Not as bad as rumor would have it. It's worse.

This is the sort of low-grade dreck that usually goes straight to video -- with a lousy script, inept direction, pathetic acting, poorly dubbed dialogue and murky cinematography, complete with visible boom mikes.

So eyeball-gougingly awful that you're tempted to give up movies for Lent.

Unbelievably awful celluloid-waster.

Low-end schlock that will likely land with a dull thud in the video remainder bin before the frost is on the pumpkin.

Tacky-looking, incoherent, badly acted and hopelessly directed disaster is easily the dullest adventure film of 2000.

Plays like a bad daytime soap opera. The acting is amateurish. Ditto the uninspired script (continuity? what's that?) and direction.

It's so devoid of joy and energy it makes even "Jason X" - a recent attempt to prolong the rival "Friday the 13th" slasher franchise - look positively Shakesperean by comparison.

Crudely animated, badly dubbed, incomprehensible, boring -- and headache-inducing -- attempt to wring a few more yen and dollars out of a thoroughly spent franchise.

Under Jordan Susman's inept direction, these twentysomething airheads, angry about the proliferation of Starbucks outlets and other societal ills, all resemble nubile models.

No one but a convict guilty of some truly heinous crime should have to sit through The Master of Disguise, an unbearably tedious and unfunny comedy.

To call Jackass: The Movie the worst movie of the year is practically a compliment. This plotless, crudely videotaped collection of moronic stunts is a movie in the same sense that those hideous, velvet depictions of Elvis are paintings.

Loud, crass and full of slapstick humor that the Three Stooges would be ashamed of. And it is almost completely lacking in charm and nuance.

Truthfully, it's all incredibly boring. Noé tosses in some dime-store existentialism ("Time destroys everything"), but this is a movie with not a whole lot on its mind except rank exploitation.

Calling Boys and Girls the year's worst movie makes it sound more entertaining than it actually is.

So awful it qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment.

Thanks to the amateurish, spectacularly talent-free quality of its cinematography, direction, writing and acting, Emerald Cowboy is simply impossible to sit through.

Based on a video game, far exceeds expectations -- in negative ways that inspire thoughts of less than zero stars.

Offensive and unwatchable.

The narrative itself, attributed to three former "Seinfeld" writers who also worked on "The Grinch," reeks of desperation.

A sexed-up Afterschool Special pretty much guaranteed to render audiences comatose.

So utterly devoid of suspense, energy or credibility it should have been shipped straight to the remainder bin at Blockbuster.

Should have been stopped at customs -- as family entertainment, it constitutes child abuse.

Lethargically paced, badly edited and shot in hideous digital video.

Little more than 91 minutes of cheesy special effects in search of a remotely coherent story.

Garfield is a downright cat-astrophe.

Nearly two hours of New Age hooey.

If ever a movie could be charged with imperiling the morals of a minor, it's probably Sleepover, a sleazy, PG-rated sex comedy that's apparently aimed at 8- to 10-year-old girls.

Exploitative rubbish.

Stars Carmine Famiglietti, Joseph Summa and Gino Cafarelli apparently also wrote Chooch and directed it under a trio of aliases. They shoulda applied to the witness-protection program instead.

Nasty, borderline bigoted, stunningly amateurish film.

Certainly the most painfully unfunny of the countless bad movies that have licensed the name of the long-defunct humor magazine.

Another repulsive, fetishistic trawl through the life and crimes of a serial killer.

A crass, shrill and laughless disaster of a holiday comedy with a desperately mugging Ben Affleck that should be banned under the Geneva Convention.

Excruciatingly maudlin.

Having root-canal surgery would be less painful than sitting through the martial-arts disaster Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior.

It's a totally inept and unfunny parody of the TV show "Cops."

The latest vanity production by writer-director-star Eric Schaeffer, who still seems to think he's another Woody Allen -- despite a growing body of work that proves otherwise.

