Every so often, a neat little moment will appear and RAISING CAIN will appear to be getting back on track, but like his schizophrenic villain, De Palma always winds up letting his worst instincts get the better of him.

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.

A disappointing attempt at comedy, considering the names of the creators and the adroitness of the stars.

Danny Glover is an adequate straight man, as both Lethal Weapon pictures demonstrate, and Martin Short can certainly be funny. But they don't really play as a team; you get the feeling that their sheer physical disparity--tall, dark-skinned Glover and tiny, red-haired Short--struck someone as so inherently funny that it didn't matter that the two of them don't ignite comic sparks.

Lets down both its actress and the audience.

Highlander 2 is beautiful. But it's largely incoherent. The film is desperately overplotted; events and years rush by and pile up like cars in an interstate wreck. It's also terribly overexplained.

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

A series of heavily telegraphed, desperately played and incredibly unfunny sight gags, Silent Movie is truly a maddeningly insulting salute to the golden age of film comedy.

Cannibal Women does manage to be on target with its humor from time to time. But there are far more misses than hits as the movie also goes for the corny, the obvious, and the ancient.

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.

Screenwriter/director Bloom has produced a bad script and his direction of young actors is even worse. Nothing very explicit survives in the final cut, leaving Andrews' grim ruminations on the horrors of a perverted family life obtuse and undeveloped.

A smug comedy about a precocious child who teaches his deadbeat dad about the true meaning of family, GETTING EVEN WITH DAD is only occasionally funny and commits every sin in the sitcom lexicon.

The film rings so consistently false that it's more likely to induce snickers and eye-rolling.

It's best to line The Uninvited right up on the soon-to-be-forgotten shelves next to the now third-generation Asian remakes and wait for the next effective foreign genre fare for Hollywood to butcher and rehash.

It fails utterly as a horror picture, although it delivers plenty of PG-13-rated flesh and unintentional laughs.

Another mindless exercise in unexciting, unmotivated action sequences punctuated by moments of stupid, redneck, good-ol'-boy humor.

So, in essence, The Informers fails precisely because we never believe these lost souls were ever human enough to have had a soul to lose in the first place.

Even the Critters seem to be going through the motions, which hopefully marks the end of this clearly exhausted series.

Though the effects work of Giannetto De Rossi is generally excellent and certainly stomach-churning, most of Zombie is slow and unintentionally funny. Fulci's work has its champions, but his films are mostly dim-witted and hold little interest for anyone other than hard-core gore fans.

The film sags under the crushing weight of its own inadequacy, lacking not only subtlety, intelligence, and insight, but also dramatic tension, character development, and a satisfying resolution.

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

Writer-director Robert Hiltzik tries to mask the poorly staged murder scenes and lousy effects with a perverse sense of humor, but it doesn't work. Some scenes, especially one involving a girl and a curling iron, are simply irredeemable.

Those looking for genuine drama should probably look elsewhere.

Arm wrestling, truck driving, weird weight lifting, and tear jerking are the stuff of this predictable Sylvester Stallone vehicle in which he plays Lincoln Hawk, a trucker-cum-wrist twister whose son, Michael (David Mendenhall), has been kept from him by his devious, wealthy father-in-law (Robert Loggia).

Given the track records of its writer, Neil Simon, and director, Hal Ashby, THE SLUGGER'S WIFE should at least have been entertaining. It isn't. Instead, it is one of the most disappointing, least credible films about baseball in recent memory.

While the film isn't entirely amateurish -- shots are cut together and the cinematography is professional if not precisely stylish -- the story feels as though large pieces are missing and the characters behave so inconsistently that there's zero incentive to care about their tribulations.

The film is brought down by stereotypical characters and a curiously dated view of Africa.

This picture never moves past dull, sitcom humor.