Sure ain't a movie. Nope, it's a product, pure and very simple and carefully tested to sell to the widest possible market.

Yes, Virginia, there is a poop fairy, which is why studio heads persist in tucking the likes of RV under their pillows, confident they'll awaken Monday morning to find all that brown turned straight to green.

If plots were people, this obese thing would be cuing up for liposuction. Mr. Brooks may well boast the greediest yarn in the annals of filmdom. One serial killer just doesn't cut it – no fewer than four, actual and potential, pack these frames.

One Star (and only for quoting Knee-Chee).

Is this movie so god-awful bad that it's hilariously good? Can't be bothered deciding. Figure that's an answer in itself.

Apparently pitched somewhere between a farce and a fable, this flick is neither. Just foolish. And frustrating. And, mostly, damned annoying.

Being risibly bad, The Happening is at least worth a laugh. Exactly one laugh, by my reckoning, and completely unintended but no less full-throated for that.

The Love Guru is a comedy like the Leafs are a hockey team.

The movie pretty much blows.

I think that the perfect name for the chick in a chick flick is Rebecca Bloomwood. I know that if Charles Dickens had possessed the good sense to write chick flicks, he could not have done better than Rebecca Bloomwood.

C'mon, in matters of haunted-house inhabitation, settling into an ex-mortuary is like renting above a dentist's office -- ashen faces and ghastly screams come with the territory.

We know to a certainty what will happen. More to the point, the writers know that we know. But here’s the intriguing bit: They don’t care. Rather, their job as diligent Tinseltown hacks is simply to devise ways of filling up the remaining 90 minutes.

Frankly, about 20 minutes into this dud, I was rooting for the alien beasties -- their diagnosis seemed dead-on.

Because the society in Menace II Society is boxed in sociologically, the picture (for all its strengths) is boxed in esthetically. Already, this genre is beginning to seem as much a victim as the victims it portrays.

Steve Miner is no Carpenter. A directing veteran of the Friday the 13th saga (parts II and III, in case you care), he's a plodder who favours long, dull buildups to short, dull climaxes -- it's slaughter by the numbers.

There are easily 54 reasons to dis 54, but let's start and finish with the obvious: The script plays like a proud offering from the lead hand at the Cliché Factory.

This picture breaks through the limits and goes way beyond the pale -- it seems to enjoy irking us for the sheer hell of it.

View from the Top never gets off the bottom -- comedies don't come much flatter.

Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.

The flames sure look real, but everything else in Backdraft, director Ron Howard's inflatable ode to firefighters, seems about as genuine as a plastic log in an electric hearth. Howard's particular type of schmaltz works well enough in small dabs on comic canvases (Splash, Cocoon, even Parenthood), but pumped up to heroic proportions, the sentimentality is just plain silly - in this case, cheap melodrama on a two-hour jag.

Using a kidnapping plot to call up some old-fashioned suspense, it doesn't even get a dial tone.

Can't have an American Thanksgiving without a turkey.

The film lacks the moronic consistency that graces the Sandlerian oeuvre at its most pristine.

Quite an artful dissembler. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this clunker has somehow managed to pose as an actual feature movie, the kind that charges full admission and gets hyped on TV and purports to amuse small children and ostensible adults.

To be fair, the movie is nothing if not consistent -- the idea is every bit as dumb as the execution.

Dumb and Dumber 'n the hood.

The visual big top is the scourging and the crucifixion -- again and again, Gibson returns to the blood-letting. Again and again, we're exposed to the clinical repetition of a single act, until an alleged act of passion comes to seem boring and passionless. Is that not a definition of pornography?

Ho, ho, horrible.

The refined taste insists on risibly bad, on hysterically bad, on poke-your-seatmate-in-the-ribs bad, and this falls well short of that hallowed mark -- it's just routinely bad.

Remember that the director, the renowned Mike Mitchell, is the genius who helmed "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo," and be sufficiently generous to accept that such a high level of excellence is hard to sustain.

The same studio has aimed a remake at the same family market. Translation: The once-modest piece has been redesigned as a vehicle (a lumbering SUV) for Steve Martin, stripped of any vestigial charm, and then thrown into neutral, where its manic engine does nothing but roar loudly and pointlessly for the duration.

No less laughable is the ending, where Ritchie neatly reflects today's prevailing attitude -- that audiences can't be trusted to handle a hint of ambiguity, but can live happily with flat-out stupidity.

And De Bont's effects are wildly over the top, devoid of the stylish cuts and intriguing angles that enriched the original. In fact, there's so little panache in his destructive action that it begins to seem like a weird act of self-destruction.

