A big techno-dud.

Technically it does not qualify as one of the worst American-made movies ever. It only feels that way. The movie's offenses are too numerous to catalog.

It has a lack of ambition and energy that is almost total: It's the most this movie can do to roll over and ask for a little more lotion on its back. [22 July 1987]

Such a low-class, low-laughs rip-off that it makes "There's Something About Mary" resemble a Noel Coward comedy of manners. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

A staggeringly bad picture: a shallow, cliche-ridden mess that keeps blowing up on screen.

Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage should be ashamed to have written such nonsense.

Mind-numbing sequel to "Pokemon the First Movie."

So derivative and crass that it's far more entertaining to try to think of the dozens of films it's ripping off than it is to take any of it at face value.

Just Married is what industry people refer to as "January Junk," cinematic flotsam that gets tossed ashore once they have cleared the shelves of Oscar contenders.

There may be better ways to waste your time than seeing this movie.

You have to have faith that kids will recognize a bad movie when it's foisted on them -- and they don't get much worse than The New Guy.

A criminal waste of talent.

Put together enough pointless, random details, and you get Gigli, a movie that's less incompetent than bewildering.

It's just a watery, undeservedly smug update of the low-budget, kids-stranded-in-the-sticks bloodfests of the 1970s and '80s.

This film should have clocked in at 90 minutes, tops, rather than almost two hours. A good, healthy scissor-snipping might have allowed some of its quirkier aspects (like the use of a stun gun and a jaw-dropping lab result) to stand out more.

About as sharp an updated version of the original as is Jennifer Lopez's song of the same name a modern, Latina version of the Beatles classic.

By embracing a static plot, making Gerardo a depressed Robotron and Mexico City a ghost town, Hernandez only succeeds in alienating us, even while focusing on the most universal of themes: Breaking up is hard to do.

Let's make this simple: If you spend money on Soul Plane, you've been played.

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.

The kind of movie that produces a particular series of questions: How the heck did this get made? Who needed a tax shelter? Who had money to burn?

For the most part, The Gold Diggers is not even chuckle-producing. At best, it might warm a cockle or two or provoke a bit of a smile.

Although several of her (Breillat's) previous films were intriguing and provocative, this one seems styled more as raw material for satire on "Mad TV" or "Saturday Night Live."

Therese's story would work better as a marionette show than on the big screen. The camera is best at picking up subtleties, and there are simply none here.

Run-of-the-mill sitcom-y in its pedestrian writing and uninspired direction.

Resembles an old Nine Inch Nails video. Missing from the mix are any characters with whom you'd want to spend one minute around a campfire.

Aside from providing a lesson about movies with titles that provide their own bad review, Say It Isn't So gives low humor a bad name.

Serves up horrendous lead acting, murky cinematography, bland atmosphere, unengaging romance, mug-crazy cameo performances, bash-on-the-head satire and ill-timed slapstick gags that look like outtakes from a Bozo the Clown show gone berserk. [20 Oct 1995]

Devotees of awful filmmaking can't go wrong with this one.

That this bit of pustulence is based on a video game of the same name is no surprise. It explains the thin plot, characters and abundant gunplay.

A sad, wasted movie.

Where the original was a serious film with funny moments, this movie isn't sure if it's a drama or comedy, too incompetently rendered to be both. What it accomplishes instead is to be nothing at all. An excessive, stupid, empty-headed nothing.

Bewilderingly bad.

The director is first-timer Mike Bigelow. Nothing's paced or shaped for maximum payoff; the shooting and editing rhythms add only clutter and noise, and the slapstick is strictly of the skull-banging, ear-splitting variety.

The movie itself has no edge. It barely has a movie.

One redeeming feature of this picture is that it will make great fodder for those make-fun-of-the-movie TV shows.

What's remarkable is how absolutely every character in the film is a movie cliche.

Sadly, the concept of dialogue is totally lost on the makers of Venom, a laughably bad example of teen-scream movies.

It's a long slog, not because what the film says is provocative but because the technique is as slack as the writing.

Could have been a funny movie. There are a few truths about food-service that McKittrick gets right but doesn't fully exploit.

So many romantic comedies come and go without making the slightest impression. Elizabethtown is not one of them; I found it galling.

It's not a film, it's an excuse to show victims bleeding at the mouth, or getting shot in the eye, or plucking out their own eyeballs. Most gruesome of all, the sequel oozes dialogue that is best described as "functional."

Newbie director Richards shoots all the women like slabs of meat, and his self-seriousness throughout London--some of it tries to be funny, a lot of it is funny by accident--borders on the delusional.

