Metacritic reviews

The Crush is the latest in the growing ''from hell'' genre, about all the fun things that happen when a ferocious, precocious 14-year-old girl develops an intense crush on the nice-guy journalist who rents a guest house from the girl's parents. Things start innocent. Get worse. Get horrible. Get ridiculous. You know the formula. Working within that formula, The Crush isn't bad.

As an unashamed B-movie, The Crush does what it says on the tin and entertains for an hour and a half. Except you feel kind of cheated by the supposed climax, with the build up proving more disturbing. Silverstone is convincingly equal parts Lolita and Norman Bates.

Yet another variation on the woman-from-hell subgenre, THE CRUSH fails to come up with many new twists beyond casting a teenager as its villain. Dancing around its own salacious possibilities, the movie is only briefly offensive and rarely surprising.

In fact, with its basic shortage of gore and only brief glimpses of nudity, it’s hard to imagine what in the film prompted an R rating, unless it stands for “ridiculous.”

A harmless sex-teaser, from a first-time writer/director, which develops into a confused, cynical and third-rate exploitationer.

With plot holes so large you could drive a HumVee through them, this debut film from director Shapiro is little more than a lousy hybrid, one part Fatal Attraction to two parts Lolita, only this time Humbert Humbert writes for trendy Pique! magazine and lives in Seattle (but doesn't everybody these days?).

There's something scuzzy about the whole exercise.

Never succeeds in becoming either torrid or scary. It does generate a few chuckles in its depiction of what are supposedly the workings of a chic and hard-hitting magazine...The Crush is for the most part grindingly predictable and mechanically played.

This is one more "yuppie-in-peril" movie, just as slick and empty, manipulative and crude, as most of the rest: all those paranoid pictures bent on scaring us with insane roommates, murderous baby-sitters and killer temps. [5 Apr 1993, p.F3]

While the material forming the basis for The Crush can't make any claims of originality, there's certainly enough there to craft a decent film around. With a challenging story, a real script, and actors willing to take a few chances, The Crush could have been enjoyable. Essentially, all that would have been necessary for a success is a complete scrapping of the film that was actually produced. Even lovers of formula thrillers will find this picture hard to swallow.