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Eddie Murphy keeps Fox’s Rotten Tomatoes streak alive!

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According to an age-old Hollywood maxim, it’s just as hard to make a bad movie as a good one. If true, I guess we can’t accuse anyone of slacking off at 20th Century Fox. The box-office jury came in with a guilty verdict on ‘Meet Dave,’ joining the critics: The sci-fi comedy -- about an alien spaceship that looks like, well, like Eddie Murphy -- is a stinker.

Even Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, the man who rarely sees a movie he can’t shamelessly blurb (‘Speed Racer’: ‘The movie is a powerhouse!’), turned up his nose at ‘Dave,’ calling it ‘bottom-feeding material’ with ‘lazyass toilet jokes.’ (Our review isn’t much better.)

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Rotten Tomatoes, the leading online aggregator of reviews, gave ‘Dave’ a 21% fresh out of 100. The abysmal score keeps an unenviable Fox streak alive. Putting aside ‘Horton Hears a Who,’ which got good notices when it hit the theaters in March, Fox has released 16 movies since ‘The Simpsons Movie’ came out last July. And guess how many of those films got a 50 or better (considered the minimum for an average score at Rotten Tomatoes)?

Zero.

Getting a 50-plus score at Rotten Tomatoes isn’t that hard. After all, ‘Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay’ scored a 55 while ‘Get Smart’ earned a solid 53. But Fox hasn’t even been within shouting distance lately, with ‘The Happening’ getting a 19 (ouch!), ‘What Happens in Vegas’ scoring a 27 (yikes) and ‘Deception’ barely cracking double figures with a lowly 11 (whoa Nellie!).

The good news: Fox only has to wait a week before it has a chance to break the streak. The bad news: Its next movie is ‘Space Chimps,’ an animated comedy about a pair of NASA chimps who blast off into space to save a distant planet from its evil nemesis. Does that sounds like 50-plus material to you? I’d love to hear from anyone who thinks they can predict ‘Chimps’ ’ Rotten Tomatoes score. You may want to watch the trailer first--and adjust your scores accordingly:

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