Hiller's sledgehammer direction turns the problems common in education into an endless parade of clichés, feebly propped up by wacky humour, inarticulacy, ham and corn. Avoid.

It provides the thinnest of excuses for rerunning the 'dramas' of the night before, but it doesn't do anything to salvage the venerable formula.

Terminally boring.

Though the film finally opts for ear-bashing histrionics, its prevailingly pedagogic tone is both coy and tricksy. The dialogue is relentless in its banality, the stereotype characters unattractive and poorly motivated, the plot protracted and predictable.

About as dreary as a summit conference in Belgium.

This surprisingly heavyweight cast - Louise Fletcher and Sally Kirkland lend spiritual support - manages to lower itself to the exploitation level material without apparent strain; indeed the performances are all truly atrocious.

Whenever things get boring, which is often, the double-crossing factor is increased, which complicates the plot without adding substance to the two-dimensional characters or to the mechanical suspense.

Pitched at cartoon level, with a bizarre collection of speed enthusiasts crudely taking care of the comedy, it relies almost exclusively on the exceptional stunt work, the plot only occasionally dropping into first gear for some boring and irrelevant dramatic stuff.

All-purpose sci-fi rip-off, set on a planet where evil Jordan lords it over a cadre of roller-skating minor brat-packers who call on ancient mystical force - 'Bodhi' - to escape his sway. A misbegotten Brooksfilm which sank without trace in the US.

Very little seems to happen in this social vacuum, and none of it is memorable.

With the exception of Abraham's world-weary performance, and a couple of nicely nasty cameos from David Rasche and Richard Young as the crooked cops, this is a disposable affair. Yates' ham-fisted direction cranks the film up into melodramatic hyperbole, but Selleck is the real villan, portraying his transformation from wide-eyed innocent to hardened man of the world by changing from clean-shaven mop top to stubbly slicked-back, with reflecting shades to boot. Laughable.

Twenty years after the taut Klute, Pakula's touch has deserted him; the glossy, literalist approach he favours here works firmly against the arrant contrivances in Matthew Chapman's screenplay, rendering already convoluted events even more ridiculous.

The real mystery is what Schlesinger and Sheen are doing making this schlock.

Dreary jousting, production values that make Monty Python and the Holy Grail look lavish, and an excruciating synthesiser score make this a real trial.

Disappointingly infantile.

The script, for which Chapman and Cook must bear some responsibility, is a three-minute Python skit bloated out to feature length, involving buried treasure, revenge, and machinations close to the throne. Depressing stuff.

A tacky rock'n'roll drama which regurgitates clichés without any sense of shame.

Through crass over-emphasis and sloppy continuity errors, Hiller fumbles most of the jokes away. The roles fit Belushi/Grodin like rubber, but the rest is second-rate.

Right from the opening sequence the film is a clumsy catalogue of pain and death, from the mutilated victims of the torturer to the trail of wasted baddies who were foolish enough to incur Bronson's wrath.

If you're still at the age when farting and nose-picking seem funny, then Caddyshack should knock you dead. Buried deep - very deep - beneath the rising tide of effluent is a pleasant enough story of a kind about trying to make it to the top as a caddy while yet remaining human; a movie which could have done for golf what Breaking Away did for cycling. Instead it allows a string of resistible TV comics (Chase excepted) to mug through an atrocious chain of lame-brained set pieces, the least vulgar of which involves a turd in a swimming pool.

Raffill's heavy-handed direction is jam-packed with product placement, and interrupted every ten seconds with yet another plug for a boring MOR rock song.

The structure continues to loosen, and although Friedkin - like Coppola - has always had difficulty with endings, this one is so arbitrary it's as if he just gave up.

Black arts movies tend to come cheap: a dark cellar, a few candles and a robe. Deep shadow is a blessing here too because the titular trolls are absurd puppets that merely wobble about and snarl a bit.

Worst of all, there's a charmless brat prince for Sonja to take under her wing. Pap, and Fleischer - who at least brought a touch of humour to Conan the Destroyer - should know better.

