Critics » Mark Olsen » Rotten
Mark Olsen

Mark Olsen

Agrees with the Tomatometer 76% of the time.

Publications:
Boxoffice Magazine , Chicago Tribune , L.A. Weekly , Los Angeles Times , Sight and Sound , Village Voice
Total Reviews:
302

Worst Reviewed Films

Showing 1 - 50 of 285
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Rating T-Meter Title | Year Add Date
0.5/5 42% The Last House on the Left (2009) " A shockingly mundane disappointment taken on its own and a deeply misguided refraction of the original." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Mar 13, 2009
1/5 18% For Greater Glory (2012) " The film's length and muddled message will likely keep it from reaching much of an audience, even within the presumed Latino faith-based target." — Boxoffice Magazine
Posted Jun 3, 2012
1/5 22% High School (2012) " Lacking real kick, "High School" winds up as irksome as a bag of ditch weed and as lame as the pun of the film's title." — Los Angeles Times
Posted May 31, 2012
1/5 7% The Devil Inside (2012) " People of the world: If you find some footage, leave it be. You will likely be doing the rest of us a huge favor." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Jan 7, 2012
1/5 5% Beneath The Darkness (2012) " At times it seems the simple ineptitude of "Beneath the Darkness" surely must mask some undercurrent of deeper sophistication and intention on behalf of the filmmakers. Alas, as it turns out, such things never surface." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Jan 6, 2012
1/5 —— A Kiss and a Promise (2011) " Why an actor would create a starring part for himself this thin and underdeveloped is beyond explanation." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Sep 8, 2011
1/5 25% Apollo 18 (2011) " The film takes a startlingly long time to rev up, and even at less than 90 minutes feels thin and at moments like it is playing for time." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Sep 3, 2011
1/5 33% A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (2011) " Unable to decide whether to pitch their story as chastely sweet or ridiculously raunchy, filmmakers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck end up with something that just lays there flacid." — Boxoffice Magazine
Posted Sep 2, 2011
1/5 15% Cat Run (2011) " It's easy to feel sucked into some kind of time warp back to the heyday of late-'90s post-Tarantino crime thrillers, cut-rate knockoffs filled with casually cartoonish violence, quippy patter, overtly flash filmmaking and incongruous pop tunes." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Apr 4, 2011
1/5 5% Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son (2011) " A film so drained of entertainment or simple humanity it is difficult to relate to as anything other than industrial artifact." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Feb 18, 2011
1/5 10% Season of the Witch (2011) " Directed by the perennially hollow Dominic Sena from a script by Bragi Schut, "Season of the Witch" is all seams. It never balances out its competing desires..." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Jan 6, 2011
1/5 —— Dead Awake (2010) " Though the performers gamely try to make the most of what little they have to work with, the film is murky to look at and unfocused in its storytelling. "Dead Awake" is a deadly snore." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Dec 9, 2010
1/5 25% Friday the 13th (2009) " The original handful of Friday films had a certain low-rent elegance about them, and this slickly done, dimly lighted, whiplash-edited update loses that too." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Feb 13, 2009
1/5 —— 1968 Tunnel Rats (2009) " With 1968: Tunnel Rats, Boll continues to show himself to be an unusually versatile filmmaker -- outrageously awful in any genre." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Dec 19, 2008
1/5 —— Waiting in Beijing (2008) " A preposterously inept, fabulously amateurish piece of vanity moviemaking." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Dec 12, 2008
1/5 32% Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) " The film is bad -- not good-bad, tacky-bad or fun-bad, just plain awful and nearly unwatchable." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Nov 7, 2008
1/5 15% Hounddog (2008) " The problems that plague the movie land squarely with the writer, director and producer, Deborah Kampmeier, who has crafted a howler of a bad script, shows little affinity for working with actors and displays no visual sense behind the camera." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Sep 19, 2008
1/5 —— murder.com (2010) " When a single episode of your sister's TV show contains hotter action and more story structure than the movie you are in, it may be time to reboot. Murder.com is strictly CTRL+ALT+delete." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Jul 18, 2008
1/5 3% Deal (2008) " Reynolds doesn't convey any of the lightning bolt insouciance that made him arguably the greatest movie star of the '70s and '80s (really) but rather just stands there." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Apr 25, 2008
1/5 14% Deception (2008) " Deception would be laughably bad if it weren't so rotely inert." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Apr 25, 2008
1/5 48% The Ruins (2008) " Not even a fixer-upper, The Ruins should be considered a complete tear-down." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Apr 4, 2008
1/5 —— Egoïste: Lotti Latrous () " The way in which [director] Anspichler lingers on those who are only moments from death, especially milking a little boy's suffering in the film's finale, is truly sickening and exploitative in the lowest sense of the word." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Jun 1, 2007
1/5 2% Kickin' It Old Skool (2007) " The film itself seems lost in a time warp -- even its attitude toward the '80s is out of date considering the ongoing revival in music and fashion from that era." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Apr 30, 2007
1/5 15% What Love Is (2008) " Now and then there is something strangely right about films this defiantly wrongheaded, but What Love Is never rises above the leaden, overbearing qualities of Callahan's dialogue and staging." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Mar 23, 2007
