Utterly amateurish.

This amateurish picture was built around surfing footage that Mikelson shot for a Compaq computer ad and developed with an eye for accommodating a series of lush tropical locations: It's no wonder the plot and characters feel like afterthoughts.

But what truly distinguishes the movie is Cage's performance, which is so off the wall that even if you don't like it you have to watch in awe.

Says many things at once without much perspective or clarity.

A meandering mess of violence and aging stars who've seen much better days, all buoyed up by an in-your-face soundtrack that never lets up.

The whole sorry business is incontrovertible proof that Hollywood learned all the wrong lessons from 48 HRS.: Bring back Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, please!

This madcap paranormal love triangle is charming on its own terms.

Although his film biography features beautiful production design and more than 1,400 costumes, it is unfortunately perfunctory, flat, and predictable.

Anemic chronicle of money grubbing New Yorkers and their serial loveless hook ups.

By the film's finale the descent into unintentional parody is all but complete, with a big death scene for Jackson complete with an angelic choir on the soundtrack -- the surprise is that they aren't singing "Dixie."

Bloated and incoherent.

Most of the occasional chuckles are provided by the spunky York, who really gives Diesel a run for his money.

Another failure in Harmon's attempt to move from TV to the big screen.

A poorly made and utterly laughable film that has gained a minor cult status with "bad film" fans.

The special effects, supervised by director John Buechler, who was the effects man on GHOULIES, are pretty poor, essentially slimy rubber creatures with a limited amount of movement and the seams from their molds clearly visible.

The best thing about this forced film is the special effects at the finale.

The winning cast makes the twist-heavy plot plausible.

Rymer's film doesn't revitalize vampire clichés in any significant way and, frankly, "Velvet Goldmine" is a more seductive movie about sex, death and rock and roll -- and it's not even about vampires.

So overwrought that it quickly crosses the line into unintentionally funny and never recovers.

You'll laugh and hate yourself for it.

Splatterpunk novelist-turned-screenwriter David Schow and director Jeff Burr take the material back to its roots, re-creating the minimal plotting and alternately muddy and washed-out look of the original. In deference to contemporary tastes, Leatherface pulls as few gory punches as prevailing standards permit (Texas Chainsaw Massacre only seemed unbearably graphic) and underscores the mayhem with an abrasive speed metal soundtrack.

Increasingly preposterous, thoroughly credibility-straining escapades.

A lightweight parody of the porn industry and daytime talk shows that has the look and feel of a middling direct-to-video feature.

Pokey, blood-spattered, cheap-scare-larded prequel.

Who will survive and what will be left of them? If you don't have a pretty good idea, this is not the movie for you. If you do, rest assured you've seen it all before.

If you want to stoke children's imaginations you've got to offer them something more inspiring and graceful than this film, which could give video games a good reputation.

Ultimately, LEGEND--a pet project of Scott's that took years to research, shoot, and edit--is done in by the director's ambition. What might have been a pleasantly innocuous children's story becomes an enormous, lumbering FX machine into which the actors, particularly a nervous Tom Cruise, seem to disappear.

The movie's tone and plot twists are so ludicrously overwrought that even Washington's admirably restrained performance -- can't rescue it from its own excesses.

Burt Reynolds hits new lows as he mugs his way through this film as Stroker Ace, a race-car driver who's under the control of chicken-franchise owner Clyde Torkle (Ned Beatty). The script is filled with good ol' boy humor and car crackups.

What more could a horror fan ask for than a spook-fest that feels pure in its intentions while taking full advantage of every opportunity to scare us silly?

While his film is less than satisfying, it's a refreshingly off-kilter experience.

The film's poky pacing is a liability -- the setup takes an awfully long time.

It's actually a sweet, often very funny story about a schlemiehl redeemed by love.

Though clearly well-intentioned, this cross-cultural soap opera is painfully formulaic and stilted.

While doing nothing to dispel the stereotype that skateboarding is the sport of brainless jackasses, Casey La Scala's directing debut does feature some nifty boarding action.

