Incarnate is such a pointless bit of hackwork that it almost makes the recent horror dud “Shut In” seem focused by comparison.

Aimless, immature, and frustratingly amateurish, Richard Bates’ “King Knight” feels like it was made exclusively for those involved in it, with no regard for an audience’s patience or time.

It's awfully tasteful and emotionally detached in its blissed-out depiction of beautiful young people cavorting in the sunlight.

To be fair, the slow burn does eventually catch fire and there’s lots of screaming and heavy breathing and dark tunnels and running and what-not. The relatively tense final half-hour is clearly the reason that very smart producer Jason Blum thought this would be a solid follow-up to “Paranormal Activity.” It’s that first hour that is the reason it took six years to (barely) get released.

The performances are consistently monotone, and the dialogue is alternately treacly, in terms of romantic statements, and on-the-nose, in terms of giving Hardin a back story to explain his rebel act.

The first act of Cabin Fever: Patient Zero is so defiantly stupid that I imagine most who rent it or struggle through it in a theater won’t care that there’s actually some material in the final act that clicks, mostly due to some incredibly strong makeup work.

A ridiculous fusion of "Paranormal Activity" and "Glee" that is so incredibly dumb that it is almost, but never quite, scary to behold.

Despite a premise rife with potential dark humor, there’s too little edge in Let’s Be Cops. Director/co-writer Luke Greenfield chose wacky over witty and the result is a film with no sense of danger, no reason to care and not enough laughs to make the sitcomish handling of a strong premise forgivable.

The sixth time is not the charm with this load of hooey that tries to make up for its lack of legitimate scares or basic narrative clarity by adding the alleged miracle of 3-D into the mix.

The good news is that I found the sequel better than the original — the writing sharper, the jokes fresher and smarter, the comic interaction between the lead characters consistently engaging.

Fear the Night often feels like it was made by artists who understand the type of movie that they’re making but maybe don’t really care enough about making it, either as a by-the-numbers genre exercise or a repudiation of its fans and their need for pseudo-enlightened catharsis.

I came to McGuckian’s film knowing nothing about Gray and left feeling frustrated that I hadn’t learned more about her, apart from the boorish chauvinists in her life.

What's missing is any genuine personality from the robot (or the human characters, for that matter).

The poems — and the film as a whole — fail to flesh James out as a whole and complicated human being worth rooting for.

What is harder to achieve than building a hospital? Producing a realistic movie about coping with grief by helping others – at least for the filmmakers behind Louder Than Words.

Then again, even they may find that this collection of half-baked scenes, inscrutable imagery and, yes, a couple of splendid musical performances wears out its welcome long before its conclusion.

There's a morbidly hilarious dark comedy buried not-so-deep inside the lousy revenge thriller Peppermint. It's just probably not the movie that director Pierre Morel ("Taken," "District B13") and screenwriter Chad St. John intended to make.

It is ridiculously lurid trash from start to finish and anyone trying to argue otherwise is as crazy as its central character. However, while its aim may be low throughout, it at least comes close to consistently hitting its targets.

The compositions are dull. The scenes are flimsy and shapeless. The pacing is the direct antithesis of what normally induces the excitement of adventure.

It’s a film with alternating shots of Katie Holmes looking scared and the doll looking creepy. Rinse and repeat. And it becomes so tediously boring that your mind will wander.

Great hero stories leave the viewer feeling inspired by the potential within the human condition. This one will just leave you depressed.

To put in Clichénese, the only language Battle of the Year knows: the creator's hearts just weren't in this thing.

Hurry Up Tomorrow takes its star’s caterwauling about how hard it is to be famous and heartbroken for granted, and expects its audience to roll with every self-inflicted wound. It’s vapid, meandering, and insistent on its own profundity as a tale of an artist reckoning with fame.

The irony is that as Gallner’s performance gets stronger, the film around him grows weaker.

If Hot Tub Time Machine 2 accomplishes anything — and it really doesn't — it is that it too never manages to find a way to justify its own existence.

Feels like it probably began life as a one-act play, set almost entirely in Lucy’s living room and with a small cast of characters. It has that feeling of a piece that needed a bit more workshopping to discern its purpose and, like a lot of independent cinema that feels like it has theatrical origins, never becomes convincingly cinematic.

A parody only by legal definition, The Mean One has no teeth as a naughty comedy or gory horror.

Imagine the most overdone, Philip Glass-style horror movie music playing over glossy footage of a university art class, and you have some idea what your eyes and ears are in for while attending The Time Being.

Instead of focusing on gastronomic nirvana, this listless culinary drama feels and looks more like a glossy European travel commercial.

In the end, it is up to Leem Lubany, a beauty who hails from Palestine and made her debut in the 2013 Oscar-nominated foreign language film "Omar," to lend a much-needed grace note as Salima.

