Scriptwise, you'll be left thinking "if it only had a brain." Like last year's "Hardware," this British effort is simply too talky. Those who seek deeper meaning will enjoy the astrological and satanic explanations, even if they make no sense.

Rarely has an act of such cinematic cruelty as Tideland been perpetrated on filmgoers.

I will admit that this TV skit stretched out to a filament-thin 83 minutes is idiotic, but I mean that in a good way.

A poor man's "Lords of Dogtown," substituting hard-core motorcycle racing for extreme skateboarding and featuring a young cast of television-bred actors.

The story’s message may not be the most original one in the world — put down your device and make eye contact — but it’s fun to watch it unfold in a world that, while far from realistic, feels real enough.

Sometimes in horror movies, bad acting is effective, its very woodenness contributing to the sense of robotic horror. That ain't happening here. These guys are just bad actors.

Everything about it screams mid-20th century. Rather than refresh the cast with new actors, the producers would have done better to just digitally reanimate Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper, the stars of the 1949 adaptation of Rand's "The Fountainhead."

A classic like this deserves to be unearthed! After all, this picture is likely to command a pedestal of its own at the local video store. Just check for shelves marked either "Sharon Stone" or "Staff's Worst Picks of 1999."

The only thing this movie should lead you to is the nearest exit.

What follows is about as suspenseful as looking at your watch to see which minute will pop up next.

The film dutifully cleaves to the contours of a well-established and viscerally satisfying formula.

The title, of course, leads one to expect the long-awaited movie version of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, but the actuality is closer to tattered but dopily diverting remnants from The Karate Kid, Road House and Rocky IV. [14 Nov 1989, p.E3]

D'Souza makes it all sound almost plausible, but only if you're predisposed to believe that Obama hates America. It's bashing, all right, but with a velvet-gloved fist.

The comic equivalent of microwaved leftover food -- and pretty stale at that.

It’s a lazy piece of work, even by the low standards of Hollywood horror movies.

Bland as a fortune cookie and as trite as the message inside.

It's a soap opera posing as moral outrage.

Fox's performance is a shadow of his "Future" self, and the rest of the cast -- everyone from teeny-boppers to wise guys to baffled adults -- are equally benumbed. You really can't blame them, what with a screenplay by Joseph Loeb III and Matthew Weisman that relies on "losing control of his bodily functions" for its biggest laugh. [24 Aug 1985, p.C6]

A moldy teenage tear-jerker.

Whatever the title of the next installment, this movie is certainly One best forgotten.

Just what we need least: a warm family comedy about child molestation.That's Georgia Rule, which combines battleship actresses of the "Steel Magnolias" variety, fall-down-go-boom comedy that was obsolete in the '30s, Lindsay Lohan's cleavage and intergenerational fondling just for kicks.

After all the bloated lines are delivered, and dozens of women are debased, and Bishop has attitudinized the story line into incomprehensibility, audience members will be asking themselves how they got on this Hell Ride and what they did to deserve it.

Uneven but occasionally funny.

There's no escaping the hackneyed plot or Mayfield's conventional hand. So don't go.

I watched Mona. I felt like drowning.

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]

The music is catchy and sounds sufficiently Elvis-like, and The Identical occupies a neglected niche as a family-friendly movie that isn’t geared just toward kids. But living up to a legend is an uphill battle, and the movie doesn’t ever reach those heights.

To that long list of third- and fourth-rate comedies we can now add Sorority Boys.

Grecian Formula and body corsets notwithstanding, Bronson looks like one of those sculpted potato heads and moves with appropriate grace. This is not the face of death; it's the face of old.

Flowers in the Attic is slow, stiff, stupid and senseless, a film utterly lacking in motivation, development and nuance, and further marred by embarrassingly flat acting and directing.

Perhaps their quest had a mythic significance in Richard Sale's original novel that has somehow eluded his screenplay in which it's impossible to believe that the movie heros are doing anything more than beating on a dead prop. [03 Jun 1977, p.B1]

Ninja III quickly falls off track.

Animated in form but completely listless in content.

Nielsen earns a few giggles with his big entrance and later on his even bigger belly, but he can't overcome the lousy material.

[A] strained, clunkily orchestrated and dismally retrograde film.

The lowest common denominator of smutty amusement [03 Aug 1983, p.B2]

While in theory this seems like an altogether valid notion, in practice it falls apart because Fred is such an obnoxious boil of a character. Instead of wanting to release him you want to deposit him in a Davey Tree Grinder. Painful death, that's what this trickster deserves.