Here Von Sydow's a rival beer manufacturer hoping to take over the world by drugging his brew, but the plotline (derived from Hamlet) soon goes flat.

Against the novelty of the canine stunts one has to balance some terribly variable acting, poor lighting, and spotty photography. Attendant adults will probably find it a long haul.

Tiring stuff.

John Barry's score, with its reiterated 'autistic kid' theme, would have sounded corny to Ivor Novello, though it's in keeping with the general principle of patronising the audience.

However one rates the bosom as an erogenous zone, it takes the talents of a Russ Meyer to make it interesting for eighty minutes. Watching the unflagging, unfunny efforts of five callow youths to see the homecoming queen's breasts, one only wonders if ever in the field of endeavour so much has been done by so many for just two.

Peeters also lays on the gore pretty thick amid the usual visceral drive-in hooks and rip-offs from genre hits; and with the humour of an offering like Piranha entirely absent, this turns out a nasty piece of work all round.

The premise of Capricorn One is so intrinsically arresting that it almost saves the film from the sheer incompetence of its script...Pretty soon the project gets bogged down in innumerable difficulties, not helped by the awfulness of most of the dialogue. The climactic introduction of Telly Savalas in a crop-dusting plane must rank as one of the most desperate measures to save a thriller since William Castle hung luminous skeletons from the cinema roof.

The script, which labours under polysyllabic mumbo-jumbo at times, is infantile, while the performances, apart from a sprightly Danner as Fonda's TV cohort, are spineless.

What happened? With Ashby, Bridges, Arquette and a script co-written by Oliver Stone, you expect the result to be better than a long drawn-out episode of The Equalizer.

A plummeting lift, seances, a spontaneous combustion set-piece and prophetic-of-doom photos are timed to keep us engaged, but never coalesce into a joined-up plot.

A series of competently engineered shock moments jollied along by a jazzed-up version of John Carpenter's original electronic score: slicker than crude oil and just as unattractive.

Generous souls may try to blame this travesty of the Deadline comic-strip on the studio execs who forced director Talalay to tone down and re-edit her cut. But what remains of Petty's anodyne sexless heroine and the dull, episodic live-action sequences suggests we may have been spared something worse even than this movie.

When the explanations begin (mainly a flashback to 17th century ancestors), things become heavy-handed, revealing the ragged direction, a dire script, and performances which range from the bemused (Albert) to the awful (Borgnine).

Heavy-handed, humourless and patronising.

The jokes are relentlessly crass and objectionable; the song'n'dance routines have been created in the cutting-room and have lost any sense of fun; Fellini-esque moments add little but pretension; and scenes of a real open-heart operation, alternating with footage of a symbolic Angel of Death in veil and white gloves, fail even in terms of the surreal.

Screenwriter Boyd has turned his laugh-out-loud novel into a groan-out-loud movie.

Which would be fine, were the characters not a punchable quintet of overdrawn saps, the acting (Ringwald and Hall excepted) overplayed and unsympathetic, and the script the wrong side of the line that separates smart from smart-arse. Its continuing cult popularity is mystifying; as teen movies go, this is a long way off, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Pretty in Pink. Hughes: stay behind for detention afterwards. And write me four sides on why this, uh, sucks.

A pathetic shadow of the Frank Tashlin/Jerry Lewis Artists and Models.

This is shoddy hackwork, replaying classic scenarios (the honest new recruit, audits by Pentagon bigwigs and manoeuvres in Nevada) with such disregard for narrative structure the reels might be in the wrong order.

Nothing jells at all - least of all the central conceit of the hero becoming shaggy (sometimes the dog's a dog, sometimes a man with fur). It's also not much fun seeing Jones, Pleshette and Wynn getting older and older, staler and staler, playing the parts they've been stuck with for years.

This particular wet dream is wrapped in a vacuous blackmail plot (which enables the young hero to fantasise that he's f.cked Sylvia to death, and her to reveal her heart of gold) and padded with lots of horrible Adult Oriented Rock (Clapton, Rod Stewart, etc).

This pitifully unfunny comedy has only two things going for it: its theme song, Starship's Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now, is a hit single; and it is short. A film about, by and for dummies.