The polite word for all this is "repurposing," a euphemism for "hauling someone else's garbage."

I have a sneaking suspicion that Running Scared could become a cult classic.

The Sisters isn't just bad Chekhov; it's bad Chekhov modernized and then plunked in front of a camera.

There are flashes of grim humor interspersed with the murders, but not enough wit to elevate this movie beyond its primary identity: grisly revenge fantasy.

With a weak script, utterly unsympathetic characters and a nonsensical plot, it can barely keep plodding along.

Williams does a fine job with her role. I was pulling for her throughout her dreary journey. It's too bad it didn't get anywhere.

Has one point to make: Islam is a bad, baaaaaaaaad religion, and it's a miracle you're even alive and reading this, so intent most Muslims are on your destruction.

You'd have to go back to "My Stepmother Is an Alien" to find a male fantasy/nightmare this off-putting.

A movie of good intentions and awful results.

Gordon, she of the Selma Diamond voice and mournful glare, is by far the most interesting aspect in a picture that might be termed unreleasably dull, if it weren't in fact in release at the moment en route to DVD.

Kathy Baker, as Burden's elegantly sodden mother, shows the only sign of interpretive life in this stiff-jointed enterprise. She has about five minutes on screen; she's lucky that way.

Rosenbush strives for a difficult blend of spoof and sincerity with Zen Noir. In the spirit of rebirth, let's assume that the next time he makes it, it'll turn out fine.

The only two onscreen items with any star quality belong to Simpson, and they're barely contained in shirts that seem to be holding on for dear life. Comedy fans, beware; breast fans, rejoice!

A half-silly, half-earnest indie with the soul of a John Hughes-era sex comedy.

Laughing at the freaks and then feeling bad about it is the sole reason for the existence of this pale little film.

Shottas exists purely in the realm of rasta-music-video fakery.

A soft-core sex comedy that keeps throwing out comic variations on the idea of the line between gay and straight sexuality.

A sort-of combination of "Lambs," "Batman Begins" and "The Joy of Cooking," Hannibal Rising ostensibly dramatizes the atrocities that turned Hannibal Lecter from loving child to serial killer. But this film is larded up with so many food references that I'm undecided whether this story belongs in a film compendium or a recipe file.

Writer-director Stewart Wade expanded his festival-circuit short film into a blobby, watery feature-length enterprise, unredeemed by its cast (though Sally Kirkland shows up as Todd's mom).

Watching Heather Graham, Tom Cavanagh and a stridently adorable Alan Cumming do their wide-eyed, moony thing in the romantic comedy Gray Matters raises the question: Is it possible for a filmgoer to be twinkled to death?

Macy's character finds romance with the Madrid, N. M., diner owner played by Marisa Tomei. They're the only two people on screen who relate in any way. But there's no movie here. There is only a tired "City Slickers"-inspired idea for a movie.

A wish fulfillment fantasy of staggering silliness, both smirkingly cutesy and gratingly offensive, this is one for the movie ash heap.

Without the brute vigilante junk, this 82-minute picture would be approximately 2 minutes long.

A real stinker. It doesn't have the courage of its own bad taste, or that of its villain.

there's no joy in this movie. It's a safe, compromised, even preachy, fable; a wannabe hip romp that never gets going. [07 Jul 1995]

For years I've criticized Murphy for not working with the best directors or powerful female co-stars. But he does that here, and his movie is still a clunker. Relatives are listed in the credits; maybe he needs to stop trying to completely control the films he makes. Either that or it's time for another stand-up concert film. [27 Oct 1995, p.B]

Someone should have told Steve Martin that, prodigiously talented though he is, his over-the-top caricature of a displaced mobster could not sustain an entire movie, particularly one as scattershot as My Blue Heaven. [20 Aug 1990, p.2]

The confusing screenplay, by John Eskow and Richard Rush, makes a few fumbling attempts to get a plot going (Downey crash-lands and has to be rescued by Gibson; later, their CIA bosses try to frame them for drug smuggling), but mainly the movie tries to get by on attitude, which is a mistake when Mel Gibson is its main perpetrator. [10 Aug 1990]

In Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy continues his one-man war against the female gender. Those women he doesn't kill outright are punched, maimed and slugged with garbage cans. But apparently they deserve it-there isn't a single female character in the film who isn't a prostitute. [17 Nov 1989, p.A]

None of the characters has been written with any personality, and none of the actors succeeds in discovering any. [05 Mar 1993]

