Venom feels like a throwback, a poor second cousin to the all-stars that have reliably dominated the box-office charts for most of this century. Partly, this is due to the fact that, as an origin story, this one seems rote and unimaginative. On top of that, the writing and filmmaking are blah in every respect; the film looks like an imitator, a wannabe, not the real deal.

This is a film that just very expensively sits there onscreen with nothing ever seeming even remotely at stake. It has no weight or substance and delivers no impact of any kind.

As generic paranormal mysteries go, this is an awfully dull one, filled with dead air and stiff direction.

In the end, the scariest thing about Boo 2! is the idea that A Madea Easter might be next.

Simply put, Sherlock Gnomes is a dreadful bore.

While The Only Living Boy in New York looks nice (it was shot on film by veteran DP Stuart Dryburgh), it's an unabashed fake — glib and movie-ish in a grating way, with lots of prefab "soulfulness" and none of the texture or rough edges of life.

The film is so ridiculously overwrought that it makes the Madea films look subtle by comparison.

Neither impressive enough to prove inspiring or campy enough to be entertaining, Samson is as underwhelming as its title character if he went bald.

More of a challenge to the eyes and ears than most pics of its ilk, it invests slightly more in its characters than usual, but not enough to make us care if they live or die.

Exhibiting all of the same weaknesses as its predecessor, as well as a fatal lack of originality, this iteration will probably mean the nail in the coffin for this smugly self-regarding series, at least on the theatrical circuit.

Failing to provide any backstory or psychological motivation for the killer’s actions, the film essentially devolves into torture porn.

Don’t Sleep practically begs audiences to defy its ill-chosen title.

It’s the sort of self-regarding, preachy documentary that should be sold in health food stores, not shown in theaters.

Veterans Englund and Shaye admirably give it their all, but their best efforts are not enough to elevate the subpar material directed in mechanical fashion by Zariwny.

Miracle is godawful, even by the standards of sports dramas, where healthy doses of manipulation and hagiography are accepted as part of the inspirational formula.

The film mostly tests viewers' ability to stay awake — and the one or two actual creepy moments it has up its sleeve come far, far too late to be potent.

Shot before Brie Larson appeared in her breakout film Room, this fish-out-of-water musical set largely in India is the sort of unmitigated disaster that the actress would no doubt have preferred to stay under wraps.

Hackneyed and familiar — entirely unnecessary seems obvious — Motohiro again takes a property that’s been overworked (he helmed an endless series of Bayside Shakedown movies spun off from television) for a pedestrian sci-fi jaunt that brings nothing new to the table.

A low-rent, post-apocalyptic sci-fi tale that doesn't succeed as either homage or parody of such obvious inspirations as the Mad Max series, Future World proves as original as its title

This derivative B movie is sure to disappoint fans of prior JCVD/Lundgren outings — which are an awfully low bar to hurdle.

Marred by juvenile humor and ersatz emotion, the film, directed by Pitipol Ybarra, is so bad that an even worse Hollywood remake seems inevitable.

An L.A. Minute simply recycles clichés in an unconvincing matter that smacks more of sitcom tropes than the big screen.

The screenplay suffers from a severe imagination deficit, as if this twisted take on "meet cute" should be enough by itself to hang a movie on. It isn't.

It should surprise no one that, as Hell Fest comes to a close, Evil Hoodie Man pulls a Michael Myers disappearing act. This leads to a narrative twist so ridiculous that all non-syringe-pierced oculi will roll.

A hopelessly muddled, tedious exercise that barely manages an interesting moment despite its plethora of violence and gore. As usual, Rockwell gives it his all, but he's unable to rescue the film from being instantly forgettable.

14 Cameras is another pointless exercise that equates sliminess with terror. The film is creepy, all right, but not in a way that proves remotely edifying.

Ironically, the most original aspect of Maximum Impact is its title. Somehow, it has never been used for an action movie before, despite sounding like every one ever made. And after this, it may never be used again.

With an ineptitude so thorough it borders on genius, Cummings achieves the rare feat of making Sheeran appear even more boring in person than he is on record.

Scurfield's directing debut is marred by all manner of clunkiness, from the embarrassing performance of Kellan Lutz (playing Lansky's chip-on-shoulder nephew, who winds up Aronoff's nemesis) to the tissue-thin montages that try to sell us on Aronoff's second career as a racer and maker of speedboats.

In a genre populated by an unusually high percentage of nearly unwatchable movies — the surprise-paternity comedy — John Asher's I Hate Kids comes as something of a surprise. Not because it's any good (no, no, no), but because of the number of talented people who, presumably having read the witless script, agreed to appear in it.

Passion is spoken of and clumsily envisioned in The Aspern Papers, but not a drop of it is felt.

All highs eventually fade, and The Last Laugh quickly returns to its noxious mix of sweet and sour.

