An action-choked dud in which even the closing outtakes barely deserve to be left on the cutting-room floor?

Darkness was clearly tossed together like salad in the editing room, since it's little more than the sum of its unshocking shock cuts.

A sodden ''feminist'' vulgarization.

Simply put, it may be the lamest movie ever made about poor white... Southern characters.

Feeling Minnesota suggests Sam Shepard trying to be Quentin Tarantino. It makes even gun battles seem pretentious.

By the end, you feel like a drill sergeant-you want to wipe that stupid grin off Sandler's face.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson (the Scream trilogy), having bottomed out in the horror genre, now dips below bottom (there isn't a line that has his knowing sweet-and-sour zing).

Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen.

So badly told that it ends up dissecting a corruption that exudes from nowhere but itself.

As Brier's comrade-in-lip-gloss, Ashlee Simpson, dressed to look like a teenybop girl version of Crispin Glover in "River's Edge," is the real deal -- in fake cred.

The movie is trash shot to look like art imitating trash.

Atrociously scripted and edited.

The movie lacks even the misplaced fervor of obsession. It's lifeless kitsch.

Don't let the Carl Hiaasen pedigree fool you: Hoot is an Afterschool Special too crummy to give a hoot about.

A glumly serious British mock rock doc: You could forgive the paucity of jokes if Brothers of the Head had anything to say, or if the '70s-vérité surface were remotely convincing.

This dank and rhythmless ''psychological'' potboiler was directed by Jamie Babbit, who made 2000's "But I'm a Cheerleader," and though she has shifted tones from shrill camp to moody angst in The Quiet, she still thinks in stereotypes so thin that they put you to sleep the moment they open their mouths.

A few more films like Tears of the Black Tiger, and kitsch will be on its way to having a bad name.

Hannibal Rising reduces this great creature of the pop imagination to a Eurotrash Boy Scout throwing a homicidal snit fit.

Murphy speaks in a breathy lisp, as if his mouth had been partially buttoned shut, and he doesn't give himself the nerd's traditional redeeming feature of a geeky, slide-rule intellect. Norbit, all frozen gawk, is just a very dim bulb.

Chatwin comes off as prickly and annoyed -- they should have called this "Perturbia."

Vampire in Brooklyn is a horror comedy that mixes lame blood-pellet effects with lame gags, and it clunks along on a series of interchangeably deserted streets that manage to look dank and overlit at the same time.

Last Action Hero makes such a strenuous show of winking at the audience (and itself) that it seems to be celebrating nothing so much as its own awfulness. In a sense, the movie's incipient commercial failure completes it aesthetically.

The most irritating thing about Hoffa is that even after you've sat through Danny DeVito's turgid, meaninglessly sprawling account of the Teamster boss' rise and fall, you still won't have any idea who Jimmy Hoffa was.

It's like a film-school thesis gone disastrously wrong.

Inert dud of a hitmen-are-people-too comedy.

In a season of digital bombast, it can be a relief to walk into a stodgy life-of-the-great-man costume drama. Goya's Ghosts, before it turns into a messy, horse-drawn load, achieves a civilized stuffiness that gives off its own mild pleasure.

The audience gets the message (religious fanaticism: bad), but nothing we see is convincing on its own.

The morality of revenge is barely at issue in a movie that pushes the plausibility of revenge right over a cliff.

The film completely misses what should have been its real target -- the filming of Game of Death, a martial-arts campfest worthy of Edward D. Wood Jr.

You can expect a lot of shredding and gurgling. 30 Days of Night is relentless, but it's also relentlessly one-note.

The backstories keep piling up, with nods to "The Shining," "The Ring," and a dozen other gothic supernatural chillers, yet the result doesn't remotely scare you.

Kate Hudson is as blah and dazed as her costar is cloyingly enthused. If it's possible to have too even a tan, Hudson in Fool's Gold would be the poster child for it.

Simon Pegg has what it takes, but he's saddled himself with a script (co-written by Pegg and Michael Ian Black) that Adam Sandler wouldn't have pulled out of his bottom drawer.

