In this infinitely idiotic horror flick, the population of Backwater, La., consists almost entirely of dumb teenagers, making it just the sort of place a demonic maniac would go fishing. And so one does, with all the ruthlessness, cruelty and utter predictability of hundreds of others in countless slasher films before him. The movie piles

I can’t imagine what the filmmakers did to poor little Dakota Fanning to make her look so wan in this thriller, short of filling her with tequila shots the night before filming. She plays a dour kid who moves with her father (Robert De Niro) after her mother’s suicide to rural New York, where she

A handful of strangers (including John Cusack, Ray Liotta and Amanda Peet) are murdered one at a time in a motel on the darkest and stormiest of dark and stormy nights. If the filmmakers had stuck to this B-movie premise, things could have been fun, but Michael Cooney’s over-reaching script tries for Sixth Sense-like significance.

Michael Keaton is far more effective as a tormenting figure than a tormented one, which makes his role here as an architect who starts hearing voices of the dead in static an inherently ill fit. Having Beetlejuice and the best brooding Batman scared silly by spooky noises doesn’t quite fit. Keaton is maddeningly passive, possibly

Further evidence that Satanists are rarely anything but silly in the movies, this Kim Basinger vehicle is an exploitative rehash of the Bethlehem story with a 7-year-old girl (Holliston Coleman) in the Jesus part. Rufus Sewell plays the lead Satanist who wants to turn the girl to the dark side, and his knack for making

This sequel to The Silence of the Lambs is a disappointing comic spectacle, in which gruesome details (disembowelments, sauteed brains) are offset by lighthearted dialogue that turns one of the movies’ greatest villains into a ghastly gag. Anthony Hopkins returns as Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, but he’s more interested in delivering one-liners than scares. From