Writer-director Bilandic fails to infuse the painfully thin proceedings with any narrative momentum or comic flair, resulting in an oppressive weirdness for weirdness' sake.

There have been films that treated Nazi doctors conducting evil experiments in concentration camps more sympathetically.

The film’s only real draws are Gibson and Penn, who come at the material from opposite ends of the acting philosophy spectrum...It's simply confounding, much like the rest of the movie.

A lifeless, tone-deaf variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. ... There’s just nothing going on here with which to engage your interest, nor is there a single moment to even slightly increase the viewer’s pulse rate.

The kind of bad movie that makes you wonder, "How did so many good actors decide to take this job?," this one comes with an easy answer: First-time director Greg Kinnear presumably used a career's worth of goodwill to enlist co-stars Emily Mortimer, Luke Wilson and others.

A movie so bland and forgettable it hardly merits a groan from the Frankenstein-like butler called Lurch, The Addams Family strongly suggests that directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon deserve little credit for 2016's Sausage Party, the hit they directed for writers/producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

Mister America proves a witless, one-note political satire whose deficiencies are even more glaring when such humor feels entirely redundant to our current state of affairs.

Not only does the film offer a superficial reading of all the famous movies that inspired it, but there’s also an incredibly bro-ish sentiment to the whole thing, as if Franco and Boone binge-watched half the Criterion Collection while slamming down brewskies on the couch.

Director Patrick Lussier and co-screenwriter Todd Farmer were previously responsible for such enjoyable guilty pleasures as "My Bloody Valentine" and "Drive Angry." Unfortunately, their latest collaboration, Trick, is definitely no treat.

The only thing it delivers is unrelenting tedium. Every aspect of the production proves so amateurishly realized that it begins to feel a put-on, although the humor seems to be strictly unintentional.

Director Magán displays no flair for action sequences, although the budgetary limitations obviously didn't help. Nor does he successfully pull off the dramatic scenes.

Infinite is a soulless grind. Juiced up with a succession of CG-enhanced accelerated chases and fight action interspersed with numbing bursts of high-concept geek speak, Antoine Fuqua’s sci-fi thriller isn’t helped by a lead performance from Mark Wahlberg at his most inexpressive.

Without Crowe's brooding performance, Unhinged would just be another forgettable, formulaic, functional B-movie. With the burly Kiwi on board, it is transformed into a forgettable, formulaic, functional B-movie starring Russell Crowe.

Michael Polish (Big Sur, Amnesiac) directs with his foot nailed to the accelerator, but all the manic energy in the world can't stave off the boredom of Cory Miller's script, which is a deadly combination of convoluted and thin.

Several people get wrongly accused of being responsible for somebody's death — there's as much undeserved guilt floating around in this picture as in a Fundamentalist kid's puberty years — and all three of our aforementioned protagonists find they have family issues that need working out. All are broadly drawn and unconvincing, like everything else in this pandering supernatural romance.

A lo-fi treatment of a high-concept crime rom-com deficient in sexual chemistry, laughs and suspense, this is a grating stunt in which actors who ought to know better, led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, play synthetically movie-ish characters meant to tickle us with the all-too-real trials of the COVID era. If you still think frozen screens and kids disrupting Zoom business calls are a hoot, it's all yours.

Gallo displays none of the screenwriting elan he's exhibited in such previous efforts as Midnight Run and the Bad Boys films, although here it's hard to separate the ponderous dialogue from the way it's delivered.

Audiences will likely feel that they're being intestinated while sitting through Fortress, a soporific and perfectly fatuous exercise that should lure modest audiences for a weekend or two before receiving a life sentence on video. [7 Sept 1993]

The movie, which bills itself as a crime-thriller-mystery, doesn’t come close to fulfilling even the lowest of expectations; it neither takes its characters seriously nor commits to its superficial attempt at topicality.

For all its high style and aestheticized visuals, this is a work of self-conscious posturing with nothing to say.

There’s nary an amusing or unpredictable moment in the film.

Punishingly dull.

Car 54, Where Are You? makes the other recent big-screen adaptations of old TV series seem like episodes of "Masterpiece Theater" in comparison. [27 Jan 1994]

The actors are all game for anything, but this is thankless work, in which the mix of live action and animatronics has no magic. The same goes for the talented voice cast, which also includes Colman Domingo and Hank Azaria in small roles.

This is the sort of movie in which even the opening credits, which continue until nearly the half-hour mark, are unbearably pretentious.

Achieves a certain cinematic distinction by outdoing "Dumb and Dumber" in sheer grossness and detail with its depiction of the unfortunate effects of explosive diarrhea.

A towering heap of nihilistic nonsense that plays like a cornball "Children of God."

Here's the deal: The worst sex cartoon in Playboy's long history can't compete with the sheer vacuousness of this inane comedy.