A gaudy, overstuffed piece of blockbuster trash.

It's "Eat, Pray, Love"-lite, and "Eat, Pray, Love" was already "lite."

Even a script written by algorithm would make more sense than Force of Nature, a dumb dud of a movie that relies on the most preposterous of coincidences and the most exhausted of premises (in both senses of the word).

The movie has a clearly defined aesthetic and a consistent tone and a good heart, and there are moments where it wanders into the sublime.

Shirin in Love blends tangy romantic comedy and tart social satire into a cinematic cocktail that's pleasingly off-beat, warm-spirited and knowing.

It's one of the year's most convoluted original screenplays, but is probably best taken as a test in plot summarizing.

Swartzwelder, going for “thoughtful,” instead achieves “glacial.” A romance wants to sweep viewers up, not bog them down. Still, Old Fashioned is both unusual and intelligent enough that, despite it not being entirely MY cup of tea, I’m hoping that it’ll succeed at doing at least a little more than addressing the converted.

Incoherently directed, thematically muddled, and poorly acted, writer/director/producer/star Livia De Paolis’ drama The Lost Girls should have stayed on the page.

As a moviegoer, however, you do have a choice. Either weep with them–or laugh at them. Or stay far, far away.

Orwell did not intend “Animal Farm” as light entertainment.

Despite a few musical bright spots, you’ll leave humming the costumes.

America has long had its wildest forms of fantasy and comfort fueled by promises about things that are not of this world. Stuff we can’t confirm until we die. An afterlife, the pearly gates. After Death follows this tradition, with a cadre of talking heads who had incredibly traumatic physical instances that are bundled here as Near-Death Experiences that prove the existence of God and Heaven.

It’s painful to watch. Not because no one cares about Adam’s heartache. But because the movie is boring, trite, sexist tripe that wants to make the viewer empathize with a guy who’s actually pretty aggressive in his pursuit of loserdom.

These are all cartoon figures out of Frank Capra’s most feverish populist nightmares.

The film may be completely worthless from an artistic standpoint but it certainly can’t be beat from a convenience standpoint.

Here is a film that is so awful in so many ways that at one point, it includes a clip from the notoriously dreadful “The Emoji Movie” and you begin to worry that that film’s reputation might be tarnished by association.

Hitman: Agent 47 is aggressively awful, the kind of film that rubs its lackadaisical screenwriting, dull filmmaking and boring characters in your face, almost daring you to ask the theater operator for your money back.

The problem is that the filmmakers' aversion to any hint of storytelling originality means that the main impression The Colony leaves is one of almost stupefying over-familiarity.

Rather than crafting a high-concept science-fiction marvel, Fuqua’s Infinite relies on shoddy VFX and ropey world-building for the worst film of his career.

An incoherent blob.

That the story is never scary is the least of its problems.

If it sounds like a fun idea for a ‘90s-style slasher pic, it is, but the execution is something else altogether. For a good HOUR, Thriller is the kind of flat, dull teen drama that even The CW would pass on.

The Death & Life of John F. Donovan is rife with melodramatic moments and insufferable characters.

In spite of its enjoyable, easy-to-exploit aspects, 47 Ronin is a big budget spectacle hamstrung by its need to be at once flippant and respectful of its honor-driven source material.

A horrible and wildly unnecessary follow-up that might actually be worse than its predecessor.

Co-writer/co-director duo Harpo and Lenny Guit’s apparent disregard for their viewers’ comfort can sometimes be quite funny, depending on your tolerance for messy, meandering absurdist comedy.

The film rarely comes to life because Rollins, the only compelling actor in the otherwise amateurish cast, is underutilized, and virtually everything else underdeveloped.

This movie, which is what you’d call a god-awful mess.

There are a few nice moments of performance and filmmaking (including the elaborately choreographed final shot), but not enough to redeem a film that seems to flinch from the harsh truths it was presumably created to address.

This isn't a knowing parody of a beloved show, a la the 2012 reboot/parody "21 Jump Street"; it's a sample of the brain-dead entertainment against which its creators are supposedly reacting.

Despite some game acting (and one truly superb moment from David Strathairn), Maladies remains on too low a boil to communicate any sense of stakes for the various characters. It seems to be trying to say something about creativity, and living one's life on one's own terms, but it's a muddle.

What Winchester lacks in originality its creators amply make up for in execution.

Although he’s playing a man of letters, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers swans around the film’s settings with a pout that suggests that he’s waiting for his cue to sing “Please allow me to introduce myself.”

The movie is bland hackwork; its crime isn't incompetence, but indifference.

It turns out the creators of this cash grab are aggressively unwilling to go much of anywhere at all.

A better title would’ve likely been “121 Minutes in Purgatory,” since that’s essentially where audiences will find themselves residing during the entirety of this dreary slog down a familiar road paved with painfully good intentions.

