The script, by co-writers and -directors Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, is intermittently clever, but their direction is leaden and assassinates every gag with a lethal accuracy the CIA could only hope to achieve.

Scenes are woefully under-rehearsed, and much of the obviously improvised dialogue would seem entirely random if it weren't so repetitive.

The spectacle of the near-naked Ricki (Lopez) striking sexually provocative yoga poses while floridly extolling the virtues of female genitalia is particularly mortifying, but it's only one of many horribly miscalculated scenes.

POLICE ACADEMY 5 presents a patchwork of ideas borrowed from a score of wittier and better-done comedies, not to mention earlier entries in the series. In short, it's exactly what you would expect it to be.

The effectiveness of this kind of issue-driven give and take relies heavily on casting, and Ritchie puts himself at a disadvantage: Madonna looks terrific in a bikini but she can't act, and the younger Giannini is stunt casting.

The opening half-hour, as Pat and former music video director Bernstein conspire to keep the secret while depicting the banal existence of this truly irritating character, is reasonably entertaining. The remainder of the film has some amusing moments, but the story goes nowhere, and if the film ran longer than its 80 minutes, it would have become too tedious to tolerate.

This trashy, overwrought thriller gets itself worked up into a fine, sleazy lather that recalls the matricidal glories "Die! Die! My Darling!" and "You'll Like My Mother", then wimps out at the end.

The pacing is slack, the comedy has an oddly sour tone and frankly, no matter how hard the script tries to paint Sean as a petty martinet with a stick up his butt, it's hard not to sympathize with him.

This shotgun marriage of coarse laughs and low-rent action cliches is, of course, utterly predictable: Cutting-edge comedy isn't lurking under the corpses of old TV shows.

Surprisingly, Hurley comes off better than either of her demonstrably more versatile co-stars; she's not much of an actress, but she has an engagingly saucy swagger and her open-mouthed expression of outraged disbelief is priceless.

In a year that saw everyone from Burt Reynolds to Michael J. Fox to Schwarzenegger himself handcuffed to six-year-old sidekicks in high-concept cartoons, one could do worse than to exploit the image of a professional wrestler forced to play mom. That said, Mr. Nanny is of little interest to any audience other than pre-teens of all ages.

Some of the humor is pretty raunchy (there are quite a few sex-related scenes and jokes) and tasteless. Adults old enough to appreciate the choice electro-boogaloo soundtrack and get the "Mr. Roboto" jokes will doubtless find the rest of it painfully dumb.

An excruciatingly unfunny comedy.

The direction is lackluster, and the film is padded with a number of useless scenes.

It's hard to imagine who would find this funny.

Instantly forgettable but fun while it lasts, Disney's live-action adaptation of the classic cartoon is an ideal action-adventure thrill ride for kids who may be a little too young for the latest Bond extravaganza.

Nelson wanders through this film like a zombie, and Sheedy, an actress who can manage an occasional burst of talent, is simply bad here. The film's only saving grace is the musical score by Cooder.

A rapper doesn't make the story fresh.

Calling CHILDREN OF THE CORN II a better film than its predecessor is something like damning with faint praise, but this sequel manages to be somewhat less ludicrous and occasionally a little more chilling than the first film.

Well over $20 million was spent to create a film full of sound and fury but without an inkling of intelligence.

It's a forgotten piece of history worth recounting. One only regrets it wasn't better recounted than it is here.

Loaded with ridiculous scenes, silly dialog, and gratuitous violence and nudity, REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS tries very hard to exploit the genre while poking fun at it at the same time. The only problem here is that little is funny.

A preposterous misfire.

Hippolyte subsequently reinvented himself first as a director of baroque erotic thrillers and then as music-video maestro to pop tarts like Britney Spears, but stalk-and-slash horror -- for all its porn-movie rhythms -- appears to have defeated him.

The Duffs are certainly cute together, but not even their natural chemistry can enliven all the preachy bits about hard work and the meaning of happiness.

This one may be just excessive enough to develop a cult following. It also proved quite popular with German audiences, for reasons we've been unable to fathom.

The dramatic scenes are frequently unintentionally funny, and the action sequences -- clearly the main event -- are surprisingly uninvolving, especially given that director Christian Duguay is an extreme skiing buff who habitually shoots dangerous stunts himself.

The movie is flat, often pushy, and has none of the bubbling joy of the SCTV sketches that Candy and Levy illuminated with their presence. Set pieces are tossed in every few minutes in a vain reach for laughter; but under director Lester's sloppy hand, there is very little to laugh at.