1/5 20% The Hitcher (2007) " That [original] film was intellectually engaging as well as tangibly creepy, while the new remake is just plain bad, and boring to boot." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Jan 22, 2007
1/5 4% The Celestine Prophecy (2006) " The movie is flatly acted and extremely ill-paced, lacking any sense of urgency, momentum or fun." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Jul 21, 2006
50% Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger (2008) " The filmmaker's overreliance on oddball characterizations and easy-bake kookiness often derails her seemingly loftier intentions." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Jun 10, 2010
11% Side Effects (2005) " While Slattery-Moschkau is obviously coming from a very earnest place -- a card before the final credits compares the annual budget for the pharmaceutical industry to that of her own film -- it doesn't make the overall effort any less clumsy." — L.A. Weekly
Posted May 11, 2006
77% Look Both Ways (2006) " Watt seems to want to say something about the role of fate and happenstance in creating connections between people, but she never quite brings the strands of her ideas together." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Apr 27, 2006
23% Phat Girlz (2006) " [Mo'Nique's] sassy forte may be talking so straight-up she sounds crazy, but she seems a little advanced to be doing 'yo mama' jokes." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Apr 13, 2006
15% Iowa (2005) " As director, Farnsworth lets tricky visuals run roughshod over dramatic unity, while as a performer, his lack of screen presence makes him seem sullen and uninterested instead of darkly charismatic." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Apr 13, 2006
5% Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (2006) " The low road always wins out." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Mar 28, 2006
71% Americano (2005) " Watching Americano is like hearing a long story about someone else's holiday, and while it seems everyone had a nice time, it's too bad they didn't shoot a better film while they were there." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Mar 23, 2006
27% What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole (2006) " Down the Rabbit Hole makes teen sex comedies, action-chick sci-fi and the other usual multiplex chum seem like high-minded discourse." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Mar 16, 2006
8% Doogal (2006) " The story, dialogue and animation here really are for-kids-only." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Feb 27, 2006
32% Tamara (2006) " An entry into the cycle of avenging teen-girl pictures, in which the filmmakers try gamely to put a unique spin on familiar material, but eventually fall back on by-the-numbers tropes." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Feb 16, 2006
—— See This Movie (2006) " ... director David Rosenthal and his writing partner, Joseph M. Smith, simply don't come up with enough material to keep the laughs coming at a reasonable pace and never quite get a groove rolling." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Jan 26, 2006
21% April's Shower (2004) " You'd think that having gone to the trouble of writing, directing, producing and starring in April's Shower, Trish Doolan would have something to say." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Jan 12, 2006
47% Hoodwinked (2005) " The animation style of Hoodwinked is dated by at least a handful of years, marked by that glassy smoothness that dominated previous generations of CGI." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Dec 15, 2005
10% Aeon Flux (2005) " It probably looked like a good idea on paper." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Dec 8, 2005
33% The Kid & I (2005) " Gores certainly seems to be enjoying himself, and diplomacy and plain old good taste prevent one from saying much of anything about his screen performance. Arnold doesn't merit such kindness, nor does producer and director Penelope Spheeris." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Dec 1, 2005
32% The Gospel (2005) " There's a lot of talk here about religion, as well as plenty of gospel singing, but no sense of what these characters truly believe." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Oct 6, 2005
4% Dirty Love (2005) " Facing up to such nasty, untidy realities of modern coupledom would have given Dirty Love some of the edge it aspires to, but seriously lacks." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Sep 22, 2005
7% Daltry Calhoun (2005) " This is the kind of smug, listless product that the world, indie or otherwise, would be better off without." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Sep 22, 2005
84% Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005) " Corpse Bride is a rather unblessed union." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Sep 15, 2005
7% Undiscovered (2005) " Director Meiert Avis is a veteran helmer of music videos, so while it is not entirely surprising that he has no feel for character or structure, it is strange that he doesn't breathe much life into the frequent musical performances and montages either." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Sep 1, 2005
21% Eternal (2004) " Conrad Pla turns in a performance of such staggering ineptitude that it almost (key word: almost) reaches a so-bad-it's-good, Plan 9 From Outer Space brilliance." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Sep 1, 2005
84% De Zaak Alzheimer (The Memory of a Killer) (The Alzheimer Case) (2005) " Director Erik Van Looy has filmmaking chops to spare, and while he has created a sharply shot and crisply paced film, he isn't able to make it all cohere, as the moving parts spin in place without any connection or harmony." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Aug 25, 2005
6% Supercross (2005) " When huge chunks of character development and narrative exposition are relegated to a track announcer's running commentary, it can never be a good sign." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Aug 18, 2005
40% Wrong Turn (2003) " This self-styled throwback to the down-and-dirty horror films of the 1970s and '80s never delivers what it definitely promises." — L.A. Weekly
Posted Jun 5, 2003
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