The best thing that can be said about Once Upon a Time in Venice, a very light action comedy from Mark and Robb Cullen, is that it allows Willis to cut loose and have fun.

Man Down is a bad film, but it’s made even worse by the taste it will leave in your mouth regarding its silly handling of a very serious issue.

The Bag Man is so sloppily executed it feels like they didn't have enough light fixtures to get the effects they wanted. But that's only one of the problems.

While empathy is first to go in the tasteless When the Bough Breaks, there is nothing good in its place.

Mostly, Fifty Shades of Black is exactly what you expect it will be. It hits all the notes of its source material, only it amps them up, and it seems to get the inherent absurdity of this premise even more than Sam Taylor-Johnson’s movie did.

The reason he’s (Cage) the most interesting thing here is not because his performances is particularly intense or eccentric but because everything around him is so wretchedly dull.

The problem is that while it never lapses into complete cartoonishness, it never does much of anything else either, and pretty much plays like a film made for basic cable that is buoyed for a while by a couple of relatively strong central performances before eventually succumbing to terminal mediocrity in its silly final scenes.

When Madea is onscreen, at least you know what universe you are in, and there is something interesting and insane to watch. Otherwise, you are thrust into an abyss of meaninglessness and plot-heavy maneuvering overlaid with Christian propaganda that wears out its welcome with the first line of exposition.

When one considers how good this material might have been if placed in the right hands, to see it squandered this way makes it almost more painful to view than the typical Sandler stinker.

Had this been the work of a young novice filmmaker, I would say it showed some promise. But as it happens, Mr. Martin is approaching his mid-fifties. He should look for better writers, to begin with.

Jiu Jitsu is too disjointed and tame to be worth an impulse-rent; it's also too silly to be enjoyed with a straight face, and too lazy to be endearingly dopey.

Overblown caricatures and stale jokes about “don’t you know who I am?!” and going to see his wife’s shaman feel about as empty as a finished cup of coffee, and unfortunately, this movie has nothing else to offer for a refill.

Last Knights is so thoroughly mediocre, so dully empty, that it’s difficult to summon the enthusiasm to trash it.

One of those rare birds that is so off-putting in so many ways that all I could do for the most part was wonder how so many presumably intelligent people could be persuaded to sign on to produce and appear in something that could not have possibly seemed like anything other than a total mess from its earliest stages.

You’ll see some durable makeup in Nina. What you won’t see is any justification why this film should exist.

It isn’t creepy, but it isn’t terribly plausible, either. It’s just another movie in which a 30ish white dude finds purpose and learns how to live life again through the love and support of a younger woman who’s more of a concept than a real person.

It takes some chutzpah to name your siege thriller Dangerous, and unfortunately, there’s not enough of it in the Scott Eastwood actioner of that name.

The Happytime Murders isn’t so much interested in immersing you in a comedic world so much as it is in having its puppets do the most outrageous things you’ve never seen or heard puppets do in a movie.

The whole thing is too much of a tease, and once you figure that out, there's no actual suspense to speak of, just momentary manipulations.

Another season, another “Liam Neeson Has Skills” movie.

Expecting is a fairly laidback movie that isn't serious and isn't funny and isn't much of anything.

From the very beginning, this is an incoherent mess.

Unfortunately, the craftsmanship is lacking.

The Darkness is pretty much a total bust—it isn’t scary, it isn’t exciting and it plods along at such a snails pace that even though it clocks in at just over 90 minutes, it plays like it runs at least twice that.

It’s the presence of Gibson and his co-star Sean Penn, who give the project a stuffy sanctimoniousness, as it so transparently yearns to be the definition of “powerhouse acting.”

The sitcommy scenes of family arguments and droll wisecracks clash with the grimmer aesthetic Carnahan wants to give it, so “Shadow Force” feels like an action film serving two masters and fulfilling neither’s needs. It’s laughable, all right, but in all the wrong ways.

You will be hard-pressed to remember anything about it even only a few minutes after watching it, which should come as a relief to everyone involved with its production.

Warrior Queen is not the first movie about this subject to be helmed by a woman — “Manikarnika” was co-directed by star Kangana Ranaut — nor does it feature a stand-out performance like those other movies do (Ranaut is very good in “Manikarnika”). So while I suppose you could do worse than The Warrior Queen of Jhansi, I know you could do better.

Nightlight is a perfect example of a film with interesting ideas that are totally smothered by poor execution.

Someone must have said, “... like 'Ghost,' but you know, for teens!” when pitching Endless, Scott Speer’s shameless and embarrassingly vacant rip-off of Jerry Zucker’s wildly successful, otherworldly 1990 romantic drama. But I bet no one in that room expected the outcome to be quite this irritating.

Between underwhelming action scenes and draining expository dialogue, Assassin Club often leaves its cast out to dry.