Instead of paying homage to these creepy creatures of bygone Hollywood, Sommers seems to be unwittingly lampooning them. The first few minutes of Van Helsing, shot in black and white, look like outtakes from Mel Brooks' gagfest "Young Frankenstein."

An overblown hodgepodge of volcano-baked desertscapes, Egyptoid-gone-baroque architecture, and gladiator-geared storm troopers with goofy headpieces, The Chronicles of Riddick bears no resemblance to the movie that spawned its namesake.

Anyone with a sizable role in Dodgeball gets mired in the script's dissipated tone. Two of the climactic jokes involve "Happy Days" references. How tenuous is that?

Catwoman, which talks about the "duality" inside all women (wild vs. docile, rapacious vs. cuddly), does have its guilty pleasures. Most of these come courtesy of ice queen Stone.

Looking for plausibility in a farce is like looking for a million dollars in a box of breakfast cereal, but elements of real life can make a comedy resonate instead of thud. Little Black Book does the latter.

Anderson gets style points for the pyramid, though. The building - a combination of Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian elements loaded with sophisticated gadgetry - totally rocks.

This so-called comedy is a frayed string of anxious jokes about whether male bonding is manly or sissy.

An unfortunate collision of earnest coming-of-age cliches and off-key acting, Evergreen almost, and certainly unintentionally, presents itself as parody.

Essentially a series of walking character sketches. The storytelling is slack and lackluster, the cliches rampant.

The kind of glossy, Hollywood-forged waste of time that would depress even the most happily lackadaisical retiree.

Combines fingernails-on-blackboard audio agony with bamboo-under-fingernails physical torture.

Alas, this eternally sunny character's mantra, "I don't have a problem, I solve problems," makes for paltry dramatic tension.

Hoffman's turn as the drag queen has its endearing and comically catty moments, but Flawless' utter phoniness subsumes all efforts at honest acting.

So stupid, so stupefying, so stupendously bad.

It's getting tiresome, this stuff.

While stylishly filmed and edited, Boogeyman is filled with every imaginable fright cliche... It's like a meal consisting entirely of airy hors d'oeuvres.

How to count the ways that Be Cool isn't? For one thing, it looks terrible: grainy, ill-lit, edited with blunt, rusty shears.

On the evidence of Palindromes, the most misanthropic, depressing, hopeless film in memory, I'd hazard that for Solondz, childhood is a problem without a solution.

There is a funny movie to be made from the outrageous egos and excesses of rap music. Death of a Dynasty is not that movie.

Monster-in-Law, where Bridezilla meets Godzilla, is a comedy so anemic, so toxic, that even Dracula wouldn't bite.

There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four.

If Stealth were a recruitment film for aircraft-carrier duty, one would be tempted to say, "Mission accomplished." As a feature film, it's a washout.

Another high school vixen movie, this one with a potty mouth (the vixen) and pretensions of social commentary (the movie), Pretty Persuasion brings to mind a number of other titles, all better.

A groaningly awful romantic comedy.

Domino is less a movie than a hyperkinetic slide show - presented during a nuclear attack.

A fairly dreadful melodrama drenched in self-pity.

This tale of a white mother's kid gone missing in a black New Jersey neighborhood - and the tensions and news media attention that ensue - is pretty much pure jive.

It would seem that Allen and screenwriters John Quaintance and Jessica Bendinger couldn't decide between making a movie about the summer that 'tweens become teens or "Scenes From a Mal"l for the MTV set.

Apocalyptically awful romantic comedy.

Basic Instinct 2 is supposed to help Stone show it's possible for a woman to be sexy in her late 40s. But it's Rampling - who is 60 - who comes off as the more provocative and alluring. Stone's purring, snarling, bedroom kink is embarrassing.

Icky, incoherent thriller.

By the end of the film's two-hour stream of Be-Here-Now-isms, anyone left in the audience will be wanting to yell, "Put a sock in it!" to old Soc.

OK, they squeezed one more lap out of this franchise. It's been a fun ride, but it's time to shut things down. If you get my drift.

