Roger Ebert's Zero-Star Reviews by DoyleE

"Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."

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"This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels."

"These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters—they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit."

"Nobody in this film really seems to be there. Not the famous actors like Malcolm McDowell and (very briefly) Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud, whose scenes have been augmented by additional porn shot later with other people and inserted to spice things up. Not the director (who removed his credit from the film). Not the writer (what in the world can it mean that this movie is 'adapted from an original screenplay by Gore Vidal'?). Not even the sound track. The actors never quite seem to be speaking their own words, which were so badly dubbed in later that the dialogue never seems to be emerging from the drama itself."

"[David] Niven (a) doesn't want himself standing nude and 20 feet tall in the middle of London, but (b) especially not with someone else's privates.… So he sets out to discover the anonymous model and wreak vengeance, or something, upon him. And then… I walked out.

"I suppose a funny movie might have been made of this material. No, on second thought, I suppose not."

"[This film] is tone-deaf comedy; the material, the dialogue, the delivery and even the soundtrack are labored and leaden. How to account for the fact that Larry David is one of the creators of Seinfeld? Maybe he works well with others.

"I can't easily remember a film I've enjoyed less.… [This] is a movie that deserves its title: It's puckered, deflated and vinegary. It's a dead zone."

"I hold it as an item of faith that Rob Reiner is a gifted filmmaker; among his credits are This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally…, and Misery. I list those titles as an incantation against this one.

"[This] is a bad film—one of the worst movies ever made. But it is not by a bad filmmaker, and must represent some sort of lapse from which Reiner will recover—possibly sooner than I will."

"Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent. It stars and was scripted by Jenny McCarthy, the cheerfully sexy model who, judging by this film, is fearless, plucky and completely lacking in common sense or any instinct for self-preservation.

"Yes, it takes nerve to star in a scene where you plop down in a supermarket aisle surrounded by a lake of your own menstrual blood. But to expect an audience to find that funny verges on dementia."

"I believe that the shark wants revenge against Mrs. Brody. I do. I really do believe it. After all, her husband was one of the men who hunted this shark and killed it, blowing it to bits. And what shark wouldn’t want revenge against the survivors of the men who killed it?

"Here are some things, however, that I do not believe: That Mrs. Brody could be haunted by flashbacks to events where she was not present and that, in some cases, no survivors witnessed.… That Mrs. Brody would commandeer a boat and sail out alone into the ocean to sacrifice herself to the shark, so that the killing could end. That [Michael] Caine’s character could or would crash-land his airplane at sea so that he and two other men could swim to Mrs. Brody’s rescue. That after being trapped in a sinking airplane by the shark and disappearing under the water, Caine could survive the attack, swim to the boat, and climb on board—not only completely unhurt but also wearing a shirt and pants that are not even wet. That the shark would stand on its tail in the water long enough for the boat to ram it. That the director, Joseph Sargent, would film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence."

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"The opening segments of the movie are simply odd, distracting and unconvincing. It's the movie's final act that is sick. [Ryan] O'Neal finally grows convinced that he has a problem. He realizes he is a degenerate gambler and needs help. So he goes to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, and finds the courage to stand up and identify himself as a compulsive gambler. He walks out with the leader of the meeting, who explains GA to him in a scene that sounds dictated by the film's technical advisers.

"Fine. He has a problem and he's found a way to try and deal with it. But can you seriously believe that MGM, with its giant investment in gambling, would allow the movie to end with O'Neal cleaning up his act and returning happily to life outside the casinos? No way. After he leaves the Gamblers Anonymous meeting, O'Neal goes to the airport, where he tries his luck on a slot machine. He wins. This is obviously a sign that his luck has changed, right? So he takes his new nest-egg back to the casino, where during an incredible winning streak he parlays his new stake into the $89,000 he needs to pay off the mob and set up a trust fund for his daughter.

"Once he's won the $89,000, does he continue to gamble? He's tempted. He holds the dice up in the air, and they glow like radioactive ingots. But then he hurls them across the room and leaves, determined never to gamble again. In other words, after he faced his addiction at the Gamblers Anonymous meeting, he improved to the degree that he only needed to gamble long enough to win back the $89,000 he needed. In real life, of course, he probably would have lost again, and gotten his kneecaps smashed.

"If this movie had been a remake of The Lost Weekend, I guess it would have ended with Ray Milland leaving the AA meeting and getting drunk—but only just enough to get a nice buzz, of course."