Coarse, cliched and clunky.

A few funny bits float the film for a while -- it's always nice to see Peters onscreen, no matter what she's doing -- but it's really as showcase for Marcus, who also wrote the script.

While kids of all ages will want to see it, the movie is loud and occasionally brutal, and while the body count is relatively low, it's still pretty scary stuff.

The basic problem is that most of the humor is based on things that are beyond parody. Bad television commercials and lame low-budget films are funny enough as they are; exaggerating their ridiculousness is unnecessary. What is successful is the painstakingly accurate recreation of everything from the commercials to the title skit. The talented filmmakers demonstrate that they can handle a multitude of directing chores, and, although the scripting may lack imagination, the visuals are handled quite well.

Not even a bravura performance from Woods, some steamy love scenes between Bridges and Ward, and a thrilling daylight car chase down Sunset Boulevard can pull this confusing remake out of the doldrums.

Self-indulgent wallow in privileged malaise.

The real problem with Taking Care of Business is that it doesn't even get much mileage out of what it does have going for it. Grodin and Belushi have both done their best work in buddy-buddy pairings (Midnight Run and Red Heat, respectively), but while the two demonstrate some comedy chemistry here, they aren't brought together onscreen until the film is virtually over.

Swank is painfully uncharismatic, leaving Christopher Walken, in the minor role of occultist Count Cagliostro, to decamp with any scene in which he appears. His performance may not be historically credible, but it's hugely entertaining: Would that the same were true of the film overall.

This psychological horror picture is harrowing and occasionally macabre -- you'll come away wondering what kind of father would cast his daughter in such a sexually brutal film.

The play for the heartstrings is so cold and calculated that the movie's sentimentality feels as synthetic as its hero, and the philosophy is simpleminded and lazy.

There's a lot of talent on display here: Dukakis has never been better and once again Fitzgerald proves himself to be a filmmaker of unfailing sensitivity, capable of transforming what could have been distastefully flip or overly lachrymose into something humorous but deeply heartfelt.

The movie takes a desperately wrong turn about 45 minutes in, and you can almost hear the great sucking sound as the whole thing churns down the drain in a swirl of narrative contradictions.

James Woods adds another hateful, embittered creep to his gallery of losers, neurotics and junkyard dogs with vampire slayer Jack Crow.

It's not a cheap rip-off -- it's a credible sequel to a horror classic, and a sad reminder that some things never change.

A brazen, irreverent, and wild satire that hits more often than it misses, THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN seeks to prove that people will do anything, absolutely anything, for money--if there's enough of it.

Yes, it's a testosterone cocktail, but at least it doesn't leave you feeling as though you've been tumbled around in a gem polisher for two-and-a-half hours.

At first glance, FOR LOVE OR MONEY looks like a holdover from the greed-filled 1980s, a last gasp glorification of Reagan/Bush era yuppiedom. The surprise is that it's actually an amusing, if occasionally formulaic, comedy.

Boring, contrived, and manipulative.

A few scary moments, but that's about it. Technical credits are good, actors are fair, direction is mediocre, but the public squashed Bug.

Better than most in the slice-and-dice genre, Terror Train has a couple of decent performances from Ben Johnson and Jamie Lee Curtis, great photography from John Alcott (Barry Lyndon; The Shining), and some atmospheric direction from Roger Spottiswoode (Under Fire).

Hope isn't funny, Winters misses the mark completely, and watching Diller is like scratching your fingernails down a blackboard. To be avoided.

Rob Reiner's feel-good tear-jerker, in which dying well is the best revenge, wants to be heartwarming. But first-timer Justin Zackham's screenplay is so stridently formulaic and disingenuous that the film falls flat at every inspirational turn.

The story vacillates between broad, kid-friendly gags and a series of oddly sour riffs on the theme of adult sibling rivalry.

So clotted with back story that the Romeo and Juliet-style romance between a warrior vampire and a reluctant werewolf never has a chance to breath, Len Wiseman's revisionist horror tale is all look and no bite.

The film's secret weapon is its kicky soundtrack.

As for the performances, Moore doesn't bring anything special to his role, but Hannah's slightly awkward and befuddled demeanor works to her advantage, since she's playing someone with a tenuous grip on reality. The other performers are generally left adrift by the simpleminded, juvenile script, which, devoid of comic inspiration, resorts to gratuitous profanity and crude sex jokes.

All but the most easily pleased kids will be bored as can be, and anyone who has fond memories of TV's Leave It to Beaver would probably rather not besmirch them.

An empty reshaping of Grand Hotel, held together by disaster in the sky. Airport will be remembered as the trailblazer of the disaster epic, one of the most trivial genres in the history of motion pictures.

This very Disney treatment of the classic fish out of water story ought to satisfy its intended audiences: kids and the parents who must accompany them.

The massive sets and extensive special effects are certainly... massive and extensive. But watching them is like watching the wheels and gears inside a hugely complicated clock: It's interesting and even beautiful, but can hardly be called scary.

