Schlocky, sluggish shoot-'em-up.

A special place in purgatory must be reserved for John Leguizamo, who produced and stars in The Babysitters, a loathsome slice of exploitation at its most cynical and crass.

Who would have thought that Super Mario Bros., the movie based on the popular video game, could be such a treat? There are some, I'm sure, who saw the end of civilization here. But relax. This movie, which was directed by music video whiz kids Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, is sweet and funny and full of bright invention. In short, it's a blast.

McCarthy’s willingness to go to the mat notwithstanding, it’s viewers who are likely left feeling punched in the gut.

It's got a lot of small movies bouncing around inside it, but there's no big movie on the outside.

Tony Scott's Revenge is fascinating for one reason only -- as an example of full-scale, mega-star perversity. The star, in this case, is Kevin Costner, and there's a willfulness in the extremes to which he's gone here to alienate his public. Costner pitches his performance at his audience like a dare, as if he were seeing how far out on a limb it's willing to climb with him.

For about 15 seconds at the beginning, the new MGM film Once Upon a Crime is a thorough delight. Then that adorable little lion stops roaring.

It's no worse than any number of other cookie-cutter slasher flicks geared for the slightly post-pubescent market.

All in all -- well, there is no all in all. There are just parts. Some fit, some don't. Some are cool, some aren't. It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

Yes, it’s all in good fun. And there’s a certain verve to the way Lynch handles the violence, even if he’s less of a stylist than Tarantino. But the film’s brutality... is so excessive, even if tongue-in-cheek, that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

A twentysomething comedy with a brain-dead script, unflattering lighting and 16 performers in search of a scriptwriter...[It] feels like one-sixth of an idea stretched to the breaking point.

The movie’s action sequences are both thrilling and idiotic.

A purgatory of low-budget interplanetary adventure.

Good ol' Fred loses any sense of playful shock he once possessed and turns into a generic figure meticulously manufactured to simultaneously gross and freak us out. It doesn't work.

So dull and formulaic, it ought to be leashed and led directly to the doghouse.

Luckily, life (just like the SAT) has its multiple-choice options. You don't actually have to watch this.

It's hard to know which is more annoying: The fact that writer-director Reverge Anselmo makes Dori's schizophrenic look like little more than a cute, sexually available lush or that he makes Mark's Marine act like a jarhead with nothing inside except fireflies.

If Simon's desire to feed the better angels of our nature is admirable, it would be nice if he could do it with better movies.

An ineffective excursion that maintains a few direct ties back to the original film but never moves the story forward.

What's Your Number? ups the vulgarity, ladling it on top of a rom-com base so insipid and predictable that the only thing to keep you awake is counting the number of times that the script drops the word "vagina."

A sex romp starring Andy Griffith? Holy AARP! The good news is that the seemingly perennial TV fixture is still funny and sharp and folksy. The bad news is that he lost the bet, or whatever it was that got him into Marc Fienberg's smarmy, lackluster comedy.

The best movie derived from a violent computer game we've ever seen. You can take or leave that kind of qualified high-five, but, for us, it was a thoroughly entertaining experience. Think of bargain basement "James Bond" amped up into TV den-sittin', mouse-clickin' overdrive. But with human actors.

Ultimately, it's hard to decide which is more deadly, the action or the dialogue. [26 Dec 1981, p.D5]

A second-rate romantic comedy.

Lacks the spirit of the previous two, and makes all those jokes about hos and even more unmentionable subjects seem like mere splashing around in the muck.

An uninspired studio product that demands as little from the audience as it did from its writers, directors and actors.

Sphere, an unfathomable chowder of recycled science fiction and undersea thrillers, briefly bubbles with promise only to plummet into the murky depths. Weighed down by inconsistencies and pretensions, the tale founders like a stinky beluga.

The First Power tries awfully hard to combine two popular film genres -- the police thriller and the occult assault -- and comes up short on both ends.