Brooks' own timing as a director doesn't seem up to its usual snuff. Light-years stretch out between the set-up of a gag and its payoff, and for a director who has always depended on the quantity of his jokes rather than the quality, the gap is fatal. When a character is introduced as "Pizza the Hut," and then shown as a melting mass of mozzarella and tomato sauce, the result is to turn a fairly clever pun into something thuddingly obvious and vaguely nauseating. [24 Jun 1987, p.3]

With The Loss of Sexual Innocence, director Mike Figgis reaches an almost comical low in the pursuit of what appears to be a desperate need to express deeper, uh, depth. Figgis' deliberate obfuscation may delight him, but it leaves the viewer mystified and bitter. [18 Jun 1999]

A sincere but clumsy attempt to capture the pain of a man trying to cope with loss and divorce through the ages. [06 May 1994]

A fatally compromised, half-realized execution. [ 10 Jul 1992]

What an enormous waste of talent and money is Labyrinth. [30 Jun 1986, p.3]

Kalifornia is that deadliest of combinations: a pretentious B movie. It repeatedly smacks the viewer in the face and then pretends that it has some intellectual reason for doing so. [03 Sep 1993]

The first starring vehicle for shock comic Andrew Dice Clay, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, turns out to be the kind of detective spoof worn out 30 years ago by Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, though refitted with salty language, graphic violence and an attitude toward women that makes the Marquis de Sade look like Phil Donahue. [11 Jul 1990, p.18]

Are teenagers really supposed to identify with a clumsy caricature such as Charlie, who, in spite of all his expulsions and school crimes, comes across as a gawping, perpetually surprised infant in an adult body?

Rush Hour 3 is DOA.

It sets a tone, all right. A lot of gamers (sorry, "filmgoers") may well enjoy writer-director Michael Davis' ultraviolent lark. It's not meant to be taken seriously. But films like this are worth taking seriously because they're genuinely cruddy and hollow and, yes, vile.

Not-funniest comedy of the year so far.

Good Luck Chuck is this year’s low-ender to beat.

Monaghan’s comic timing saves this go-nowhere affair from 100 percent lousiness.

Viewers who don’t flee the intrusively uplifting soundtrack and choking sentiment get just what that opening promised: a by-the-numbers, based-in-reality inspirational sports movie, thick with overwhelming pride and nostalgia for small-town farmland America.

The lighting is appropriately dim, the music is reasonably clever, and they get in a few nice scares in the beginning. But as the movie wears on and Angela’s desperation grows, any glimmer of fun seeps away. And we’re left watching the same old grim game of cat and mouse.

The usual bad movie sometimes gives a few chuckles, amuses audiences by making them feel superior. But young director Leonard makes a different kind of bomb. Fascinated with technology, Leonard makes cutting-edge techno-turkeys, with wildly elaborate visuals and ridiculous plots. [4 Aug 1995, pg. I]

It’s hard to believe that a lineup so stellar could generate so few laughs, but there it is.

The preposterous 88 Minutes is a serial killer movie starring Al Pacino's festival of hair.

Morgan Spurlock is a living, breathing cautionary tale. Take a good, long look, kids: This is what happens when society validates really annoying people.

Sucks a whole lot of talented people into a wormhole of lousy. The film either needed to be a lot wittier to make up for the way it looks, or a lot better-looking to compensate for the funny it isn't.

A whopper this isn't. It's not even a Whopper Junior. It's the paper the Whopper Junior came in.

At what point might animators be arrested for doing work so ugly it causes aesthetic blindness in millions of younglings?

Only Sarah Paulson, as the Spirit's doctor and sometime lover, seems to be in there playing the scenes as if she were a human being in a comic book superhero scenario, as opposed to a comic book character stuck in a cruddy movie.

The vocal characterizations aren't the problem here; the script and the animation are the problems, and in feature animation, you can't arrange more significant problems than those.

Max Payne offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster--it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie--is the presence of Mark Wahlberg.

As Vaughn's therapist mother, Sissy Spacek comes off best. But she's a rare bird of whom it truly can be said: She's always good. No matter how grim the material.

Dark Streets lost me early, real early, like still-adjusting-my-eyes-in-a-dark-theater early.

This one's a certifiable soul-sucker, dining out on its characters' venalities while wagging a finger at the horror, the horror.

A funny thing happened to Larry Doyle's 2007 debut novel on the way to the multiplex. It turned into its own ring of coming-of-age comedy hell.

None of it is funny. It’s all pain and no funny.

Just the same auld same auld.

A buddy cop film in which one of the cops continually quotes dialogue espoused by fictional cops, in everything from "Heat" to "RoboCop," and not once is it funny.

Haven't we seen the oh-my-gosh-my-spouse-is-secretly-an-assassin-but-you-know-a-nice-one routine once too often?

