This film might have been more accurately titled Bungle All the Way because everything that can be wrong, is. Not only is the product miscast from top to bottom, it's also tedious and painfully not funny. [22 Nov 1996, p.3E]

The matte work is awful, the lighting terrible. Many of the vehicles look like bumper cars, borrowed from the nearest amusement park and covered with plastic tops; the rest look like Disneyland rejects. Chase sequences are boring. [24 Jan 1992, p.3F]

Sitting through A Good Old Fashioned Orgy is like being monopolized by the most irritating person at a really boring party.

Director Mike Figgis waited about an hour and 48 minutes too long to decide to make this a comedy. [8 Oct 1993, p.3E]

Despite the best efforts of McCarthy, and a winsome Maya Rudolph as Phil’s 1940s-style secretary, Bubbles, The Happytime Murders is more like the “Boringtime Slog.”

When Child's Play 2 isn't dwelling on some atrocity being performed on a character nobody cares about anyway, it commits the ultimate horror genre transgression: It's really, really boring. [12 Nov 1990, p.3D]

Dream a Little Dream is so murky and convoluted that it just comes off as being tired. [10 March 1989, p.3F]

The new Clint Eastwood movie, Pink Cadillac, might approach mediocrity if it were about half an hour shorter. At almost two hours, it is, to paraphrase a line in the movie, Snooze City. [26 May 1989, p.3F]

This film fails, and for several reasons - not the least being that movies about bickering police partners who fight crime with snappy wisecracks and serious weaponry just might be the most overused plot of the last 15 years. [12 April 1995, p.3E]

Jim Belushi can be a pretty funny guy, but this time he should have heeded the old show-biz warning about staying away from animal actors. [02 May 1989, p.4D]

Warlock is one of those awful movies that serves a purpose: On a rainy day it's a way to keep dry, and most of the film is so dark that it's easy to nod off during the duller parts. [06 Mar 1991, p.5E]

Perhaps tracking down the folks responsible for this film should be Milo's next assignment.

This is the feel-bad film of the year. Recommend it to someone you hate.

For the rest of his life, Spencer Susser can brag to the other ditch diggers that he persuaded two of the best young actors in Hollywood to star in one of the worst movies ever made.

Slater is monosyllabic and mostly expressionless. When Tomei and Perez speak, they have nothing to say, as contrasted with the rapid-fire lines they had in their earlier films, lines that kept them interested and enthusiastic, so that their performances just glowed. Here, they're as dull as the dishwater in the diner, and so is the entire movie, tragic ending and all. [12 Feb 1993, p.3F]

Formulaic serial-killer crapola.

"Beverly Hills Chihuahua," we owe you an apology. Among talking-dog movies, Marmaduke is the runt of the litter.

The best that can be said for this film is that it’s short.

THE BODYGUARDS for the people who made The Bodyguard should be fired - because they should have thrown their clients to the ground and held them there until their desire to make this movie went away. [30 Nov 1992, p.3D]

Sparks would be delighted if this movie were compared to his other story about reunited lovers, but compared to “The Notebook,” The Best of Me is the coffee-stained outline of a sales pitch for sleeping pills.

This summer's first really bad major movie has finally arrived, and it's time to celebrate. There's been a lot of mediocrity, but until Color of Night there'd been nothing deeply rotten on the grand scale of "Last Action Hero" or "Hudson Hawk." [19 Aug 1994, p.9F]

Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man is a terrible movie. For the first 20 minutes or so, it is so far over the top in its pseudo-mythic urban cowboy way that it is at least entertainingly terrible. [23 Aug 1991, p.3F]

The sanitized setting and sappy script are so littered with cardboard characters and crass product placements that you'll mourn for the muggers and porno theaters that De Niro cursed in "Taxi Driver."

By the time the movie's ugly conclusion is reached, we are so numbed by the mindless degradation of it all that we couldn't care less who wins. We know we didn't. [01 Aug 1997, p.03E]

It is one thing to hit an audience over the head with a message, but Belly puts it in a big steel drum and drops it on you from a fourth-floor window. [04 Nov 1998, p.E3]

The story is inane, the characters generate little sympathy and director Howard Deutch never gets this movie up to a decent running speed. [22 Jun 1994, p.5F]

The suspense trickles out of A Kiss Before Dying in the first 10 or 15 minutes, and the movie just lies there until the final 10 or 15 minutes. Writer-director James Dearden tries to inject life into the long, slow middle with blood, breasts and buttocks, but we never sense that any of these attributes belongs to actual breathing human beings. [26 Apr 1991, p.5F]

This mess is guilty of being both racist and homophobic. And it’s as shamelessly lazy and crude as its title suggests.

The worst thing about this multifaceted failure is the two-time Oscar winner behind the camera. Where there ought to be a director, there’s nothing but an empty chair.

The movie inspired theater critic Judith Newmark to write a sonnet in response.

The Good Son is cheaply manipulative in a way that can make you angry. [24 Sep 1993, p.3EV]

A vigilante/torture-porn potpourri, is particularly toxic because it's scented with phony importance.

In addition to starring, Jolie Pitt wrote and directed By the Sea. She has given herself relatively little dialogue, but stuck her husband with lines like “Stop acting like this!” and “You resist happiness!”

When a celebrity chef like Rodriguez is just going through the motions, we can smell that the grindhouse fad is way past its expiration date. It's time to put a fork in it.

The plot of Jade is so ridiculous, its dialogue so dreary, that nothing can save it - not seriously talented actors, not a revered director, not $ 40 million worth of movie-making muscle. [13 Oct 1995, p.3E]

This stinker is only good for endless laughs.

Surprise — this bad dream is for real.

With few exceptions, the dialogue's high point is when it's only dull. [15 Apr 1989, p.4D]

FIVE WRITERS. Count 'em, five. Five men (I mourn for my gender) employed as writers of a screenplay. Five human minds. Five human imaginations. And the result is Turner and Hooch. Never have so many worked together to create so little. [1 Aug 1989, p.3D]

Is there really a need to make a 14-year-old the sexual object of adults' attention? A coming-of-age movie that tries to sympathize with a teen-ager can be enlightening. A movie that tries to tantalize us with a child is shameful. Second, the stereotype of the treacherous Lolita taking advantage of a man twice her age is not only sexist, it's misogynistic. Take The Crush and can it. [9 Apr 1993, p.3F]

Calling it "idiotic" would be unfair to all other idiotic movies. Find a word that combines moronic and malevolent. [14 July 1993, p.3F]

Comedies, in general terms, are easy to evaluate. If you laugh a lot, it's good. If you don't, then it isn't. Well I didn't and it wasn't. [02 Feb 1994, p.6F]

There is such a thing as an infinitely bad movie, and this is it.

WE ALL know we have to suspend disbelief when we go to the movies, but never has an audience been asked to suspend as much as it has been by director Alan J. Pakula in Consenting Adults, a dumb, unconvincing tale that features some of the poorest performances in history. [20 Oct 1992, p.9D]

The screenplay, by Jim Harrison and Jeffrey Fiskin, from Harrison's novella, might have made a good B movie, but Scott refused to let that happen. He was out to make another A movie, and made an F movie that also is excessively and unnecessarily violent. [19 Feb 1990, p.5D]