Take a wretched premise. Imagine the worst picture that could be made from it. Then imagine something even worse. That's Alien vs. Predator.

Watching this film is a little like wallowing in warm surf with soft pop music wafting in the breeze.

Doesn't look like a movie somebody made. It looks like a movie somebody hallucinated and put up on the screen.

The semiserious comedy by director Sven Pape is in its own category, and unfortunately it's not always an interesting one.

No more than a minute into this, and it becomes obvious that the next 98 are going to be trouble.

The desperation TV stars must feel to be on the big screen is the only explanation for Edie Falco and Elisha Cuthbert's appearance in The Quiet, a creepy family drama that reeks of pretentiousness.

A pure Frankenstein flick -- ugly, profane, terror-inducing, clumsy, nasty, desperate, stupid, contemptible, horny and brought to life by schlocky, shoddy science and an electric wish to prove that its makers still matter.

A romantic comedy and an adventure story, but in this case that just means it bombs in two distinct ways.

Miserly on food porn but not on prefab characters, it's well short of a cinematic feast.

Catherine Hardwicke's prettified movie is a strange adaptation because it supplants the woodsy horror of the original fairy tale with two new elements: a romantic triangle and a witch hunt.

Levinson is careful not to make the Afghan people into buffoons, which is good, but it doesn’t change the fact that these folks are cardboard characters.

“Avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness,” Hector writes in his book. But avoiding this movie might be a good start.

The picture gives us two protagonists and sets up a situation in which only one of them can have a decent life. Then, having devised this sour souffle, the screenwriters find no adjustment to make it palatable. The resolution is flip, at best.

Don't let this dog out -- please.

The dragging pace is one of several agonizing defects in this bloated sci-fi action drama.

Still, it's almost impossible to entirely wreck this great chestnut of Broadway and film. Thanks mostly to the terrific songs, the new version has transporting moments. [20 March 1999, Daily Notebook, p.B1]

Like “Chinatown” with no stakes or “The Big Lebowski” minus the laughs, Poolman is a neo-noir comedy that shares just one quality with its superior influences: a palpable love for Los Angeles in all its corrupt, cruddy glory.

Has maybe a half-dozen moderately frightening scenes.

The film is an improvement on previous Sparks moody-doomed-love opuses such as “The Last Song” and “Dear John.” If that is damning with faint praise, the cogs here are the same as in his previous love machines

It's the lightest of the Batman movies, the most cartoony, the dumbest and the least ambitious. But it holds the audience's attention, brings on a few laughs and never really gets boring.

Writers David Bryan and Joe DiPietro are somehow always generous yet trenchant with their rich source material. It’s a fairy tale with a “a pretty, pretty girl in a pretty, pretty dress,” but one with a rotten foundation — a royal marriage less built on love than strategized by cold pragmatism.

Among the slapstick, there are musical numbers and a few surprise cameo appearances. In the end, the film leaves you in a dance-happy mood.

Could have used more dramatic energy, maybe at the expense of some of that gorgeous scenery.

Not about the justice or injustice of the legal system. Rather it's about the tragedy of Sam's predicament.

What is bloody and full of holes?

Hitman: Agent 47 takes an austere European aesthetic and combines it with Hollywood mindlessness, and the result is like a guilty pleasure, minus the pleasure.

Michael can't be killed, and so a ''Halloween'' picture can never really end. It can only stop. And since it can stop anywhere, it may as well stop sooner than later. This one stops later, and by the time it does it's hard to care. [17 Oct 1989, p.E4]

To its credit, no matter how self-important and dreary Infinite gets at times, it’s never dull, and there’s always a little sparkle to it and a reason to keep watching.

Neutralizes these characters, makes them cute and one-dimensional like fluffy dolls.

Granted, you don't expect much from a movie like this: azure seas and honey-dripped sunsets, perhaps, a little titillation and a few wicked laughs. But Robert Steadman's photography lacks the imagination of Almendros' work on The Blue Lagoon, and the rare erotic moments are no match for the dumbness of Leslie Stevens' script. [03 Aug 1991, p.C3]

It has a weak story that provides no tension, feeling or interest. Its opening action sequence is just a long, drawn-out dud, filmed by director John Moore in the worst modern style of quick cuts and smeary, jittery photography.

Stupid, derivative horror film that substitutes extreme gore for suspense.

