Saturday matinees may not be the ideal time to check out a purported horror movie, but The Covenant never really tries to generate any scares or suspense. The five teens behind me are the only members of the target demographic in the near-empty theater, and their only audible reaction comes not to any act of witchcraft but to a male-male kiss. (Granted, the antagonistic smooch is more Fredo Corleone than Ennis Del Mar, but manhood-asserting 17-year-olds are squeamish.) Renny Harlin likes 'em loud, pretty and dumb, and he's designed this one for teen girls who have grown up with Harry Potter but now like to ogle The O.C. For a filmmaker with half a brain, there might actually be something to chew on in the story of old money sons of privilege set to inherit their fathers' power upon reaching adulthood and easily tempted to abuse it. But Harlin is content to trust the poutiest of the boys, good to his mother and his girlfriend, to use the power wisely and not turn into his Dorian Gray dad once he has vanquished the glowering, almost-as-pouty villain. The teen crowd really likes the "make you my wee-otch" taunt, which is the wittiest thing in the script. Make of that what you will.

—Shaun Brady

Covenant

The night before the Toronto Film Festival's orgy of cinema begins, a sensible person would be resting his eyes. But instead, I rushed out to the mall to see a movie as elusive as any of the festival's global treats. In its finite wisdom, 20th Century Fox chose to release Mike Judge's Idiocracy in only seven cities in North America, and this is one of them. In fact, it's about as close to Philadelphia as the movie is likely to come.

A dumper among dumpers, Idiocracy has been released with a minimum of fanfare (Fox's Web site doesn't even acknowledge its existence), so it's somehow fitting that when I turn up at a gleaming multiplex looking for the 7:30 show, I'm redirected to the run-down complex across the street, where a crowd of about eight awaits the evening show.

In Judge's dystopian satire, Luke Wilson plays an unremarkable Army librarian whose ultra-averageness makes him the ideal test subject for a secret government experiment. Five hundred years later, he and Maya Rudolph's flash-frozen streetwalker awaken in a radically dumbed-down nation now known as "Uhmerica." On this planet of the mouth-breathers, crudity rules: Starbucks doles out handjobs instead of lattes, and a popular TV show features a man getting repeatedly whacked in the balls. Sports drinks have replaced water, even in agriculture, and corporate logos cover every inch of the landscape, as well as a few patches of available skin. Familiar brands take a pounding, but Judge crams the frame with punnish byproducts, too many to be grasped in a single viewing.

Judge is a plodding filmmaker, and while Office Space's lackluster shots might have passed as an extension of cubicle drudgery, Idiocracy's turgidity is a bit of a drag. But if Judge's vision of a future where the lowest common denominator has dropped through the floor never quite grabs hold, it's still twice the movie Talladega Nights was — the difference being that Idiocracy's targets didn't pay for the insult.

—Sam Adams