Whereas Romero's approach to this material is distinctly tongue-in-cheek, Gornick makes the mistake of giving the stories a straightforward treatment that merely heightens their inherent weakness. Both pictures use animation to tie things together, though the cartoon work in both is weak.

Only Michael Winslow, repeating his uncanny ability as a sort of human sound-effects machine, is able to give any life to this, but his efforts are like reviving a beached carp. They don't come any worse than this.

Shot in Berlin and set in the far-off future of 1994, The Apple was clearly designed to duplicate the success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and failed dismally, in large part because the music is so stupendously banal.

Serviceable enough, if you come to it with sufficiently modest expectations.

Exactly what you'd expect. This moderately amusing formula comedy is the screen debut of sitcom star Kelsey Grammer (Frasier), who plays a naval commander charged with piloting a WWII-era submarine in war games against the high-tech nuclear fleet.

Lack of chemistry between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts sinks this souffle.

The climactic shootout might have more impact if we actually cared about the so-called characters.

This intermittently charming look at East-meets-West culture shock in contemporary Beijing seriously overreaches its grasp.

Most of the film's imagination and energy seem to have gone into the clever casting and flamboyant costume and set design.

Whaley's determination to immerse you in sheer, unrelenting wretchedness is exhausting.

The general level of mayhem, the sudden transformations that are Plympton's trademark moves and the pervasive irreverence will no doubt delight Plympton's legion of fans; others may find 80 minutes of these shenanigans exhausting.

Formulaic film recounts the tumultuous birth of Israel.

This is director Luc Besson's first attempt at combining animation with live-action, and while the look of the film is impressive, he should have focused more of his efforts on fleshing out the script that he adapted from two of his own "Arthur" books.

It's eye-filling, to say the least, but there's not much tension or sense of danger.

The film's only plus is some superb ski photography.

Kristofferson acts like someone who has just awakened and would like to go back to sleep--something many in the audience found themselves doing.

Beautifully photographed in locations from Bavaria to London to the English countryside, and including some excellent special effects from Les Bowie, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER deteriorates a bit in its relatively ludicrous ending. The film does, however, boast some truly frightening images of black magic rituals, a gruesome birth scene, and a very immodest Kinski.

It's tough going relieved only by some lovely Irish scenery. -

FREDDY'S DEAD is one of the weaker entries, with overt violence downplayed, perhaps because Freddy has become something of an institution, star of the silver screen as well as a short-lived TV series and innumerable merchandizing ploys.

This charming musical based on the comic strip character Little Orphan Annie features many memorable songs and pleasant dance numbers.

Basic knowledge of the original series is mandatory, but the more familiar you are, the more glaring this movie's considerable deficiencies will seem.

Some great things can found in this fluidly kinetic film, well-directed by X-Files series and movie veteran Rob Bowman, including no-nonsense dialogue, epic photography and a terrific score. It's too bad the story is so sloppy and stupid.

But clichéd rapid-fire editing and cheap-looking digital-image manipulation drain away every ounce of atmosphere, and overexplanation blows what could have been a darkly ambiguous ending.

With its endless string of good-naturedly cheap jokes and its comic-book style, The Return of Swamp Thing is good campy fun, spoofing its horror premise effectively.

Stylish, well acted drama.

Director Peter Medak and screenwriter Leonard Michaels (working from his own novel) apparently tried to make a film like THE BIG CHILL for mature men, but the stagy result of their efforts will leave viewers cold. All of the characters are so broadly drawn that they become laughable, rather than interesting.

A sporadically funny spoof of aliens-from-outer-space films that begins to run out of fresh ideas after the first 30 minutes.

In this quartet of scary tales, two stories work and two don't.

This might have been a terrific movie. It has all the right ingredients: a beautiful woman in an odd situation, a background as colorful as any movie ever made, a script by veterans Lorenzo Semple and David Newman, and a historic comic strip. So what went wrong? Blame must be laid squarely on the shoulders of John Guillermin, who directed the movie as if he weren't sure if it was adventure, comedy, or camp.

There are about as many laughs in the film's 101 minutes as in a three-minute sketch by the Monty Python troupe, from which much of the cast hails.

Totally daft and a lot of fun.

A caper comedy without chemistry is just a bunch of waiting around for something to get stolen.

