The movie, in short, rides on a revenge plot and a beauty-and-the-beast subplot, and there's some nice photography and production design; screen writer L.M. Kit Carson lends some Texas texture and funny lines. But mostly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is straight blood and guts. [23 Aug 1986, p.D11]

Unfortunately, the film's stalking hordes of zombies aren't the only lifeless things about it. [03 Nov 1986, p.B2]

Extremities pretends to be a serious movie, and in a film culture where women are routinely exploited and revenge is taken blithely, it is, at least, a departure. But we don't learn anything about men and women, or revenge, from "Extremities" -- we just watch people score debating points, to the tune of J.A.C. Redford's stale TV-movie score.

It takes a director with a true genius for disaster to put together SCTV veterans John Candy and Eugene Levy, the fine character actors Kenneth McMillan and Robert Loggia and the delicious new comic actress Meg Ryan and come up with a movie without a single laugh in it. Indeed, who but Mark Lester could have pulled it off? Lester's idea of directing is to turn up the music and wreck a lot of cars -- this isn't a movie, it's a Volvo ad.

It's funny and sad and a little surreal, the kind of movie that makes you willingly suspend your disbelief. You don't have to be a kid to enjoy it, but you'll feel like one again when it's over.

What madcaps! [12 Aug 1986, p.C8]

She's Gotta Have It is Spike Lee's impressive first feature, discursive, jazzy, vibrant with sex and funny as heck. [22 Aug 1986, p.D1]

And in the leads, Danson and Mandel won't make anyone forget Laurel and Hardy, or Namath and Gifford, for that matter. Not that there's any time for them to develop any chemistry -- Edwards is always revving up the rock 'n' roll and launching into another slapstick car chase. Which makes "A Fine Mess" the best argument yet for the 55 mph speed limit.

As you watch Howard the Duck, you get the vivid sensation that you're watching not a movie, but a pile of money being poured down the drain. [02 Aug 1986, p.G10]

This may be catnip to a kiddie audience that, these days, would seem to know no other world. But it's hard to think much of a movie whose only point of identification with its audience is its utter superficiality. [05 Aug 1986, p.C10]

When he crushes a patrolman's head between his hands, you think you're watching a happy campesino lusty for coconut milk; when he skewers a depraved camp counselor with a knife in the temple, he is the happy barbecuer on a sunny Sunday afternoon. "Soup's on!" he might have cried. Then he tears a girl's head clean off. Well, the head probably wasn't doing her much good anyway. [6 Aug 1986, p.D10]

Jackie Gleason and Tom Hanks team entertainingly in Nothing in Common, a sugar-coated variation on "Death of a Salesman." It proves an uncommonly funny drama, its painful truths brightened by Hanks' clowning glory and Gleason's glowering deadpan. [1 Aug 1986, p.25]

Watching Maximum Overdrive is like sitting alongside a 3-year-old as he skids his Tonka trucks across the living room floor and says "Whee!" except on a somewhat grander scale...It's hard to even imagine a movie so impeccably devoid of everything a movie ought to include. [29 July 1986, p.C2]

Heartburn is a masterpiece, a collaboration of mature artists at the peak of their craft, and something of a summing up for Mike Nichols, who, more successfully than any other American director, has staked out the terrain where men and women meet as his own. Here it is -- a movie that is seriously funny.

Cameron and company have made a sequel that is gripping and vital. The 2 1/2 hours fly by with this brave company, our imaginations sucked into the screen as if by a black hole. [18 July 1986, p.N31]

Pirates hasn't got an ounce of excitement -- or at least it hasn't excited composer Philippe Sarde, whose score is the symphonic equivalent of Muzak and is rarely wedded to what we see on the screen. So what's left is a pricey playpen for Polanski's sense of perversity. [19 July 1986, p.G1]

ROBIN WILLIAMS rises above the mediocrity of Harold Ramis' newest comedy, which features the cherubic improv comic as co-owner of a de'classe' Club Med. Even so, Club Paradise is lost. [11 July 1986, p.N31]

The movie is adapted from David Mamet's play, "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," but it bears little relation to it -- screen writers Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue nod to Mamet's structure, appropriate a couple of monologues and take off on their own. They and the director, Ed Zwick, could have done a better job of opening the play up -- outside life rarely intrudes on this foursome, as it needn't in the theater, but must in movies. [2 July 1986, p.D1]

THERE'S Big Trouble in Little China all right, as Kurt Russell wrestles his way through this kung-fu comedy adventure. It might have been a Raiders of the Lost Wok, but instead it's a bad marriage of martial arts and action spoofery, bungled by director John Carpenter working from the world's worst screenplay. [04 July 1986, p.N29]