One of those rare instances of a movie being so bad ... it's still really bad.

This crass drag of a dud at best manages to elicit just a couple of half-hearted chuckles over the course of its 80-minute allotment.

A muddled and routine murder mystery tricked up with a science fiction gimmick that wouldn't pass muster for a "Twilight Zone" episode. The writing is poor, but the direction is even poorer. This is a film to delete from one's memory bank.

It's completely undone by its terrible screenplay, inept direction, oppressive musical score and muddy visual palette.

A turgid mess of a film that has a lot of ideas on its mind, none of which prove very interesting or in fact coherent.

A painfully unfunny, would-be comedy.

Cheap-looking, broad and ultimately unnecessary comedy.

In his second feature as a director, Gallo acts as writer, director, producer, star, cinematographer, production designer and editor. Thus, the failure is all his.

A lame comic premise, a tiresome-bordering-on-obnoxious protagonist and a script devoid of humor is a lot to overcome for any movie, and Surviving Christmas is not the one to do it.

Has the crass look and feel of a 90-minute infomercial.

The film is nearly unendurable.

The film doesn't know what it wants to be -- reality programming pushed to the max or a satire of reality TV? -- but it winds up as an exercise in the rankest sort of cynicism.

An experimental, transgressive work that pretty much fails on every level, A Hole in My Heart, depicting the efforts of a trio of amateur porn filmmakers, eventually will be considered a minor footnote to a talented director's career. In the meantime, it's the audience members that will have to suffer.

A dreary indie ensemble drama about six thirtysomethings coping with the emotional aftermath of their friend's suicide, the ultra-talky and static Walking on the Sky would barely pass muster as an Off-Off-Broadway offering.

Overlong, over-the-top dirge.

Unfortunately, the R rating will prohibit the target audience -- namely teenage boys who find penis jokes endlessly hilarious - from seeing this relentlessly unfunny and vulgar effort until it shows up on video and cable.

This perfectly dreadful romantic action comedy manages to embarrass its three eminently attractive leading players in every scene, making this an automatic candidate for whatever raspberries or golden turkeys or other dubious awards may be given in future for the films of 2012.

One of the most obnoxious and least necessary animated films of the century thus far.

Without Antonio Banderas, The Big Bang would be a whimper of a movie, too awful to watch.

"Just to document yourself being bored is very boring," Enci says at one point. It's one moment of fiction here that rings all too true.

Amateurish vampire/musical mashup begs for a wooden stake.

So bloated that it's forever on the verge of bursting – a sentiment reflected by the film's overindulgence in ear-splitting pyrotechnics.

This is a film so bad that not only was it not screened in advance for critics, it's publicists wouldn't even provide background information. It might as well have been entered into the Witness Protection Program.

Managing to make the lore of snuff films not just repulsive but mind-numbingly dull, the horror film Gut offers two characters -- and, one imagines, a filmmaker -- who should have put splatter films behind them many years ago.

This lushly and pretentiously made drama about a young American whose worst instincts are unleashed during a stay in Paris endeavors to entice with details of the seedy underworld of La Pigalle but is a turn-off in almost every respect.

When a slasher pic can't exploit a woodchipper for more sadistic thrills than we get here, it shouldn't expect moviegoers to salivate for a sequel.

Barely qualifies as late-night cable television fodder.

This stupefying dull mockumentary purports to explore themes of media manipulation and political propaganda, but whatever points it’s attempting to make are buried amidst the ponderous goings-on that will result in a quick exit from theaters.

Utterly lacking in imagination or suspense, this inane effort is strictly for hardcore Argento cultists.

None of the characters,--whether human, fantastical, or anthropomorphically animal—prove remotely engaging. And the cheap animation, the sort of low-grade CGI endemic to endless direct-to-video efforts, proves visually unappealing.

This witless found-footage comedy — doesn’t so much satirize its chosen genre as shamelessly rip it off.

The only things left out of The Single Moms Club are genuine humor and emotion.

With jokes that fall flat so often, the film’s cardiograph flatlines before the first five minutes are over.

Battles are sickeningly brutal, and viewers who have no ethical problem with that may object to their sheer lack of imagination.

A flop-sweaty cash grab that gives a bad name to sequels in which key talent has jumped ship... Viewers who expected nothing from the first but were pleasantly surprised will get burned badly here.

Lacking sufficient self-parody to entertain as a campy monster-movie spoof, or the budget to thrill as action adventure or sci-fi, much like the creature it depicts, Poseidon Rex represents a throwback that even its own distributor can't really get behind.

Whatever doubts the viewer may share about the true circumstances of this tragic event are quickly erased by the ineptness with which the story is dramatized.

School Dance is the sort of oppressively offensive comedy that makes you aware of your brain cells dying as you watch it.