Bizarre yet popular.

Toward the beginning of Turk 182!, Terry the fireman (Robert Urich) brays, "Gimme annudda beeah, Hoolie." Audiences should understand that this is their cue to leave the theater. In the movie's condescending populism, The People are enshrined, The System is scorned. And The People say: phooey. [16 Feb 1985, p.C6]

Stars Samuel L. Jackson in the worst role of his career -- one hopes.

It's hard to imagine an audience that won't break up in laughter at this bewildering mixed message: Enjoy this movie, but you really shouldn't be watching it.

A truly awful and extremely loud scareflick.

Insufferably cloying experience.

Here, common sense flies out the window, along with the hail of bullets.

In this vile contribution to the animated holiday genre, Sandler proves himself once again determined to get rich by setting the bar just a little bit lower each time out.

The intentions for I’m in Love With a Church Girl may have been noble, but nearly every part of the delivery turns out to be flawed.

There is a televisiony smallness in its focus -- and while director Karen Arthur treats her story seriously, she has only a rudimentary feel for the medium and fails to bring the suspense elements to a boil.

This movie reeks, stinks, smells and destroys life as we know it with one olfactory destructive blast.

A rarely funny spoof that's heavy on bone-crushing and blood-gushing.

Hot to Trot is an unbridled disaster, a screwball horseplay so lame you want to put it out of its misery.

Slack when it should be tight, dull when it needs to be sharp, The Bounty Hunter represents a failed attempt to make an Elmore Leonard movie without having to pay Elmore Leonard money.

For a movie about the Great Communicator, “Reagan” communicates surprisingly little.

Salva certainly gets points for creative repurposing. Much of what transpires in Dark House has been seen before, just not all in the same movie.

Another cheesy, overdrawn and witless "Saturday Night Live" takeoff.

One thing the makers of Saving Silverman do not have to worry about: Hannibal Lecter will never visit them to eat their brains. That is because they have no brains.

When the names of the players flash on the screen in Friday the 13th, it is not so much a list of the cast as a body count. Practically everyone who spends more than five minutes on camera dies horribly -- in close-up. Considering the quality of the acting, most of them deserve no better. [13 May 1980, p.B3]

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]

Ghost Team should have spent more time with its big-hearted living characters instead of chasing after dead ones.

Confusing as heck.

The remake neither pays perceptive tribute to the original nor updates it in anything but hackneyed form.

Behind all the noisemakers and funny glasses, New Year's Eve - and everyone in it - is dead behind the eyes.

The Villain is the sort of dumb comedy that never smartens up. [23 July 1979, p.B11]

The only thing epic about The Legend of Hercules is what a failure it is.

The whole movie becomes such a pileup of detritus, whether it’s cop cars or plot points, that even something as important as rationale becomes an afterthought.

I can't imagine why anyone would pay money to see this sorry excuse for a film, which plays more like a home movie than something from cinema professionals.

Blame It on Rio, ha. Rio is innocent. Let's put the blame on executive producer Gelbart along with Caine and Bologna. Unlike the starlettes they've taken in tow, these three guys are old enough to know better.

It's something no one should watch.

Everyone in the film is mean-spirited, manipulative and repulsive, and I'm only talking about the women! The men are much worse, particularly Dan Aykroyd.

A blundering cringefest, thanks to unintentionally laughable dialogue, hackneyed writing and uninspired direction.

Contains about enough laugh-out-loud sight gags and non sequiturs to justify what it demands of a viewer's time and money.

This time, the jokes about dead animals, gunk in the hair, incest and all other taboos are flatter than the road kill Gilly finds himself picking up for a living.

There's no telling how many sounder, wittier scripts, including stories in the same genre, might have been overlooked or rejected in order to waste time and resources on this feeble in-house imitation.

Broadly acted and badly directed, the cast never clicks and the gags fall flat. (Or, they stoop to dog flatulence.) This is a movie made for one-stop shoppers.

You and your kids could probably craft a richer, more exciting polar bear adventure using nothing but Klondike bar wrappers and the power of the imagination.

More in the dumb and dumber tradition of "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" sequels.