There are entertaining touches in this blackly comic grotesquerie, but it is no more frightening than a teenage slasher movie. Perkins, in his first stab at directing, never gives us time to anticipate. At best, he parodies the classic, but without restraint. [04 July 1986, p.N29]

A delightful and frequently funny cartoon feature based on the characters of the Sherlock Holmes series. [07 July 1986, p.B8]

An unconscionable mess of unyielding crassness, from the overall tone, which celebrates gaucherie all the while it's saying that love is what really counts, to the sound mix, which makes most of the dialogue, which is larded with impenetrable slang, doubly impenetrable. [04 Jul 1986, p.C2]

Ruthless People has an enchanting comic premise -- everyone in the film is either an S.O.B. or wants to become one. But ultimately, the black comedy is not pursued very far -- the movie's too good-natured for its own good. And the elaborately worked-out farce structure, involving a victim who may be either kidnaped or dead, is mostly wasted on a style of humor that, by comparison, makes Buddy Hackett seem the very soul of sophistication. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

Running Scared, ha. They ought to call this police story "Re-Running Scared." It's as cliche- riddled as Scarface's limo. [27 June 1986, p.29]

Karate Kid II doesn't give us any emotional movement in Daniel's character, or Miyagi's, or their relationship, either -- it just recapitulates them. The only character who changes in the story, in fact, is Sato, whom you couldn't care a fried fig about.

There are some scenes that rival any in recent memory -- Winger and Hannah escaping a flaming finale in a burning gallery and Winger and Redford escaping an exploding warehouse -- but the whole is less than its parts, a little too careful. Kind of like dinner theater.

A low-key, high-tech, out-of-touch tale of a teen who builds his own personal nuclear projectile for a science project. It's an ambivalent adventure patterned on the likes of WarGames, but without the humor or action. [13 June 1986, p.29]

Mona Lisa is consistently undercut by sentiment, whether it's the cute routines between George and his best friend, a mechanic and junkman, or the "heartwarming" stuff between George and his estranged daughter. In the end, "Mona Lisa" is another movie about the lovable little people; the movie is mushy where it should be monstrous. [16 July 1986, p.D1]

A mostly tedious, cheaply made shoot-'em-up from the always classy Dino De Laurentiis. [07 June 1986, p.D5]

A kind of landmark of exquisite bad timing. And that's the most intriguing thing about it. [6 June 1986, p.D3]

Despite its occasional sparkle, Invaders From Mars is an overlong movie with a tiny spirit. It plays to a certain smug superiority of an audience nurtured on junky television, and while that smugness is in some ways justified -- movies like the original "Invaders From Mars" had their obvious failings -- it's also, over the course of a feature film, more than a little annoying. The original "Invaders From Mars" did something this spoof never even comes close to -- it scared the heck out of you. That's something Hooper might try accomplishing, before he sets about sending it up.

If this guy tripped over a print of "Citizen Kane," he not only wouldn't know what it was, he'd hit somebody over the head with it. [24 May 1986, p.C1]

There are movies that make you want to mince words, and then there's Poltergeist II: The Other Side, a movie so ineffably bad, you can't even find the words to mince. [23 May 1986, p.D2]

Top Gun is basically "An Officer and a Gentleman" with less spirit and depth. But it's still fine formula movie-making -- like a feature-length "Be All That You Can Be" commercial. It's got lots of loud music, hot colors, heat-seeking missiles and other pointed objects. Real men squint into the radar's gleam below deck, while real men hunt MiGs upstairs. [16 May 1986, p.29]

In Short Circuit, there's nothing at stake, either emotionally or artistically or howsoever -- and I mean nothing -- but the movie's so diverting, and so giddily oblivious to its own faults, that it almost doesn't matter. Funny and paced at a gallop, it's a melt-away movie made for summer nights. [09 May 1986, p.D1]

If it is useful to know that a director knows absolutely nothing about filmmaking, from script to casting to editing to where to put the camera, then there is one useful thing to be had from Blue City. First-time director Michelle Manning has spun a yarn that is grotesquely implausible, less affecting than plausible, and less attractive than affecting -- Blue City seems to have been processed in mud, and even Godard at his most perverse couldn't have violated the rules of camera placement and framing more doggedly. [5 May 1986, p.B4]

The point is well taken, but, basically, Cradle is a long rapturous interlude of baby pictures, now and then reinforced with pointed pro-momma dialogue. Even with the politics, it remains just so much French Pablum. [09 May 1986, p.28]