No Retreat, No Surrender borrows heavily from the likes of The Last Dragon, Karate Kid and even Rocky IV, but makes them look like masterpieces by comparison.

The film does assert there are some things positive thinking won't conquer, like sickness, senility and death. But it smothers any serious intent in cheap homily, modern mythology and sickly sentimentality.

Despite making use of Hackman, Christie and Marshall in supporting roles, and actual US newscasters to cover the election results, the film is still a complete mess. Barely held together by Cy Coleman's powerful score, it finally falls apart thanks to the embarrassing amateurism of the party political broadcasts the characters produce, and the Vidal Sassoon world they inhabit.

De Palma is not a director one looks to for conscience, and his track record on the issue of rape has been innocent of moral debate. It's odd to find him dealing with both, and the non-sensationalist approach seems to have taken a toll on his energies: Casualties of War is dull.

Once thought of as racy and adventurous in its treatment of sex, this turgid nonsense about a high-class whore with love in her heart has dated atrociously. Taylor hams away and Harvey in his debonair mood is distinctly unappealing, while the overall effect is too excruciating even to be unintentionally funny.

An uneven blend of crime thriller and rural romance, this aims for an adult complexity but misses the target by a mile.

A curiously indigestible phenomenon, like being forced to eat five courses of avocado by an overbearing dinner-party host.

A painfully sincere, meticulously faithful, and pitifully plodding adaptation of Hemingway's novel about the symbolic struggle between an old Mexican fisherman and a giant marlin.

This is shameless stuff: happy, barefoot peasants sing that traditional Latin cancion, 'Crush the grapes, crush the grapes,' the moonlight is so strong you could get burned, and the metaphors are writ large as tabloid headlines.

A tame, poorly plotted serving of schlock, less horrific for its ketchup-smeared murders than for the bare-faced fashion in which it tries and fails to rip off Carpenter's Halloween in matters of style and construction.

A kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Catch-22, or maybe Fuller's Shock Corridor set as an episode from The Twilight Zone. Sounds interesting enough, but isn't.

Barker calls his shambolic, uninvolving narrative 'scattershot'; put less kindly, it's as explosive and directionless as a blunderbuss.

Few people can be so big-hearted as to tolerate Ed's agonising brand of pedantic humour.

Together with Hamburger Hill, this illustrates that Irvin probably couldn't stage an action scene if you held a gun to his head. Even more turgid and unconvincing are the quieter 'dramatic' scenes, which serve only to arrest the plot's minimal momentum and prolong the agony.

Somewhere in the Hollywood hills there's a computer loaded with a software programme called BuildaStar. A hack punched in the script requirements for this intended star vehicle for Selleck: an action yarn pitting an American loner against evil Nazis, bent coppers, a sultry girl-friend; sardonic sex with a lashing of perversity and gratuitous nudity; dare-devil stunts and chases for excitement.

Three witlessly routine tales (adapted from stories by Chetwynd-Hayes), drearily executed and graced not at all by such luminaries as Pleasence, Magee and Whitman.

Jade Calegory, who plays the boy-hero in this cuddly alien yarn, was born with spina bifida, and the film is neither sentimental nor exploitative in dealing with its wheelchair-confined star. Unfortunately, there's little else to commend.

This is rubbish: an incoherent James Bond-ish yarn distinguished only by its formal decadence and the presence of basketball's Dennis Rodman.

A dismally unfunny shambles.

Third and last in the Bad News series, with Curtis as a Hollywood hustler trying to make a buck exploiting the sad sack little league baseballers, but suffering the obligatory change of heart. Dire.

It is regrettable that the highest of production values have been invested in this, the cheapest of stories.

One problem here is that the jokes aren't funny; another is that Sally Field is funny by mistake.

Endless and doggedly in earnest.

McDowell's comically histrionic performance is, in fact, the single redeeming feature in this lamentably simplistic and unpleasant piffle.

The jarring 1990s sensibility of this over-directed, under-written movie extends to style as well as content. Worst of all is the blatantly fetishistic attitude the director adopts towards his posturing macho star.