Really two movies in one, and there's not enough breathing room for both of them.

It is horrible. Time curls up and dies while this Hilary Duff vehicle wheels its weary, conventional way along.

The problem is not the credulity-stretching script. Or even that much of the movie just isn't all that funny. The problem is that it thinks it's freakin' hilarious.

A fairly straightforward, if preachy, tale about environmentalism.

Here's the best thing about Stealing Harvard: A dog bites Green in the crotch for a really long time. Priceless.

A dud that squanders a decent cast and succeeds neither as the comedy nor the action film it purports to be.

Reprises all the tedium of slasher flicks.

A gruesome tale of obsessive love and mutilation, it's less a work of art, however, than a luridly stylish expression of female self-loathing...A prettied-up snuff movie.

A protracted and only sporadically imaginative menu of ways to be murdered.

Hatched by screenwriters watching "The Sixth Sense" on methamphetamines

After watching this movie, which stars Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Bates and Gabriel Byrne, I was moved only to find my own bridge to leap from.

Cro-Magnon-dumb...Less funny than your own funeral.

Monday at 11:01 a.m. would probably work well as a half-hour television episode or a short story. As a feature film, unfortunately, it feels a bit like clock watching.

This suspense drama, which stars Sally Field, Kiefer Sutherland and Joe Mantegna, tries desperately to press your vigilante buttons. But its manipulative agenda is so transparent, you don't know whether to take exception or laugh it off.

Its main purpose -- and no, you are not experiencing ocular breakdown -- is spiritual.

This film is just a coarser, dumber, smuttier remake of the 1983 Eszterhas-penned "Flashdance," throbbing music, working-class Cinderella and all.

Most of the comedy, such as it is, consists of the uppity Chase acting "street" and the ghetto-fabulous Tiffany putting on moneyed airs. But, if you've seen the trailers, you already know that.

In terms of actual social conscience, the movie gets a demagogic, rabble-rousing F. It also gets a failed grade for honest writing.

Ed...is thrown together with such little concern for originality or its audience, it's appalling.

The director, J. Lee Thompson, was once a proficient craftsman. Not all that long ago he and Quinn were associated on the prestigious hit The Guns of Navarone. You can't help wondering what they, along with Mason and Neal, talked about between the takes of this howler. [29 Mar 1979, p.D15]

Not that much deep thinking went on here.

Although the film is little more than a slapstick showcase for the nosey-neighbor character Varney has played in TV commercials, it's not the slapped-together piece of work you might expect. The movie is fairly inoffensive, and younger kids may get a real boost out of its us-against-the-world spirit.

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.

A particularly loathsome piece of cultural detritus, a trashy, crass piece of work that panders to the anxieties and desires of adolescents without a scintilla of sympathy or coherence.

With horrific wildfires scorching California, the timing of this firefighter comedy also seems off. It might inspire empathy, if only it were actually funny.

More sluggish than a funeral barge, cheaper than a sale at K mart, it's a nerd, it's a shame, it's Superman IV.

Leaden, laugh-free, lacking anything resembling a heart, mind or soul.

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]

Just Police Academy all over again, without laughs.

Scriptwriter Kitty Chalmers really should have called it Replicant, since Cyborg borrows bits and pieces from so many genre films and since it has really no soul of its own.

As if aware that Congo is the least interesting adventure ever filmed, screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (who once wrote a funny movie called "Moonstruck") tries to inoculate the activities with humor.

If there's one piece of wisdom to be culled from this botched project, it's this: No one gets Carter.

The projectors in the theater practically shut down with boredom.

Under the direction of "Die Harder's" Renny Harlin, the movie has a crackling pace and a glossy look. It's all the more pernicious for that, this slick glorification of hate and loathing that portrays women as sexually promiscuous and men as infantile, violent and feeble-minded. Here's one Ford that doesn't have a better idea.

Predictable, lazy and as overprocessed as Kate Hudson's hair, this thoroughly joyless movie also possesses a deep nasty streak, making it loathsome when it might have been merely annoying.

Why sit through a lesser imitation, when you could just rent "Heathers" and those other movies for a far more enjoyable time? Drop-dead bitchery? Been there, done that.

The air inside the pyramid isn’t the only thing that’s stale in this ludicrous yet mildly likable horror film.

If this sounds like "Tootsie" with a ball, well, it is. Screenwriter Bradley Allenstein should be hauled up in writer's court for his shameless cribbing of that far superior comedy. Someone call a foul.