The movie is one of those can't-miss projects that, uh, misses...Altogether, this is about the most listlessly paced thriller you could imagine: Ashby's penchant for letting his actors improvise just results in endless dithering; and the image is weirdly flat -- the movie's shot almost entirely in profile. Actually, there aren't just 8 million ways to die -- now we know there are 8 million and 1. [25 Apr 1986, p.D2]

MOST Americans are probably having a hard enough time trying to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys in Central America, and Oliver Stone's "Salvador" is careful not to help us take sides. Much to its credit, that's mainly what makes this political thriller so terrifying...It's not that there aren't any villains in this film -- based on the real-life account of photo-journalist Richard Boyle who co-wrote the screenplay with Stone -- but that there are so few good guys to turn to. [4 Apr 1986, p.29]

Legend may turn out to be legendary, but not in the way the filmmakers intended. As a flight of fancy, it has the balletic grace of the goony bird, crashing on takeoff and spending the next 90 minutes in a fluttering tizzy on the ground. [24 Apr 1986, p.D3]

What's left here is not so much a movie as an assault so unpleasant, it leaves you wondering what you could have done to deserve it. [27 May 1986, p.B3]

Wise Guys, a surprisingly sweet, but sluggish Mafia farce, teams easy-going Joe Piscopo with driven, dangerous Danny De Vito in a neo-Abbott and Costello Meet the Godfather.

My Beautiful Laundrette is quirky and fresh and ambitious and pretty much everything a movie should be, except good.

If amusing, A Room With a View is little more than a lark, a series of skits, a two-hour tribute to the rich British eccentric.

Lucas is about as likable as this kind of movie ever gets.At the heart of Lucas is an interesting idea -- a Woody Allen movie for kids, with a bespectacled, nerdy hero -- that never gets developed. Still, director David Seltzer has kept it low-key, sweet and personal -- it's like a nice "Afterschool Special."

A cut above the usual hack 'em up, and perhaps even a hack above the usual cut 'em up.

The Money Pit is Richard Benjamin's attempt to make a '30s comedy through the lens of Steven Spielberg -- there are contraptions and "smart" dialogue and, unfortunately, nothing to hold them together. [28 Mar 1986, p.D2]

Like the original "Care Bears Movie," Care Bears Movie II is nothing but an insidious feature-length toy commercial. But since Funshine Bear has taught me to look on the bright side, I will admit that the animation in the sequel is of a higher quality.

Howard entices us into overlooking the film's faults with some genuinely amusing scenes, particularly those featuring Japanese-American Gedde Watanabe as a beleaguered Assan executive who doesn't fit the corporate mold. [14 Mar 1986, p.27]

So when the movie turns out drab and predictable, it's depressing -- you think Hill has become a stranger to his own sensibility. [24 March 1986, p.C3]

The camera style is grotesquely overwrought, a relentless exercise in technique for technique's sake. It's all here, folks: fancy wipes, expressionistic angles, quick-cut close-ups, stylized backlighting, camera moving in endless illogic. It's as if a 15-minute history of film technique had been compiled by a psychotic. [19 Mar 1986, p.B9]

Given the low budget, there was no money for transitions or fancy wideshots, so the look is strangled, stranded and somehow like stagework. All the same, if you are a woman who loves women, you will no doubt love Desert Hearts. But it doesn't seem a good bet to cross over. [18 Apr 1986, p.27]

Trouble in Mind is something of a jumble, but never less than an intriguing one. It's an off-center romance, as unnerving as a half-remembered nightmare. [25 Apr 1986, p.D1]

The movie lacks luster, and that quintessentially adolescent passion that fueled "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." There's no punch to the pacing, and the players, though pleasant, are uninspired by Howard Deutch, who is directing his first feature film after doing videos, including one from Ringwald's second movie, "Sixteen Candles." The happy ending, changed to suit the tastes of preview audiences, steals the movie's potential pathos, and turns teen trauma into so much gooey, rose-colored mush. [28 Feb 1986, p.11]

Much of the problem lies with Howell, a dilute, rabbity actor in the Tim Hutton mold. Everyone acts Howell off the screen, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, who displays an easeful gruffness as the girl who joins Jim. With Howell's weightlessness, the deeper elements of the story -- the byplay between guilt and innocence, for example -- never accumulate.

Golan and Bruner, in other words, have made the Holocaust into just another tear-jerking tool for the Cannon Productions shlockenspiel. This is called "chutzpah." The unoffended will find that the movie doesn't even deliver on its own sordid level. There isn't any action till 70 minutes into the film.