Throws its obvious predecessor, "Waiting to Exhale," into relief, making that 1995 syrupy revenge fantasy look positively Shakespearean next to the moronic Two Can Play That Game.

Despite some imaginative fatalities, is less a movie than a slick video game.

Unimaginatively recycles all the teens-in-the-woods gorefest conventions.

It's tempting to call traveling on Juwanna Mann, except it never goes anywhere. This film fouls out.

Commits the cardinal sin of all bad IMAX films: It favors visuals over narrative, glitter over substance.

Plagued by continuity problems, ham-fisted storytelling and a problematic voiceover by Da Brat, Civil Brand feels less like a prison movie than a prison sentence.

Limps along on a squirm-inducing fish-out-of-water formula that goes nowhere and goes there very, very slowly.

Slow and dragging, Pootie Tang is worse than a below-average sketch-to-screen Saturday Night Live film.

Not only does American Outlaws distort history, but the filmmakers have created a dull, one-dimensional pop icon out of James' complex character and legend.

At the end of 83 unmerciful minutes, audiences will be exclaiming, "Dude, I can't believe I sat through that movie!?" Stick to the trailer.

Good performances in bad movies are nothing new, but it's sad that Moore's first major cinematic outing scrapes the bottom of the melodramatic barrel.

It breaks director Billy Wilder's most important movie commandment: Thou Shall Not Bore. It's just not funny.

99 minutes of excruciating "reality."

Caruso, who showed flair in the Val Kilmer vehicle "The Salton Sea," has a penchant for the dark side. In this case, it's the plodding, predictable ZIP code of the dark side.

In a case study of how to screw up a simple, powerful revenge story, director Jonathan Hensleigh punishes audiences with an unbearably sluggish action movie that requires the word "action" to be placed in quotes.

To call this movie a dog would also be an insult to canines, so let's just say Scooby-Doo 2 is a Scooby-Don't.

Released in theaters five years after its 1999 Sundance Film Festival premiere, Kalem's film is too precious, too self-conscious and far too enamored with itself to ever have any kind of genuine emotional truth.

The "Showgirls" of superhero movies. This is not a compliment. A vacuous lingerie show posing as feminism, it's the biggest movie hairball this side of "Garfield."

So dark and dirge-like are its first 85 minutes that a few uplifting minutes at the end can't dissipate the somber cloud Noel summons.

If only they didn't cannibalize their source material so much, then take an extreme rule reversal just before the end credits, they might have achieved something original, rather than just a fan-fiction derivation of George A. Romero's canon.

Knoxville, Jed Rees and Bill Chott act daffy and more impaired than their counterparts, and that never sat right with me. This may not be the equivalent of acting in blackface, but it's awfully close.

The exhausting slapstick violence is the film's chief variation, and it's no fun at all.

Yogi Bear gives cheap hackwork a bad name. Which is a shame, because hackwork made this industry.

What's remarkable about the remake is its nastiness.

Offers only one point of interest beyond the breasts of its second female lead: Aniston's barely disguised disdain for her material.

This movie is crushingly ordinary in every way, which with Rand I wouldn't have thought possible.

As if by deliberate and vaguely sadistic design, Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil leeches the fun clean out of the first "Hoodwinked" (2005).

It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest.

It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique, stupid and unnecessary. Other than that….

This latest version is le pits.

Certainly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creations have suffered permanent damage thanks to Ritchie's films.

The Devil Inside joins a long, woozy-camera parade of found-footage scare pictures, among them "The Blair Witch Project," the "Paranormal Activity" films and certain wedding videos that won't go away.

Pure, witless discombobulation.

In A Thousand Words the camera stays about two inches from Murphy's hyperactive face, and you start to see the strain and desperation in the actor's eyes.

The aftereffects of watching Lockout include an inability to focus or to complete a simple declarative sentence without an ill-timed cutaway in the middle.

Dominated by Adam Sandler's D-minus Bela Lugosi impression, the 3-D animated feature Hotel Transylvania illustrates the difference between engaging a young movie audience and agitating it, with snark and noise and everything but the funny.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, as some Albanian dramatist once said, but Taken 2 isn't good-cold, as in steely and purposeful; it's cold as in "lost the scent."

If it weren't for Kate Lyn Sheil, who has a couple of scenes as a blase Brooklyn waitress inexplicably ending up in the protagonist's bed, 'The Comedy' might well have qualified as the worst film of 2012.

Arkin in particular can barely hide his lack of enthusiasm for the material. Some of the looks he shoots his co-stars appear to contain a secret code of some kind, deciphered as: 'Well, at least I'm in 'Argo.'"