Kutcher's performance isn't terrible, but the brilliant, bewildered, increasingly desperate Evan is the film's center, and grounding its flights of fantasy in rock-solid emotional reality is more than Kutcher can manage.

Only the sheer force of Sandra Bullock's apparently ingenuous charm keeps this sodden romantic comedy afloat.

It's still trash.

The soundtrack, which ranges from Johnny Cash to Serge Gainsbourg to the Wu-Tang Clan, is admirably eclectic but can't be said to pull things together.

This high-concept gangster picture tries unsuccessfully to duplicate Reservoir Dogs's(1992) hair-raising high-wire balance between dark comedy and violent crime thriller, undermining some entertaining performances and the script's small virtues in the process.

Kudos to writer-director Eric Schaeffer for doing a sexually graphic romantic comedy about fiftysomethings without being patronizing or cutesy. With both heart and guts, he honestly depicts how that moony-eyed, falling-in-love rush of endorphins is the same at 55 as it is at 15.

Benson is as annoyingly untalented as ever, and the film is definitely overlong, bordering on the dull.

THE BRIDE must be commended for its attempt to tell two parallel stories, but unfortunately the halves do not balance, resulting in a picture in which the lead characters (Sting and Beals) become secondary to the supporting ones (Brown and Rappaport).

Though Verow attended the American Film Institute and has made more than a dozen shorts and features since 1994, his low-budget gay-themed films are characterized by phenomenal indifference to framing, sound quality and performance. If his relentless amateurishness is deliberate, it's self-defeating; if not, it's inexplicable: Most people who do anything for more than a decade get better at it.

The supernatural plot elements are developed so unconvincingly that the story seems to be about people ruining their own lives by believing in stupid superstitions, so it’s a shock to realize the ghostly goings-on are meant to be taken seriously.

Besides the humor and the technical savvy, the biggest difference between this film and the five before it is that the characters are actually allowed to live long enough for the audience to develop some sort of empathy with them. Some of these teenagers are downright likable, and we don't want to see them get killed. That element, more than any other, was the real breakthrough in the series.

Though the material in Madhouse is intentionally sophomoric, though slapstick comedies can be funny, and though there's nothing wrong with a bit of good silliness, assured, deftly paced direction and adroit, lively performances are necessary to pull such broad comic romps off. Madhouse fails to deliver on both these crucial counts.

The story's a bore; its arrhythmic stutter of humor and drama, tension and calm never builds into any coherent emotional arc.

A genial and instantly forgettable sports comedy.

If you accept the film on its own brain-damaged level, there actually are laughs to be had.

Feather-light and proudly goofy, this Jackie Chan action comedy appears to be aimed squarely at under-12s.

To be fair, this could have been worse.

The film lacks any suspense or drama, and the special effects are not that special.

If it weren't all so cluelessly sleazy it might be funny.

Astonishingly inept drama.

Obviously, gags rather than plot are central to a movie like LOADED WEAPON, but even so, neither the writing nor the acting is strong enough here. Estevez and Jackson are adequate as deadpan actors who remain oblivious to the chaos around them, but they lack the super-straight persona that makes Leslie Nielsen so effective as a dimwitted cop in the NAKED GUN movies. Often the jokes seem to barely squeak over their heads when they should fly.

Earnest but unenlightening drama.

This efficient but soulless funhouse ride eschews suspense in favor of frantic scrambling from disturbing specters, like the naked female ghost who lurks around bloody bathtubs.

Only Lynch's over-the-top network executive stands out in this otherwise bland film that tries for satire but neglects to be funny.

A deliciously bad reworking of The Karate Kid, with just a touch of Rocky IV tossed in.

Scott Spencer's intelligent, rather lurid novel of youthful angst is here watered down to stock teen romance. Most notably, the graphic sex scenes at the core of the book are reduced to picture-perfect set pieces, and the film is soporifically slow-moving.

A reprehensible film that unashamedly steals ideas (if not entire scenes) from other works.

This poorly plotted film concerns three middle-class suburbanites who turn to crime when faced with poverty.

Just another excuse for mindless sex and violence: as if we needed one.

