Ultimately unable to overcome both its amateurish qualities and its overly familiar elements.

The end result doesn't even satisfy on its own sleazy terms. Not only does it lack the satirical nihilism of the "Hostel" films or the admittedly clever torture machinations of the "Saw" series, it doesn't even provide its target young male audience with the requisite nudity.

As ineptly directed by Robby Henson, the violent (but not too graphically so) goings-on are largely incoherent, with matters not helped by subpar performances, laughably inane dialogue and cheap CGI effects.

A cliched, talky variation on the 1936 Bogie classic "The Petrified Forest," with scant dramatic tension but gallons of spilled blood on the menu.

An overwrought and undernourished drama.

Going the Distance is, in a way, a remarkable film: It's hard to imagine any romantic comedy going wrong in so many different ways.

Whatever sociological interest it engenders is smothered by its hamfisted execution, including stubbornly lugubrious pacing, overly self-conscious performances and awkward dialogue and voice-over narration that all too bluntly lays out its themes.

Staggeringly misjudged in virtually every department, from the wannabe effervescent script to Johnny Depp's dopey hairdo.

In the end, it isn't so much that the New Arthur isn't the Old Arthur. Rather it's the anti-Arthur.

Every bit as frantic, frenetic, groan-inducing and all around grating as its two predecessors.

One can reflect on what the young Coppola, with his masterful camera work and vivid imagination, might have done with such an opportunity. Unfortunately, the present-day one produces only tepid and tired imagery that would not earn high marks in any film school.

Jack and Jill is witless and sloppily constructed, getting by on fart gags, homeless jokes, Latino stereotypes and that old favorite, explosive chimichanga diarrhea -- and no, not in an inspired "Bridesmaids" way.

Film noir is combined with horror to zero effect in Dylan Dog: Dead of Night.

Supplied with uniformly vapid dialogue, the characters come off like a bunch of twits.

Manages to be simultaneously offensive and bland.

This is a second-rate special effects-dominated 3D entry that will join several prominent would-be blockbusters that need not be mentioned on the summer junk heap.

Relentlessly unpleasant and nihilistic in its approach and execution, The Divide is best appreciated as a virtual instruction manual on how not to behave during a crisis.

Throughout, gags are cartoonishly broad and afforded so little time for setup and delivery we seem to be watching less a story than a catalog of tossed-out material.

An awkward mixture of melodrama and whimsical romantic comedy that should make the briefest of appearances in theaters before, like its main character, moving on to other planes. It might serve a valuable purpose if it at least prompts viewers to finally schedule those long delayed colonoscopies.

Clearly aiming for high artistic ground, the film doesn't even satisfy on an arousal level, with the discreet nudity and endless yakking not exactly proving a turn-on.

The story is told in a hammer-on-anvil manner that evinces no gift for social satire or sharp cultural insight.

This witlessly antic sex farce about a yuppie substance abuser coping with myriad personal issues during a stint in a rehab facility pretty much fails on every level, other than providing big-screen exposure for a passel of veteran older actors.

Getaway seems built for non-English speaking territories in which dialogue is as disposable as Bulgarian police cars. If only those audiences were as dumb as the action itself.

Putting aside the grating performances, the clumsy direction, the visual ugliness and the haphazard development of story, character and relationships, the movie is hobbled by its intrinsic unsuitability for contemporary retelling.

Long on mood but short on just about everything else, this would-be thriller directed by David Jacobson is as boring as it is baffling.

If The Legend of Hercules were just a little more inept or over-the-top, it might have been ridiculous fun. As it is, unfortunately, Harlin embraces the mediocrity of the screenplay with a dour straight face, draining it of any enjoyably camp possibilities.

With a frost-bitten script whose skeletal plot cuts and pastes bits from innumerable other survival yarns, the biggest surprise the film offers is that four people were required to write it.

Coming across as more than a little desperate in its unrelenting freneticism, Think Like a Man Too possesses none of the charm of its predecessor. By the time the seemingly endless film reaches its conclusion, you’ll wish that what happened in Vegas had stayed in Vegas.

Plot details turn out to be secondary to the cheap visual effects and abundant gore that Reeder frequently manages to incorporate by taking the narrative on some inexplicable and queasily violent detours. Overall, performances are just perfunctory enough to convey the concept of acting.

It's a bad memory trip through the wasteland of movies past, swamped with bonehead dialogue, stock parts, cookie-cutter romance and gunked to the gills with generic techno-drool. [8 July 1992]

Garant and Lennon’ script, with its insistence on constantly repeating the same gags, rapidly wears thin.

Erotic thrillers are a time-tested genre, but this effort, scripted by Wesley Strick, is neither erotic nor thrilling.

More scares are induced by the creepy soundtrack composed by Slash and Nicholas O'Toole than by the perfunctory special effects.

