Stakeholders discovered they were sitting on a bomb, but realized they had nowhere to safely explode it.

More time baking in the creative oven might have added fuller flavor. In its current form, “Itsy Bitsy” contentedly feels “good enough” to go to market with what it has.

Would you ever want to watch “Karma” a second time? Will you even remember you watched it a first time? The answer is of course, “no.”

Adrienne Barbeau likely filmed her sixty-second scene so quickly, her driver probably kept the car running the entire time.

While that makes for adequate entertainment in the interim, the franchise needs to consider creative course correction for a fresher future.

Whatever machetes were taken to screenplay drafts and final footage make mincemeat out of characters with absent introductions and relationships with no resonance.

If you have good humor when it comes to gore-coated goofs, you too will flip the film an upward thumb while the sour grapes crew bitterly erects a bunch of middle fingers.

The preferred way to look at “The Intruder” is as a Lifetime movie-of-the-week that happened to have a multimillion-dollar theatrical makeover.

Turns out “The Manson Family Massacre” isn’t as bad as I feared. It’s astonishingly worse than I possibly could have predicted.

“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” has enough gas in its tank to get across the finish line on the strength of its roster, raw material, and flourishes of creepy creativity.

Unoriginality makes the movie way late to a posthumous possession party already won decidedly by “The Autopsy of Jane Doe.”

“Lake Placid: Legacy” gets three stars out of five for being a-ok for this sort of thing, with “this sort of thing” being made-for-mediocrity cable TV creature claptrap.

While the comic book incarnation is an all-timer for its medium, this version is a middle-of-the-road movie as far as Batman’s cartoon capers go.

“Slender Man” builds itself like a toddler builds Mr. Potato Head, except with even less sense for anatomy or creativity.

I don’t think I’ve seen a microbudget movie use Spartan style for psychologically suggestive storytelling this well since Mike Flanagan’s “Absentia.”

“Alita: Battle Angel” might remind many of “Ready Player One” minus the exhausting parade of pop culture references.

“Glass” delivers a humdrum 22-page one-shot fated to be sold five-for-$1 alongside old Archie comics in a water-damaged long box.

Think along lines like “Ouija” and “The Gallows” and “DreadOut” basically plays like a supernatural Blumhouse teen thriller except in Indonesian.

My 50/100 rating purposefully erects a fence to reflect the divide between viewers who will find “Luz” creepily captivating from those who just find it tediously taxing.

“Critters Attack” is the movie “Critters” would have been if it had the modest budgetary uptick to go a little crazier with its irreverent ideas for Crite carnage.