From its opening shots, the film is like an invigorating elixir, a movie pick-me-up that delivers thrills and races your pulse but keeps your head in gear too. It's divinely frivolous, nearly perfect fun.

It would be hard to reduce filmmaking to its basics more than Fire Birds does. It's more video game than motion picture -- the first coin-operated movie.

Coarse and haphazardly engineered and never more than intermittently funny.

Screwball romance, action picture. Summer movie.

Class of 1999 gets a D for dumb, dull and derivative, and so what if director Mark Lester, who made "Class of 1984" eight years ago, is borrowing from himself? The latter was just a punked-up version of the original rock-and-roll high school film, "Blackboard Jungle." For this new venture, Lester has simply tacked on elements of "Westworld," "RoboCop" and "Terminator" in a blatant attempt to enroll the action faction.

X marks the G-spot perhaps, for this is an orgiastic comedy of terrors and errors.

Unfortunately, the fact that these particular stories come from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen King can't overcome the direction of John Harrison and the movie's basic television-level aspirations.

Edel gives us the grungy details of the atrocities without providing a context to give them relevance. In the end, the film's ugliness becomes ugliness for its own sake.

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

This is a surprisingly inept tale about an evil nanny and a killer tree that's right out of Jason's woods. Despite a prologue that aims to excuse subsequent plot deficiencies and a finale that's as absurd as you're likely to find in a modern horror film, The Guardian is simply ludicrous.

Unfortunately, Lumet isn't the brawny social commentator he would like to be -- he's a Jimmy Breslin manque'. His script chronicles a complex, gargantuan evil, but his insights into urban life haven't progressed beyond those of his earlier films -- the chaos of conflicting interests and cultural hatred is one that by now we're more than familiar with -- and his storytelling style isn't compelling or tightly focused enough to keep our attention from flagging.

Spaced Invaders is a slight, obvious sci-fi parody that would like to be in the same league as Spaceballs, but doesn't even deserve the comparison.

Certainly the going is grim, and there's nothing socially redeeming about "Blues" whatsoever, but writer/director George Armitage's movie is also funny, stirring and full of great moments done in the pop-arty, lightly macabre spirit of producer Jonathan Demme.

Feeble....Director Tony Bill tries to give Mitch Markowitz's script a spirit of madcap abandon but instead achieves a kind of forced hilarity that's neither funny nor liberating. [11 Apr 1990, p.D4]

You'll probably have some laughs along the way in spite of your better instincts.

Despite its mixture of macabre slapstick and broadly stroked caricatures, the film has sleepy-time rhythms; it's easily the pokiest farce I've ever seen.

After the film's first few minutes I watched, neither entertained nor illuminated, with something close to total indifference... (Greenaway's) extravagances and attacks on taste seem less like the bravery of the courageous artist than the empty desperation of a charlatan.