Solarbabies is a hilariously bad movie that doesn't make much sense and isn't much good when it does. Director Alan Johnson has stolen most of his visual ideas from Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner") and George Miller ("The Road Warrior"), and he hasn't the slightest idea how to direct actors. That said, the movie has its campy pleasures.

See critic run. Oh, for the days of Smell-a-Vision.

Alas, the movie's producers could use a genie of their own. Surely, if granted three wishes, they could have produced a better film.

If the John Candy-Dan Aykroyd comedy The Great Outdoor had a few more laughs we might be tempted simply to write it off as mediocre and let it go at that. But this woodland farce is just coarse enough, and unfunny enough, to achieve true awfulness.

The kinetics aren't that good, the twaddle is off the charts and the characters seem written by monkeys on amphetamines with crayons.

The camera style is grotesquely overwrought, a relentless exercise in technique for technique's sake. It's all here, folks: fancy wipes, expressionistic angles, quick-cut close-ups, stylized backlighting, camera moving in endless illogic. It's as if a 15-minute history of film technique had been compiled by a psychotic. [19 Mar 1986, p.B9]

Not just a bad thriller but also a thing of pain.

Definitely stuck in the fourth grade.

It’s hard to know which of the film’s many flaws to cite first, so here’s one thing it does fairly well: scare the bejesus out of you. That’s assuming you have read nothing about the subject of vaccines and autism, and are of a generally lax and incurious mind when it comes to the rigors of scientific inquiry.

With his teddy bear appeal, it's not surprising that there was more magnetism between Selleck and the Baby in "Three Men" than there is between Selleck and grown-up babe Paulina Porizkova (though the two femmes fatales are similarly gifted). And it doesn't help that this high-paid clotheshorse is a chilly beauty whose presence is as spare as her figure. It's hard for Selleck to look deeply into those far-focused mannequin eyes.

The results are a wheezy, tired attempt to milk more laughs out of the '60s, by doing exactly what "Austin Powers" did.

Happy Birthday to Me is a cheesy tease from the outset. The opening sequence entraps the first victim, then allows her to escape, then entraps her again and allows her to escape again. By the time the filmmakers get around to making a murder scene stick, you're already fed up with their methodology and wondering why the movie wasn't called something like "The Coed With Nine Lives." [15 May 1981, p.F4]

A cross between an after-school special and MTV video, melding threadbare plot with colorful visuals and delivering a message, which is, basically, Vanilla Ice is cool, you know?

Intriguingly, Jinn makes a plea for understanding and cooperation between Muslims, Jews and Christians. Disappointingly, writer-director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad does all too good a job burying that message within a blustering supernatural thriller.

The Wizard is not only tacky and moribund, but it teaches gambling and bad sportsmanship.

It's a comedy to be laughed at rather than with, largely because the producers decided to dub Arnold's Teutonic voice with that of another actor, one who sounds like he's giving bus departure announcements at the Port Authority Terminal. [30 Jan 1992, p.C7]

The movie isn't a disaster, and if you responded to the first one, its memory may carry you over the roughness, the excessive, ugly violence and lack of conviction here. Hill and his stars are merely going through the motions, but the motions are immensely familiar. If you've been there before, then you've been there.

The problem, or problems, stem from the lazy, unfunny script; the weak computer-generated animals (never have God's creatures looked less lifelike while dancing to Chic's "Le Freak"); and the squandering of so much talent.

It's not Deuce's satisfied clientele, but the audience, that gets the shaft.

The movie manages to be simultaneously superficial and heartbreaking. That’s no easy feat — nor is it a laudable one.

The unapologetic laziness and ineptitude of Jack's impersonation, which is played for cheap laughs, is just as lazy as Sandler's performance as the real Jill. You don't buy it for a minute.

Coasts on comic fumes, relying on colloquialisms, foreign accents, racial stereotypes, lemon sharks, Speedos and inopportune erections to supply the funny. Any one of these things might work in a comedy that was less contrived.

Hopeless rip-off of Hitchcock's "The Birds."

There’s nothing wrong with a good, dumb comedy, but “Bride Hard” doesn’t even qualify as in-flight entertainment.

For da love of God, spare me.

Bizarre yet popular.

Toward the beginning of Turk 182!, Terry the fireman (Robert Urich) brays, "Gimme annudda beeah, Hoolie." Audiences should understand that this is their cue to leave the theater. In the movie's condescending populism, The People are enshrined, The System is scorned. And The People say: phooey. [16 Feb 1985, p.C6]

Stars Samuel L. Jackson in the worst role of his career -- one hopes.