If the moral of Click is a stop-and-smell-the-roses bromide about how family comes first, the real message of this sappy, potty-mouthed seriocomedy is that a steady diet of Drakes and Hostesses will do you no good.

"The Godfather" without Brando, "GoodFellas" without Scorsese, "The Sopranos" without Gandolfini - 10th & Wolf is all that, and less.

Trapped between edgy art flick and exploitation psychothriller, The Quiet manages to be neither, and manages to be pretty awful in the bargain.

So achingly empty, it's nearly existential.

A mix of "Alice in Wonderland" and William S. Burroughs, "Psycho" and the psychotic. It's pretty much a squirmy experience all around.

If all you ask of a movie is that it have scenic stars and some scenery (here the Sierras of California substitute for the Rockies of Wyoming), then Flicka is adequate. Me, I expected some conflict, some resolution, and a horse that took me on a wild ride. This one really never gets out of the gate.

Tobey Maguire, terribly miscast and squeaky (that voice - it belongs to a kid!).

What a mess.

A predictable, by-the-numbers TV-movie-sized affair which will break your heart - especially since it also contains brief flashes of horror greatness.

Perfect Stranger is the Egg MacGuffin of whodunits, a cheesy affair that casts so many baited lures that they tangle each other and don't hook you.

Art-directed within an inch of its life, Sleuth has the smirky gloss of a project that everyone involved with thinks is terribly good, and terribly clever. These people - Branagh, Pinter, Law and the usually great Caine (even in bad stuff) - are laboring under an epic misconception. Sleuth is just terrible.

Guy Ritchie's Revolver premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago September. That's 26 months on a shelf somewhere, depriving moviegoers the thrill of jaw-droppingly awful Ray Liotta line readings, of bloody shoot-outs, bags of money, cutaways to frosty babes sucking on lollipops, and even a bit of violent anime.

Like a grade-school version of an Indiana Jones adventure.

Drawing comparisons to "The Wire" may be unfair, but taken on its own, this anemic vehicle for Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan to mug and jive through is just weak, weak stuff.

An abhorrent cyberthriller starring a compelling Diane Lane.

No doubt conceived as an underwater version of "National Treasure," Andy Tennant's film plays like a Three Stooges movie with scuba gear.

Tedious, ludicrous and harmless glimpse of the dawn of civilization.

Judah Friedlander and Lindsay Lohan are striking, respectively, as a Lennon paparazzo and a fan creeped out by Chapman.

88 Minutes proves itself to be a maddeningly mediocre, ineptly manipulative "real-time" thriller.

Maybe if there was something going with the dialogue - snappy Chandlerisms, say, or even just sentences that made sense - the fussy digital artifice of The Spirit wouldn't seem so, well, dispiriting.

An embarassingly unfunny, stumblebum adaptation of Toby Young's memoir.

At one point, Statham chases down a sports car while pedaling madly on a kids' bike. Pathétique!

A generic oven-stuffer that wants to be a stocking-stuffer, is a turkey, despite the foil wrapping and some artfully deployed tinsel.

The acting is better than the script deserves and Lexi Alexander's cut-to-the-hearse direction lends the film considerable kick.

Like moussed hair and inverted-pyramid shoulder pads, this sloppy, sloppy slapstick is an artifact from the 1980s.

Entertainingly goofy for about 30 minutes. And then, for the next two hours-plus, it's agony.

Screenwriters Nicole Eastman and the "Blonde" team of Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith provide dialogue that has the propriety of the locker room.

A stagy, arty, and uncompelling account of the Welsh writer and his menage-y relations.

Another tale of Tinseltown drugs, sex and excess - has transferred itself to the screen with mind-boggling, laugh-inciting horribleness.

The film quickly turns unintentionally, and unrelentingly, awkward.

Ostensibly a comedy, and a feeble and innocuous one at that, Post Grad is one of those what-were-they-thinking?

A pity-party of Hollywood narcissism.

Faced with the script's weak humor and feeble stabs at irony, Schwartzman and Stiller turn it way up, setting the dial at "hammy."

Surrogates, which borrows tone and content freely from "I, Robot," is all windup and no pitch.

It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.