This must be one of the worst movies ever to get a big-screen release. If it weren't so boring, this unbelievably bad indie sex comedy would be worth going to for five minutes of laughs at its sheer incompetence.

Aspires to be a highly stylized exploration of the mind of a serial killer, but it's nothing more than a gory, bloodsoaked snuff film, reveling in its own shock value.

Just Tara-ble.

A witless, stale and half-hearted rehash of cliches borrowed from the likes of "The Wedding Planner," "The Wedding Singer" and "Four Weddings and a Funeral," this pathetic, alleged comedy certainly wasn't improved by clueless direction by Clare Kilner.

A witless and vulgar sequel.

The dreadful acting, direction and script make Nowhere Man a nowhere movie.

Infuriating, but not for the reason filmmakers want it to be.

Shoddily made, boring and, most shockingly, without a single decent scare.

None of this is remotely funny.

A relentlessly dull film that's shot on eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.

"I am surrounded by oceans of boredom," the campy Abraham complains at one point. It's a sentiment audiences are bound to share.

HUGELY tedious and mostly incomprehensible.

A vile and laughless follow-up to Schneider's 1999 hit.

If 65 million years of evolution have been building up to this movie, then Darwin was wrong. But there's no intelligent design here either.

This painfully unfunny mockumentary about obsessive collectors of frozen-food entrees takes potshots at anti-abortionists, Christian rockers, aversion therapy for gays and the disabled -- and misses almost every time.

Aeon Flux is by far the year's worst movie, a most dubious achievement.

The material has been dumbed down for contemporary tastes and Carrey's frantic comic style.

If you experience any laughter while in the presence of this movie, it's a credit to your imagination. But if you can tickle yourself, why spend the $10.75?

A collection of throwaway gags from other movies, a big blue recycling barrel of comedy waiting for the trash collector. It's rated PG-13 because 13 is the maximum age of those who might find it funny.

An excruciating indie knockoff of "Training Day."

A cut-rate ripoff of "Aeon Flux" with Milla Jovovich as a butt-kicking futuristic heroine in a midriff-baring bodysuit, is ultrastupid, ultra-incoherent, ultrasilly - and way, way ultraboring.

Virtually unwatchable and laugh-free.

The people who are inflicting this movie on us intend it as some sort of inspirational epic. But the only thing it will motivate viewers to do is get out of the theater.

A movie so bad it's not even worth watching on DVD.

An appallingly unfunny and unromantic romantic comedy.

It's hard to believe that the distributors of See No Evil were so afraid of what critics would say about their movie that they refused to provide advance screenings. The movie's target viewers aren't the type who read reviews, if they read at all.

Laughless, pointless and downright creepy, Say Uncle is a would-be black comedy.

The Amy Sedaris comedy based on the failed TV show isn't the least funny film of the year - but for that it should send a thank-you note to "United 93."

A couple of years ago, a disaster like Shadow boxer - with the hapless Cuba Gooding Jr. scraping below the bottom of the barrel - would have gone straight to video or been buried on an obscure cable channel at 3 a.m.

There is plenty of blame to go around for this laughless mess.

[Hernandez] is obviously a man more concerned with art than commerce, but good intentions don't always make for good filmmaking.

Vanity productions don't come much worse than One Third, an amateurish, dialogue-free curiosity courtesy of Yongman Kim, the founder of the Greenwich Village institution Kim's Video.

Utter junk.

It's trashy and disgusting - and those are the best parts. Mostly it's just an endless, pointless drone with characters like bacteria and dialogue like an untuned radio.

God, if you exist, why do you keep letting morons like Walsch get rich?

The longer the movie goes on, the more annoying Benigni's infantile behavior becomes.

Williams appears to be having trouble keeping his eyes open, and the audience will, too.

The ineptly made Animal Cannibal isn't remotely convincing as reality, and worse, isn't remotely entertaining as fiction.

Sickeningly violent and inane movie.

A pathetically unfunny comedy that should have been shipped straight to video, if not recycled as guitar picks.

