An actual film of unrelenting silliness. Far from being a "miracle of rare device" (yes, the movie even quotes Coleridge), this is a disaster of common occurrence - a poorly directed, ineptly edited, badly photographed bundle of celluloid. [14 Aug 1980]

The movie has a sharper and more acerbic screenplay than you normally find in bargain-basement, D-list teen comedies.

The only memorable facet of The Blue Lagoon (at the York) is the visual prowess of the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros - but here the photography, unlike his work in Days of Heaven or Kramer Vs. Kramer, is too great. It's all there is, and its monumental beauty overwhelms the fragile orchids-and-jockstraps pastoral of the narrative, with its faux naif philosophy. [12 July 1980]

Max Payne, game or movie, has precious little to say.

Given Waller's experience and budget, one might expect he could upgrade the B-movie acting and stock situations. He doesn't. The pay-off comes not in the story or acting, but the camera play and movement.

Although director John Berry equips him with a bottle at every opportunity in an effort to recreate the bumbling but lovable charm of Matthau's performance, Curtis is never a sympathetic character. Curtis is by nature far too slick and suave a character ever to be a lovable curmudgeon. [04 July 1978]

Whether madcap parody – the "American Psycho" of G-man flicks – or walk on the wild side of Lynch's obsessions, the film's a failure.

So, romance-novel boilerplate that sounded clichéd on the page becomes outright laughable as it's transferred to the screen.

So highly imitative as to strip the word “derivative” of any meaning, Rebel Moon is fan-fiction writ large, as if Snyder believes he’s outsmarting everyone from George Lucas and George R.R. Martin to the estates of Frank Herbert and H.R. Giger.

Forgettable.

All that's missing are the laughs. In their place, we get wall-to-wall predictability. [13 Aug 1983]

Though Silent Hill's shoddy dialogue and incoherent story constantly irritate, several sights and scenes possess a certain surreal grandeur...Sadly, that's not enough to compensate for Silent Hill's utter lack of tension, intrigue, character development or satisfactory explanations for what the hell's happening on the screen.

While the monster Wilde is scary enough, the directing and writing is lazy, relying on “boo!” tactics and insinuating a religious subtext by cutting to close-ups of crucifix jewellery. The ending is slapdash.

The filmmakers have also advertised that their new movie eliminates the "Pow! Right in the kisser!" threats of spousal abuse that permeated the original series. The question of audience abuse has yet to be addressed.

If you can’t Smurf anything nice, then don’t Smurf anything at all. Such is the key lesson to be taken away by discerning parents this weekend after being dragged by their children to yet another big-screen adaptation of everyone’s second-favourite blue-man group.

The problem lies with Williamson's script, which feels as if it has been torn from different places and glued back together like a ransom note.

If TMNT the franchise is going to reach the same lofty heights of blockbuster-dom, it still needs to find its own inner hero.

The only surprise here is the real star of the show, who turns out to be not Halle Berry, not even Bruce Willis, but a flat computer screen in all its hard-driven glory.

At times a bit plodding, Voyage of the Damned certainly succeeds in making its point, as did the conniving Hitler: It's harder to condemn the perpetrators of racism when you turn away their victims at your door. [17 Sep 2005, p.12]

By comparison to this effort, "Pineapple Express" seems like a model of thoughtful maturity.

Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.

Grown-ups will find it painful to watch a clearly embarrassed Arnett go through the motions, muttering his lines as he internally wonders why he never became the next Kevin Costner.

It's a colorless, poorly paced film in which the most interesting thing is McQueen's half-hearted struggle to create a saleable character. Most of the time, the calculation comes across as lukewarm Clint Eastwood, who is not a model McQueen should ever be reduced to imitating. [4 Aug 1980]

This new Garfield outing is a true feat in shoulder-shrugging nothingness.

This Means War is a Valentine's date dud: Think wilted roses, squashed chocolates and flat champagne.

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

This isn't a movie so much as a marketing strategy -- a moving poster loosely disguised as a motion picture.

5 Days of War feels low-budget in everything except its battle sequences.

If it had the guts to be either zany or pointed, it might have been both; instead, it's neither. It's an old copy of Mad magazine that wouldn't have been your favorite even when you were 12. [6 Jan 1986, p.C11]

The only thing stopping Roth's film from being an irredeemable zero-star disaster is its introduction of a dramatic principle that I'm nicknaming Chekhov's Gun Cabinet – but that's hardly justice for such a recklessly criminal cinematic act as Death Wish.