It's hard to imagine an audience that won't break up in laughter at this bewildering mixed message: Enjoy this movie, but you really shouldn't be watching it.

A truly awful and extremely loud scareflick.

Insufferably cloying experience.

Here, common sense flies out the window, along with the hail of bullets.

In this vile contribution to the animated holiday genre, Sandler proves himself once again determined to get rich by setting the bar just a little bit lower each time out.

The intentions for I’m in Love With a Church Girl may have been noble, but nearly every part of the delivery turns out to be flawed.

There is a televisiony smallness in its focus -- and while director Karen Arthur treats her story seriously, she has only a rudimentary feel for the medium and fails to bring the suspense elements to a boil.

This movie reeks, stinks, smells and destroys life as we know it with one olfactory destructive blast.

A rarely funny spoof that's heavy on bone-crushing and blood-gushing.

Hot to Trot is an unbridled disaster, a screwball horseplay so lame you want to put it out of its misery.

Slack when it should be tight, dull when it needs to be sharp, The Bounty Hunter represents a failed attempt to make an Elmore Leonard movie without having to pay Elmore Leonard money.

For a movie about the Great Communicator, “Reagan” communicates surprisingly little.

Salva certainly gets points for creative repurposing. Much of what transpires in Dark House has been seen before, just not all in the same movie.

Another cheesy, overdrawn and witless "Saturday Night Live" takeoff.

One thing the makers of Saving Silverman do not have to worry about: Hannibal Lecter will never visit them to eat their brains. That is because they have no brains.

When the names of the players flash on the screen in Friday the 13th, it is not so much a list of the cast as a body count. Practically everyone who spends more than five minutes on camera dies horribly -- in close-up. Considering the quality of the acting, most of them deserve no better. [13 May 1980, p.B3]

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]

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.

A nihilistic, narcissistic, knuckleheaded move about nihilistic, narcissistic knuckleheads, The Informers might have been an interesting exercise in satire, if it only had a sense of humor. Which it doesn't. You'll need one, though, after forking over 10 bucks to see it.

Lacks "spark."

Playing a hero who's meant to be something akin to the young Dalai Lama, Ringer brings less than zero gravitas to the role. He makes the kid who plays Gibby on "iCarly" look like Sir Laurence Olivier.

It's still got some panache.

We should be asking ourselves why so noble a nation would produce swill like Joe Dirt.

An inspid comedy about Daddy and Daddy's little girl. It's an irksome, one-dimensional sitcom with smut.

Despite formidable competition, Looker makes a persuasive case for Stinker of the Year among suspense thrillers. [30 Oct 1981, p.C6]

What makes it so bad is the jokes, a collective of offensive jokes - imagine uncomic Polish jokes applied to every race, religion, form of life and nationality, even including Polish - which are so poorly acted out by a cast including Imogene Coca, Alice Ghostley, George Gobel, Fannie Flagg and Roddy McDowall that they actually sound funnier in the recounting that they are on film.

It's depressing enough to sit through an unfunny comedy, but it's worse to watch Falk, Penn and Berg having to earn a living like this.

So twitchy, fidgety, skittery and wiggly that the drug it made me yearn for was Dramamine, followed by a chaser of bourbon, 12 years old.

The problem is that to introduce the idea (and therefore the probable further adventures of) an American ninja warrior, Cannon has had to fall back on two filmmaking traditions it's not all that comfortable with: plot and character development. As a result, it has come up with a lumbering, overloaded vehicle when what's needed is a sprint car of a movie. [03 Sep 1985, p.B11]

The unsavory nature of the concept is softened to a considerable extent by the ridiculous nature of the depiction. The performers are obliged to stumble through such a prolonged, outrageous dance of death that the stupidity of it all tends to obscure the viciousness of it all. [26 Feb 1982, p.D3]

After a somewhat promising opening, the movie falls flat.

Very young children, it should be said, probably won't have any problem with the movie. It's bright and perky on the surface. But for anyone mature enough to pay closer attention, it's going to fall short of expectations.

Everything in it is a cliche including the end.

A big, fat clunker.

If you saw "21 Jump Street" back in the '80s, or any of a number of shows featuring cute and cuddly cops, you pretty much know where this flick is heading.

Travolta is simply useless in Old Dogs, but Williams is actively offensive.

The movie spares no effort to reach out to the crudest, youngest audiences it can.

