A lazy, hasty effort that offers little beyond a few jack-in-the-box startles and a high body count, including Hewitt's bouncing about in a shirt half-unbuttoned over a bikini top.

It’s the direction, not the script, that really kills the picture, as Mazer limps along from the chugging contest to the half-naked conga line to the car chase without ever raising the laughs he needs from the comic set pieces or the tension he needs from the dramatic developments.

So here’s an idea: Maybe filmmakers should shoot what Ashton’s up to off-camera, because not many laughs are making it to the screen.

Because it’s emotionally manipulative, unashamedly contrived and outrageously sentimental. Lead actor Oscar Isaac doesn’t care a damn about that, mind you, giving a memorably heart-wrenching performance anyway.

Dopey.

It's outstandingly obnoxious.

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

While not as edgy or funny as "The Mask," the popular 1994 "original" starring Jim Carrey, the movie offers eye-popping animation high-jinks and a warm-and-fuzzy story that reinforces what some would call family values.

The story is a much more serious problem, a run-on, overstuffed narrative that feels like a very long prologue for a climax that never comes.

Why are movies about sophisticated technology and hidden persuaders and subliminal seduction - Agency is the other example that springs immediately to mind - so technically sloppy, so incapable of persuading even the smallest child of their plausibility and so utterly unable to seduce someone dying to be ravished by a well-made thriller? [2 Nov 1981]

A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.

Frankly, about 20 minutes into this dud, I was rooting for the alien beasties -- their diagnosis seemed dead-on.

Grade Underclassman an "Unacceptable effort," and "D" for derivative.

Old Dogs is offensive mostly because it wastes time.

One Star (and only for quoting Knee-Chee).

A mundane sitcom with feature pretensions, the kind where the comic "situation" is simply a coat-rack for hanging a rag-tag assortment of inflated sight gags and telegraphed punch lines.

Like its predecessor, Grown Ups 2 is proudly retrograde, both in its relentless deluge of toilet humour and the way it bear-hugs some good old-fashioned conservative values.

Like Jerry Springer, it's loaded with class bias, offering a condescending fantasy that sees the poor as exotically grotesque, promiscuous, violent, and spiritually doomed. [17 Oct. 1997, p.D9]

Mind-numbing, soul-testing, character-defiling experience that offers not one nanosecond of comic relief.

When animal passion turns into animal stupidity. [1 May 1990]

There must be a musical somewhere in the musty vaults of movie history as bad as The Pirate Movie, but I'm at a loss to recall it - speaking comparatively, this unclean thing imparts to Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu the delicacy and charm of a moment with Fred Astaire. It makes you long for The Blue Lagoon. It encourages you to baste yourself in that masterpiece of oily ennui, Summer Lovers. It makes an evening with Kate Smith look good; hell, it makes an evening with Margaret Trudeau look good. [9 Aug 1982]

About the only fun to be had in the movie is screenwriter Alan McElroy's cartoon spook-speak.

It's all very pat and, ultimately, annoying.

Brain-melting, head-spinning rank toxicity that shows no evidence of intelligence as we know it.

Remember that the director, the renowned Mike Mitchell, is the genius who helmed "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," and be sufficiently generous to accept that such a high level of excellence is hard to sustain.

You will die at the hands of Zed's unborn son. Shucks, those wicked witches sure had a way of taking the fun out of life. Luckily for scheming kings, sadly for blameless movie-goers, such party-pooping prophecies are now mainly confined to formulaic flicks like The Beastmaster. [23 Aug 1982]

This is Canadian cinema as defiantly ugly and mean as anything churned out from the bowels of callous ol’ Hollywood.

A hypnotic, black hole of a movie that sucks reputations, careers and goodwill down its vortex. Rarely has a movie that doesn't star Madonna achieved such a skin-crawling mixture of deluded preening and bungled humour.

No less laughable is the ending, where Ritchie neatly reflects today's prevailing attitude -- that audiences can't be trusted to handle a hint of ambiguity, but can live happily with flat-out stupidity.

[Lange] does give the movie the only excitement it possesses -- the frisson of a hideous thrill -- but it's still an excruciating embarrassment.

Not funny, suspenseful, moving or even offensive enough to want to torpedo. Just devoid of any conceivable value. [19 Apr 1997, p.C13]

Serving Sara, which often feels more like serving time, is one of those tortured Hollywood romantic comedies that starts with a passable premise and turns into an inventory of flat gags and weak lines set against a travelogue backdrop.

All hell breaks loose and it's a heck of a lot of fun to watch.

Fewer heads in the film and more evidence of one on the director's shoulders might have squeezed a legitimate laugh or two out of this contrived juvenile carnage.