Fear strikes out in slasher flick This movie is laced with enough gratuitous bloodshed and reactionary zeal to warm the heart of a Montana militiaman. [12 Apr 1996]

Jefferson in Paris isn't merely wooden; it's concrete. Nor is it simply bad; the thing is astonishingly bad. Sure looks pretty though. [08 Apr 1995]

Writer/director Gus Van Sant, who's built his reputation on the romantic decadence of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," completely misses the poetry and the irony of the book. [20 May 1994]

FALLING Down is a nasty bit of business, a two-faced manipulator that condones what it pretends to condemn. Cluttered and often downright silly, it's not much of a movie, but it is a fascinating sign of the times - a litmus test for every prejudice and fear harboured by the white middle class in ailing, urban America. [26 Feb 1993, p.C6]

Occasionally, Murphy cuts loose with an ad-libbed riff that's almost funny, but then it's back to the slim-fast plot and the stick-on crudities. [03 Jul 1992]

A three-hour oration, rambling and familiar and repetitive, during which director Oliver Stone uses the assassination of John Kennedy as an elaborate pretext for delivering a dull sermon. [20 Dec 1991]

Think of a really bad, uncensored Saturday Night Live comedy sketch. Then make it worse – make it longer.

Damned if those dual spoilsports, the gladiatorial director Ridley Scott reteamed with his portly star Russell Crowe, haven't drained every drop of merriment right out of the myth.

Surviving Picasso is flat-out dull, hanging like a K Mart print in a suburban mall - a testament to Merchant-Ivory's blew-it period. [20 Sep 1996]

Adam is back to lining his pockets again.

Only read the bottom line of the accountants' review, after your generic masterpiece has gone the distance from theatrical release to video stores to the nethermost regions of the cable dial. If the accountants' judgment proves kind, head to the bank and feel free to enjoy precisely what you've denied so many others – a really good laugh.

Neither boring enough to qualify as pornography nor vital enough to generate a controversy.

Where the hell is the movie?

Wisdom lies in taking a pass on Hall Pass, but bravery demands something else, something far more instructive: Watch it, every vacuous frame, if only to measure the precise aesthetic distance from blessing to curse.

Film encyclopedias may beg to differ, the Cahiers du Cinéma might correct me, but, as far as your humble correspondent knows, Wanderlust is the first mainstream movie ever to star a Floppy Prosthetic Penis.

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

It's a dumb-ass comedy done strictly for a seriously large paycheque.

2 Days in New York plays like 2 years in Attica. You don't watch this movie so much as serve it out, a light comedy doled out as a heavy sentence.

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

Soderbergh has bathed the Depression in lovely, golden-brown hues - so lovely, so golden, that the flick seems to be unfolding from inside the delicious core of a burnished bran muffin. [20 August 1993]

Meant to be a nodding aside to the film buff, with plenty of in-jokes for the cognoscenti, Crimewave ends up as a random list in dire need of a good file-clerk. [3 July 1987]

[Pitof's] managed to create an entire digitalized city that has all the allure of an underground parking garage. And his action, it's cluttered; his editing, it's confused. The result: blandness butchered, hamburger chopped, kitty littered.

It's not a bomb at all. A dud is more like it - Last Action Hero isn't interesting enough to be explosively bad. For all the inflated pyrotechnics on the screen, the picture seems consistently grey and almost pitiably small. [18 Jun 1993, p.D1]

Consequently, as star vehicles go, Ford Fairlane runs straight over the very guy it's meant to transport. Some will see that as the movie's greatest fault, others as its only virtue. Take your pick, and come out swinging. [13 Jul 1990, p.C1]

But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star. It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.

An actual film of unrelenting silliness. Far from being a "miracle of rare device" (yes, the movie even quotes Coleridge), this is a disaster of common occurrence - a poorly directed, ineptly edited, badly photographed bundle of celluloid. [14 Aug 1980]

A sustained if wildly uncoordinated assault on our senses, complementing those feverish jump cuts with a cliché of equally stunning proportions

A 0-star Comedy that is nonetheless guaranteed to rake in multimillions.

Bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

The whole mess turns nuttier by the second. A black comedy, you ask? I wish. There are plenty of laughs here, but nary a one is intentional.

Watching inept American actors and wishing they were badly dubbed into Japanese isn't any fun at all.

There's nothing even mildly intriguing, or remotely galvanizing, about Showgirls.

The incomprehensible leads to the inexplicable which ends in the indecipherable.

Calls itself a movie. It has words and pictures like a movie, and will appear in theatres like a movie, and will damn sure charge admission like a movie. But, truth be told, that's pretty much where the resemblance stops.