A feeble dramedy about a Baltimore beauty shop where someone should come in to sweep up the clichés.

Sony dumped this sleazy, inept and worthless piece of torture porn into theaters yesterday.

No, Bratz, an unwitting and witless critique of American consumerism run amok, does not star Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

The real mystery here is why this slapdash semi-effort didn't go straight to video.

Succeeds completely at failure; the unified incompetence of its writing, directing and acting suggest a man who manages to be on fire and drowning at the same time, just as the bus runs him over.

Excruciatingly acted and ineptly directed by Bob Odenkirk, The Brothers Solomon is faux Farrelly brothers that should have gone straight to video.

If a more incoherent and self-indulgent movie has been released so far this century, I'm not aware of it.

This partially animated, charm-free atrocity is awful enough to instantly cure any remaining nostalgia for the rodent trio.

Easily the worst movie I've seen so far this year.

Brain-dead political satire/tear-jerker.

Thoroughly inept in just about every aspect.

With its dopey fight scenes, grimy look and goopy gore, this movie is so far from ept that inept is the wrong word. It's anti-ept.

Excruciatingly unfunny.

State of Play is bordered by the states of absurdity and cliché.

This is the sort of comedy that requires you not only to suspend disbelief, but your sanity as well.

Damonically awful.

Tedious and tawdry.

The would-be noir Beyond a Rea sonable Doubt has an absurd story, but on the plus side you can hardly see what's going on because the photography is so murky.

Stick a fork in Nia Vardalos. I've been to funerals that were a lot more fun than I Hate Valentine's Day, her second alleged romantic comedy in less than a month.

Not only isn't the new effort up to the standards of the anime, it's bloody awful by any standard.

A schmaltzy, smutty and mean-spirited quasi-satire.

There's something seriously wrong when you assemble actors this good -- and can't believe a single stilted word coming out of their mouths.

Grotesquely unfunny comedy.

There is only one joke here, milked endlessly.

Unlike the modern glamour-vamps of "True Blood" and "Twilight," this group of smitten and bitten men are no fun at all. That is, unless you like heavy breathing, underwear sniffing, cringe-inducing blood sucking, murder by stabbing or hanging, plus grainy, underexposed cinematography and stilted acting.

Hearing snoring from behind me at a screening the other day, I looked around and noticed four people had dozed off during the prettily photographed, boring vanity project that is Oh My God?

Brain-dead film.

Even by the extremely low standards of the genre, When in Rome gets failing marks for chemistry, credibility and even coherence.

Less funny or romantic than your average colonoscopy, this cringe-inducing bore provides dubious employment for four Oscar winners, two nominees and a raft of TV performers.

It's the worst of both worlds as Disney cash cow Miley Cyrus makes the most dubious "dramatic" debut of any singer since Britney Spears.

A mind-numbing piece of would-be provocation from the button-pushing Harmony Korine, Trash Humpers gets no stars from me -- not because it's offensive and disgusting like his earlier "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy," but because it's about as enervating a way to waste 78 minutes as I've ever experienced.

Burzynski is dull, dull, dull, even for an infomercial.

If M. Night Shyamalan sold his soul to the devil for the success of "The Sixth Sense," I think His Satanic Majesty has finally collected in full with The Last Airbender.

You Again could be taught at film schools as an example of how not to make a movie. And how not to humiliate veteran actors.

Say a prayer that there's no "Hatchet III" in the future.

So bad it's almost (but not quite) good, Dan Ireland's Jolene is an unusually elaborate and excruciatingly long vanity production based on a short story by E.L. Doctorow ("Ragtime").

Overblown, interminable and unfunny.

The noise level reminds me of Canal Street in Chinatown on a Sunday afternoon.

A soul-deadening mash-up of "Kill Bill," "Showgirls" and dozens of other better flicks that's not the least bit exciting or sexy, Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch is what happens when a studio gives carte blanche to a filmmaker who has absolutely nothing original or even coherent to say.