It's sickeningly violent!

A trite, bantamweight "Bull Durham," hasn't a single line, gibe, gesture or twist that hasn't already been chewed up and spat out in many a movie baseball dugout.

Movies should invite viewers in, taking them on a journey together with the characters on-screen. Unfortunately, Life Itself is less journey than lecture.

This is a movie for a grade-schooler's -- a female grade-schooler's -- sensibility. It's earnest, silly and sweet, with just enough food fights and musical numbers to keep everyone else from gagging on the goo.

They are also bloody and sadistic. There are two basic gore effects: In one, heavy chains fly through the air to impale people with sharp hooks, which then separate those people from their skin, or worse. Elsewhere, flesh crawls and melds with nearby flesh. There are also close-ups of various bloody, flesh-dripping tools and assorted maggots. All this is decidedly gross but not particularly frightening. [9 March 1996, p.H03]

Some of the jokes are so raucously or goofily low-minded that you may laugh out of a kind of shocked weakness.

Cinematic sleeping pill.

I suggest you think of this movie as another bad sausage from the Warner Bros. meat-packing factory. And you should think of this review as a government health warning. Eat this thing at your peril.

Paradise is about as romantic as sand in your pants. [07 May 1982, p.13]

The movie suffers most of all from a feeling of creeping irrelevance, as if it's being delivered well after its sell-by date.

A nihilistic, narcissistic, knuckleheaded move about nihilistic, narcissistic knuckleheads, The Informers might have been an interesting exercise in satire, if it only had a sense of humor. Which it doesn't. You'll need one, though, after forking over 10 bucks to see it.

Lacks "spark."

Playing a hero who's meant to be something akin to the young Dalai Lama, Ringer brings less than zero gravitas to the role. He makes the kid who plays Gibby on "iCarly" look like Sir Laurence Olivier.

It's still got some panache.

We should be asking ourselves why so noble a nation would produce swill like Joe Dirt.

An inspid comedy about Daddy and Daddy's little girl. It's an irksome, one-dimensional sitcom with smut.

Despite formidable competition, Looker makes a persuasive case for Stinker of the Year among suspense thrillers. [30 Oct 1981, p.C6]

What makes it so bad is the jokes, a collective of offensive jokes - imagine uncomic Polish jokes applied to every race, religion, form of life and nationality, even including Polish - which are so poorly acted out by a cast including Imogene Coca, Alice Ghostley, George Gobel, Fannie Flagg and Roddy McDowall that they actually sound funnier in the recounting that they are on film.

It's depressing enough to sit through an unfunny comedy, but it's worse to watch Falk, Penn and Berg having to earn a living like this.

So twitchy, fidgety, skittery and wiggly that the drug it made me yearn for was Dramamine, followed by a chaser of bourbon, 12 years old.

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]

The unsavory nature of the concept is softened to a considerable extent by the ridiculous nature of the depiction. The performers are obliged to stumble through such a prolonged, outrageous dance of death that the stupidity of it all tends to obscure the viciousness of it all. [26 Feb 1982, p.D3]

After a somewhat promising opening, the movie falls flat.

Very young children, it should be said, probably won't have any problem with the movie. It's bright and perky on the surface. But for anyone mature enough to pay closer attention, it's going to fall short of expectations.

Everything in it is a cliche including the end.

A big, fat clunker.

If you saw "21 Jump Street" back in the '80s, or any of a number of shows featuring cute and cuddly cops, you pretty much know where this flick is heading.

Travolta is simply useless in Old Dogs, but Williams is actively offensive.

The movie spares no effort to reach out to the crudest, youngest audiences it can.

Oxford Blues, the latest refinement in abysmal youth-pandering movies, suffers first and foremost from that modern filmmaking malady: The No Exposition Blues. [01 Sep 1984, p.B2]

Spade is no actor. He's a quipper. And his acerbic asides aren't anywhere near funny enough to carry a movie.

Director Renny Harlin, whose colon-studded credits include "Die Hard 2: Die Harder" and "Exorcist: The Beginning," knows the deal here: Pay homoerotic homage to youth and beauty, crank up the heavy metal on the soundtrack, and spare no effort to backlight the omnipresent rain.