When it comes right down to it, TWO MOON JUNCTION could be far, far worse than it is; but given the built-in limitations of this type of film, it can't be any better.

Little Acuna -- who looks even younger than 11 -- gives a sweetly unaffected performance as the beleaguered child.

A hastily assembled follow-up to the surprise smash hit of summer 1992, SISTER ACT 2 is a slapdash affair, with paper-thin plotting and characters more or less redeemed by some winning musical sequences.

It's a sorry state of affairs when a goldfish and a frog (Ginger's prize specimen, unsubtly named Casanova) have more chemistry than a romantic comedy's human leads.

Rarely has more high-powered movie technology been deployed to achieve such frivolous ends. Kids seem to love it, while sophisticated viewers may find it enchanting, appalling, or both.

There's a surprising sweetness under its crude exterior.

It's none too deep and a tad cartoonish, but also fast-paced, filled with quotable one-liners and often very funny.

While the King source material forcefully taps into some deep-seated fears, PET SEMATARY (which was to have been directed by George Romero) squanders its potential through the ham-handed direction of Mary Lambert (SIESTA), who continually goes for visceral shocks at the expense of the more deeply disturbing psychological themes inherent in the material.

This new SAW film is so utterly unimaginative it doesn't even count as hommage; it's just a smudgy copy of a still chilling original.

This multiple-twist thriller gets off to a fine, creepy start but eventually becomes too preposterous for its own good.

Where "Pitch Black" relied on shadowy threats and sharply drawn relationships between a small group of stranded victims-to-be, Twohy's bloated space opera is an eye-popping three-ring circus of fabulously freaky costumes, over-ripe declaiming and computer-generated spectacle.

For a movie about all sorts of warm and gooey things -- faith, surrender to wonder, and the possibility of love in a hard, cold world -- it's got a bracingly astringent edge.

Donnie Yen is famous for combining martial arts traditions into his own unique fighting style and Collin Chou, who studied with Sammo Hung, is up to the task of holding his own.

This likable adventure is basically "Lassie" with scales and should appeal to the books' large audience of adolescent boys.

Neither as dull nor as insufferably smug as it could easily have been.

A rip-off of ALIEN (1979), this Roger Corman production has plenty of gore and a mindless storyline. A group of astronauts are sent to rescue a stranded spaceship. One is raped by a giant worm, another blows up, and a third cuts off his own arm. The special effects are excellent.

The result is formulaic, shamelessly manipulative and surprisingly watchable.

This tale has been told and retold; the races and rackets change, but the song remains the same.

It may be nearly 40 years past due, but it was worth the wait.

There's at least one ending too many, Union regularly vanishes for long stretches of the movie, and director Michael Bay's unmitigated pandering to viewers who whoop with glee whenever someone gets it between the eyes is genuinely distasteful.

Throughout the film, doors slam, windows shatter and poor, battered Betsy wakes up screaming with tiresome regularity; even Sutherland appears bored by it all.

The story is moving, and the animation includes some powerful images, although some of the early scenes depicting the suffering of the mice in Russia may be too frightening for younger viewers.

This forced comedy feels too long, although John Candy's unique manner sometimes overcomes Carl Reiner's flat direction.

Overlong but interesting thriller.

An updated version of the more gritty original, given an inappropriately lush look by director Zeffirelli.

STEPHEN KING'S SLEEPWALKERS is an unusually stupid and tedious film that seems aimed at viewers who have never seen a horror movie and will therefore be shocked and surprised by the idea that such apparently nice people as Mary and Charles Brady could be murderous, shape-shifting energy vampires.

In the grand tradition of "Beerfest" and "Bladels of Glory," this insistently ludicrous -- and not entirely unfunny -- two-joke comedy satirizes an old Hollywood standby: the big-comeback sports movie.

It's neither romantic nor particularly funny.

Heartfelt as Reno and Applegate are here, the film strands them with an impotently blustering, straw-dog villain and a limp, directionless story.

The heavy-handed score by notoriously heavy-handed James Horner is often the only indication that there's supposed to be a point to this showcase for Gooding's relentlessly adorable mugging.

DMX delivers a surprisingly solid and convincing performance, but he's easily overshadowed by the very talented Ealy, who makes his secondary character truly memorable.