Struggles mightily to find its loony essence. But Bullock's apple-cheeked larkishness is all flailing limbs and bug-eyed reaction shots - there's no there there. Cooper's character is woefully underwritten, Church's is yet another vain anchorman-wannabe cartoon.

The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense.

Michael Lembeck directs with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, pounding every joke and cliche until they are flat, flat, flat.

Tennant aims for a contemporary version of "The Thin Man," wedding the banter of sparring spouses with sleuth work. To say that he falls short of the mark is understatement.

As an account of how for-profit big business literally rips a consumer's heart out, Repo Men is too graphic for me.

A mercifully fleet and lamentably uninteresting adaptation of the DC Comic about a war-weary Confederate soldier.

Parents in a masochistic mood can compound the headache-inducing experience by paying extra for the 3-D version.

Murderously unfunny.

Cage appears as a knight of the Crusades, slogging across the continents, slaying infidels and unbelievers and anyone else who gets in his way. There isn't a minute when it looks like he's having fun.

What distinguishes The Dilemma in this genre is its resounding unfunnyness, its emotional dishonesty, and the general unlikability of its cast of characters.

Hiring this sensitive fantasist (Gondry) to make the superhero saga The Green Hornet is like hiring satirist John Waters to make "Rambo." Hard to think of a more mystifying mismatch of filmmaker and material.

Nostalgia for the '80s - big hair, Madonna, cocaine, big hair, Duran Duran, more cocaine - is all well and good. Unless it's practiced with the charmless ineptitude of Take Me Home Tonight.

Beastly offers a thoroughly dopey reread of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale.

A case of when bad scripts happen to good actors. Given its similarities to a bygone sitcom, one might call it "Friends" without benefits.

Hands-down the most nightmarishly awful film of the year.

The aquatic and surf scenes are spectacular. The story, a clichéed climb to inspiration. Soul Surfer is more parable than plot.

Here is a movie with everything going for it and nothing working.

What has Campbell wrought? An intermittently amusing, interminable affair that for sheer ugliness and a scenery-chewing performance by Peter Sarsgaard has a certain Camp appeal.

The overwhelming sci-fi action spectacle is a merciless sensorial assault that leaves you with something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.

The film would be a moth-eaten mess without the wisecracking animals. Not that it's funny with them.

Completely unappealing people.

Viewers get very little about Madoff himself. While the film is primarily about Markopolos, it makes little sense without much insight into his nemesis.

It fails as a gripping home-invasion thriller.

This heavy-handed muddle of a cop thriller is just impossibly bad.

The greatest lacrosse movie of the 21st century - and, unless I'm mistaken, the only lacrosse movie of the 21st century.

The problem is that these stoic warriors infect Act of Valor with more wooden acting than you'd see at a ventriloquism school.

Rarely has a film so equally balanced macho and nacho, but Wrath does leave us with a few valuable lessons: a.) fratricide is a nasty business, best left to the Greeks and b) fighting fire with fire may sound good, but it turns out to be a really stupid idea.

Laughably bad adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novel.

Hit & Run is a pleasant enough diversion - but more of the PPV persuasion.

Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast.

This saga of a former soccer star coaching his son's team in order to worm his way back into the heart of his ex-wife aims to be warm and funny. Alas, it is mechanical and exhausting, like a windup toy of a monkey crashing together cymbals for 106 minutes while incrementally winding down.

The violence is plenty, and pointless.

The film has been directed in a murky, rhythmless fashion by Niels Arden Oplev.

The unintentional effect of movies like Bless the Child is that they are enough to make agnostics out of true believers.

Nothing wrong with the syrupy romance Here on Earth that a megadose of insulin couldn't fix.

Full of kerplunkingly unfunny jokes and ex-"Saturday Night Live" cast members turning up to do shtick.

Unfortunately, it lacks a compelling story or characters of any complexity.

Rarely has sex on screen been so aggressively anti-erotic.

What a stupefying thing it is.

A stunt that fails.

I laughed once.

Wastes an A-list cast in a sorry send-up of B-movie private-eye cliches.

This film about a career gal's date with fate careers out of control.