If Ed Wood had directed "The Silence of the Lambs," it might have been as unintentionally hilarious as the goofball would-be thriller The Abduction of Zack Butterfield.

Director Michael Bay, Hollywood's answer to the Antichrist, isn't primarily interested in your soul, though his movie does a pretty effective job of sucking that away (and sucking, in general).

Ineptly directed by Raja Gosnell -- the genius behind the "Scooby-Doo" features, "Big Momma's House," and "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" -- this cheesy-looking flick has lousy animation, worse special effects and the most headache-inducing, blurry 3-D since "Clash of the Titans."

Extremely cool-looking in the manner of "Sin City,'' but clumsily staged, slackly acted and mind-numbingly dull, Israeli director Guy Moshe's English-language fantasy is set in a future when guns, and apparently coherent conversations, have been outlawed.

Putting it as kindly as possible, this pitiful romantic comedy directed by Scott Marshall (dad Garry did "Pretty Woman'') peaks with its animated opening credits.

It's pretty sad if you're a comic and Al Pacino is the funniest thing in your movie.

Wince-worthy as Guttenberg is, he cannot be accused of being worse than the amateurish direction and the trite script (both by Allie Dvorin) stuffed with insufferable romcom banter and putrid dirty jokes. Some films go straight to video; this one should have bypassed that step and headed for the incinerator.

A root canal seems a more pleasurable way to pass two hours than this interminable vanity knockoff of "Traffic" about troubled Angelenos.

I have zero reservations about telling you how much I loathed New Year's Eve, a soul-sucking monument to Hollywood greed and saccharine holiday culture.

It really couldn't have been easy for Jason Lee ("Almost Famous") to keep a straight face while saying, "I'm not in this for the money.''

Nearly totally laugh-, chemistry- and coherence-free, this fiasco from the director of "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle'' has a script whose sensible parts would fit on a napkin with enough room left over for the Gettysburg Address.

Tim & Eric seem driven by a hatred of the audience and a wish to punish the same. Every episode of every sitcom I've ever seen is funnier than this movie, and I used to watch "Just Shoot Me."

There is one big winner in this mess, though. Congratulations, 1961's "Snow White and the Three Stooges": You're now the second-worst movie on the subject.

With the abysmal A Little Bit of Heaven, Kate Hudson's possibly unprecedented losing streak remains unbroken: She hasn't made a good movie since Almost Famous, 12 long years ago. Even Nicolas Cage can't say that.

The movie seems to think it's building up massive suspense by not telling us our hero's back story, but given that the wife and kid aren't around and he keeps telling people who ask that he's not divorced, it's obvious they're dead. The only mystery, then, is what exactly happened to them. The answer is: nothing interesting.

Grueling vanity piece.

What truly makes U.N. Me repulsive is its crassness.

The movie is so inept - with its flat characters, histrionic acting, dull dialogue ("Killing him is not going to change anything"), a dreadfully overdone musical score and la-la-la flashbacks starring the kid - that its clichés grow slightly funny. But not funny enough to make the endless torture scenes bearable.

I didn't know whether to be more offended as a moviegoer or as an American, but I do know I'd rather gargle nitroglycerine than watch this again, though given that the film looks like it were buried under a log cabin for a century, I barely saw it the first time.

An exceedingly dull and stillborn attempt to update the Brothers Grimm.

If you mashed-up the worst parts of the infamous "Howard the Duck,'' "Gigli,'' "Ishtar'' and every other awful movie I've seen since I started reviewing professionally in 1981, it wouldn't begin to approach the sheer soul-sucking badness of the cringe-inducing Movie 43.

Would you rather . . . watch this movie, or spend an hour and a half having your arm hairs plucked out with a rusty pair of tweezers? I’d have chosen the latter if it’d been on offer.

An inept, brutally unfunny collection of sketches.

“I’d rather gouge my eyes out with hot spoons!’’ De Niro exclaims at one point. I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about, but I’d like to think it referred to the prospect of being forced to watch The Big Wedding.