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.