Part of the appeal is that it's so bad it's good: The story is ridiculous. At other times, it's just plain good: There are ski and snowboarding scenes, plenty of them, that are beautifully filmed and exhilarating to behold.

A schlocky thriller that might appeal to less discriminating members of the mall crowd.

After a promising opening, with Jason on a rampage and a cold, peculiar bounty hunter (Steven Williams) on Jason's trail, Jason Goes to Hell switches focus midway to the young couple, and from there things go downhill. Still, the film has its moments. [14 Aug 1993, p.F1]

There's no footing in reality. Nothing about it feels authentic: not the blathering Mary, not the lifeless secondary characters, not the bromide-happy dialogue or the plot that twists less often than it spasms.

A mindless comedy where the blatant racial stereotypes are outnumbered only by the flatulence jokes. The best thing that can be said about this movie is it falls just short of being an international incident.

Is it a comedy if the audience laughs or is it a comedy if laughs were intended, irrespective of whether they're generated? Excuse Me for Living qualifies under the second definition.

Only a complete idiot could think Epic Movie is remotely funny.

Curiously enough plays like a 90-minute version of the old television show. That's not necessarily bad.

While it's beautifully shot, it's way too slow.

A lot of talented people with the best of intentions got together and made The Last Face, and yet it’s an almost unwatchable flop.

Weekend at Bernie's II has the tell- tale signs of a bad film directed by its screenwriter. There's lots of goofy shtick, and the actors seem to have been directed to act silly. Instead of playing for truth, they mug and overdo it, particularly McCarthy, and the result is deadly. [10 July 1993, p.C3]

Schlock, but amusing schlock.

But their comic talents are completely wasted by an inane script whose idea of humor is to make jokes about lung cancer and the notorious Tuskegee experiment on black men with syphilis. [20 Jan 1998]

The film is a failure in just about every way, save for its acting, which is adequate.

The Beverly Hills Cop formula shows serious signs of wear in its third outing as Eddie Murphy tries desperately to hold onto his tough-guy, mock-grin edge while screenwriters and director John Landis do little more than stir-fry lame gags with furious but tiresome fusilades of gunfire. [25 May 1994, p.E1]

Lame comedy.

Offers only tired jokes, grimace-worthy physical comedy and bad, bad acting.

Tries screwball and gross-out comedy and fails on both counts.

Unoriginal, frequently incomprehensible and cheaply made.

Worse than dull. It's parasitic.

With no subtitles to explain what's going on in Yu-Gi- Oh!: The Movie, there's no reason for adults to come anywhere near it.

It's a shame Arnold is stuck on the loudmouth clod schtick, because there are moments he's downright pleasant on screen. But in Carpool, these moments are kept to a minimum.

An acquired taste.

Mixed Nuts, opening today at Bay Area movie theaters, is laced generously with chuckles, though it neglects one little detail that helps make movies satisfying: a plot. [21 Dec 1994, p.E1]

Remarkably empty, remarkably noisy, remarkably pleasureless. It's unwatchable.

In the long history of bad movies about bad illnesses, A Little Bit of Heaven just might be the worst.

The audience has already checked out, long before the formulaic finish.

It doesn't help that Glitter is such a derivative mishmash of cinematic and real-life situations that it's nearly impossible to count all the ways.

A glossy piece of trash.

Too predictable, but kids should like it.

Will you find yourself wishing you were looking at someone else? Not really.

The film is like watching Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a rubber bat -- it's only almost heinous.

The bad news is that the characters and situations are platitudes and the story is so heavy-handed that the film is hard to sit through.

Don't invest too much in the word "Golf" at the beginning of the title. Golf in the Kingdom is arguably less of a sports movie than the first "Harry Potter." (At least someone won that game of quidditch ...)

A pleasant addition to the time-honored genre of terminally cute youth romance movies, roughly equivalent to staring at a saccharine greeting card for a while.