The clunky narrative doesn’t ring true for a second, and the hackneyed dialogue is even worse.

The kind of mindless, silly romp the multi-hyphenate has become known for.

The whole thing reeks of fiction being used to process missteps in its makers' own lives. This story isn't nearly ready to leave the shrink's couch.

Dripping with floridly phony dialogue that no actor should be forced to speak, this paternity mystery uses the Bosnian conflict as the manipulative backdrop to a preposterously overwrought and overlong melodrama.

A sense of heaviness, gloom and complete disappointment settles in during the second half, as the mundane set-up results in no dramatic or sensory dividends whatsoever.

Over the decades, there’s been no shortage of boneheaded premises for romantic comedies, but the painfully ill-conceived Barefoot takes boneheadedness to regrettable places.

This overstuffed, witless and bloated stillborn $140 million epic is unlikely to spawn the studio's intended franchise — unless, as is so often the case, international audiences come to the box-office rescue.

The plotting here is so hopelessly tangled, clichéd, and bereft of psychological complexity that it's difficult to care what happens to any of these people.

Its Hitchcockian aspirations are sabotaged by a tendency towards lurid melodrama that is more laughable than chilling.

The story makes 94 minutes seem as long as a season of Lost and as fresh as the seventh viewing of a Gilligan's Island rerun.

There’s scant emotional, aesthetic or intellectual gratification in this grainy, flat-looking portrait of the artist as a young nut job.

A tediously unfunny comedy that is chiefly distinguished by the fact that it marks one of the last screen appearances by the late Dennis Farina who steals the film as a Tom Clancy-obsessed, would-be military thriller writer.

The film forms a near-perfect storm of misjudged decisions, with its implausible plot, irritating or outright-dislikeable characters, and strained attempts at “wacky” British humor that fall so flat they’re below sea level.

Awful Nice, about two perpetually warring brothers, grates on the nerves from first moment to last.

This low-rent, convoluted tale about a young woman returning home to solve the mystery of her mother’s violent death is amateurish to the extreme.

Suffering from tonal inconsistency and all-too-familiar thematic elements, as well as an absurd framing device whose logic is not even consistently maintained, Locker 13 hardly deserves being opened.

While the original was no classic, it had a few mild laughs and the plus-sized actor displayed a certain buffoonish charm. Such is not the case with this painfully unfunny, slapdash follow-up in which the title character is so relentlessly obnoxious that you'll be cheering for the villains.

Mortdecai is an anachronistic mess that never succeeds in re-creating the breezy tone or snappy rhythm of the classic caper movies that it aims to pastiche.

Big, dumb, and boring, it finds the cowriter of Independence Day hoping to start a directing career with the same playbook — but forgetting several rules of the game.

This earnest but painfully clunky film, though professional in tech respects and seemingly well financed, plays like the work of an ambitious high school history student.

Aside from the ponderously contrived narrative, however, which mines a long list of supposedly relatable female insecurities and neuroses, much of the characterization relies on one-dimensional stereotyping.

The not so fair and balanced film might have made its religious themes palatable if it worked reasonably well as a thriller. But director/screenwriter Lusko shows no flair for the genre, his muddled execution lacking any sense of pacing or suspense.

This Lifetime-grade pic is bad enough to have no impact, a vanity project whose ostensible story -- a grieving dad fights bureaucracy to build a children's hospital honoring his dead daughter -- is one of the least dramatic things put on screen in recent years.

Ralph Ziman's Kite repackages an assortment of genre tropes into an instantly forgettable Luc Besson-aping slog that would be unneeded even if Besson hadn't just returned to big action flicks himself.

Indeed, all this teeters closely to all-out tastelessness, but what makes 3.0 even more unbearable than its predecessors is the sheer ineptitude beneath the glossy surface: the laughable narrative, scatterbrained storytelling and inconsistent characterizations basically magnify the previous film's flaws to an improbable extreme.

It's commonly expected that a self-described "thriller" should deliver some, well, thrills, but actor-director Zoe Quist's self-indulgent third feature turns out to be practically inert.

While its provocative themes certainly bear exploring in our sex-obsessed societal landscape, The Olivia Experiment is too superficial and cliche-ridden to make them resonate, and its attempts at humor fall thuddingly flat.

The film’s uneasy mixture of melodramatic and supernatural elements quickly devolves into a frequently risible genre mashup.

The problem with The Pyramid is that it doesn't have a single new idea in its arsenal. All the shocks are cribbed from the likes of Alien, The Descent and a ghostly host of other horror films, but they're not even very effectively done here.

Offering a silly conceit that requires either finesse on screen or a cast whose magnetism overrides disbelief, Mind has neither.

Best viewed as a glossy advertisement for the venerable military academy that is its focus, Field of Lost Shoes doesn’t exactly score points for objectivity.