Campbell and Edwards work wonders with the rocky, wide-open Oregon landscape, but none of their periwinkle-blue skies and sparkling shots of whooping cranes in flight can compensate for a film that aims high, means well, and ultimately fails its audience. [20 May 1994]

A dreary little thriller that irritates more than it thrills.

When viewing the action thriller London Has Fallen, there’s no escaping the reality that you’ve seen everything on the screen before — many, many times. For every bullet, and you will lose count, there is a cliche.

The rat problem happens only on the graveyard shift, accounting for the title of Stephen King's all-time worst movie -- and he's got a lot of them. [27 Oct 1990, p.C3]

At its most interesting, and a bit frightening, when Moore starts to get a little loony. Too bad they didn't follow through and make this more of a psychological thriller than a melodrama.

This clumsy, self-indulgent film veers from comedy to tragedy and is told in flashbacks, with treacly diary entries and unconvincing "testimonies" from friends providing a window into the past.

Had a chance to be not just OK, not just fluff, but something special, and it's a shame that the people making it either didn't realize it or didn't have the guts to take this movie where it wanted to go.

Highlander: The Final Dimension is no more compelling than the average pile of bricks.

If only the projectionist could be persuaded to play the first 10 minutes over and over for two hours, this might be a satisfying movie. Unfortunately, the middle and the end feature a weak lead character, choppy fight choreography, humorless dialogue and computer-generated effects that look as if they came from the "Ghostbusters II" era.

Director Q. Allan Brocka loads up the screen with eye-candy for every preference -- no one keeps a shirt on for long. Think Skinemax with a gay twist. But his script overdoses on pop culture references and bitchy wisecracks that his trying-too-hard cast can't quite pull off.

The movie isn't up to much either, but it has a certain eccentric energy, nicely stitched to rock-and-roll songs and a music track by ex-Police drummer Stewart Copeland. And it draws you in for an agreeably empty-headed ride and thrilling skating scenes. [18 Sept 1993, p.F1]

As light entertainment goes, CHiPs is fairly accomplished, and Pena and Shepard make a good team. If someone wants to turn CHiPs into a franchise of some kind, worse things have happened.

Although it isn’t a top-flight horror movie — too slow for thrill-chasers, too ridiculously fictionalized for historians — the film serves as a proper 99-minute commercial for that San Jose tourist spot.

The movie is made even worse with embarrassing flashbacks, painful voiceover, and inane dream sequences. It’s like a Merchant-Ivory film – on Quaaludes.

"Steel" plays like a Saturday morning cartoon -- overdone stunts and hokey chase sequences with the hero on a motorcycle, dodging heavily armed gangsters as well as cops who think he's a bad guy.

Most of this huge-cast extravaganza is a botched farce. When that doesn't work, it turns sentimental. The presence of liked and familiar actors helps make it watchable, but there is no disguising that this is a weak, badly constructed comedy. At least it's short.

Any good will built up during the decent first half hour is quickly vaporized.

One of the year's funniest acts of malice.

Feels like an extended TV cartoon segment.

The best that can be said of this charmless animated picture is that whether or not it ends happily -- an outcome you're unlikely to give a hoot about -- it does, happily, end.

The kind of horror movie that's not a bit scary and quite a bit gross.

That was probably writer-director Roman Coppola's main responsibility in "Charles Swan," to give the audience a character worth watching. Get that right, and everything else falls into place. Get that wrong, and the audience finds out just how long 84 minutes can be. The answer: really long.

The story, a dystopian tale with heroes and villains and lots of triumphs and reversals, is so busy and so inherently interesting that the movie is entertaining until the finish - or the sort of finish. As only the first part of the story, Atlas Shrugged doesn't end, it stops.

Funny though it is - is it could have been a whole lot funnier.

Belongs in the holiday hall of shame.

Setting out to make a cult movie is almost as strange as setting out to make a camp movie. Or setting out to make a movie that's so bad it's good. If you know you're doing it, you're not really doing it.

With a novel idea at its center and some good jokes scattered throughout, Pixels is a relief from the self-serious action films that invade movie theaters at this time of year. For most of the way, it’s good enough to enjoy, and for the rest of the way, it’s good enough to root for. But ultimately, it’s not quite good enough ... to be good enough.

It's as close to nothing as anything could be while still being something.

A powerful and disturbing political drama.

Better for several reasons. First, they've jazzed up the animation. The backgrounds appear to be digital, and they are striking. The story is also less violent and combative.

An unflinching -- yet overlong and overindulgent -- film.