None of the faux icons comes close to being a character. Instead, they are contrasted with a group of nuns who skydive without parachutes. Could this possibly be a metaphor for Korine's filmmaking? It certainly goes splat.

It's like "Schindler's List" crossed with "The Sound of Music," and Roger Spottiswoode directs it in a stiff, lifeless, utterly dated style of international squareness.

It's not much fun to see these two reduced to "Mad TV" parodies of themselves.

It's just a grindingly inert death-wish thriller.

While George Lopez, Cheech Marin, and Paul Rodriguez are funny men, it's amazing how boring these Latin-shtick cutups can be when none of them gets a single good line.

Randall Miller (Bottle Shock), appears to be trying to cross a bad Elmore Leonard thriller with a bad indie-festival family-angst comedy. He gives us the worst of both worlds.

It's a dispirited, galumphing mess.

It all makes you want to see a Bollywood movie, all right -- a good one.

Writer-director-stars Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, of the Whitest Kids U'Know, here prove the crassest, most maladroit moviemakers you know.

A stillborn rendering of Michael Chabon's first novel.

Isn't it time Steve Zahn grew up? Ever since the '90s, this walking quirk of an actor has pushed his dazed solipsistic zaniness (he's like Michael J. Fox’s hillbilly cousin), but he's 41 now, and it no longer looks cute on him.

As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this headache-inducing techno-violent mishmash.

The result is a sub-"Saw" knockoff that manages to be brutal yet monotonous, not to mention monstrously unpleasant.

The thinnest, draggiest, and most tediously preachy of the Saw films.

A ponderous dystopian bummer that might be described as "The Road Warrior" without car chases, or "The Road" without humanity.

Whenever an actress takes on a gritty working-class role, the audience does a gut check of authenticity. Either the actress gets it, like Melissa Leo did in "Frozen River," or she doesn't, like Michelle Monaghan as the spoilin'-for-a-fight truck-driver heroine of the inert indie dud Trucker

In Trash Humpers, the latest slovenly, haphazard, is-it-a-travesty-if-it's-bad-on-purpose avant doodle from director Harmony Korine, three figures in rubbery old-age makeup do indeed mimic intercourse with Dumpsters.

Taylor Hackford, fails to squeeze the tiniest bit of juice, sexy or comic or otherwise, out of the chintzy-libertine locale.

I wish I could say that the film is half as intriguing as it sounds, but A Woman, a Gun... lacks the Coen brothers' precision, their diabolical game-board cleverness. It's a remake in shaggy outline only.

The Rite commits the supreme sin of making the devil dull.

Anderson has made a zombie movie without the zombies.

Except for the relentless, jittery way that the film has been photographed, there's nothing of interest going on in it. It's all fractious guerrilla-newsreel "style" masquerading a void.

It's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" with only one chipmunk, and (if possible) even less fun.

It's one of those stultifying aftermath-of-
a-car-crash movies.

The title, Machine Gun Preacher, makes it sound like a piece of grindhouse kitsch - and by the time it's over, you'll be thinking, ''If only!''

It will have you groaning between yawns.

Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better.

It will come as no surprise that the movie isn't scary. But here's the real damn: It isn't funny, either.

The movie, a shoddy mess, is a bargain-basement rip-off of ''Ronin."

The definition of aiming low is when the John Hughes film you're ripping off is ''Weird Science."

Stops time, all right -- it stretches 94 minutes into something that begins to feel like infinity.

The hilarious diminuendo of that title is such that the movie might as well have been called ''Wes Craven Presents: Not a Hell of a Lot.''

Schaeffer's howler of a romantic comedy, which presents itself as a valentine to Clayburgh even as it keeps dreaming up fresh ways to humiliate her.

It has that vintage Polish pace, their signature arch pomposity and rhythmless weirdness, only this time the brothers had to go and make a cosmic allegory of American dreams.

Serves up the sort of shrill ''satire'' of middle-class Jewish vulgarity in which the mere mention of words like ''brisket'' and ''klezmer'' is automatically presumed to be hilarious.

The Punisher is a moronically inept and tedious piece of death-wish trash.