As poorly animated features go, this one ranks down there with the worst of them. The characters have no real personalities, and the whole thing is just too somber for its own good.

Body of Evidence is at its most hilarious in the deadly earnestness with which it unfolds its ludicrous plot, populated by paper-thin characters who range from the underdeveloped to the simply inane. BODY is oddly conflicted by the sheer unpleasantness of its depiction of sex.

Smacks of a certain kind of TV movie filled with pious uplift, even as it makes token concessions to contemporary lifestyles.

Bart the Bear shows more versatility in his gender-bending role than Lillard, who trots out his old, tired slacker shtick.

The individual stories are so truncated that they can't do much in the way of giving their characters real emotional depth.

The script's vague, silly "explanation" for Linda's experiences -- nature abhors a spiritual vacuum, so weird stuff happens to the faithless -- is the icing on the irritation cake.

This old-fashioned Western about the glory years of the Texas Rangers, cast with fresh-faced, telegenic young actors whose performances range from adequate to awful, is undermined by a serious lack of true grit.

If you pitch your expectations at an all time low, you could do worse than this oddly cheerful -- but not particularly funny -- body-switching farce.

The film's subtexts are profoundly reactionary. Women are foolish and untrustworthy.

For most of the film, Cedric seems to be holding back, though his relationship with genuinely charming rapper-turned-actor (Lil') Bow Wow offers up a few funny moments.

An innocuous comedy chiller, HAUNTED HONEYMOON isn't very chilling and, worse yet, isn't very funny.

Heartfelt but overly familiar film.

Fiore captures various artists horsing around with groupies, smoking dope and hanging out backstage, and cuts the material together in the kinetic but meaningless manner of MTV promos.

It has a certain Midwestern charm that settles calmly in the stomach, making the viewer feel warm, comfortable, and quick to smile.

Considering the major talents involved here, one would expect to find something more than a run-of-the-mill crime thriller. In a sense one does, for 8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE is a paralyzingly inept film.

This dreary science-fiction/historical-action hybrid is a misfire of staggering proportions.

There's way too much of the usual bonding, beatings, petty humiliation by guards, cat fights in the yard and trips to the hole.

This noisy, time-wasting spectacle is crammed with what purports to be characters, except that not one of them has any more depth than will fit into a one-line description.

Not since Larry Clark's "Kids" (1995) has the threat of HIV infection been used so gratuitously, driving a narrative that ultimately has nothing to do with the AIDS crisis.

As meticulously deranged as its paranoid protagonist.

The music is surprisingly good and there's a skateboarding bulldog that you've just gotta see to believe.

Lee obviously wants to portray Ethan as something other than the dutiful No. 1 son, but Ethan isn't entirely convincing as a doped-up street hustler.

Up The Academy is another in the seemingly endless parade of inane teenage comedies.

Bloodsport is strictly for martial arts buffs; little is offered here in the way of plot, dialog, or acting.

Try as they may, neither the cast nor the filmmakers can cover up the fact that this movie, like Moore's prototype, is a dud.

This time around, expect more of the same -- a tedious, muddleheaded tale about a malevolent spirit haunting cyberspace -- with somewhat tastier special effects.

The film's major draws are R-rated gore and some nice physical effects, proof that a man in a top-of-the-line monster suit can still be more effective than CGI.

It's a good thing the two rappers are such utterly natural actors, armed with terrific comic timing.

Derivative, predictable and entirely forgettable, the sort of low-expectations genre picture that generally goes directly to video.

So shallow and brainless it's in perpetual danger of drying up and blowing away.

A reductive spook show in which a bunch of puny humans get chased around by scary monsters.

Ethan and Lenny's story is silly, good-natured and full of unlikely moves, just like the titular twister.

Neither Ketchum nor the filmmakers take an exploitative approach to the material; their focus is the way the youngsters' petty cruelty erupts into murderous sadism.

Jeannot Szwarc does well in the director's chair, and Jean-Pierre Dorleac deserves special commendation for his costumes. But Seymour is given too little to do, and Reeve does too much.