A comedy without laughs. The people on screen laugh more than the audience. I'd be willing to bet that the average person laughs more during any given 105 minutes of the workday than they would during all of Ski Patrol. Even if they go to Ski Patrol having had a few drinks. [05 Mar 1990, p.F1]

Great trash, one of those mediocre movies that in its own crass way is more enjoyable than most things that get nominated for Oscars.

Chevy Chase continues his string of starring roles in bad movies. [16 Feb 1991, p.C3]

It's a completely botched effort -- botched in its direction, its writing and editing.

Cocktail is unbelievable - a picture that sets itself up as a gritty, authentic character study but is laughable, false and stupid in all its details. The only connection to reality here is that there are actually such things as bartenders. [29 Jul 1988, p.E1]

That lack of concern for the way people actually interact renders the film useless as entertainment, or as a conversion tool.

This utterly tasteless crime film about Tokyo’s top madam, a drug dealer and a serial killer is one of the worst films of the year.

A discordant comedy that gives bad taste a bad name.

At times, it actually hurts to watch.

Piles cliched character upon cliched character, and then doesn't give any of them very much to do.

This is a sloppy hash of a movie, poorly directed and plotted in a way that looks as if it were improvised on the spot.

Its dazzling special effects make its combatants flip and fly, spin and soar, all the while punching and kicking each other like jackhammers, only to leave viewers utterly unmoved.

A lame pastiche of Hollywood romances.

Big, opulent and frequently wretched, Pinocchio is so bad that its American distributor, Miramax, opened it on Christmas Day with scant advertising and no advance press screening.

Ugly. ..and unpleasant -- and clueless on a grand scale.

This sixth installment, by far the worst in the series, is bland and deadening.

Is it worth seeing once? Sure.

Spending an hour and a half inside a uterus might be more entertaining than this tiresome sequel.

So mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality.

A stupid comedy with toddlers talking like hip '90s grown-ups.

Gives stupid, vulgar comedy a bad name.

A movie so filled with contemptible, ugly and unfunny characters that it is physically difficult to watch.

It's impossible to imagine why Lions Gate, the indie distributor that released "Monster's Ball," would bother with this garbage.

Bare-bones vanity project.

Shore possesses only two talents -- his ability to assume yoga-like positions and fondle his own behind, and his mystifying knack for getting starring roles in bad movies.

Douglas does his best acting while watching and reacting to what he sees on screen. If this ends up being his cinematic swan song, it will not have been a bad way to go.

There is an affecting story within first-time filmmaker Fay Ann Lee's Falling for Grace, but it is merely a subplot, one among too many that decorate this thin, unsatisfying romantic comedy-drama.

Turns into a pedestrian slice 'n' dice feature.

Of mild interest as a curiosity, but not as entertainment.

A solid network effort about heroism in a most immoral world.

Light entertainment that doesn't quite work. The film has too many scenes that meander, and the picture's offhandedness begins to seem less like clumsy charm and more like pointless vamping.

Perhaps Patten is trying to do to us what Rinpoche does to his followers, but the film's meandering structure and intrusive narration detract from the focus on the master.

Between Two Worlds, written, produced and directed by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, takes on too many worlds and too much politics in what could have been a gripping, straight-up documentary about a crisis in Judaism in the United States.

A poignant and insightful look into the human suffering caused by agricultural bioengineering, features an unlikely but appealing protagonist to tell its story about a global phenomenon.

An entertaining film. Few will agree with every word spoken, but Chomsky’s vision of history is worth encountering and considering.

The videos speak for themselves — and provide a worthwhile time capsule of a turbulent era.

Transfixed is proudly personal, which is its strength.

In essence, the film is a series of reflections, but fortunately for us, many of them are thought-provoking.

Ovation has a self-involved air that may be off-putting to those who don’t feel deeply immersed in that world. You may get the sense you’ve wandered into a super-intense acting class or someone’s therapy session — a hothouse atmosphere that’s oppressive.