THE PRESIDIO is a formula flick that can't even manage its own simple arithmetic. This is meant to be an action-thriller with comic overtones, the kind where a pair of mismatched cops corral the heavy-duty nasties while treating us to a steady stream of lightweight banter. Because it's a TV premise, brought to half-life by a forgettable script and bland direction, the poor thing seems mighty uncomfortable on the big screen, washed out and embarrassed, eager to abandon the pretense and rush to its rightful home in the movie-of-the-week margins. [10 June 1988]

One of those unmemorable summer movies about which the only good thing you can say is that it has charm. Nothing for everyone. [17 Jun 1994]

Hellboy forces audiences to detach and glaze over because it is hateful and lazy and was made by awful filmmakers who probably don’t like movies very much. For anyone who manages to see this movie in the theatre – I’ll see you in hell.

[Walken's] every minute on screen is filled with that level of jittery invention, and, watching him at play, not even the flintiest temper could resist a wide grin. Envy can surely be a trial, but Saint Christopher is there to ease our troubled journey and see us smilingly home.

Add them up and the sum has a certain mathematical inevitability: Really annoying characters, really annoying movie.

This is an excellent movie for watching Jolie, one of the more entertaining sidelines in recent Hollywood movie going. There are two firsts for her here: Angelina does blonde and, more importantly, Angelina does comedy.

Kline and McCarthy are lovely in their few scenes together (they’re the reason for that extra half-star) and for those brief moments, you see the film the actors thought they were making.

The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.

A dull, formulaic romance comedy with an ulterior motive and a sly message. Remarkably, the message is this: "Please Re-elect George Bush."

A lamentably slack and dishonest genre exercise.

Once it is said that the helicopters are good and the movie is bad, there isn't much left to say about Fire Birds. [26 May 1990]

The movie offers nothing new or special, but at least it isn’t as painful as watching Sandler walk Al Pacino through a Dunkin’ Donuts rap.

Entertaining and well done. Without losing its comic rhythm for a moment, it is also a withering spoof of black victimism and the corrupting effect of racial solidarity on the American legal system.

Sentimentality exceeds the bounds of the seasonal fantasy in Trapped in Paradise and ends up with all the charm of winter slush. [03 Dec 1994]

It’s a chase film, it’s a buddy film, it’s a ridiculous, loud and often offensive romp. Witherspoon’s character is cornball and annoyingly adrenalized – what was she thinking?

Fails as a comedy-drama because it’s neither funny nor involving. But it fails as a buddy movie because Willis and Morgan make for a dull couple.

I doubt that Lawrence is conscious of this process. Nevertheless, stuck in a dull commercial feature, a very good actor happens upon a new solution to an age-old problem: She improves the script by transcending it, and steals the picture by abandoning it.

This material might make for a sly, subversive take on the genre, but writer-director Tyson Caron positions Dash as the hero of his story, a fatal flaw.

This story soon turns excessively maudlin.

Unless you are a Connery fan - or a special effects fan, or perhaps a broadsword-fighting fan - the profoundly silly plot sinks this film beyond redemption. [04 Nov 1991]

It's kind of fun but the twists and turns are all too familiar.

This briefly inspired bit of surreality quickly descends into gratuitous bondage, mayhem and dumb humour, marking the usual progression from mildly absurd premise to gratingly idiotic conclusion.

Damned if Parker hasn't done it again. An intermittently good filmmaker but a consistently bad polemicist, he may well sway opinion here -- but, oops, not in the hoped-for direction.

A lightweight flick about a heavy-duty subject, A Dark Truth plays like a TV movie back in the days when TV wasn't worth watching.

It is sincerely, painstakingly and astonishingly awful.

A confusing, muddled, sloppy mess of bad intentions and worse execution.

Incoherent and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Sanders’s version of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure.

Torching “witches” is the one part of the story that has some historical basis, and adds an uncomfortable edge of misogyny to this otherwise empty fantasy.

Though The Cave really, really tries to be scary from as many directions as possible, it fails to hold much in reserve and never manages to build suspense.

Instead of playing the role in drag, the erstwhile Madea simply is a drag.

Adolescent boys will savour My Way's bombast and solemnity. Cringing adult audiences will more likely beat a retreat before final call.

What a shame that The Spirit isn't nearly as good as it looks.

Few things are more painful to watch than a botched comedy.

