Despite its preposterous storyline, Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead is surprisingly entertaining and fun. While the film, directed by Stephen Herek from a screenplay by Neil Landau and Tara Ison, might have been sharper, wittier and cleverer, it nevertheless achieves on its own level by genuinely involving its young target audience.

It's a handsomely mounted but poky thriller undone by a fatally miscast lead.

Alas, even the lowest expectations go unmet by FREEJACK, which turns out to be an inexplicably lame, penny-pinched futuristic actioner.

Trying to jump on the PORKY'S bandwagon, the makers of SCREWBALLS came up with another bad, teen sex comedy. The girls are given degrading names, the boys have only one thing on their minds, and the producers obviously have no sense of social or artistic responsibility.

The script is heavy on platitudes about friendship, but since there isn't a single fully fleshed character in sight, who cares?

The cast, including genre veteran Bruce Dern as a kindly lawyer, do their best with the material, but you can't make a crackling thriller out of soggy cliches.

Overblown, ridiculously contrived drive-in flick.

Writer-director Henry LeRoy Finch's ripely overwrought exercise in Southern Gothic psychodrama, which happens to unfold in a picturesquely decaying house in Maine.

There's no point to any of this other than simply having fun. It's like a comic book come to life, complete with colorful villains, mindless violence, nifty gadgets, sparse logic, and some wonderfully silly dialog.

Falls victim to an overly tricky rethinking of the way familiar TV shows are transformed into movies.

No one and nothing can be taken at face value in Beach's twisty tale of secrets and lies, which buries its very interesting idea in a welter of ludicrous dialogue and skin-flick imagery.

The trouble isn't just that this haunted-house story, written by Mark Wheaton and directed by Hong Kong filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang, is both formulaic and derivative. It's that it's completely free of atmosphere, the very thing that their 2002 "The Eye" had in such creepy abundance.

The film's performances are uniformly strong and remarkably coherent, given the conditions under which they were delivered. The actors shot for eight hours straight in a fully lit and set-decorated house, each individually miked and followed by his or her own personal camera operator.

The lesson -- that three into two won't go --has been learned by other improbably attractive couples in "bold" movies about youthful experimentation and its long-term consequences, but the word never seems to get around.

It's the movie equivalent of fast food -- nobody needs this to be good, just adequate. And Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is nothing if not thoroughly adequate.

Without Bullock, the film's frantic antics would be painful to watch; with her, they're just trivial.

A preposterous wilderness adventure (the kind that makes kids think sneaking into the zoo's bear pit is a cool idea) laid over a touchy-feelie story about good parenting.

Let's be blunt: Bass can't really act.

Repetitive and uninspired, it panders to the lowest expectations of horror buffs and squanders the efforts of a competent cast.

A benign, mushy gruel that tries desperately to maintain the sticky sweet consistency of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" but ultimately ends up coasting on the "kefi" of that previous success.

M. Night Shyamalan's sixth film mines a rich lode of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it clichés, but while the set up is spooky, the development is heavy handed and marred by Shyamalan's inability to write natural-sounding dialogue or convincing characters.

A totally inane script designed to cash in on the rollerboogie craze.

This feeble attempt to revive the characters from the popular TV series "Get Smart" copies the show, but without the sharp humor that made it so popular.

Will put the kids to sleep, but may kill you.

About 10 minutes into DEEPSTAR SIX, it becomes clear that the film is yet another uninspired variation on ALIEN. The mechanical screenplay and flat direction fail to build suspense, and the characters are routinely drawn. While the technical work, relying heavily on miniatures, is competent, the rendering of the monster is hardly worth the wait.

The main characters are defined by their problems, and the secondary characters (notably Brigette's parents) are so crudely drawn it's hard to imagine what Cates was thinking.

Compulsively watchable.

Herzfeld's sophomore movie is one long howl of rage over the relationship between criminals, journalists and thrill-hungry audiences.