Though it is silly, sleazy, and graphically violent, The Toxic Avenger does hold a bit of warped charm for fans of this sort of thing.

Written by Fraser Clarke Heston, son of Charlton, THE MOUNTAIN MEN is a mindless, bloody pseudo-western purporting to show the last days of the fur-trapping era.

If Michael Wincott -- who under normal circumstances can chill your blood just by breathing -- can't make the villain compelling, you know the movie's in trouble.

Without Azaria's comedic gifts, the movie would be close to unendurable.

A sly, self-mocking sense of humor is apparent even in Robocop 2's title, which identifies both the film's sequel status and its hero. And what a fantastic nightmare creation Robocop 2 is.

Israel Horowitz's script fails to develop sympathetic adult characters, leaving the children to give the film whatever charm it may have.

Written by Tom Holland, who would go on to write and direct FRIGHT NIGHT and CHILD'S PLAY, the script does a nice job of translating the awkwardness of adolescence into a horrifying event.

Funny but far-fetched entertainment from director Minnelli, who doesn't need to rely on strange plot devices to make a good movie.

The result is a glossy, engaging suspense film that jettisons much of its predecessor's sadism and subtext in favor of crowd-pleasing revenge violence.

Believe it or not, this fantastic story (of a close encounter of the worst kind) ultimately proves to be pretty uninvolving, relying on the quality of the performances to maintain interest.

As provocative as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," but nowhere near as engaging.

Misbegotten mess.

The first two thirds of the screenplay by Aja and cowriter Gregory Levasseur is a relentless exercise in bare-bones nastiness.

Too disturbing for most children, too suggestive of cornball kiddie fare for most adults, this oddly affecting film is unlikely to capture the audience it deserves.

There seems to be a message here about being true to yourself, but it's hard to find it under the blubber jokes.

It's not nearly as funny as "The Waterboy" and has little of "The Wedding Singer's" goofy charm, but die-hard Adam Sandler fans -- whose numbers are legion -- will find plenty to laugh at.

An extraordinarily predictable and uninviting western directed by McLaglen in the John Ford vein but with none of the Ford atmosphere, complexity, characterization, or inventiveness.

A few effectively directed sequences and special makeup effects by Tom Savini (most of which were cut to avoid an "X" rating) are the only reasons to sit through this terribly familiar material.

Vonnegut's brand of juvenile surrealism...doesn't age especially well...but it could hardly be worse served than to be brought to the screen with such ham-fisted literal-mindedness.

This melodramatic action opera is a lurid love letter to the guns and poses aesthetic of Hong Kong action cinema.

Moooove along, there's nothing to see here!

A spoof of "political correctness" on campus, PCU is a sanitized rip-off of NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE that's neither smart enough to qualify as satire nor offensive enough to entertain.

Sax keeps things moving, but the best thing about the film is the British cast.

Aggressively non-linear and heavy on the visual flair, Mike Figgis' allegorical voyage through the mind of a filmmaker alternates between the tawdry, fake sophistication of fancy perfume commercials and an unholy regurgitation of the worst excesses of European art cinema.

Although the film fails at a number of levels, most acutely in never making us care much about any of the characters or their problems, it possesses a loopy charm that makes it a pleasure to watch.

First of all, it has no music. That aside, it doesn't have any wit, joy, or drive. Children who haven't had the pleasure of seeing The Wizard of Oz might enjoy this film, but it will also frighten them. There are some fine, Oscar-nominated special effects, but the excitement just isn't there.

Neither a conventional documentary nor a work of complete fiction, Hammer's film constructs a secret history, part imagination and part reality that is both revealing and slyly entertaining.

Hard though this antic farce tries to be outrageous, its satirical jabs at American culture are obvious and juvenile, as is the use of Jimmy's plastic bubble as a goofy metaphor for fear of life.

In the final analysis it all feels very much like a successful acting exercise that while psychologically acute, doesn't really bring much more to the table than what we've already gleaned from a few episodes of "Oz."

Easily one of the most gimmicky films of all time, Clue must be the only movie in history to be adapted from a popular board game.

The film will mostly be remembered for Bisset's wet T-shirt sequences.

An occasionally brutal, but generally plodding western from Lancaster (his first as a director), who fails to pump much life into the anemic script, giving the cast little to do.

Silver Streak is a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1930s but with none of the verve or the motivation needed to get an audience to swallow the shenanigans.

Although it's possible to enjoy isolated sequences of LIONHEART, this is not one of martial arts superstar Jean-Claude Van Damme's better kick-ass vehicles. Sleekly produced and densely plotted, it lacks the excitement of the earlier Van Damme flicks which had a less calculated aura about them.

Excessively gory, FORBIDDEN WORLD nonetheless has several well-directed suspense scenes, and its special effects are impressive for a low-budget effort.