It’s a satisfying drama that inverts the usual way of building interest and suspense. Instead of wondering what’s going to happen, we sit with the knowledge and wait for every character to react to what we already know.

It’s a character study of a character who isn’t worth studying. It’s a revenge movie, but when the revenge comes, the only person you feel like getting even with is the screenwriter.

What starts out as a bottom-feeder noir a la “Breaking Bad” or “Hell or High Water” transitions into scattershot ambitions of being a mythic tragedy.

Aside from a few moments involving Dudikoff, American Ninja 4 is a formula action picture without appeal, and its contradictions and illogical turns of plot don't help matters. [09 Mar 1991, p.C3]

How much of it is true? Well, all of it. It happened, at least in the inner life of an imaginative boy, whose boundless curiosity served as the launching pad for a unique and productive life.

What follows is everything a story like this demands — car chases, shootouts and trying to stop an explosive device by cutting the right wire — but there’s little fresh here.

1 Angry Black Man is a more thoughtful and intellectual exercise than its prosaic and incendiary title at first suggests.

The best parts of Ai WeiWei: Yours Truly include the scenes at Ai’s studio in Beijing, as he conceives the project and we get a glimpse into how the sausage is made; and the titular focus on political prisoners.

Who Are You, Charlie Brown? can be a little too slick and clean, especially for those of us who harbor fond memories of the rough edges in A Charlie Brown Christmas (which premiered back in 1965, and still gets its moment in the sun here). But overall it’s a smart and pleasant revisiting of the Peanuts gang in all their idiosyncratic charm — a charm that remains remarkably durable and true.

If anything, this modest but entirely charming movie may deserve a tiny slice of immortality by showing the kind of goofy, escapist fun that can be created even in a grim time.

We don’t always get a full picture of Barbara Lee, however, there’s no doubt for a single frame that this consummate politician — a pragmatic firebrand — is long overdue for recognition beyond the Bay Area.

It’s a telling scene, musicians enjoying the company of other musicians, professionals all. Guy is a bluesman’s bluesman. They flock to see him jam; he’s still playing ’em, and still losing ’em.

Defined only by their scars, all three lead characters feel generic, as if Werthman built them out of archetypes that ran through his case studies.

It’s not boring bad, but flashy bad. It’s not “I’m sick of this, already.” It’s “I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”

This Place Rules isn’t the last or best word on the events of that day in 2021, but it’s a fresh angle and one that was hard-won. Callaghan didn’t just turn over a rock to get this story, he burrowed under the rock and lived there for months.

With its picture-perfect Taipei cityscapes, appealing cast and soothing, smoothed-over storyline, Love in Taipei makes for a stress-free comfort watch. Fans of the book may just wish it had been truer to its source material — after all, isn’t teendom supposed to feel a little dramatic?

The film doesn’t deny that justice must be served, and those who commit crimes must pay. Its question is: How it is paid fairly to the satisfaction of victims and their families and to the benefit of society? The answers are down the road, many miles ahead.

Though some of the acting has a stilted feeling, the emotional charge and unusual look of the film linger.

The new movie splits the difference between the horrible and the hilarious, with predictably lukewarm results. Still, the story is delicious enough to survive an earnest treatment.

Even without containing a modern frame of film, “Apollo 13: Survival” seems current, even without the coincidence of Americans stranded in space.

Whatever one might think of these flourishes, Peterson’s movie accomplishes an important objective: getting the question of Lincoln’s complicated male relationships more out into the open. It’s a commentary in and of itself that it took so many years for this fascinating topic to get to the screen.

One can’t but admire the resilience of the film’s subjects, and when the story turns to the dedicated army of teachers in programs such as the Children’s Literacy Project (teachakidtoread.com), it becomes downright positive.

Nate Parker’s film isn’t always successful at balancing empathy with suspense or its prison reform message with character development. But there are engaging moments from start to finish, with a plot that, while not as surprising as writer-director Parker may have thought, wracks nerves multiple times.