I’m not sure why audiences and critics were so harsh toward Poseidon, Wolfgang Petersen’s remake of the inexplicably Oscar-winning 1972 disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure, as it’s a perfectly acceptable, escapist summer movie: A boat flips, people die. What more do you want?
Poseidon wastes precious little time getting the giant wave to tip that cruise ship upside down. I think it’s chapter 5 on your DVD player, and Petersen (director of the equally water-logged The Perfect Storm and Das Boot) milks the spectacle for all it’s worth. True, that causes the film to suffer in character development, giving us extremely simplified personalities that pretty much begin and end with the stars’ images; for example, Kurt Russell is basically playing Kurt Russell, with Josh Lucas doing Josh Lucas. And the rest of the cast includes Hot Daughter, Single Mom, Token Kid, Expendable Minority and Fussy Richard Dreyfuss, who, because he wears an earring, doubles as The Gay Guy.
Ultimately, as an effects-heavy action-adventure, that doesn’t matter. That Russell still harbors nice-guy charisma and Emmy Rossum sports wet cleavage through the whole thing helps even more. It even has bite, with one person in particular meeting a gruesome death worthy of a slasher flick. Like Paul Gallico’s original novel, Peterson’s film could be accused of a little racism, if subconscious, doing away with almost all the Latinos and blacks in one fell swoop. Just seeing Andre Braugher in the role of the ship’s captain is an automatic death knell.
The film gives water a sense of real menace. Claustrophobia is very real, and Poseidon takes advantage of that. So for a disposable thriller with good special effects, Snake Plissken and a little Fergie ass-shaking, Poseidon will do you right for a night’s rental. —Rod Lott
Had star Erika Christensen actually gone all the way and bared her considerable assets, 
Wait, so what’s the problem here? I’m thinking back to when I was in high school. And if someone as cute and curvy as Christensen wanted to have sex with me and it meant she would show up at my house to look at old pictures with my mom or instant-message me while I was doing homework, so be it. ’Tis a very small price to pay for hot, chlorinated sex. 
I, Robot doesn’t have a bad premise, just bad execution. My main problem with this movie lies with a miscast Smith. Continuously walking with a rap-video swagger, he has two modes of acting, each inappropriate: In normal situations, he’s over-the-top and shouting, while in times of life-threatening danger, he’s suddenly under the spotlight at Catch a Rising Star, lobbing leftovers from his 
Those who do make it find immediate action, in a flick jammed full of it — and largely gory! — ranging from a dude getting stabbed right in the taint or another blowing up after having a grenade shoved in his mouth to your more standard, everyday decapitations and dismemberments. Although armed with machine guns, the men get inventive when it comes to defeating their enemies; Sammo even uses leaves to fell the bad guys by sending them flying through their necks.
Building a hotel over one of the seven gateways to Hell will come back to bite you in the ass. So will bringing home a woman with milky eyes and a German shepherd, especially if you meet them standing motionless in the middle of the road. These and other lessons, director Lucio Fulci imparts with torn parts in his splatter horror classic 
Melding two beloved fright-film subgenres — the zombie movie and the haunted-house thriller — Fulci’s The Beyond goes way beyond the horror norm, testing audience’s tummies with an triple-eye-gouging, face-melting, head-impaling, throat-tearing, forehead-penetrating, cheek-puncturing good ol’ time. The practical effects are grossly realistic, except for one point where some fakery is obvious. However, that’s the part where several tarantulas slowly crawl onto a paralyzed guy’s face and tear it apart, claiming the honor of being cinema’s all-time sickest spider scene. Arachnophobes will flip.