It is unsparing when it comes to gruesome descriptions and ominous characters, but it's got more giggles than goose bumps. The Exorcist III isn't about to scare anybody.

Yet despite the stirring performance at its heart, the movie is ultimately too restricted by its own dramatic conventions, and it only seldom comes to life.

If the story is fun — and it is fitfully, only after a protracted, sloggy set up — it’s a lot less so than either of the first two films.

Like too many genre directors these days, Ken Wiederhorn went for a mix of horror and comedy, and it's probably not his fault he succeeded mostly with the latter.

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]

"5" has none of the pizazz of "1" and "3" and is only marginally better than "2" and "4," the worst of the "Elms."

A soulless replica of Don Seigel's 1956 model and Philip Kaufman's 1978 update.

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 trashy Japanese production with special guest Raymond Burr. [27 Sep 1985, p.25]

The effects are generally good, and those Cenobites are definitely not the kind of folks you'd have over on New Year's Eve. Still, it's odd that the most intriguing, and threatening, items in the film are those darn puzzle boxes.

What starts out as a moody arthouse flick rapidly becomes an uneven B-movie yukfest (sometimes intentional, sometimes not), with low-budget concessions to the Hollywood cop-versus-killer industry.

Though Mother has already collected two prizes for its screenplay, it's really rather thin. If it weren't so slow and repetitious, there'd only be enough whining and grousing for a Seinfeld episode. [10 Jan 1997, p.D01]

Like a faked antique that copies the physical characteristics of the original but misses the spirit, the new animated Disney film, The Fox and the Hound, looks like Bambi and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but exudes phony innocence. [10 July 1981, p.17]

The film lacks the very imagination it touts, along with another trait that it links to exceptional athleticism. That’s obsession.

Without a story or, for that matter, any theme but a kind of aimless nostalgia, you peel and peel away at it only to find, in the end, nothing.

If Rogers moves through the film somewhat lethargically, Six Pack's bare-bones plot doesn't provide much inspiration. [20 July 1982, p.B4]

A wild, inventive ride through the unconscious, by way of Art History 101 and An Introduction to Film Tropes. The story of a famous psychoanalyst struggling with his Oedipal demons with the help of some hardened burglars isn’t a story at all, really, but a decidedly rickety scaffold on which Krstic can hang his images, an array of ecstatic references to the painters and directors who have inspired him.

The End never really lives up to its beginning. It's much too long and, after a while, the one-track theme - how a man reacts when he's suddenly told he has less than three months to live - begins to get old. [26 May 1978, p.20]

Ponderously cliched and predictable. [19 July 1996, p.N33]

Mischiefin other words, is echt teen sex comedy, hitting its marks in the way a skilled carpenter drives home his millionth nail. Even the deviations from the formula, like the movie's sweet, naive tone, are only predictable extensions of the formula.

Photograph goes a little too far in implementing Batra’s favored style of storytelling. Sometimes, less isn’t more, but — as in this case — not quite enough.

Alternately fascinating and disappointing biopic about French scientist Marie ­Curie.

The Final Countdown emerges from a round trip through this time-bending exercise flattened into a two-dimensional letdown. [01 Aug 1980, p.C7]

For all its boldness of concept and carnage, The Prowler is never entirely satisfying. There are too many missed opportunities to transcend the genre’s schlock, too many passages where nothing happens, too many scares that fall flat. Still, it’s an intriguing artifact of an earlier horror-movie era, one that toys with the idea of villains and victims while slashing the slasher formula to bits.

A mannered, gratuitous exercise in Grand Guignol dreadfulness that was made by and with unknowns. [03 June 1978, p.B6]

There isn't much conceptual or stylistic integrity in Tightrope. It's calculated to function at the most expedient and spurious levels of nightmarish artifice. [17 Aug 1984, p.D1]

Let’s just say that, for the right audience, Junior may deliver. But there’s a whole lot of pregnancy to go through first.

Stallone hasn't done himself proud in Paradise Alley. The film could still use a director, a scenario writer and someone to discourage the star from lapsing into happy-go-lucky imitations of Lee J. Cobb. Still, there's something likeable about this zany manipulator. [10 Nov 1978, p.E1]