The film just looks a mess, apart from some of the rather pretty shots of banana slugs and redwoods. It doesn’t help that the characters, even accounting for how little developed they are, come across as entitled, self-absorbed brats, and that the very title is, on a first viewing, a complete enigma. At least it’s only 72 minutes long.

Featuring endless scenes of multitudes of women baring their breasts in public in various areas of New York City, Free the Nipple is an unfortunately tone-deaf and poorly executed drama that doesn't exactly help its cause championed by the celebrity likes of Miley Cyrus and Lena Dunham.

Neither the dramatic nor action elements are remotely compelling, with the nearly two-hour running time feeling interminable.

This is not to say that there isn't plenty of obvious truth and common sense in many of the film's assertions. But then again, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

It's all very familiar in that Blair Witch kind of way, with neither the characters nor situations proving remotely interesting.

Tedious, visually unsatisfying, poorly acted and narratively disjointed, Area 51 is a textbook example of directorial sophomore slump.

Featuring endless scenes that defy credibility..Any Day truly succumbs to mawkishness in its final act.

At no point along the way does the film provide a reason to invest your interest in any of this.

Bad movies are bad. Bad theater is worse. But bad movies resembling bad theater are perhaps worst of all.

The action is nearly relentless, only occasionally interrupted by humorless, tedious exposition, but despite the freneticism it’s almost all completely boring.

Step Up All In and Into the Storm writer John Swetnam’s debut is just as derivative as his earlier films, but also demonstrates that his dearth of imagination extends to directing as well.

Schilling the director proves even less adept than Schilling the screenwriter, bathing the melodramatic proceedings in an overbearing musical score more appropriate for a daytime soap.

So comprehensively does the film fail to represent the labyrinthian literary wonders of Amis’ book that it scarcely seems worthwhile to detail its universal shortcomings.

The Choice is the cinematic equivalent of staring at a Hallmark Card for two hours.

The funniest bit involves a particularly sadistic brand of torture that he inflicts on Hannah.... She quite rightly screams in protest, as should anyone forced to watch this movie.

Exploiting the serious issue of homelessness for the purpose of cheap romantic melodrama, Other People's Children squanders whatever potential it might have had.

Colonia marks a truly misguided attempt to fabricate a Hollywood-style thriller out of the darkest quarters of Latin American history.

From the very first scene, the rhythm is off, the staging and editing graceless, and the dialogue (the screenplay is by Kyle Pennekamp and Scott Turpel) alternates between trying too hard and not hard enough.

Amid the rarely very creepy buildup to the Amityville-ish showdown to come, the screenplay piles on more unrelated domestic drama than the picture can take.

A trainwreck of a sci-fi flick bent on extending a franchise that should have died a peaceful death almost exactly one decade ago.

Although there's a long cinematic tradition of mixing comedy with scares to excellent effect — Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein being a prime example — this lackluster effort manages to be neither funny nor scary.

Shallow is a mild word for it. Others would be silly, miscalculated, unconvincing, artless, pandering, hokey, ridiculous. Or just plain awful.

A lazily written and generically directed Fatal Attraction knockoff.

A textbook example of how not to turn real-life headlines into big-screen drama, Jeppe Ronde's Bridgend is a toxic combination of the laughable and the reprehensible.

Other than some rather surprising DJ appearances, attractive scenery and beautiful bodies, Lebrija can’t find much to command attention other than an indulgently long and off-putting cock-fighting sequence.

[A] stunningly self-important but numbingly empty cocktail of romance and insulting refugee porn.

Directed and scripted in boring, incoherent fashion by Francesco Cinquemani, Andron brings new meaning to the word "derivative."

Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV is so lacking in human interest, or even in merely satisfying action, it is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to pay to sit through it. What Takeshi Nozue's movie does offer is massive, vividly rendered landscapes of sci-fi/fantasy pastiche, home to mayhem that is prettier than it is involving.

Judging by the number of Nagels listed in the film's credits, ClownTown would seem to be some sort of family project. A trip to Disneyland's Haunted Mansion would have been a better choice.

This overlong and amateurish effort only serves to demonstrate that noble intentions and sincerity aren't enough to make for compelling drama.

Crucially, Litz misses almost every opportunity to build atmosphere and create suspense, or even a hint of heightened drama, rendering the tone of the film virtually somnambulistic throughout.

A bizarre mixture of black comedy and horror/suspense, Happy Birthday is a juvenile effort that at least has the decency to make its American and Mexican characters look equally bad.

New World Order demonstrates a distinct lack of originality.

Mendelsohn's villain is boringly one-note, Eve Hewson's Marion uses an incongruous Yank accent and always looks as though she's just stepped out of the makeup trailer, F. Murray Abraham swans around in fancy cardinal's vestments looking sinister and Foxx seems pissed off that he's not somewhere, perhaps anywhere, else. As for Egerton, he's a boy doing a man's job.