Oxford Blues, the latest refinement in abysmal youth-pandering movies, suffers first and foremost from that modern filmmaking malady: The No Exposition Blues. [01 Sep 1984, p.B2]

Spade is no actor. He's a quipper. And his acerbic asides aren't anywhere near funny enough to carry a movie.

Director Renny Harlin, whose colon-studded credits include "Die Hard 2: Die Harder" and "Exorcist: The Beginning," knows the deal here: Pay homoerotic homage to youth and beauty, crank up the heavy metal on the soundtrack, and spare no effort to backlight the omnipresent rain.

I wouldn't want you to consider even renting this thing. It would only encourage another prequel, this time featuring two dumb toddlers who keep walking into doors and become great pals. Call it "Duh and Duh."

The message of The Ultimate Life could be summed up on a greeting card. Or rather, 12 greeting cards.

Bissett, to her credit, is the only one who appears to know that the movie around her is a near-classic of sexy absurdity.

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

This movie pulls out so many bad-action-movie cliches, you wonder if this is a how-not-to primer.

Absolutely awesome in its relentless mediocrity.

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects could be the worst Charles Bronson film ever, and that's saying something. If it were any slower, it would be running backward.

A glorified infomercial in defense of the holiday that contains about 15 minutes of actual content padded out with almost an hour of filler.

Enervated, torpid, slack, dreary and, oh yes, nasty, brutish and long.

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.

The film turns out to have nothing going for it at all, except a small charge for soul-deep Madonna haters.

An offensive, comedy-free comedy.

There's precious little to listen to, laugh at or ogle in The Wash, a sudsy slog that gets sidetracked by, of all things, a plot.

As a child, I thought pure hell meant eternal agony in the flames of Satan. Now I know it's looking down at your watch and realizing Serving Sara isn't even halfway through.

Does not live up to the extravagantly wounded ferocity with which Travolta attacks his part.

Mr. Nanny, a dumbed-down variation on Kindergarten Cop, uses the same ingredients that made the (only slightly) classier Schwarzenegger comedy a hit: A muscle-bound galoot, hired to protect young kids, puts them in even greater jeopardy while he slam-dances with the villains. Those ingredients don't blend well in Mr. Nanny, and they sure leave lumps.

It's a pestilence of infectious claptrap.

Sheer torture, the very definition of unfunniness itself.

Movie 43 is a near masterpiece of tastelessness. The anthology of 12 short, interconnected skits elevates the art form of gross-out comedy to a new height.

A smutty, imbecilic farce.

When it comes to style and sophistication, Walt Disney's live-action "Mr. Magoo" ranks slightly above plastic doggie doo and slightly below rubber chicken. The cartoon Magoo, so memorably voiced by the late Jim Backus, would never have stooped so low for a laugh, yet the visually challenged old gentleman's near mishaps gave you something to smile about. [25 Dec 1997, p.C11]

Vampires suck? That's a matter of opinion. But here's what inarguably, unequivocally does suck: Vampires Suck.

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]

Despite an army of appealing actors in its large ensemble cast, the rom-com Mother’s Day is startlingly unappealing. Clumsily edited and culturally tone deaf, it’s more obsessed with the titular holiday than even most mothers would find reasonable.

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.

Although Bostwick is left in the most exposed position by the nonsensical war games invented for Megaforce, it's obviously Needham who deserves the preeminent rap for fabricating a system of illusion so juvenile that the actors can scarcely avoid looking like chumps.

Not merely Pacino's over-mannered, near-histrionic performance, but the movie itself could be characterized as busy, busy, busy. It's so full of plot twists and revelations and exploding sports cars that its very perkiness comes to seem comic.

Merely airheaded where it should be lighthearted, Hudson Hawk offers a klutzy, charmless hero, and wallows dully in limp slapstick and lowest common denominator crudeness.

It takes a director with a true genius for disaster to put together SCTV veterans John Candy and Eugene Levy, the fine character actors Kenneth McMillan and Robert Loggia and the delicious new comic actress Meg Ryan and come up with a movie without a single laugh in it. Indeed, who but Mark Lester could have pulled it off? Lester's idea of directing is to turn up the music and wreck a lot of cars -- this isn't a movie, it's a Volvo ad.

Dismal.

There really is no other movie on Earth quite like it. And that's including "The Human Centipede: First Sequence," the 2009 horror film on which this dismal, nauseating and yet bizarrely artful sequel is based.

In makeup, Davis is quite evil-looking and, like most good actors facing similar challenges, imbues a weak character with a strong presence. The movie is interesting only when he's wheeling about on screen, but in retrospect this is probably one set of reels Davis wishes he had sat out.