Makes Baywatch seem intellectual.

A couple of vaguely amusing monologues apart, this lame, tame variation on the buddy-buddy comic cop thriller is flaccid, predictable, and as sickeningly anthropomorphic as one might fear.

In the mood for two hours of relentless fights, gory kills, clichéd McGuffins and unmemorable characters, all served up in a weightless CG environment? Mortal Kombat II punches a hole in all those boxes.

The script seems a collection of loose ends and rewrites; the direction is deeply dispirited; and with the exception of O'Toole and a couple of engaging vignettes, it's a complete turkey.

A shallow, chic confusion of eyes, camera lenses, and saleable images of violence of the sort it now purports to question as an 'issue'.

Based on a French play (La Cuisine des Anges by Albert Husson), it's static and laden with leaden talk, with nothing to interest the eye as recompense.

Erotic, surely, only for the very easily pleased, with Dereks J and B and Cannon Films converging to form a matrix of sustained, tawdry silliness.

There is some startling footage, but Anderson's direction dithers perceptibly, and finally opts for an unpleasant mish-mash of phony ecological concern and meretricious sensationalism. The ultimate indignity the beast suffers is to become a simple extension of Harris' threadbare macho image.

Besides the implausibilities, the direction has two fatal flaws: it's both tediously slow and hugely narcissistic as the camera focuses repeatedly on Depp's bandana'd head and rippling torso.

The excessive blood-spurting gruesomeness and cartoonish stop-motion effects trivialise the horror and undercut the would-be black humour in this travestied sequel to Stuart Gordon's hugely enjoyable film.

A low-budget sequel which tries, and fails, to make a virtue out of adversity by substituting cheap mechanical effects for the expensive light and magic of Parts I and II.

Leaden, xenophobic, and utterly stupid, it's far more offensive than Rambo and far less well executed.

Teen nihilism of the cheapest kind, it's as pretentious as Jean-Luc Godard, as tacky as one of those Z grade turkeys by Ted V Miklas, and at least twice as boring as that sounds.

While it may make the City of Light look beautiful, ultimately, this insufferable indie auteur's navel-gazer is just another faux-kinky vanity project in which its creator's neuroses are placed on an undeserved pedestal.

What played as rousingly dumb fun in "Independence Day" (1996) — all those pie-eyed nationalistic monologues, and U.S. landmarks reduced to rubble — now come off as callously insensitive, even with tongue firmly in cheek.

Tired byplay between Reynolds’s mystified straight man and Bridges’s supernatural old pro will kill off any fond memories you have of zesty buddy films past and present.

Fans of the spectacle of Kevin James falling over (nine times in 104 minutes!) and shockingly brazen product placement ("Is T.G.I. Friday's as incredible as it looks?") may dig this deranged comedy; everyone else will be scratching their heads.

Every move is a misstep.

Sherman based this obtuse psychosexual dystopia on his own hippie upbringing; the result is virtually teeming with bitter resentment for the drug-addled parent collective that inadvertently turned his adolescence into a chapter from "Lord of the Flies."

Julia (in his final role) hams it up shamelessly as the camp commandant, but not even his suave presence and throwaway quips can save this noisy, brainless mess.

A wooden ensemble, paper-thin frights and dull TV-special looks don’t help matters. ‘This place doesn’t suck,’ someone observes early on. If only.

Watching people play a board game ain’t ever going to be scary, and that’s essentially what we have here.

The one cop (Bentley) who buys Jill's story looks like the most likely suspect (or at least the most likely red herring) - and then he vanishes for the entire third act to, supposedly, make his mother some soup. Wait, what?

Even if Women in Trouble didn’t keep bringing to mind a superior artist, the film would still be badly written (DOA tangents about cunnilingus and kink don’t make dialogue edgy, only vulgar), not to mention unevenly paced and an embarrassment to all involved.

An economic slump is no reason to settle for this junked-up, unintentionally depressing "Office Space" bootleg.

It's simply one wearisome '90s crime-cinema cliché after another.

Stupid, offensive and as substantial as a text message, this toxic piece of kiddie trash isn't worth the pixels.