Pays backhanded homage to Woody Allen via the travails of college loser Max (Gary Lundy), who fears that years of wallowing in "Annie Hall" have permanently poisoned his love life.

It's sad to see such subtle, wrenchingly emotional work expended on such trifling material.

Gotcha is a hopelessly shallow film, serving up a good deal of hokum in the ridiculous plot. It's a contrived idea to start with, and the script goes through predictable twist after twist until the inevitable conclusion.

Although this film suffered from some miscasting--especially the choice of Shields, whose performance is more than mildly distressing--King of the Gypsies offers an often fascinating look at gypsy culture in America.

The result is a little bit nutty and pretty entertaining in a thoroughly unconvincing way. And watch out for that 11th-hour twist -- it's a head snapper.

Lets down both its actress and the audience.

An amazing technical accomplishment that never becomes a coherent movie.

It has the air of a particularly accomplished student film, by a student whose philosophical concerns outweigh his interest in narrative filmmaking.

The film looks great and makes sophisticated use of digital effects.

Objection! Actors of Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan's caliber should not be subjected to playing bland and distasteful characters in mediocre romantic comedies.

The kids, especially the Breslin siblings, are cute. Cusack is underused, but makes her annoying, potpourri-loving suburban mom seem sympathetic. And Corbett is well-cast as an eminently suitable, if slightly dull, life mate for the newly grown-up Helen.

This mean-spirited revenge story would once have starred Cole Hauser's father, veteran B-movie psycho Wings Hauser, and played grindhouses and drive-ins. And it would have been a far more entertaining picture.

Though stylishly produced, this clumsy parable will probably engender more boredom than sequels.

It's not fun and it gets tiring real fast.

McEveety can't match Stevenson's sense of comic timing and handling of slapstick humor, but he still manages to make HERBIE GOES TO MONTE CARLO an entertaining children's film.

The action has more to do with digital effects than true martial artistry, and is targeted squarely at adolescent boys too young to rent porn and gamers too lazy to yank their own joysticks.

Why would anyone who wanted his or her film to be taken seriously saddle it with a cutesy title like this?

Long sequences of Stone in risque sexual situations do little to counteract gratingly bad dialogue, identikit characters, and Phillip Noyce's by-the-numbers direction.

Is it funny? Sporadically.

The one highlight occurs during a couple of brief montage sequences which feature Varney mimicking a variety of cartoonish characters. These few moments are actually funny, but prove to be the only amusing moments in the film.

A bit more violent than the average spaghetti western.

Odd, quasi-mystical movie that’s too silly for adults to take seriously and frankly too weird for kids.

Produced by the son of Trinity Broadcasting Network founder Paul Crouch, this historical epic offers a solid two hours of spectacle and intrigue drawn from The Book of Esther by way of Tommy Tenney and Mark Andrew Olsen's novel "Hadassah."

A protracted piece of whimsy.

Chilly, muted and refreshingly free of cheap shocks, this stylish psychological horror tale is greatly enhanced by subtle (acting) performances.

Though there are a few chuckles, the presentation is predictable slapstick and takes much longer than need be to get to the main point.

It's really all about the cars, kandy-kolored nitro-injected streamline babies with sweeter curves than a Playboy photo spread, more personality than Rome, Brian and Monica combined and enough juice to send a fleet of rockets to the farthest reaches of the known universe.

Too bad the film isn't nearly as elastic as the miraculous green goo: It can barely contain all the flubber-induced chaos and still make sense, but the filmmakers don't quit till they've run out of funny things for flubber to do.

Charlie Sheen and Michael Biehn star in this visually engaging, fast-paced action film about an elite anti-terrorist unit of the US Navy. Unfortunately, an uneven script and undeveloped characters weaken the dramatic content of the story.

Salma Hayek steals the awkwardly formulaic, cliche-ridden show right out from under him (Perry).

Neither Scrooged nor Murray, who is front and center throughout, is particularly funny.

Once the action degenerates, the film relies on Chan's charming smile and Evans's mediocre slapstick for relief, making one wish the medallion's special powers could transport them into whole other story.

This by-the-numbers (no pun intended) psychological thrill ride is efficient and utterly soulless.

A misfire of spectacular proportions.

It's an enjoyable ride.