it's something.

Mr. Magoo manages to be faithful to cartoon's format without capturing an iota of its charm. [26 Dec 1997, p.24]

If Kristen Stewart ever saw Vampires Suck, she'd be scarred for life.

I admit, I jumped a couple of times in the beginning, but as the movie progressed, it lost its horror and picked up its stupidity. [20 Aug 1993, p.21]

Give it points on setting and a couple of the performances, but the joke-starved All's Faire in Love only rarely rises to the level of fair to middling.

Abetter title for Jaws The Revenge would be Jaws The Refund. A refund is what a lot of people who go to see this picture will demand. This Time It's Personal, the tag line for the new film's ad campaign, doesn't seem quite right either. This Time It's Terrible would have been more accurate.

Throughout the movie, there are occasional "joke" lines, most of which are pretty lame but at least they establish that this is all intended as comedy. For the most part, however, the humor depends upon the audience's finding the movie's repulsiveness funny.

It's an ugly movie to look at and a faintly nauseating one to sit through, truth be told.

This PG-rated romp is bland bananas compared to its R-rated predecessor. Besides, immediately following the liberating craziness of Animal House, another slob comedy didn't seem like such a bad idea. Now, after nearly a decade of slob comedies, the last thing we need is yet another, tamer one.

A generic sports drama, it scores points for being that rare "faith based film" to show a little edge.

The story isn't particularly organized. It's more a collection of scenes - than a coherent coming-of-age tale.

If Laugh at My Pain makes people take a second look at this perpetual third banana on the big screen, so much the better.