Naturally, Brooklyn is the setting for the type of old-fashioned brand of fairy-tale film this stinker aspires to be, but each time the inspirational Brooklyn Bridge is shown the desire to jump off it is doubled.

Mary Reilly comes across as too much brooding atmosphere and too little story. [23 Feb 1996]

The Keep has opened just in time - if it had waited another couple of weeks, it would have been the worst horror movie of 1984 and there wouldn't have been anything to look forward to all year. [17 Dec 1983]

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]

[Pitof's] managed to create an entire digitalized city that has all the allure of an underground parking garage. And his action, it's cluttered; his editing, it's confused. The result: blandness butchered, hamburger chopped, kitty littered.

Who needs original stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones when you have, um ... well, what does this new Men in Black Cinematic Universe offer, exactly? As evidenced by MiB:I, absolutely nothing of value.

Judging by Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham is not a great, not a good, not even a barely competent director. He has said that "a filmmaker must be part magician, part gypsy and part huckster." On the basis of this effort, Cunningham has conveniently overlooked the first two components and settled for a complete mastery of the third. [14 May 1980]

It is the best anti-cat propaganda in the world. It could make you hate Garfield. Because the biggest sin of Cats, other than all its writhing sexuality and the heinous hairball filmmaking, is that it is supremely boring.

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]

John Wick is the most blatant attempt to establish a character’s name recognition since the Angelina Jolie actioneer "Salt."

It’s not uniquely bad, nor so bad it’s good. It’s factually, quantifiably bad. Overcooked, underdressed, sloppy, indigestible: just your classic crap hamburger of a movie.

The scenes of Traynor threatening and battering his wife feel just as phony and unconvincing as the sunnier stuff that preceded them, partly because Sarsgaard – usually a fine and subtle actor – flies so over the top in his depiction of a creepy Svengali.

Set aside the fact that Sugar’s screenplay is filled with holes, that its characters are as loathsome as they are thinly sketched, that its budget is as bare-bones as your local No Frills, and we are still left with a movie that is barely competent on a technical level.

Completely miscast, egregiously plotted and ludicrous in absolutely every single other way, Bliss is a true cinematic disasterpiece.

This is a movie of pussyfooting and sidestepping, unconcerned with race, history, heroism or really any idea at all beyond “Hulk smash.”

A C-grade thriller that is further dumbed down to dunce-cap calibre, Flight Risk might have worked as an enjoyably grimy piece of genre trash had Gibson not made every single wrong directorial decision along the way.

Rest assured that the story is as nonsensical as it is disposable, a cocktail-napkin of an idea brought to digital life with hundreds of millions of dollars of the emptiest-looking CG animation ever produced.

It is charmless, incoherent, ugly and so aggressively stupid that it defies any attempt to shove it into the desperate “guilty pleasure” box.

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]

Stupendously stupid and never remotely in control of its faculties, the film represents a kind of weaponized incompetence, hostile and assaultive.

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.

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]

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]

It's just a shrunken case of large-screen aspirations wedded to a small-screen mentality. [22 May 1992]

It is not so much lazy filmmaking as it is a very expensive middle finger to common sense and the basic concept of entertainment.

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

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]

This is the sort of movie that ends up awash in sincere revelations, and not a moment of it feels remotely believable.

Sitting through what is so far the worst movie of 1988 is enough to make any cuckoo's nest seem sane. [3 June 1988]

Isaac pulls a full Tom Hardy by adopting a weirdo voice, awkward mannerisms and unknown motivations in a bid to give life to a villain who is, in his own words, pure “motiveless malignancy.” It doesn’t work, nor does anything else in this so-bad-it’s-good-no-wait-still-bad mess from William Monahan.

Director Marshall ( Pretty Woman) has created a comic drama so confused in tone, the actors often seem to be acting in different movies.

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

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.

One of the worst movies of the year.

The product of a first-time director and writers who have no sense of scene structure or shape, or even a discernible sense of humour.

A two- hour-plus surrealistic bummer - it makes the audience feel as if it is coming down from a virulent drug. (The pacing, the images, the music and the endemic menace recall clinical descriptions of cocaine-induced paranoia.)...A disgusting, misanthropic movie.

