It's a completely botched effort -- botched in its direction, its writing and editing.

A sour story with a repellent lead character, deadly comic schtick and tin-eared direction to produce 90 minutes of sheer, plodding mirthlessness.

The film is a failure in just about every way, save for its acting, which is adequate.

Sommers film just lies there, weighted down by a complete lack of wit, artfulness and internal logic. So it's a disaster -- a big, loud, boring wreck.

Duller than first version.

If garbage could think, it would look down on 9 Dead Gay Guys as garbage.

Even camp status eludes this tepid and misguided picture.

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had their fun with From Dusk Till Dawn, and now they need to stay away from each other. For their own good. Forever.

This may be hard to believe, but there's not a single moment of drama or tension in any of the action sequences. And the film is made up almost entirely of action.

The best bits come in the first few minutes -- or maybe the jokes just seem fresher then.

The result is embarrassing: quick cuts and shaky, hand- held camera work, bad acting and lots of attitude.

With Lake at the center, something that could have been innocuous becomes painful, and a sure shot at mediocrity is transformed into one of the worst films of the year.

The script is weak and unrelenting. The stunts are unspectacular. The special effects are nothing you haven't seen before. But worst of all, there's the spectacle of Schwarzenegger glorying in the wonder of Schwarzenegger. [18 Jun 1993, p.C1]

Cocktail is unbelievable - a picture that sets itself up as a gritty, authentic character study but is laughable, false and stupid in all its details. The only connection to reality here is that there are actually such things as bartenders. [29 Jul 1988, p.E1]

In UHF we get 90 minutes of Al Yankovic, and that's 85 minutes too much. The problem isn't that he's weird, but that he isn't weird at all. The premises for his gags are commonplace and predictable, and his follow-throughs lack imagination. He seems incapable of spinning more than one tired joke from each set-up. [21 Jul 1989, p.E1]

Muddled and endless.

A dull, boring, poorly acted, limply written and thoroughly unappealing fantasy, featuring bland characters locked in a struggle of no interest.

It is a colossal bomb, an epic miscalculation, an excuse for actor self-indulgence and for what sounds very much like bad improvisation.

No matter how guilty our knucklehead-protagonist's victims supposedly are, it's difficult to maintain a rooting interest.

There's nothing here but wreckage. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is so ineptly made that the story is advanced solely through announcements.

An ugly, misguided exercise.

She's hopeless, he's hopeless, and this movie is just ghastly.

Attack the Block is the other alien-invasion movie opening today, the lousy one, the one from Britain. In Britain, it's probably just a regular bad movie, but here - with accents that are barely comprehensible and in-jokes about council flats, not to mention a swerving handheld camera and some of the cheapest effects since "Night of the Lepus" - it's surprising this thing ever got released.

It's just not enough to say that The Three Stooges is the death of comedy. Rather, it's the death, burial, putrefaction and decomposition of comedy. It is where comedy, once alive, ends up as dust blowing in the wind, like something out of a really bad Kansas song.