Quick show of hands: How many people reading this are demented serial killers? One? Two? Six? It’s hard to say, but if we went by the sensational news reports that frequently aired during the ’80s, then all of us should have firsthand knowledge of the sound a puppy makes when you boil it alive. This is because we grew up watching horror movies and that way — so these reports claimed — inevitably led to mental illness and murder.

If you are a teenager having fun, someone somewhere is making money explaining to concerned parents how the activity you’re enjoying is going to rob you of your sanity and turn you into a demented maniac (or at least someone who doesn’t get into a good college). And chances are someone is going to eventually exploit this concern in a terrible made-for-TV movie. Which brings us to Mazes and Monsters.

In this early Tom Hanks vehicle, the threat to humanity is LARPing (or live-action role playing for those of you who have robust social lives or haven’t seen Role Models). Hanks plays Robby, a troubled college student who joins three other students to play the Dungeons & Dragons-esque title game, only to lose his ability to tell fantasy from reality when they take the game out of the dorm room and into the real world.

The script is as ridiculously overwrought as its plot suggests and eschews any semblance of subtlety in favor of in-your-face obviousness, usually to inadvertently hilarious effect. The gaming equivalent of Reefer Madness, it’s the kind of film you should watch if only to remind you that as crazy and dangerous as the kids may seem today, they’re going to eventually grow up to be as boring and normal as we are now. —Allan Mott

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Although it’s adapted from a swiftly paced Michael Crichton novel to which it stays fairly faithful, the stunningly weak Timeline is a dreadfully dull excuse for a sci-fi action thriller, not to mention a career low for director Richard Donner.

A group of graduate students is excavating an old castle in France when a strange message from their professor that carbon-dating suggests is 600 years old. Turns out the old coot has wayback-machined himself to the 14th century! The corporation behind the technology making it all possible recruits a few of the kids to go back in time as well to save him.

And how I wish I could go back in time to save myself two hours and four bucks. This is not a story — it’s an endlessly cycling collection of footage of knights falling down, students climbing out of houses, swords clanging, and our heroes checking their “countdown markers” to see how much time they have left to make their rescue. In the spirit of things, I kept checking the readout on my DVD player to see how much more crap was left to unload before the closing credits.

If I hadn’t read the novel beforehand, I never would. There are so many things wrong with this movie that I lost count. But I have mustered up enough energy to recall three:
• Scottish comedian Billy Connelly — Howard Hesseman’s replacement on Head of the Class — plays the professor. Do you remember how annoying it is to hear Connelly speak? Me, too. I’d leave him trapped, because even powerfully grating voices like his can’t travel six centuries.
• A.I.’s Frances O’Connor looks like an elf. And I don’t mean a cute elf, but a gnarly elf with food poisoning and gonorrhea.
• Paul Walker — the himbo star of The Fast and the Furious franchise — is a truly terrible actor. But he is prettier than any of the females in the movie, which is never a good sign. —Rod Lott

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WARNING: If a movie ever begins with the credit “R.I. Diculous Presents,” be afraid — be very afraid — because it’s Invasion of the Star Creatures, an utterly witless, laughless, 70-minute exercise in tedium, written by Little Shop of Horrors star Jonathan Haze, who writes as well as he acts.

It concerns two bumbling privates at a missile base, both of whom are short and have heavy Quentin Tarantino unibrows. They do pratfalls and have dumb dialogue, firmly planting the movie in what I call the “why I oughta” school of comedy — you know, the remedial kind.

They’re sent to investigate a radioactive crater in Nicholson Canyon, only to find a horde of star creatures (men with burlap sacks over their heads, ping-pong balls for eyes and twigs and leaves placed randomly about their tights) and, better yet, two bra-busting honeys named Poona (!) and Tanga (!!) from 60 million light years away who want to take over Earth and who wear skintight space suits that can’t quite contain their ass cheeks. They’re played by Gloria Victor and Dolores Reed — or, as the credits refer to them, “Wow!” and “Wow! Wow!”

But “Woof!” is a more appropriate word to sum up this dog. If you make it to the part where the boys start hanging out with the Indians who freak out at the very mention of the word “Custer,” you’re a braver man than I. —Rod Lott

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