How bad does a film have to be to get the death doughnut? Disgracefully bad.

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

Lutz and fellow operative Carano are as warm and responsive as Ping-Pong paddles, batting lines back and forth lifelessly.

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

The plot is as incomprehensible as the dubbing and many of the special effects are neither special nor effective.

A 0-star Comedy that is nonetheless guaranteed to rake in multimillions.

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

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

For most of the feeble, unmoving 109 minutes of The Art of Racing in the Rain, a Kevin Costner-voiced golden retriever named Enzo longs for death. I felt the same way.

Simply put, this is a bad, bad film, this summer's answer to last summer's "The League of Extraordinary Gentleman." A dog for the dog days of summer.

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.

Despite an inspired central section involving Robin Williams as the King of the Moon and Valentina Cortese as his Queen, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a near-disaster of Ishtarish proportions. [11 Mar 1989, p.C3]

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.

Just how dumb is Senseless? So dumb it even takes the fun out of stupid.

What's worse than the actual movie itself, though, is how indicative it is of modern group-think studio production.

Campy costumes can't disguise the incoherent plot, confused performances and lame script that send this star vehicle spiralling downward.

The faith-based War Room is so named because life is a battle to be strategized, with, in the case of God’s infomercial of a film, a large bedroom closet serving as scripture-plastered command centre.

One of the most aggressively stupid blockbusters ever made, a painful exercise in Hollywood greed and artistic incompetence on every level.

A sustained if wildly uncoordinated assault on our senses, complementing those feverish jump cuts with a cliché of equally stunning proportions

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

Not just bad, but weirdly, fascinatingly bad.

It's an empty, moronic, pandering and utterly forgettable, low-rent "Moulin Rouge" that pays curious tribute to Barnum by similarly hailing its audience as slack-jawed rubes, slobbering for whatever passes as entertainment. It's godawful.

The sadly unable De Palma hasn't raised Cain, he's been buried by him. [08 Aug 1992]

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

This so-called comedy unfolds with embarrassing desperation and mind-numbing vulgarity.

Unlike Griswold vacations past, the peril in which the family finds itself isn’t leavened by anything funny.

Watching inept American actors and wishing they were badly dubbed into Japanese isn't any fun at all.

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

Coming soon to a screen in hell’s multiplex is Super Troopers 2, a sequel that sets back Canadian-American relations to an 1812 level and retroactively awards an Oscar to "Porky’s II" and a Pulitzer citation to 1995’s "Canadian Bacon."

Airheads is a movie so direly muddled it actually manages - no mean feat this - to seem more stupid than the rock biz idiocy it aims to satirize. [5 Aug 1994]

A technically slavish and totally atrocious Hollywood remake. [19 March 1993]

In past celluloid lives Eddie Murphy has been responsible for a handful of the most popular movies ever made, which explains why he has been able to bring Coming to America to your neighborhood theatre with its misogyny, technical ineptitude and witlessness intact.

Writer-director David Hewlett probably had visions of a pocket-sized 2001: A Space Odyssey, but instead produces something closer to Cheap Space Nine.

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

There's nothing even mildly intriguing, or remotely galvanizing, about Showgirls.

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.

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]

It's not acting, it's not moviemaking, it's not cooking, and it's hardly watchable. [17 July 1995]

A perverse, lame-brained thriller that is pornographic, misogynist and homophobic. If that makes it sound appealing, I should also add that it's silly, boring and intellectually insulting.

The first 48 HRS. was similiarly nasty and violent, and it too was emptier than the inside of an efficient bell jar, but it was funny. Eight years later, director Walter Hill can find nothing to laugh about - the violence in this appalling picture is played out in a mirthlessly misanthropic vacuum. [8 Jun 1990, p.C1]

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.

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

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

Bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

Just when you thought this movie had run out of bad ideas, this last-minute outpouring of sanctimony feels like a whole new way of being slimed. Some movies come with parental warnings; this one feels as though it should come with a mandatory biohazard suit.

The whole mess turns nuttier by the second. A black comedy, you ask? I wish. There are plenty of laughs here, but nary a one is intentional.

Major surgery has been known to take less time and give more pleasure than this forgettable flick. [13 Oct 1990]