Death Wish 3 is a little like granddad yelling, You kids better get out of my yard, and then following up his threat by tossing a grenade onto the patio and turning the kids into human hamburger. [01 Nov 1985]

If this rings distant Laurel-and-Hardy, or even Crosby-and-Hope bells, it's on purpose. Gooding's and Sanz's performances are almost a tribute to vaudeville-influenced two-guy comedy.

Like Mr. Magoo, after 90 minutes the audience still didn't see the point. [26 Dec 1997, p.C3]

One of the worst movies of the year.

Anything but a seasonal treat. This special-effects-heavy, big-budget musical from expatriate Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky (Runaway Train, Tango & Cash) ranks as one of the most misguided children's films ever made.

Mother’s Day is a concocted market-driven holiday, and so is this M&M’s-obsessed movie – candy for the sweet-toothed among us.

Every actor and actress involved seems to have been instructed to act as guilty as possible and, in this at least, they're entirely convincing. Not guilty of murder, perhaps, but of a really unfortunate career choice.

The stunt work is top-notch; the dialogue and drama often food-spittingly funny. I can hardly wait for Extreme Ops II, perhaps set atop a South Sea island volcano, with North Korean agents and parasailing.

Hired hand Lester made one of the worst films of the decade, Firestarter, and he's still getting his jollies by incinerating people on the screen. Last time it was supposed to be scary and this time it's supposed to be funny; both times it's been simply boring and somewhat offensive. [20 Aug 1986, p.C5]

A bland, timid and thoroughly un-thrilling teen thriller.

Bullock, easing into her mid-40s with box-office mojo intact, remains the star attraction as the annoyingly endearing Mary. You simply can't imagine another actor of her stature pulling it off.

A Haunted House 2 is so dreadful that it demands its own category of dumbness.

Delta Farce is so relentlessly racist (and homophobic), without ever having the intelligence to pass that bigotry off as satire, that viewers will be left thinking "Borat" has a soft touch.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer must be stopped. For the last two years, this filmmaking team has created a series of spoof movies so feeble, shoddy and unfunny that they may be part of a diabolical, "Manchurian Candidate"-like plot to stunt the intellectual development of American adolescents.

A flawed fraud, a youth movie so disjointed, witless and condescending that it's painful to watch.

The plot makes the casting look inspired. More than inane, it's offensive. [14 Dec 1982]

Billy Madison is so singularly stupid that "Dumb and Dumber" looks (almost) like a beacon of braininess and taste in comparison.

There's potential here for a macabre cult favourite touching on themes of technology and the body-mind split, but the movie's progression into rambling incoherence gives new meaning to the phrase "fatal script error."

Brainless, but enjoyably over-the-top, the retro gang melodrama, Deuces Wild represents fifties teen-gang machismo in a way that borders on rough-trade homo-eroticism.

There is, admittedly, something splendidly subversive about putting the movie's arch-villains into a children's theme park - the ultimate symbol of both apple-pie family values and the whole U.S. entertainment industry. There are no real worms in this apple, however; like most flicks conceived as marketing vehicles, it's hollow at the core. [27 May 1994, p.D3]

As it stands, Murphy has put his idols and friends in front of a camera, given them a watered down version of The Sting and hoped they'd make the best of it. They don't. [23 Nov 1989, p.C12]

In the life-is-too-short category, file Kangaroo Jack as a sub-Farrelly Brothers, dumb-plus-dumber buddy picture.

Is this movie so god-awful bad that it's hilariously good? Can't be bothered deciding. Figure that's an answer in itself.

Horror at Christmas might work, but tedium doesn't.

A vigorously cross-marketed product, with comics, collectable cards, games and a television series.

Deja vu's too kind a term to describe what happens in the latest chapter in the lives of the characters created so long ago in print by Peter Benchley and brought to life - and, eventually, to death - on screen by Steven Spielberg. [22 July 1987]

In the battle for the hearts, minds and fat wallets of North American teens, College fights dirtier and sinks lower than most gross-out screen comedies.

Somewhere between cartoonishly bad for comic effect and bad because the filmmakers didn't really give a damn, The House of the Dead is, at least, unpretentiously dumb.

Despite the talents involved, including Steve Martin and director and co-writer Nora Ephron, the result is a messy, almost desperately mirthless thing Mixed Nuts an empty shell. [23 Dec 1994, p.C6]

What's up with director John McTiernan? The man has got to get a career of his own -- sponging off the pale leavings of Norman Jewison just won't do.

If ever there's been a martial-arts movie that makes you feel as if you've been kicked in the head, surely it's Kung Pow! Enter the Fist.

About as much fun as being given a wedgie and hung from the camp flagpole, Daddy Day Camp is an unnecessary sequel.

The film is significantly inept even when Crawford is not on the screen. [03 Nov 1995]

Calls itself a movie. It has words and pictures like a movie, and will appear in theatres like a movie, and will damn sure charge admission like a movie. But, truth be told, that's pretty much where the resemblance stops.

