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.