Knowing is the path to eternal pain.

A riot of artfully grungy hotel rooms, sleazy costumes and sordid behavior, Allan Mindel's directing debut gives off the smug air of hipsters at play, making it hard to care what happens to any of its lost souls and inept opportunists.

The film is carelessly directed, paced, acted, and scripted, offering today's teenagers, at best, a confused message. Foremost among its endless problems is Avildsen's pathetic direction. Under his uninspired guidance, the actors appear to be performing in filmed rehearsals, guilty of glaring character inconsistencies from one scene to the next. The cliche-ridden story throws in every possible obstacle to the young couple's happiness.

Surprisingly entertaining, if less than original.

Once the star of some of the finest movies of the '70s and '80s, Keaton has begun making just this kind of chick-flick comedy with increasing regularity at least since 1996's "The First Wives Club," and it's gotten so she's not even trying to get into character anymore.

Breezy and eminently watchable.

Sporadically funny... occasionally very funny.

Fans won't want to miss this addition to the canon.

A surprisingly shoddy affair that abandons the unabashed romance of its predecessor for a rudimentary action-adventure plot involving guns and drugs.

This lackluster sequel forgoes everything that made the original a superior horror film in favor of simplistic genre cliches.

Though the film contains many haunting images, the absence of a solid emotional foundation makes its increasingly preposterous story developments feel arbitrary and ultimately pointless.

Gorehounds will likely be pleased by the graphic bloodletting, but there's little else of interest here.

Director Mike Barker has delivered a film that proves there's life left in the old genre yet, and does so with style, intelligence and surprisingly little violence.

This movie misfires in its attempt to combine a children's dog story and adult comedy by pairing Benji and Chevy Chase. Silly and slow-moving.

There's no accounting for the success of this over the failure of Eastwood's infinitely superior Bronco Billy. The year 1978 was the year of heavy pictures, with The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and Midnight Express. Perhaps people just wanted to sit back, eat some popcorn, and have a good old evening of cheer and laughter.

Smith brazenly ignores plot conventions and concentrates on an apparently endless stream of crude and occasionally clever one-liners.

An entertaining piece of good ol' boy fluff with plenty of car and boat chases.

Bummer, dudes. Longtime fans who expect the fun lingo and pizza-gobbling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of the past may be shocked by director Kevin Munroe's reimagining of the popular kiddie series.

She's Having a Baby could have been a fascinating and funny look at the conflict between marriage and personal ambition had its writer-director probed more deeply into the subject. Hughes instead falls back on the easy jokes, hip music, and superficial character studies that have obscured the basic viability of all his work.

Although billed as a sci-fi film, HARDWARE is unquestionably a horror. In his calculated enthusiasm to shock, first-time writer-director Richard Stanley has filled the screen with gratuitous violence and psychosexual perversion but failed to present a plausible, reasonably coherent plot.

Bynes is a charmer who adeptly straddles the line between romantic heroine and physical comedienne, while Firth is extremely enjoyable as a befuddled father.

Beneath the heavy accents, wild gesticulating, slaps to the head and garish flocked wallpaper, there's an awful lot of heart.

The final irony is that it's tailored for a PG-13 audience: The violence is bloodless, the sex is all come-on and the surreally reckless stunts cater to viewers too young to drive.

Surprisingly humor-free. Worse, with the exception of Cornwell's brilliant Bowie, the impersonations aren't particularly good, and can be found in any two-bit comedian's repertoire.

Feels more like a 90-minute pilot for a TV series than a feature film.

So unimaginative that it's more of a remake than a sequel. Reynolds and his buddies all act as if they're in a home movie as they rehash the same tired gags and dull chases that filled the original.

The plot is a recycled mess, the dialog is awful, and the character motivation is nil, but thanks to Konchalovsky (and a strong performance by Russell), Tango and Cash is not only bearable, it's likable. Responsible for some of the finest films of the 80s, the Soviet-born director brings an insane, kinetic energy to the film that makes for effective action sequences and potent satire. A very smart "dumb" movie.

The film offers some disturbingly misogynist elements as well as a healthy dose of crushing violence. Still, those quibbles aside, this is a fun movie and a must-see for Eastwood fans.

Anyone who understands the meaning of the title or catches all the frog references scattered through writer-director Martin Curland's feature debut will have a head start understanding this confused and confusing comedy.

The film attempts to mock both slasher movies and the mentality that produces them, but its humor is so sophomoric that it's a little like the pot calling the kettle stupid

Equal parts "Mad Max" and "Day of the Dead," this third and supposedly final entry in the Resident Evil franchise is no less derivative than its predecessors but moves along at a brisk clip.

For all the tear-jerking plot twists, it's a glumly dry-eyed affair.

Kenan and Kel share a wonderful comic chemistry that has a lot in common with the anarchic goofiness of Abbott and Costello or Martin and Lewis, leavened with a good deal more mutual affection.