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.