Nothing in Imaginary Heroes rings true, least of all a plot that lightly combines domestic abuse, adulterous pregnancy, teen bisexuality, job abandonment, and a possible case of Mysterious Movie Disease. These are not ordinary people. Or real ones.

The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.

Fragmented and monotonous, without a semblance of the gymnastic cleverness that at least made the first Mortal Kombat film into watchable trash, Mortal Kombat Annihilation is as debased as movies come.

Selma Blair, the one vibrant actress in a cast of colorless screamers (including Tom Welling from Smallville and Maggie Grace from Lost), takes Adrienne Barbeau's old role.

The Zodiac has been made with the dunderheaded flatness of bad '70s TV.

Shainberg reduces this most disturbing of all photographers to a portraitist of Halloween.

The gimmick in The Abandoned is that people battle their zombie doubles, whom they can't kill, since they'd be killing themselves. But the movie sinks so deep into deathly atmosphere that there's no life to it.

Confined to just a few sets, the movie is like the pilot for a sitcom you never want to see. Yet Ephron seems to think she's making a feel-good holiday classic: She floods the soundtrack with old pop versions of Christmas standards, trying to render stale comedy appetizing by drenching it in syrup. [23 Dec 1994, p.50]

Angel-A shows how director Luc Besson can be French in a way that even the French might despise...Quel ick. And très tedious.

In theory, A Thousand Words should draw on its star's abilities as a physical comedian, but Murphy, miming his order for a triple latte at Starbucks, comes off like Charlie Chaplin on crystal meth; he's strenuously unfunny to watch.

This is the rare horror film so bad that you almost wish it had turned into a good old connect-the-gory-dots slasher movie. The only mystery at work is how Lawrence's agent ever let her sign on to this.

This may be the first talking-animal movie in which the critter hero seems to have been body-snatched by a commentator from C-SPAN.

The trouble with Whipped isn't that its characters are dirty mouthed horndog jerks -- it's that they're phony dirty mouthed horndog jerks.

As an actor, Raymond is whiny and annoying, but not nearly so much as the film.

Just... bad. As in BAD bad.

Even Snow Day's winter wonderland looks fake.

An inept low-budget thriller.

The film isn't just bad; it's a barely coherent, inert mess -- a heart-tugger for voidoids.

Why would filmmakers with this much talent work this hard to thumb their noses at everything they put on screen?

The comedy is nonexistent.

This may be the only would-be blockbuster that's a sprawling, dissociated mess on purpose. It's a perverse landmark: the first postmodern Hollywood disaster.

Poisonously smug, one-joke indie comedy.

A movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it.

Personally, I'd say that it was about time Arquette was leashed.

It's a shrill, stupid, brickbat-blatant piece of hackwork that practically sweats to be ''commercial.''

It's like ''Grease: The Next Generation'' acted out by the food-court staff at SeaWorld.

The picture is so lethargic that I began to think of watching it as a form of atonement.

If you look hard, you can make out a story in Femme Fatale, but it has nothing to do with the senseless pileup of jewel thievery, shutterbug voyeurism, and leggy sex bombs so shallow and bad they seem to have come out of a 1978 copy of Hustler magazine.

It appears to have been modeled on the worst revenge-of-the-nerds clichés the filmmakers could dredge up.

It might be courting hyperbole to call Corky Romano the single worst movie ever to feature an ''SNL'' cast member (Dan Aykroyd hit some pretty arid valleys), but I'm willing to go out on a critical limb and rank it among the all-time bottom dozen.

A somber, draggy, deadweight, lugubrious, absurdly self serious version of ''American Beauty.''

There's something uniquely embarrassing about a rock & roll fable that is no more authentic (and no less coy) than an episode of ''The Monkees'' yet insists on presenting itself as the epitome of rebel-yell cool.

Halloween: Resurrection comes closer to comatainment.

For the audience, it's like watching the dreckiest of teen puppy courtships trying to pass itself off as ''Annie Hall.'' La-de-blah.

The only thing shocking about it, however, is the degree to which self-congratulatory gutter exhibitionism has become the degraded ash end of indie ''edge.''

