One would expect a horror movie about a possessed laundry-press to put the audience through the wringer. Instead, this tedious Stephen King adaptation takes the two-dimensional characters of the source story and squashes them even flatter.

Under Hamilton's moribund direction, this becomes a Bond-in-uniform saga, with a can-they-spike-the-Kraut-guns-in-time plot. All the potentially exciting set pieces (traitor in our midst, whose side are the Gucci-clad partisans on?) are thrown away with a disregard for the basic mechanics of suspense, and the climax is literally cardboard thin.

Aside from a good exchange rate of one-liners, the chief feeling left by the movie (a remake of Claude Berri's Un Moment d'Egarement) is of a thin, cynical calculation. Sole reason to catch it would be to monitor one more step of Caine's increasing excellence as middle age overtakes him.

Ross, who began his career as a dancer and choreographer, brings plenty of gusto to the material and the performances are ebullient, but this is still a cynical and manipulative exercise with little feel for the teen culture it purports to celebrate.

Eastwood at his least appealing in a poor sequel to the already disappointing redneck comedy of Every Which Way But Loose. The story is similarly thin - trucker Eastwood, accompanied by his orang-utan buddy Clyde, gets involved in repetitive brawls with sundry unsavoury brutes - while the humour is far too broad and the direction plodding.

Bond struck camp long ago, so it would seem pointless to complain about the dilution of Fleming's cruel stud into a smirking dinner-jacket with a crude line in double entendres. But the problem here is that the elements which act as consolation in late Bondage are missing.

Would-be seadog Short inherits old boat and sets sail for adventure in the Caribbean only to have sozzled captain Russell land the whole crew in deep trouble. Queasy ocean-going comedy, not helped by Kurt's Robert Newton impersonation.

The Bond films were bad enough even with the partially ironic performances of Connery. Here, featuring the stunning nonentity Lazenby, there are no redeeming features.

There's absolutely nothing to it, beyond Ms Beals cavorting in a leotard, lots of sheeny backgrounds courtesy of Lyne the former adman, and a Joe Eszterhas screenplay mixed through with cliché concentrate as female blue-collar worker proceeds from showgirl at a men's club to the big audition for the Pittsburgh ballet school. The star, it has to be said, is not at her most convincing as a welder (how does she afford an apartment the size of an aircraft hangar?), nor should we forget that most of the serious terpsichorean gymnastics were done by uncredited French dancer Marine Jahan.

Dismally lurid stuff, ham-fistedly directed and low on credibility.

Where Misery restored one's faith in Stephen King adaptations, this travesty buries his reputation alive. Neither Singleton nor scriptwriter John Esposito has grasped the anti-capitalist undercurrents of King's story, relying instead on cheap shocks and dodgy creature effects.

By and large, a rather pitiful parody of the Universal Frankenstein movies, taking typically Brooksian liberties with characters and plot, resorting to juvenile mugging, and relying to a great extent on fairly authentic sets and photography for its better moments.

A standard, camp, unapologetic Mel Brooks parody, with digs at Kevin Costner's Prince of Thieves and its multi-racial Merry Men, and an arsenal of throw-away gags. An impressive cast - Stewart, Hayes, Ullman - cannot unfortunately save the day.

There is not nearly enough violence. No one is eviscerated. The villains, all mumblers to a man, are not punished by having their tongues cut out. The body count is only somewhere in the high eighties - and most of these are simply gunned down with a deplorable lack of invention. Very little is done by way of eye-gouging, limb-crushing or tooth-extraction.

Farley is the physical pratfaller, a clumsy oaf with the brawn of a bison and a brain to match; Spade the slimline sidekick with a long line in snide. It's some indication of the wit involved that Farley is reduced to cracking fat jokes at his own expense.

First-timer Gornick's direction is so painfully inept that not one of the episodes is even slightly scary, let alone horrifying. The only terrifying thing about Creepshow 2 is the thought of Creepshow 3.

There's no subtlety of characterisation, and despite the severity of Henry's injuries, little to disconcert the viewer. Bening and Ford give the material all they've got, but they're fighting an uphill battle.

Given that it comes courtesy of Adam Sandler’s production company Happy Madison... it’s no surprise that Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is a lazy, witless, laugh-free experience. But even by their standards, this is a slog to sit through, so glacially paced that at times it achieves an almost zen-like level of anti-comedy.

In his prime, co-writer Michael Ritchie might have turned this into a caustic Downhill Racer or Bad News Bears-style critique of professional sporting values. Director Turteltaub, on the other hand, patronises both characters and audience with daft knockabout humour, tear-jerking sentiment and racial stereotyping which skates on very thin ice.

A right royal mess.

The crude good-girl/bad-girl dynamic between its young leads is just one of many crass elements in this woolly, well-meaning but fatally unconvincing melodrama.

Gung-ho American World War II bomber pilot falls for an already married English rose during teatime rendezvous in war-torn Hanover Street. Anaemic and foolish.

A copy rather than a sequel, this has none of the intelligence, wit or tempo that graced the first swarm of hungry fish.

The film’s sole saving grace is Tommy Lee Jones’s amusingly cranky FBI agent, but he can’t save this ship from sinking.

So the cast is talented, the director has a decent track record and of course ‘The Secret Scripture’ looks pretty, in a picture-postcard sort of way. But the script is painful, not just horribly clichéd but trite, directionless and unaccountably pleased with itself.

A virtual remake, down to the final shot, of Michael Winner’s 1974 exploitation hit ‘Death Wish’ – and lacking even that film’s adolescent grasp of street justice.

The couple drive into town, body in the boot, looking for help, but they won't find any in the script, which totters from one cliché to the next, eventually disappearing up its own cornhole in a conflagration of cheap FX.

Howard T Duck, of Marvel Comics, might well have a beef against Lucasfilm for transforming his magnetic comic strip personality into a zipperless polyester duck-suit (filled interchangeably by eight different actors, each apparently under four feet in height) in this aimless movie.