I wouldn't want you to consider even renting this thing. It would only encourage another prequel, this time featuring two dumb toddlers who keep walking into doors and become great pals. Call it "Duh and Duh."

The message of The Ultimate Life could be summed up on a greeting card. Or rather, 12 greeting cards.

Bissett, to her credit, is the only one who appears to know that the movie around her is a near-classic of sexy absurdity.

A blockheaded travesty that fancies itself a rollicking update of "The Pirates of Penzance."

This movie pulls out so many bad-action-movie cliches, you wonder if this is a how-not-to primer.

Absolutely awesome in its relentless mediocrity.

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects could be the worst Charles Bronson film ever, and that's saying something. If it were any slower, it would be running backward.

A glorified infomercial in defense of the holiday that contains about 15 minutes of actual content padded out with almost an hour of filler.

Enervated, torpid, slack, dreary and, oh yes, nasty, brutish and long.

Those bumbling boys and girls in blue are back on the streets in Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach. And they're more moronic than ever -- '80s Keystone Kops dropping their pants, breaking wind and parading their big American "mangoes." Nothing is too degrading for these troupers. Gradually the more employable members of the original squad, such as Steve Guttenberg (not that he's so great), have gone on to better assignments. But the desperate have returned to reprise their roles in this fifth-rate rehash of the rather wonderful original. "5" is a comic assault, batteries not included, an insufferable collage of coarse slapstick vignettes.

The film turns out to have nothing going for it at all, except a small charge for soul-deep Madonna haters.

An offensive, comedy-free comedy.

There's precious little to listen to, laugh at or ogle in The Wash, a sudsy slog that gets sidetracked by, of all things, a plot.

As a child, I thought pure hell meant eternal agony in the flames of Satan. Now I know it's looking down at your watch and realizing Serving Sara isn't even halfway through.

Does not live up to the extravagantly wounded ferocity with which Travolta attacks his part.

Mr. Nanny, a dumbed-down variation on Kindergarten Cop, uses the same ingredients that made the (only slightly) classier Schwarzenegger comedy a hit: A muscle-bound galoot, hired to protect young kids, puts them in even greater jeopardy while he slam-dances with the villains. Those ingredients don't blend well in Mr. Nanny, and they sure leave lumps.

It's a pestilence of infectious claptrap.

Sheer torture, the very definition of unfunniness itself.

Movie 43 is a near masterpiece of tastelessness. The anthology of 12 short, interconnected skits elevates the art form of gross-out comedy to a new height.

A smutty, imbecilic farce.

When it comes to style and sophistication, Walt Disney's live-action "Mr. Magoo" ranks slightly above plastic doggie doo and slightly below rubber chicken. The cartoon Magoo, so memorably voiced by the late Jim Backus, would never have stooped so low for a laugh, yet the visually challenged old gentleman's near mishaps gave you something to smile about. [25 Dec 1997, p.C11]

Vampires suck? That's a matter of opinion. But here's what inarguably, unequivocally does suck: Vampires Suck.

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]

Despite an army of appealing actors in its large ensemble cast, the rom-com Mother’s Day is startlingly unappealing. Clumsily edited and culturally tone deaf, it’s more obsessed with the titular holiday than even most mothers would find reasonable.

It's all incredibly stupid, right down to the predictable romantic entanglements of father and son with the only two women not committed to He Who ... well, you know. Lacking even the cheapest of thrills, this "Corn" is down to its last cob.

Although Bostwick is left in the most exposed position by the nonsensical war games invented for Megaforce, it's obviously Needham who deserves the preeminent rap for fabricating a system of illusion so juvenile that the actors can scarcely avoid looking like chumps.

Not merely Pacino's over-mannered, near-histrionic performance, but the movie itself could be characterized as busy, busy, busy. It's so full of plot twists and revelations and exploding sports cars that its very perkiness comes to seem comic.

Merely airheaded where it should be lighthearted, Hudson Hawk offers a klutzy, charmless hero, and wallows dully in limp slapstick and lowest common denominator crudeness.