Superman IV is a pathetic appendage to the series, a dull, shoddy film that makes the minimal 1950s TV series seem rife with production values by comparison. [27 July 1987, p.10C]

The film may as well be titled "Stephenie Meyer's Waiting Around."

It's hard not to feel angry that you've spent almost two hours watching this moronic exercise.

Not only is Slackers painfully bad, but it's also about as morally unpleasant as a teen sex comedy can be.

So excruciatingly awful, the word "dumb" could sue for slander.

A lamebrained attempt at horror that is just a derivative pastiche of ideas lifted from other bad films.

Phantoms may have sold like hotcakes as a book. But this movie version is a grotesque fiasco, a confoundingly senseless story told with unexciting visuals, cliched dialogue and ear-bashing sounds... Watching it is a truly hellish experience. [23 Jan 1998]

Johnson Family Vacation is simply a bad trip.

Mark my words: Mindhunters will do for psycho-thrillers what "Showgirls" did for stripper movies.

The fatal flaw in David Duchovny's big-screen directorial debut, House of D, is not Robin Williams as a retarded janitor. It's David Duchovny, the man who chose to cast Robin Williams as a retarded janitor.

Commenting on performances here is like critiquing the production design of a porno--it's beside the point. Briefly: Knoxville, bad choice, man. Reynolds, you make a good villain. Simpson, lovely posing. Scott, you're from Minnesota and it shows--but I bet stunt driving school was fun.

There are few words to describe the awfulness of this movie, but let's give it the old college try: dismal, depressing, embarrassing and utterly lacking in any artistic or social worth.

There's no plot here; like the MTV show that spawned it, this movie is just a progression of increasingly disgusting and/or dangerous stunts.

The melodramatic clumsiness of the script, and, in one scene, its gratuitous endorsement of marijuana, betrays the youth of its writer, recent UCLA graduate Shane Black. And veteran director Richard Donner, whose credits include another cartoon movie, can't seem to thread the scenes together in any meaningful way. [6 Mar 1987, p.G]

Shot in the same style as “Spinal Tap,” Electric Apricot fails to wow in every way possible, but the music disappoints the most.

Verdict: not so hot

Plays like an amateur debut effort written over a weekend during which its writer wasn't entirely sober.

Stewart's insistently ironic delivery of every line becomes an irritant in a movie that is already monstrously irritating.

About as interesting as watching paint dry.

This movie thrusts you so close to these intoxicated idiots that you practically have to wipe off secondhand tequila, sweat and spit stains afterward.

Bad decision after bad decision occurs over 93 minutes.

It was Mark Twain who famously said, "Golf is a good walk spoiled." I'm telling you that Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius is 120 minutes wasted.

You live in a free country, you put up with crud like Hostel Part II. It truly is crud, though.

Viewing UHF may be injurious to your sense of humor. Rarely has a comedy tried so hard and failed so often to be funny. [21 Jul 1989, p.A]

Nothing, absolutely nothing, at either location is the slightest bit funny. [13 Sep 1985, p.C]

The most horrifying film of 2007, Bratz is based on the popular line of collagen-lipped, doe-eyed slut-ette dolls and their male companions, "the boys with a passion for fashion ... and the Bratz!" (In other words, they're bi-curious.)

Nothing in this movie is properly focused; everyone keeps talking about a character whom we never meet and does not matter; the tone keeps slipping around from indolent satire to thudding sincerity, and the Challenger shuttle disaster backdrop is queasy-making at best, offensive at worst.

The result just might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film as well as the history of hypocrisy, and along with serving beer, I hope they show I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell in hell.

Replete with audience-insulting writing and blatantly hateful jokes, storytelling like this makes most video game plots look like "Moby Dick."

Evil isn't this boring.

Rarely has the question of a documentary's artifice mattered less. I genuinely hated this picture, almost as much as I've admired Phoenix's work in everything from "Gladiator" to "Walk the Line" and even the hackneyed but affecting "Two Lovers."

Snyder must have known in preproduction that his greasy collection of near-rape fantasies and violent revenge scenarios disguised as a female-empowerment fairy tale wasn't going to satisfy anyone but himself.

It's not just the sound of crickets you hear watching this movie. It's the sound of dead crickets.

A loathsome shocker... Watching it almost turned my stomach.

A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy isn't just not funny, it's totally just not funny.

Even with 87.5 years to go, the 21st century may never see a stupider comedy than That's My Boy.

It's a soul-crusher, and when I say it may be the most dehumanizing experience since "Hostel: Part II" the comparison is not an idle one.