The scariest thing about this hokey bombast is that it got made in the first place.

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]

The scriptwriters try to conjure some history/mythology to validate the plot's twists and turns, but the whole thing ends up more confusing than Days of Our Lives on fast-forward.

Much of what's offensive and insufferable about All About Steve can be laid at the feet of screenwriter Kim Barker, best known for inflicting "License to Wed" on the world. Why do these people still earn obscene amounts of money churning out dreck? And why do stars like Bullock keep paying them?

Definitely exceeds expectations, but in the worst way possible.

Here's what I really like about The Mod Squad: Nobody in it gives a damn.

The Toy, starring Richard Pryor, is a coarsened American remake of a deft French comedy of the same title, which starred Pierre Richard and passed this way five or six years ago. Fluctuating wildly between facetiousness and solicitude, the new version never comes close to reproducing the sane, lightweight charms of the original.

Lohan brilliantly brings off her double turn and clearly believes in the picture, as do all who worked on it. These things used to be called B movies in the old days.

A pretty dreary affair to sit through. It's not even scary.

Snow Zou’s directorial debut does have a few noteworthy attributes: attractive stars, sun-dappled cinematography and an audacious payoff.

In Police Academy 6: City Under Siege, the humor (kind word, that one) vacillates between the soporific and the moronic.

A more kid-friendly version of "Dumb and Dumber." And there's even a moral: "Yahoo for education," though the movie doesn't really put any muscle behind it.

The whole production is like a wake. Rest in peace, Bernie. Please.

The only quandary in this film is in where to begin despising it.

Someone definitely inhaled too much before making this one.

A depraved, incoherent, instantly disposable piece of hackery.

Propelled not by characters but caricatures.

Landis's handling of the cop business is unnecessarily laborious, but Murphy's patented insincerity is winning. And a few of the slapstick set pieces are genuinely thrilling, especially a riotous nighttime chase scene.

Eddie Murphy's directorial work is amateurish at best. And as a performer he looks as if he is in agony, as if his mother made him stand in front of the camera for punishment.

Someone must have told Sean Penn and Madonna that people would come to see them in anything -- and poor fools, they believed it. "Anything" in this case amounts to nothing: Shanghai Surprise, a quintessentially misbegotten fiasco even in the year of "Under the Cherry Moon." [24 Sept 1986, p.D2]

You can stick around for the only funny line, which involves a breakfast burrito, but the smart surfer would head for the hills and Willie's goat ranch.

There are two distinctive features to the movie: the mind-numbingly banal plot as one chases another who chases another, and all the offensive material.

Go expecting the very worst. Just don't expect to laugh.

We're only a little spooked, only a little amused and, by extension, only a little entertained.

There's nothing inspiring about Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie, unless you count the way it compels kids to continue to support the "Yu-Gi-Oh" franchise.

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.

America is less successful as a debate, since it isn’t one. D’Souza controls the conversation, and thus goes unchallenged when he tries to make real-world points with make-believe scenarios.

Arthur Hiller, who last directed the sour "The Babe" -- not the one about that sweet pig -- finds even less to work with in TV veteran Don Rhymer's stupid screenplay.

Usually, Ephron is one of the most reliable comic voices in the movies, but here her gifts seem to have deserted her. Though she shows her customary talent for smart one-liners, the spirit of the film is forced and desperate, as if she lacked faith in her gags and were trying to shove them down our throats.

It has no moments of athletic grace amid the chaos, no apparent sense of strategy. It's basically just mayhem set to rock music.

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)

Stinketh like the breath of a dyspeptic dragon.

We don't have much space to tell you about Glitter, so we'll be blunt. This star vehicle for singer Mariah Carey is primarily a showcase for her breasts.

Bad as Bolero is, it is unfortunately not bad enough. Seekers of inadvertent high-camp hilarity will be as let down as those who are suckered in by the promise of Bo's golden flesh. [03 Sep 1984, p.D1]

It's gotten to the point where Gooding's presence on a marquee practically guarantees we'll be bashing our heads against the seat in front of us. Bonk, bonk, bonk.

It plays like a soft-core-porn potboiler left over from the 1970s about a hot vampire chick.

The movie is fast, slick and dumb as a post.

The movie is simply not professional. It's not, even by the lowest standards of Republic B-westerns in the '30s or bad, cheap horror films in the '50s, releasable.

Neither character seems especially insightful, and their intense focus on the self and the terrific delicacy of their feelings comes to feel narcissistic and annoying.