The biggest mystery of all is why director Marc Rosenbush, whose background is in theater, bothered putting this story on film when it's so obviously meant for a stage.

Cage’s latest film, Jiu Jitsu must represent his career worst — and keep in mind, this is the man who made 1989’s “Vampire’s Kiss,” in which he ate a cockroach.

There's just the matter of facing it: that The Perfect Man is just something slapped together -- by people who don't care, for an audience they figure will care even less.

Neither a masterpiece nor a remake of one, but its wistfulness is infectious, and its melancholy mood lingers for days.

Fast falls from interestingly loopy to tiresome.

This is a movie in which the audience knows half the gags in advance, but thanks to director Dennis Dugan's timing and Farley's execution, the audience doesn't just laugh anyway, but laughs harder. Knowing in advance is part of the fun.

Nothing really works here, and nobody seems to have put in a huge amount of effort, except maybe the marketing department -- there are many product placements.

De Palma plays both sides against the middle, and eventually the thing collapses. Instead of simply pursuing what seems to be his vision of the story, about a flawed but decent man getting martyred to a corrupt system, he tries not to offend and ends up making empty and confusing gestures. When at the end of this remarkably cynical movie, Morgan Freeman, as a principled trial judge, stands up and makes a speech about decency -- ''Decency is what your grandmother taught you'' -- it's hard not to laugh out loud. [21 Dec 1990, p.E1]

Director David Hackl’s biggest credit is Saw V, and he remains adept at gross torture and keeping a mystery moving. Definitely a B production, Dangerous has aspirations. View that as more of a comfort than a threat.

Unfortunately, it’s not much of a movie. The best thing “Happytime” has going for it is shock value, and that wears away after about 10 minutes. It doesn’t have an interesting story, and the jokes fall flat.

As vile, unredeeming and thoroughly unpleasant experiences go, I Spit on Your Grave at least has one thing interesting about it. It's a document of the most paranoid fantasies that urban, Northern people have about a rural Southern people.

Vampire in Brooklyn is neither funny nor frightening and comes up a tedious middle-road hybrid from veteran scaremeister Wes Craven, who directed.

Four screenwriters are credited with this sloppy piece of work. Divide the embarrassment into quarters.

Twenty minutes in, the movie is already operating at a deficit, and it never recovers.

Sometimes it's unpleasant, sometimes it's insincere, and for long stretches it's boring.

Fascinating in its own strange way, not as entertainment but as a cultural document.

Channels the spirit of Frank Capra in this serio-sentimental fable about a man who loses his memory but finds his soul.

A childish, empty effort.

For Friday night this will do just fine. It's definitely a good matchup -- Stone's cynical bravado versus Berry's resilient spunkiness in a world-class cat fight.

Mary is a fictionalized and heavily dramatized account of the life of the Virgin Mary, but the movie’s great and only pleasure is in watching Anthony Hopkins play King Herod as a homicidal maniac.

Hogwash and not even funny hogwash.

It’s all about as exciting as watching two drawings fight each other on a computer monitor.

Unwatchable.

A mostly inoffensive nothing of a film with one or two mild chuckles and lots of chop-socky commotion.

It's amazing how far a movie can go on nothing but speed and directness.

Very earnest, often engaging, but not quite as much of a pleasure as the original.

Even the element of surprise isn't enough to save this film, which has too many slow parts and features an ending that's extremely tepid by 21st century horror movie standards.

As a movie, it's not much. But it's the best showcase for his charm that Butler has ever had.

Cool World is less artful, short on scripted finesse, and is lacking technical acumen. [11 Jul 1992]

How one likes Taxi has everything to do with how one responds to the hapless cop character, played by Jimmy Fallon.

The movie lacks the one thing that the classic "Three Musketeers" story can't do without: panache.

The overall premise, involving mental illness and suicide, isn't all that funny, at least not in practice, and the picture begins to seem labored and long.

The fact is that too much time is spent with the British characters in the film, time that could have been spent really getting into Rani’s story. She was fighting for the independence of India, but the filmmakers lost their own colonial battle.

If Eddie Murphy gets an Oscar for "Dreamgirls" later this month, the deciding factor with voters may be his performance in Norbit. It's much more impressive than anything he does in "Dreamgirls."

Screenwriter Don Mancini, who created Chucky, has decided to rely on the same formulae from the earlier pictures. It doesn't give Jack Bender -- who directed TV's wonderful The Dream of Oz last year -- much of a chance to prove himself with his first feature. [30 Aug 1991, p.F3]