On the plus side, Allen's basic movie-making skills are sound. The $13-million film looks crisp and clean. An idiot could follow the story line and two hours could go by without many glimpses at the wristwatch. In short, the perfect made-for-TV movie. [15 Jul 1978, p.E1]

What saddened me, however, wasn't the silliness but recognizing the great Swedish actress Lena Olin under a lot of "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" makeup. What a waste.

It's lewd, crude and socially irredeemable.

For those who saw the first two Massacres, this will seem pretty much deja-boo! All too much of III is rehashed horror. The first installment was genuinely shocking, unrelenting, visceral terror. II was camp terror, a gothic detour that cast Dennis Hopper as a good guy (albeit nuts). III envisions itself as a return to I, but director Jeff Burr is no Tobe Hopper (director of the first installment), and even the special effects seem bloodless imitations.

The movie is unsurprising and not especially ambitious, but it’s agile enough to vault over most of its flaws.

Hampered by Niall Johnson's script, which is often confusing, muddy and ultimately cliche-ridden.

Sadly, this movie is a far cry from the atmospheric, even thoughtfully crafted original, which made you truly scared for the unkempt, everyman victims. But this latest version, though just as grisly, is literally hackwork, and stars a forgettable, airbrushed cast of slaughterees.

The movie itself is already like one long commercial.

Is it mindless fun for the kids in an air-conditioned environment? I guess, sure, but it's maddening how many details in Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore are swiped wholesale from other stories.

Never Ending Story II is as flat as the pages of its script.

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]

This movie, written in crayon by James Kearns, is too dumb to come up with a way of defeating the system by using its own rules.

A knuckleheaded but amiable summer trifle, Stroker Ace is aimed straight at Burt Reynolds' vast heartland public.

Grown Ups finds Sandler reverting to lunkheaded, lazy-laff form.

It’s a shame that the beginning of a movement that has come so far, so fast has been reduced to a trite, calculatingly manipulative reenactment.

Tries to cram too many ingredients into one small pot.

A considerable cut above the crop of recent features by other 'SNL' alums.

A lightweight skating story/road-trip film, is apparently the best it can do, which is to say, not good at all.

With a surprisingly unhappy, anti-Hollywood ending that will appeal to those who like things dark.

Two if by Sea, directed by Australian Bill Bennett, suffers from a symptom common to romantic comedies that begin after the couple have visited the haystack: There's simply no more sexual tension. Without it, you'd better be as good as Tracy and Hepburn.

The Smurfs is exactly like Amy Adams's princess-in-Manhattan comedy "Enchanted," only far less clever, kindhearted, original, exciting or entertaining.

As directed by Steve Miner and shot by Gerald Feil, the film's use of 3-D is spectacularly and viciously effective. (Gray-lensed Polaroid glasses are handed out at the door; this 3-D process works much better than that used on recent 3-D TV broadcasts.) Not only sabers and butcher knives are tossed into the movie house, however; there are also such relatively benign protuberances as popping popcorn, a leaping snake and a blue yo-yo. From the back of a van, a hippie reaches out with a joint, and very early in the film the audience gets poked at with a pair of rabbit ears atop a television set. An opening scene of sheets flapping on a clothesline is attractively eerie, and a later shot of a victim sitting on a pier that juts into a pool of water is actually pretty. The playfulness is so engaging it's really too bad that the gore has to be so unrelenting, but the producers of these films are now trapped in their own excess [17 Aug 1982, p.B1]

If it touches on notions of scientific arrogance and the question of what makes us human, it ultimately does so lightly, and with a mix of eye-popping action and loopy good humor.

Will satisfy only those who can't tell the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly.

A meet-cute whimsy set among divorced fifty-somethings in New York, it blunders on toward oblivion, excruciatingly unfunny and pitifully unromantic.

The movie feels like Nicholas Sparks fan fiction.

What a bomb this highly touted union turns out to be...There is less drama than a Dr Pepper commercial, and its feeble attempt at camp makes "The Return of the Living Dead" look like a production of Stratford-on-Avon. [20 Aug 1985, p.C3]

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]