Volcano is a very famous movie because it happened to come out two months after Dante's Peak, which was also about a volcano but which, lucky for the makers of Volcano, hadn't used the word "volcano" in its title. A similar phenomenon happened the next year, when Deep Impact and Armageddon were released, both about giant space objects hurtling toward Earth. And it happened again in 2001, when you had the two films about grotesque swamp monsters, Shrek and Bridget Jones's Diary.

Volcano begins…

Let's say you write a weekly column about bad movies, and that this column is extraordinarily popular and has made you beloved the world over. (LET'S JUST SAY.) Then let's say someone suggests as fodder for this column something called Surf Ninjas, which of course you have not seen, because why…

Our film this week is from 1986, and it is called King Kong Lives. "What??" you're saying. "No he doesn't!" King Kong fell off the Empire State Building in 1933, or off one of the Twin Towers in 1976, or off the Empire State Building again in 2005. In any case, he is dead. He does not live. This…

If there is one thing we learned from Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, it's that you can heal a broken leg by rubbing your hands together and then touching it. Countless lives have been saved with this knowledge. And if there's another thing we learned from Mr. Miyagi, it's to never, ever give up, no…

In 1974, movie audiences were enchanted by Death Wish, a delightful romp in which a man named Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) goes on a killing spree after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped. His killing spree only targeted criminals, though, so he wasn't a dangerous psychopath but simply a…

For every George Clooney who makes the transition from a successful TV career to a successful film career, there are a hundred Bill Cosbys who never manage to do anything other than star in self-titled TV shows and associate themselves with Jell-O Pudding Pops -- a nice consolation prize, sure, but…