Salva spins a backwoods serial killer setup into something really scary.

In spirit and nuance, this is an amazingly faithful remake.

It's a brilliant little microcosm of the '60s experience that, in a most gentle way, shows us how the counterculture probably was doomed from its inception.

A redundancy, and a bore. The characters are harrowingly unsympathetic, the action sequences are by-the-numbers, and Carpenter's usual saving grace -- his sense of humor -- is nowhere in evidence.

Anderson is a hopeless romantic in a cynical world, and for a brief moment he makes the case that true love is the only power that can crack time and space.

I can't imagine how Smith can capture a big enough audience to pay off this private joke, but the inner geek in me had too much fun to care.

Tries mightily to have the charm of "Bull Durham," but instead fields raunchy sex jokes, predictable story line, dumb dialogue and a lackluster love affair.

It's hardly original and rarely laugh-out-loud funny -- the filmmakers constantly fall back on the sight of bounding balloon Jimmy squeezing his way out of one situation after another.

So lame and Woody himself seems so worn down and the humor is such a pale shadow of the former Allen brilliance that -- despite a few chuckles here and there -- it's a considerable disappointment.

Sometimes so intimate it's embarrassing, and the messiness at falling in love at any age is disquieting.

Behind the narrative twists and contrived dramatic complications is a searing and scary look at dysfunction.

Ultimately, it's a surprisingly empty experience.

A pretty dreadful affair -- ludicrous as history and a veritable gallery of visual cliches.

A sad, sad, sad, sad rip-off.

The film leaves an acrid taste with the viewer who sits through its long and winding tale of tortured courtship.

Hardly sophisticated, but it's as inspired as teen sex comedies get.

Surprise of surprises, it's a blast.

The result is a heartfelt film brimming with ideas and passion but hampered by a literal approach that douses the emotional heat.

There are hints of madness in all the characters, and it gets creepier and more surreal as it goes along until it finally comes to a showstopping climax that took me completely by surprise and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.

Ultimately successful at what it sets out to do, even if it's not as much fun along the way as the original.

The first two-thirds of the movie are a kind of stumbling relationship drama, but the last third segues into a spooky feast of torture, mutilation and murder.

Since we never see Thomas, we can't care for him. And he's hardly a sympathetic "hero" in his treatment of women and his insistence that other characters honor his personal boundaries while he ignores theirs.

A first-class snoozer.

A winning combination. By some bizarre quirk of star chemistry, their persona complement each other, the action scenes have comic flair and the movie is mindless fun.

A rarity: A fun, entertaining 'G' movie.

It has its flaws, and traditionalists are likely to think it falls well short of its inspiration, but it works on its own terms, it fills the screen with Burtonesque excitement and it strikes me as one of this tepid movie summer's better offerings.

It isn't quite like watching a train wreck -- it's more perverse and anti-climactic -- but it's as hard to shake once it's passed.

A sweet-spirited, extremely well-cast little comedy.