The incomprehensible leads to the inexplicable which ends in the indecipherable.

The movie 10 to Midnight gives you two genres for the price of one. You get the reactionary vigilantism of Death Wish combined with the slice 'n' dice misogyny of low-grade horror films, the kind in which virginal female bodies are systematically bared to allow unobstructed ingress to knives and other instruments of brutality. All that and Charles Bronson, too: a weirdo jackpot. [15 Mar 1983]

The vibe isn't mellow, nor predictably, affably dumb. Rather, this is a slapdash effort whose faux-Farrelly brothers humour is papered over with an unremitting, distasteful malice, featuring a cast that's completely wasted, in both senses of the word.

There is no reality here, and no style: Cocktail waters down the philosophy of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and serves it in a shot glass to hustlers. High school hustlers. [29 Jul 1988, p.C11]

You have an exploitation formula that's billed as "a sensual game of cat and mouse." [5 March 1993]

Before immediately handing the movie an F and sending it off to summer school, give the filmmakers, and especially co-star Jason Schwartzman, credit for their anarchic willingness to try anything to shock a laugh loose from an audience.

A limp Eddie Murphy vehicle that even he seems embarrassed to be part of.

Quite an artful dissembler. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this clunker has somehow managed to pose as an actual feature movie, the kind that charges full admission and gets hyped on TV and purports to amuse small children and ostensible adults.

Date Movie is a good date movie in one sense: If you're still speaking to the person who brought you to see this, you just might have a future together.

Benigni as a Pinocchio with 5-o'clock shadow and tufts of arm hair poking out from under the sleeves of his puppet costume, it borders on creepy.

The movie degenerates from the merely farcical to the appallingly tasteless...As the end draws mercifully near, one character proclaims: "This ship needs blood to survive." A film needs more than that. [22 May 1980]

Unplanned will make you writhe in agony over how such an ugly, malicious and potentially dangerous piece of religious and political propaganda could have made its way into this world.

As should be obvious by now, Harvey Keitel is a lucky man indeed: how many actors, stuck in an atrocious film, have so many immortal lines? [20 Feb 1980]

Just as the book is usually better than the film, one suspects the video game is probably more entertaining and coherent than the movie. In the case of Alone in the Dark, this is a certainty.

About as endearing as unanesthetized gum surgery.

Ratner’s film commits too many cinematic sins to count.

Still Smokin' is a shabby, cut-and-paste film. The only surprise is that the title does not refer to the pair's notorious predilection for good grass; it has, shall we say, a more scatological connotation. Cheech and Chong's unique kind of humor - poor taste for its own sake - might have touched a chord seven or eight years ago. But nobody's listening any more. [9 May 1983]

A cheap pickup from the Playboy Channel that was too soft for Playboy but appropriately raunchy for the college movie crowd. [27 Apr 1984]

Obviously, commercial film has a proud history of appealing to our less noble instincts. But why does this particular thing fail so provocatively, going beyond mere stupidity into downright offensive? #2. Not just because it is charmless, humorless, cynical and mean- minded. Lots of movies are that. Yet Garbage Pail crosses the fine line where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. In fact, it invents a brand new genre: kiddie nihilism, a callow theatre of disgust. Antonin Artaud, meet Mr. Dressup. [26 Aug 1987]

Properly handled, any one of these characters could be made, just barely, believable. But here they simply go off, like rockets, exploding out of nowhere and racing across the screen, one after the other.

Great cast, too bad about the movie.

Your Mommy Kills Animals works best as a fast-moving carnival of faces and feature stories. Like most amusement-park rides, it lets you off dizzy and confused, whereas the best documentaries leave you feeling that you've come to a settled perspective on a subject.

David Beckham may star in Goal II: Living the Dream but calling him an actor is like calling his wife a singer.

The story of Canada’s tragically unhip – Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart, charter members of a group that has sold 40 million or so albums and discs since 1973, without ever getting a whole lotta love. Never mind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Rush never even made it on American TV until funnyman Stephen Colbert invited them on The Colbert Report in 2008.

More entertaining in concept than execution. What starts as geek comedy gradually slides into a familiar morality play about the savagery beneath the veneer of civility.

While oil is still synonymous with unmitigated catastrophe, the documentary Gasland warns of the dangers lurking in natural-gas wells.

It's pure emotion. Drumming, for these masters of the instrument, is about communication, acceptance and, above all, deep love.

Possibly no one else does "grim" with as much unsparing enthusiasm as the Scandinavians.

At once a departure from and a follower of teen-movie form, and the fact of the former almost forgives the fate of the latter.

It’s tempting to say that Aram Rappaport’s Syrup sticks, but it’s also true.