According to the press kit, "Producer Daniel Melnick's personal stamp on films has always been to avoid the obvious, the cliche'." Uh, Dan . . . you lost your stamp.

I suppose there's not much point at this late date to complain about how all movies look and sound alike today, how dull stretches in the story are pumped up with loud music, how handy, so-called "comic" hooks (one character has a flatulence problem, another will do anything for sex, another will do anything for money) have taken the place of characterization, how directors don't even try anymore to create a real milieu. [15 Feb 1986, p.G6]

Overall, the movie is cloddishly composed, with awkward zooms and theatrical blocking. This is one of those movies where characters speak in asides to the audience; Nunn has reinvented the proscenium arch.

Down and Out suggests the kind of conflict of values that the fish-out-of-water story depends on: wealthy Dave is a workaholic, but Jerry doesn't want to work; Dave is a striver, but Jerry's given up. But the idea is never really pursued.

The two teams, older and mostly fatter, train and play, and I trust I won't be ruining anything for you if I say there are no surprises. Screenwriter Ron Shelton has constructed a stand-up-and-cheer machine, and while the machine works, it doesn't make you feel any better about being run through it.

It's a clumsy, laughable alarm-ringer from Sidney Lumet, who looks at the power-lunchers and the new right, and shakes his head rather audibly. [31 Jan 1986, p.23]

A ridiculous rabble-drowser with the heart of a bully and the soul of a thief.

Runaway Train isn't just bad -- it's bodaciously bad, grotesquely overblown, lurid in its emotion, big ideas on its brain. And anyone with a taste for camp will have a glorious good time. [20 Jan 1986, p.C4]

Clan's greatest fault, however, is simply that it is an epic bore. [28 Feb 1986, p.11]

The actors haven't much to do. It looks like everybody needed the work. [10 Jan 1986, p.21]

Reinhold has a face that is halfway between leading-man handsome and Donald Duck, and a relaxed, drawling confidence with a line -- he seems to float not above the action but on it, like oil on water. And he seems to survive Head Office, a comedy so confused and cowardly it makes television look daring. [4 Jan 1986, p.D4]

The drama itself packs a powerful -- and timeless -- gut punch.

If you are a science-fiction fan (and I am), Enemy Mine is a fun diversion, maintaining a precarious balance between laughable and melodramatic. But you do get the feeling they had hoped for an earth-shaking metaphor. [27 Dec 1985, p.21]

Africa might have been another Gone With the Wind, blown by passion and buffeted by social upheaval. But in the end it's like a trip to a game park called Extinction. [20 Dec 1985, p.C1]

Clue is based on the popular Parker Brothers board game in which the players try to guess, well, whodunit, and where, and with what weapon. You leave it with one conviction: stick with the game.

The sparkly but flawed sequel to the couple's last caper. [13 Dec 1985, p.29]

It's the kind of stuff you come up with when you're not trying very hard, and on Spies Like Us, nobody seems to be trying. And that can be very trying indeed. [09 Dec 1985, p.C3]

Young Sherlock Holmes delivers all the ingredients that Spielberg addicts relish: action, effects, a cute fat kid, a pretty girl and a hero who's good with swords. But, like a room at a Holiday Inn, there are no surprises. [6 Dec 1985, p.33]

All the air has gone out of Rocky, something Stallone, who also wrote and directed, seems to realize -- he won't leave his movie alone. It's riddled with hapless gimmickry: zooms, slow motion, double images, freeze frames, embarrassing MTV-style montages, a noisy, aggressive sound track, and flashback after flashback to the movies that have gone before, in order to remind you why you're there, as if to insist, "See, this used be a good idea." [28 Nov 1985, p. E1]

Despite a nice performance by Dern, Smooth Talk never gets better than its good intentions. Adapted from a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, the movie is awfully short-storyish -- it meanders through its slight narrative, and the dialogue can be stilted and literary (it's meant to be read, not heard).

Easily the worst of the four movies drawn from S.E. Hinton novels to date, and that's saying a lot. [9 Nov 1985, p.G14]

The movie was written by Rudy DeLuca, who also directs, and a camera in his hands is a dangerous thing. The only method to the framing is an unerring instinct for the inappropriate; "Transylvania 6-5000" appears to have been edited with a putty knife. And the look of the movie, which alternates between a moldy green and gobby white overexposure, leads you to ask not who was the cinematographer, but why. [8 Nov 1985, p.C4]

Target depends on a few sleights of hand, all transparent; so transparent that you quickly forget about what's wrong with the movie and focus on its strengths -- particularly a quirky, adventurous performance by Gene Hackman. [8 Nov 1985, p.C1]

Amateurish, emotionally fraudulent. [28 Jan 1986, p.C4]

Subway begins as the world's greatest car stereo commercial and ends as the world's worst concert film. In between is a muzzy tale of doomed love; and when doom lowers its boom here, it feels awfully like relief. Rarely has the excitement of an opening sequence been so quickly piddled away. [22 Nov 1985, p.B7]

Overheated and recklessly violent.

