The Amityville Horror (1979)

The first of many not-very-good films in the Amityville series is a haunted house story based on reportedly true events.
Newly-weds Lois Lane and a long-lost Gibb brother occupy 112 Ocean Avenue, a house in which a vicious murder spree took place one year before. Soon afterwards their life takes on a murderous slant.
Acting is good most of the time and there's a violent unease helped along by excellent editing between past and present in the first half hour, but then things go sour. It drags on and on, desperately trying to make the boring crap that married couples engage in seem interesting.
The Lalo Schifrin score and the occasional creepy event were the only things preventing me from making good use of the stop button.

2½ ax games out of 5

MARS ATTACKS! [1996]

As much of a hugely unfocused mess Tim Burton's sci-fi comedy Mars Attacks! is, it's still one of my top five favorite films of his.

Inspired by 1960's Topps' trading cards of the same name, the film is more of a homage than a satire of 1950's sci-fi b-movies and 1970's ensemble cast disaster films.  Beneath all the goofiness and scattered chaos is a ruthlessly funny dissection of American society and culture that ultimately hurt it's popularity in the States but was a great success in the rest of the world.  It's colorful, loud, hilarious, tremendously corny and occasionally shocking, all of which makes for one of Burton's craziest films to date.  

3 peace doves of war out of 5

The Illustrated Man (1969)

A tattooed drifter seeks the woman that inked him, giving rise to an anthology of three framed narratives adapted from the Ray Bradbury book (1951) of the same name. The author wasn't actually involved in the production.

The stories are badly made; they're pretty crap, actually. Rod Steiger almost saves the day with his terrifying angry drifter guy.  He gave me the wiggins.

It would've worked better as a TV series, à la The Twilight Zone.

2 painted arse-cheeks out of 5