The insult begins with casting Cage, a patently American actor who makes no effort to Canadianize himself, as a Canadian legend: the role could have made a Canadian a star. It continues with races so sloppily edited the relative positions of the skiffs change dramatically during two-second reaction shots. [17 Jan 1986, p.C1]

Not just bad, but weirdly, fascinatingly bad.

General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.

The concept is high but everything else is merely fair to middling, one more or less watchable B-movie in megabucks clothing.

Director Adam Shankman pushes together scenes with little rhythm or flow. Writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant ignore credibility, throw in pointless sight gags, treat humiliation as comedy and use tiresome ethnic stereotypes. In short, Diesel doesn't get the help he needs.

When Queen of the Damned knows it's ridiculous, it's moderately entertaining fun; when it tries to be serious, it's truly ridiculous.

The problem is that for all its R-rated ambitions, none of the kills in Expend4bles is particularly inventive, memorable, or even base-level fun. For a movie centred on the cathartic pleasures of mercenary murder, the only death wish that audiences will walk away muttering is one directed straight at the screen.

But Keaton is a mistake. He's an actor with an innate sense of irony firmly grounded in the here and now. Even as Batman, skepticism was his forte; true belief falls way outside his range.

The devil is back in Exorcist: The Beginning, and he is more disgusting than ever. Not more scary, just really yucky, in a kind of maggots-on-a-pizza-slice way.

Hey, it’s all good clean fun.

Aside from uninspired movie-parody gags, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore suffers from gadget overload.

It's not fair in a film like this, a shambles from beginning to end, to judge the performances, but as Tom Cruise has now become a big star, something should probably be said of his characterization. Something. [21 Apr 1986, p.C12]

Like a tone-deaf singer at a benefit concert, John Q. is a bad movie appearing on behalf of a good cause.

Adam is back to lining his pockets again.

I think the guy who exited the advance screening after less than 15 minutes said it best. "This movie's garbage," he hollered, as the audience members tittered and shuffled their feet, which they continued to do throughout this humourless, hackneyed yawnfest.

Somewhere, back in the mists of time, co-writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber must have flapped their gums in the fond hope of crafting a script; today, that whisper of hot air has swollen into a feature flick that rains down upon us a veritable torrent of inane plot.

Sitcom star Harris puts his smart-aleck chops to good use as Patrick Winslow.

A layabout movie -- not risibly bad, just relentlessly sub-par.

Rarely does a film so graceless and devoid of merit as this one come along.

Certainly, this is meant to be a bittersweet tale of the ties that bind the generations, of the love-hate relationship between a demanding Daddy and his amiable offspring. But nothing really develops, nothing ever connects. [02 Mar 1984]

A film like Endless Love comes about as close to reality as a Hobbit sequel, only without a single dragon to remind impressionable viewers that they might not want to take it literally.

That the producer thinks Beals plus Sting equals big bucks at the box office may be the biggest contrivance of all. [19 Aug 1985]

The madness of Madhouse simply eludes me. [16 Feb 1990]

It's a comic-book idea that might have been fun. But it's beyond the reach of first-time feature director Kevin Donovan, who squanders his main asset, Jackie Chan, and fumbles the vital action sequences.

A series of implausable adventures, everything from killer cockroaches to world-tilting flash floods, punctuate this otherwise stupid action picture about Third World War survivors. [16 Nov 1977]

It would be easy to spend hours trashing The Galllows if it just wasn’t so disposable.

Unfortunately, nobody had the good sense to call the comedy authorities and shut this Zookeeper down.

One of the most preposterous efforts by any major director in recent memory.

Even at the abbreviated length of 70 minutes (less feature than featurette), material so maniacal wears very thin very fast. [5 Feb 1993]

It should not exist, and the fact that it does is a slap in the face of anyone suckered into buying a ticket.

Once Bullock's character clears her head at the top of the thrill ride, Premonition becomes inescapably dull because it is her mental health, not her purposefully dull husband's fate, that interested us.

For the price of a ticket, and 100 minutes of your time, how many laughs are enough to qualify as just compensation? Will four or five do? Let's be generous and count five.

If laughs are the currency of any comedy, then this one pays minimum wage and, worse, makes you work damn hard even for that pittance.

A laughably bad melange of blood, guts and racial stereotypes.

As for the locals, they speak like extras from "Fargo," although, on this go-round, that weird Swedish accent has somehow lost its power to amuse.