I nodded off watching Just Visiting.

Repetitive and tedious.

Connoisseurs of giant, gnarled chunks of charred flesh, rejoice! There's plenty of it -- or stuff resembling it -- in the slasher-fest convergence of two killer franchises.

In this frothy beach movie, they make pop-music lite together but create an utterly unconvincing romantic couple, seeming more like siblings or best friends. From Ruben to Clay might work better.

The jokes are unabashedly pitched at 12-year-old boys, with flatulence, masturbation and excretions as the leading themes.

As a western, American Outlaws is an utter failure. As the basis of a "Mad TV" parody, it is an unintentional hoot.

8 1/2 Women is a collage-y, self-reflexive sort of film that is designed to shock but more often just annoys.

Long, lumbering and endlessly unfunny.

Reiner, who made "This is Spinal Tap," "The Sure Thing," "When Harry Met Sally" -- memorable movies all -- has made this silly slice of Lean Cuisine. And that, in the end, makes Alex and Emma an utter tragedy.

Proves a theory first advanced in the movie "Repo Man": The more you drive, the stupider you get.

"Zis is not verking! Zee glitter cannot overpower zee artist!" That, in a sentence, sums up what is wrong with this picture.

The thing about stoner comedy is that, well, it helps to be stoned.

The highlights of the movie are a great song, Sam Phillips' "I Need Love,'' which comes at the end, and Stiles' affecting crying scene.

A standard-issue, ineptly executed serving of the genre's staples, from skeptical cops to an all-knowing psychic.

The whole affair has a painfully self-conscious, self-referential air. Jokes land with a thud, and so, alas, does Rocky, who seems to have forgotten how to fly.

Totally lame.

I could make a joke here about the new Pokemon movie.

Contrived story lines and an altogether phony resolution erase whatever energy and wit the film displayed, leaving the viewer with an empty, disappointed feeling.

A syrup-thick New Age ghost story of the same sappy stripe and mawkishness as another Costner foray, "Message in a Bottle."

Written and directed on autopilot, containing every cliche endemic to these movies: clueless parents, bratty brother, nasty rich kids, pool fight, food fight, girls who can't drive.

Maybe, you think, there is something daring and brilliant going on here: an excursion into the darkest territories of the human soul. But no. In the end -- or the beginning -- there is no point to all this. Or at least not a point worth making, and making us watch.

Affleck, for his part, behaves as if a Zero from "Pearl Harbor" dropped one too close to his noggin. He looks permanently shell-shocked.

While "Boogie Nights" was a dirge for the death of pleasure (which coincided with the death of the porn-film industry), Wonderland is death warmed over. Literally.

It pains me to tell you, But really, it's true: The Cat in the Hat Is a piece of dog doo.

Rarely do you encounter a movie without a shred of originality. You Got Served is such a cinematic vacuum.

A stale and stupid thriller.

A dementedly artificial and artsy film, a headache-inducing jumble of fractured narrative, flashbacks within flashbacks, and shifting perspectives.

Those who want something more substantial from a movie than a vid-game script with centerfold appeal will not find it in this noisy, bone-crushing survivalist flick inspired by the Game Cube diversion.

Tedious and incoherent thriller.

Cross "Get Shorty" with "State and Main" - Hollywood hustlers, colorful crooks, crafty poseurs, and a production crew on location - and you have the stuff of The Last Shot. One other thing: eliminate anything funny.

It's hard to understand what Malevolence is doing in theaters. If ever a movie deserved to go directly to DVD, it's this dreary horror treatment.

Both the sex and the battle sequences here look like football plays drawn by an NFL coach and shot by the wide receiver's mother. Usually, even when I don't like a Stone film I admire its frenzied energy, but the editing here is as lethargic as the compositions are perfunctory.

A lethargic, lurching holiday-themed comedy.

Even Boll seems to lose interest as the story unravels. By that time, the supernatural cliches, plot inconsistencies, dead ends and red herrings have piled up so high you can barely see the screen.

Little kidniks with an appetite for zap-pow silliness might find this to their liking. Everyone else, beware.

