Because of the square, lackluster way that director Michael Gottleib has staged his material, the whole production seems sort of limp and perfunctory.

A chiller that, except for the last half hour of ghoulish effects, is undeadly dull. [02 Aug 1985, p.23]

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

A thrill-an-hour distraction that promises much more than it delivers.

Despite all their toil and trouble, the tale leaves us more bothered than bewitched.

She (Madonna) really ought to be tried for impersonating Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Or playing a second-rate Hitchcock mystery blonde -- she's even named Rebecca.

On the whole, Deadly Friend is a routine horror movie, poorly photographed (by old-time cinematographer Philip Lathrop) and poorly performed (with the exception of New York stage actress Anne Twomey, as Paul's mother).

Culkin's best comedy ever. If only this movie wasn't supposed to be a horror picture.

Each new attempt to revive the Western seems to plunge the patient into a deeper coma. Arriving on the heels of Jack Nicholson's Goin' South, Alan J. Pakula's cataleptic Comes a Horseman suggests a conspiracy to kick the poor old Western while it's down. [25 Oct 1978, p.D13]

In short, Magic is unworthy of its name. It's frightfully feeble and obvious. [11 Nov 1978, p.F11]

The finished film has no thematic or emotional integrity. It flip-flops withdesperate hypocrisy between clownish antics and indignant orations. [09 Feb 1978, p.B13]

Perhaps the ultimate "Judgment" comes from Estevez, who observes: "Nothing about tonight makes sense."

This latest project, a murder mystery scripted by Aaron (A Few Good Men) Sorkin and Scott (Dead Again) Frank, is bilge water.

While this sort of thing may have worked in the '30s, by today's standards it's half-baked.

A low-horsepower chase movie with Charlie Sheen and D.B. Sweeney...Peter Werner, with plenty of documentaries and "Moonlighting" episodes to his credit, directs this out-of-gas look at the young and the mobile. What this movie needs is more macho, more moxie, more attitude. Fill it up, and make it high testosterone.

Let's hope Bergman leaves the rest of Hiaasen's books alone.

Tracy is Tinseltown's annual celebration of everything that's wrong with itself: the hype, the agent-negotiated star system, the Hollywood "fun" assembly-line method of copy-cat mediocrity, etc.

In The Rookie, Eastwood's new buddy movie about a couple of cops in the auto theft division, Clint teams up with Charlie Sheen, and he couldn't be more naked in his attempts to connect with a younger generation of moviegoers if he laced up a pair of Reebok Pumps.

Seditious themes aside, the adventure fails mostly because Ward never achieves super- hero status. He never quite lives up to the name RE-MO. Sluggo maybe.

Into the Night is billed as a comedy-thriller, but the thrills are nothing but a generalized nastiness, the comedy an uneven collection of gags. Few of the jokes have anything to do with the characters (nor, for that matter, do the characters have anything to do with the characters); and few of the thrills have anything to do with the gags.

Can contemporary romance be this flat?

Indeed, you come out of Back Roads feeling more familiar with the configuration of Sally Field's spinal column and chestbone than the character she's struggling to embody.

Suspect doesn't provide even the most basic pleasure that we've come to expect from thrillers -- it's doesn't get our pulse racing. For most of it, we're stuck in what must be the ugliest courtroom in the history of movies, and after a while, it becomes a drag on your spirits.

It's deeply vapid, with the emotional consistency of styling mousse.

Technique counts for a lot in directing a picture like this -- more perhaps than in any other genre -- and Foley doesn't have any. His approach here is to toss things up into the air without caring much where they land. And as a result, the noise they make when they land is not a pretty one.

Ironweed, the new film by Hector Babenco starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, comes about as close to being an unmitigated waste of talent as any movie in recent memory.

Kleiser has no feel for comedy, and there's no affinity between him and his star. He shoots the material as if he didn't quite get it, and the gags dribble out weakly, without any emphasis or piquancy, as if the camera itself were perplexed by the scene unfolding in front of it.

The Coca-Cola Kid starts out as a lively satire of American business, posing a young Harvard MBA as a pin-striped cowboy attempting to claim a piece of the Australian outback for Coca-Cola. But Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev, like a ham-handed juggler in a high wind, thwarts his promising idea by tossing up a jumble of plot detours and subplots that never come down. [30 Aug 1985, p.B1]