Benigni's Pinocchio is meant to be adorable, but he comes off as less an enchanted puppet than as a harmlessly deranged middle-aged man prancing about in the kind of froufrou cream-colored pantsuit that Dinah Shore retired to her back closet in 1977.

To dismiss this movie for being ''offensive'' would be to offer it high praise.

Ryan radiates neither desire nor terror. She's freeze-dried in a world of lifelessly abstract feminine fear, and so is the movie.

The film treats its audience like fidgety junior-high schoolers, piling on the sub-Koyaanisqatsi cityscapes and cheesy episodes with Marlee Matlin as a lonely photographer, plus bouncy cartoons of human cells who look as if they'd be happier chasing stains in bathroom-cleanser commercials.

She Hate Me manages to be at once racist, homophobic, utterly fake, and unbearably tedious. This time, it's Spike Lee who's doing the bamboozling.

Top-heavy with whimsy, so muddled it makes Mission: Impossible look like a model of narrative cohesion, The Saint is the apo-theosis of the new incoherence, with the cliches of espionage and action thrillers jammed together like bumper cars.

As bumbling and mindless, as naively misconceived, as that clapping-through-tears moniker.

In every way dreadful.

A black comedy in the form of vicarious serial punishment.

Parts of the film play like the world's slowest and most insensitive reality show (Who Wants to Be an Octogenarian?).

The movie has no wit, no charm, no cleverness, no traction. Simply put, it is no fun.

What sin did Heather Locklear commit to deserve her role in The Perfect Man?

On the level of a no-budget student film in which the shots barely match up into sequences. It's about as much fun as watching blood dry.

Stupefyingly tedious and annoying.

The real problem is the movie itself. The plot, with its interlocking contrivances, is like a machine that keeps trapping the actors in its gears. Since they aren't allowed to relate to each other on a simple human level, the spangly back-and-forth chemistry on which a romantic comedy depends is nowhere in sight.

The Libertine is such a torturous mess that it winds up doing something I hadn't thought possible: It renders Johnny Depp charmless.

Carrey suggests an escaped mental patient impersonating a game-show host-and, what's worse, his hyperbolically obnoxious shtick is the whole damned show.

Manderlay is turgid and hollow.

A fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing.

As the killer, who plucks out his victims' eyeballs, Kane, the seven-foot bald WWE wrestler who's like a modern Tor Johnson, is so inept he's more cuddly than terrifying.

It doesn't take long to figure out that Shadowboxer 's Helen Mirren, as a cancer-ridden hitwoman, and Cuba Gooding Jr., as her doting stepson, are the most unconvincing team of hired assassins in movie history.

Dour, absurdist, gruesomely awful.

Fragmentation can be an artful method; it can also be the last refuge for someone who scarcely knows how to make a film. In the no-budget fantasia Wild Tigers I Have Known, the fragments are like a borrowed collage of gay coming-of-age tropes.

Combines hugs and ''pain'' and dialogue so fakey-cute it makes your ears hurt.

Cowgirls, a flaky-surreal adaptation of Tom Robbins' 1976 feminist hipster road novel, finds the director of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho" lost in the ozone of his own private whimsies.

Being Human doesn't seem to be about anything: Its five astonishingly limp parables might have been spun by a depressed Aesop who forgot to take his Prozac.

A grisly piece of torture porn.

A joke of a title in search of a movie with a single good joke.

Mr. Magorium, who is 243 years old (so are his jokes), is a cross between Willy Wonka and Geppetto, but Hoffman plays him with little more than a goofy dumb lisp, achieved by tucking his lower lip under his upper teeth, so that he looks just as rabbity-stoopid as he sounds.

The movie is one soporific, depressed, deadeningly vague scene after another.

Is there anything more dull than an ineptly cynical fairy tale?

A soporific dud, which should have been tossed out of Sundance.

George Lucas is turning into the enemy of fun.

The filmmakers even manage to turn seamy Bangkok into the least exotic setting imaginable.

This remake is merely vile (and dull).

It's like a pastry that's been sitting on the shelf for 60 years.

A magical-realist sitcom war farce that ends up being about nothing but its own slovenly smugness.