Krush Groove is a kind of "Purple Drizzle," partly because of the story, which is scattershot; mostly because of the music, which isn't music at all, but rap, that tired fad of worn-out rock critics. [1 Nov 1985, p.B4]

Re-Animator is splatter heaven. Based on the sci-fi novel by H.P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator's gore is exceeded only by its wit. Not since the heyday of Roger Corman, perhaps, have filmmakers had so much fun with an exploitation movie.

There's nothing wrong with gag-based comedies -- that's what the Sennett comedies were, and that's what "Airplane!" was, too -- but the gags in Better Off Dead aren't all that inventive. Oh, Better Off Dead has its moments -- in particular, a Chinese drag-racing duo who learned their English from watching Howard Cosell on "Wide World of Sports" -- but it's mostly the usual gross-out fare: inhaling Jello through a straw; fat kid; girl with dental retainer; sticking Q-Tips in nose, ears, mouth. [17 Oct 1985, p.B10]

What follows is about as suspenseful as looking at your watch to see which minute will pop up next.

SWEET DREAMS is like "Coal Miner's Daughter," but without the grit. It's a slow, insensate musical biography, with the unfortunate Jessica Lange miscast as country singer Patsy Cline. The physical and emotional opposite of the coarse Cline, Lange looks like a refugee from a dude ranch in her western gear, her delicate features overwhelmed by a raggedy black wig and a rhinestone cowgirl's hat. She croons into the smokey, liquor-soaked night of a honky- tonk saloon, "I Fall to Piecessss . . . ." [11 Oct 1985, p.29]

The most elementary requirement of an action movie is that the hero know the score, be in command -- it lends tension to the moments when he's not in command -- a requirement that screen writer Christopher Wood blithely neglects. Aw, forget it -- just tell me when it ends.

Lester doesn't have the sense of visual style that other directors, like Spielberg and Lucas, bring to their comic-book movies; harshly lit and sometimes amateurish, Commando doesn't last in your eye. And Lester doesn't pace his sequences, allowing the suspense to build -- it's all breakneck, and it tires you out. [04 Oct 1985, p.E3]

VIOLENT CRIME against women is not entertainment. "Star 80" was not entertainment. "Body Double" was not entertainment." And Jagged Edge is not entertainment. It is commercially packaged abuse. And we are supposed to call this anger art.

The Boys Next Door is just another exploitation movie about murderous nuts -- exactly what you wouldn't expect from Penelope Spheeris, the director of "Suburbia." [12 Nov 1985, p.B11]

Invasion USA might actually be fun in a campy way if it weren't so dourly exploitative.

The Journey of Natty Gann shows how skillful filmmaking can take something that's almost unendurably hokey and make it charming. Beautifully photographed and designed, evocatively scored, it's a pleasantly archaic family entertainment in the Disney tradition. [18 Jan 1986, p.G1]

Agnes of God offers little besides its jury-rigged suspense. Oh, there are oodles of cigarette jokes -- Livingston is a chain smoker, Mother Miriam a reformed one -- till you wonder why the acknowledgment to Benson & Hedges in the closing credits didn't come above the title.

Mishima tries to make sense of both its subject's life and his work, and ends up illuminating neither.

The gags just aren't very funny, relying overmuch on the usual British understatement...Morons From Outer Space has, by my count, eight laughs (which works out to 62 cents a laugh). [21 Nov 1985, p.C16]

The problem is that to introduce the idea (and therefore the probable further adventures of) an American ninja warrior, Cannon has had to fall back on two filmmaking traditions it's not all that comfortable with: plot and character development. As a result, it has come up with a lumbering, overloaded vehicle when what's needed is a sprint car of a movie. [03 Sep 1985, p.B11]

It's particularly disappointing because Perry -- a talented director whose credits include "David and Lisa," "Diary of a Mad Housewife," "Rancho Deluxe" and "Mommie Dearest" -- has assembled a fine cast whose considerable talents go to waste, smothered by the plodding script and stale social commentary. It's also disappointing because the film opens with such promise: several wonderful scenes, some genuine laughs, snappy dialogue. Then the Novocain sets in. [3 Sept 1985, p.B11]