Hostage may well be the first action flick cited both for child abuse and audience abuse. In a singularly sadistic and degrading way it has something to offend everyone.

The left hand doesn't know who the right hand is shooting in State Property 2, Damon Dash's prodigiously muddled thug-life sequel.

This one is so bad that even Ed Norton couldn't get this mess to move through the sewer.

Once upon a time there were made-for-television movies. Now there are made-for-television movies for movie theaters. The Perfect Man, another anemic Hilary Duff vehicle, is a case in point.

This insipid take on the teens-in-peril formula, with a snake-bit ghoul chasing kids around the bayou, is truly a fangless task.

Doom is, to its detriment, a remarkably faithful re-creation of the massively popular video game. In other words, it's a dark, violent, nerve-wracking, trigger-giddy waste of time.

Vilely violent, Saw 2 is the Phnom Penh of splatter movies.

A forced-march comedy.

Alas, this joyless affair doesn't have a clou.

Aja's stomach-churning remake (produced by Craven) follows the original with frightening fidelity, amping up the barbarity from a nine (on the 1-10 scale) to a 12.

I would have told you that its title refers to recreational vehicle. Having seen it, I now know the initials stand for reeking vulgarity.

The cast, especially The Game, does a fairly good job with this meager material, but it's like trying to make chateaubriand out of Spam.

The script is a stupid mix of Teutonic tongue twisters (say hello to Herr Schniedelwichsen), hoary German cliches (from phallic sausages to U-boat spoofs), and bad slapstick.

A vast disappointment.

Has to be one of the nuttiest, sappiest (literally), most unintentionally hilarious spectacles to come down the time-travel turnpike in eons.

Can be described as whatever is the opposite of a Christmas classic.

Happily N'Ever After carjacks "Cinderella" and puts her wicked stepmother behind the wheel.

The wrestler carries himself with decency and without self-seriousness, the qualities that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. Austin deserves better material than this. So do we.

Hot Rod never establishes its own personality.

Sappy script. Cheesy supernaturalism. Tired satire.

Though Hilton may be a model, if her work in Hottie is any indication, she is no actress.

The whole project is a cloying, artificial mess. The slapstick comedy doesn't bite, and the formulaic sentimentality doesn't grip.

No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.

As a cinematic experience, it's like being locked in a coffin for an hour and a half.

About as not-funny as a comedy can get.

I'm ripping up my Lars Von Trier fan club card.

You would think any movie with the word "salmon" in the title would have to be funny. Think again.

An inert comedy starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic unlucky in love, When in Rome is a rom-bomb.

If you actually sit through this enervating ordeal, you'll swear that time is Frozen.

At a certain point, it actually becomes embarrassing to watch Heigl and Kutcher play at being in love.

An unlikable and excruciatingly unfunny comedy.

An astoundingly senseless thriller.

A lazy assemblage of sketch-comedy raunch, mock-schlock TV ads, and ideas that even the writers of "Mall Cop" and "Observe and Report" would have tossed.

Too bad it's hog-tied by a ridiculously familiar plot, uneven direction and characters of such dizzying simplicity that you wish the demons would get to them just to smack some sense into their heads. [26 Sept 1983, p.D3]

Slackers is, well, consummately cheesy. Ugh.

Somnambulistic pacing, kerplunkingly unfunny jokes, and mugging thespians making fools of themselves. Truly torturous spectacle.

The movie heads in a disastrous direction: namely, a police academy ceremony... This lets-wrap-this-thing-up moment sucks the life and the honesty out of an otherwise compelling portrait of tainted lawmen, tainted law.

Six guys and a gal who flatline on arrival. Easily the lamest action-adventure fantasy since “Wild Wild West.”

Reaches breathtaking lows of incoherence, sexism, racial stereotyping, and -- did I say incoherence?

Appalling sequel.

So bad you're nostalgic for "Gigli." So painful you need an epidural. So mindless you'll lose yours wondering, "What were they thinking?"

Has to be among the worst movies ever made.

With its first-person-shooter perspective and gun-andrun narrative, this one’s for the PlayStation crowd. It’s not a movie. It’s an adrenaline pump and purveyor of raw carnage.