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]

It's the kind of stuff you come up with when you're not trying very hard, and on Spies Like Us, nobody seems to be trying. And that can be very trying indeed. [09 Dec 1985, p.C3]

Watching Maximum Overdrive is like sitting alongside a 3-year-old as he skids his Tonka trucks across the living room floor and says "Whee!" except on a somewhat grander scale...It's hard to even imagine a movie so impeccably devoid of everything a movie ought to include. [29 July 1986, p.C2]

It's all incredibly stupid, right down to the predictable romantic entanglements of father and son with the only two women not committed to He Who ... well, you know. Lacking even the cheapest of thrills, this "Corn" is down to its last cob.

If this guy tripped over a print of "Citizen Kane," he not only wouldn't know what it was, he'd hit somebody over the head with it. [24 May 1986, p.C1]

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.

I spent a lot of time during the new Corey Haim-Corey Feldman movie, License to Drive, trying to figure out where it is set. Then it hit me. IT IS SET IN HELL! Hell, in this case, is a place where all the actors are named Corey. Where everyone is under the legal drinking age. Where everybody still breathes through his mouth and Oxy-5 flows like champagne.

Content to pick up where the skid marks from "Smokey and the Bandit II" left off, The Cannonball Run quickly establishes itself as an aggressive shambles, the latest exercise in amateurism from facetious professionals. [20 June 1981, p.B1]

There's more suspense in On Golden Pond. And when the predictable ending comes, it has none of the titanic man-versus-beast struggle of the original. It all happens so quickly, you wonder if you've missed something. But, no you haven't, because there it is -- the familiar calm sea . . . of credits.

Encino Man, the riotously unhilarious new comedy about a misfit couple of California high school nerds who discover a cave man buried in the back yard, is the kind of movie that gives evolution a bad name.

Caddyshack II, a feeble follow-up to the 1980 laff riot, is lamer than a duck with bunions, and dumber than grubs. It's patronizing and clumsily manipulative, and top banana Jackie Mason is upstaged by the gopher puppet.

Cannonball Run II is a real lemon. [29 June 1984, p.19]

A cross-pollination of Home Alone and The Secret of My Success, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is the kind of movie that makes you wish you could sneak into the projection booth with a pair of pinking shears. To say that it's dead isn't really fair; nothing that's dead could be this obnoxious.

Unfortunately, all too many paying customers will remember being suckered into the Derek remake of "Tarzan," which shortchanges every feature susceptible moviegoers must assume they'll find: tongue-in-cheek romance, exotic high adventure and generous scrutiny of Bo in the buff. Denying people the forms of amusement, notably erotic amusement, that the publicity suggests, Derek exposes a truly dangerous ineptitude.

Howell, a second-string Rob Lowe, has the title role in this embarrassing variation on "Black Like Me," a half-witted collegiate farce guaranteed to offend just about everybody. Blacks are stereotyped as they haven't been in decades, and whites are portrayed as Boston bigots and selfish preppies. But the really pathetic thing about this tired old knee-jerker is not that it's racist, but that it's racist and doesn't even know it.

Those bumbling boys and girls in blue are back on the streets in Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach. And they're more moronic than ever -- '80s Keystone Kops dropping their pants, breaking wind and parading their big American "mangoes." Nothing is too degrading for these troupers. Gradually the more employable members of the original squad, such as Steve Guttenberg (not that he's so great), have gone on to better assignments. But the desperate have returned to reprise their roles in this fifth-rate rehash of the rather wonderful original. "5" is a comic assault, batteries not included, an insufferable collage of coarse slapstick vignettes.

"4" isn't even a film; it's more like a long trailer, a collection of scenes without sense. It has everything you expect and nothing more: flat and uninspired aural and visual jokes about bodily functions (people's and pigeons'), leather bars, porta-johns, superglue, fat and/or stupid people -- all interspersed with "training," jailbreaks and an airborne chase finale.

What we have here is basically "Jason vs. Carrie" with neither the visceral shock of the first "Friday the 13th" nor the subtleties of the Stephen King tale. In fact, "VII" is a catalogue of cheap self-imitation, from director John Carl Buechler's constant pulling of visual punches to the script's regurgitated cliche's from earlier "Fridays." The ending is the stupidest one ever and that's saying something.

It would be a grim day for the movies if every picture were as dignified as "Gandhi," but that's no excuse for an indignity as craven and amateurish as Spring Break. [30 March 1983, p.B10]

It's foul, with so little left to the imagination that we get a look between his toes. [13 May 1983, p.19]

Also zero, which is the amount of inspiration and achievement in this continuing saga of the little boy who drowned in Crystal Lake 30 years, seven films and approximately 286 teenagers ago (30-7-286)

A manifest abomination on every measurable level, So Fine, the painfully threadbare comedy opening today at area theaters, is easily as transparent as the peekaboo jeans that give the film its nominal but squandered topicality. The film's only conceivable distinction is that it could be the worst that Ryan O'Neal has ever made, and that's saying something. [25 Sept 1981, p.C6]

A blockheaded travesty that fancies itself a rollicking update of "The Pirates of Penzance."

You could call it a nightmare but that would be an insult to Elm Street.

The movie was written by Rudy DeLuca, who also directs, and a camera in his hands is a dangerous thing. The only method to the framing is an unerring instinct for the inappropriate; "Transylvania 6-5000" appears to have been edited with a putty knife. And the look of the movie, which alternates between a moldy green and gobby white overexposure, leads you to ask not who was the cinematographer, but why. [8 Nov 1985, p.C4]

If it is useful to know that a director knows absolutely nothing about filmmaking, from script to casting to editing to where to put the camera, then there is one useful thing to be had from Blue City. First-time director Michelle Manning has spun a yarn that is grotesquely implausible, less affecting than plausible, and less attractive than affecting -- Blue City seems to have been processed in mud, and even Godard at his most perverse couldn't have violated the rules of camera placement and framing more doggedly. [5 May 1986, p.B4]

Watching it, you feel as if you're being hammered to death with champagne corks.

A buddy cop parody of the lowest possible caliber, National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 empties its chamber but only nicks its enormously deserving target. It's a fusillade of tired jokes and cheap shots, primarily meant as a burlesque of "Lethal Weapon," but "Basic Instinct," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "48 Hrs." also come in for some lame bashing from director Gene Quintano.