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My 100 Worst Movies of All-Time (25-1)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

25. Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Kicking off our bottom twenty-five, we have another legendarily bad sequel, Jaws: The Revenge. Suffice to say, this movie’s as bad as everyone has said. Again, this is another horror sequel that just kills off its most famous characters, making Sherriff Brody die of a heart attack off-screen and then having his son, Sean, get killed by the shark at the very start of the film. It just feels insulting to the series’ legacy and is such a lame way to try to make us give a shit about Ellen Brody… that’s right, the main fucking character of this movie is the mom who is basically window-dressing in the previous films. This could work with a hell of a writer who tries to flesh out her character, but this is Jaws: The Revenge: of course we don’t give a shit about her. The film is just fucking boring, and rehashes the original film for most of the runtime, only a thousand times worse and with nonsensical plot developments which make the shark seem like it has psychic powers. I generally find that the movies most notorious for being bad are over-hyped: sure, they’re bad, but they were also famous enough that a general audience would recognize them. For the real bad shit, you usually have to look into the more obscure films which lack even professionalism. Jaws: The Revenge, on the other hand, is one of those bad movies that has well and truly earned its reputation. Like I said before: the 80s were a wild time for baffling, theatrically-released stinkers.

24. BloodRayne (2005)

Oh hey, BloodRayne has an entry in both my all-time worst games and worst movies list, what an accomplishment! Once again, we’re looking at a Uwe Boll video game adaptation “classic”. Despite its star-studded cast (which includes Michael Madsen, Billy Zane, Udo Kier, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Rodriguez, Meat Loaf, and Kristanna Loken, fresh off Terminator 3, as Rayne), the film feels completely amateur on every level you can think of. It makes for an incredibly shoddy film, which attempts to create this huge fantasy epic, but with basically no talent, budget, or capability to do such a thing. It doesn’t even feel like this is a passion project for Boll, everything is just lazily done. It’s not even as laughably entertaining as some of his other, more notorious efforts either.

23. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

Even by the standards of 90s slasher sequels, Freddy’s Dead is just the worst. The film is so embarrassing: New Line Cinema clearly viewed Freddy Krueger as a global icon, and so they removed the last shreds of horror from him to give him more mass appeal. Instead, they just play up his one-liners, making him completely insufferable. The result is like one of those corporate mascots who is marketed as edgy, but they can’t actually be edgy or they’ll piss some people off, so they just come across as lame instead.

The film looks incredibly cheap, which is why it’s so shocking that they actually had a fairly large budget to work with. Its plot is also downright insane, immediately starting with the premise that, in a ten year period, Freddy has killed every single teenager in Springwood, except one. That is just monstrous and gets glossed over almost immediately. It also just suffers every pitfall you’d expect a bad slasher sequel to fall into (bad acting, bad narrative, tired formula, etc).

That said: Carlos’ death scene is still a solid, grade-A kill, and the one time that the cartoonish tone actually works for the movie.

22. Pompeii (2014)

I would say that this movie was a bigger disaster than the real-life eruption of Vesuvius, but that would be just insensitive, stupid and uninspired… oh hey, all of those words COULD describe Pompeii adequately though. Pompeii is clearly trying to be a mix of Gladiator and Titanic: a lowly gladiator and a high-born merchant’s daughter fall in love and try to evade her betrothed and survive the natural disaster going on around them, only to be met with tragedy at the end. Unsurprisingly, Kit Harrington and Emily Browning put in terrible performances as the lead characters. Only Kiefer Sutherland puts in an enjoyable performance, as he hams it up like mad as the primary antagonist. The actual eruption sequences are about as loud, CGI-filled, and over the top as you’d expect. The eruption of Vesuvius has a ton of potential for a great film, but you’re not going to find it here. Stay as far away as possible.

21. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)

This… this movie did not get a theatrical release. In 1997!? No, there is no way they would do that. I literally am having to look this up as I’m writing this, because I do not believe it happened. Not with this level of quality. No, that is not possible, no one in their right mind would think that this movie belongs on a theater screen. OH MY FUCKING GOD, IT GROSSED $51.3 MILLION!??!

I legitimately think that the original Mortal Kombat is one of the best video game adaptations of all-time. This sequel is staggeringly bad, even by the standards of video game movies. The acting is abysmal. The narrative is nonsense. The special effects look horrendous. The fights are terrible. The sets and costumes look so fake. THIS MOVIE HAD A $30 MILLION BUDGET!?!?!!!?

It might sound like I hated Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, but I actually love it. It is a special kind of bad, one which is utterly unhinged and never boring. However, it is because of that love that I have to put Annihilation in the place it deserves: near the top of the worst movies of all-time list.

20. Dogman (2012)

I’ve long had a fascination with the legend of the Michigan Dogman, a werewolf-like beast said to roam the woods of its namesake state. So, when I found out that someone was making a movie based on the cryptid, I was immediately interested. Hell, I saw a copy of the Blu-ray of this movie at an HMV back in the day for like $30 or $40, but I was so interested that I almost went and paid that outrageous amount for it. THANK GOD I did not, because it would have been the worst purchase of my life. I’d love to say that Dogman is this plucky, indie film success story, but it is anything but that. The film looks so cheap that you could confuse it with a home video. The narrative is incredibly dull, with no suspense at all. The acting is below even amateur. Oh, and to make it all worse, the film just ends anti-climactically, leaving you feeling even more pissed off after all that. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but Dogman really left an impression on me that I vividly remember it for just how bad and boring it was and will often bring it up whenever I’m asked what the worst movies I’ve ever seen were.

19. Monster Hunter (2020)

Boy, Paul W.S. Anderson sure is getting a lot of spots on this bottom twenty-five list, isn’t he? I’m not even exaggerating when I say that Paul W.S. Anderson has to be the worst writer-director and producer in Hollywood these days. After ruining the Resident Evil film franchise, Anderson and Milla Jovovich turned their sights to another Capcom video game franchise: Monster Hunter… and, somehow, they’ve managed to make an even more insulting adaptation of their source material.

Now, I do think that Monster Hunter could make for an interesting high-fantasy film series if it’s confined to the world of the games and features a character learning to hunt these monsters that threaten civilization. Instead, Anderson goes for that lucrative US military propaganda money and makes this a dimension-hopping misadventure where a bunch of marines get pulled into a portal to a world full of monsters. Pretty much everything here sucks, particularly the direction and breakneck pacing. The film barely makes use of the Monster Hunter concept of preparing for the hunt ahead, which is nuts considering that’s entirely what those games are about. Instead, this is just another brainless Paul W.S. Anderson flick that will entertain only the most undiscerning of tastes.

18. Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

Silent Hill: Revelation is staggering for how badly it captures the appeal of its series. The original Silent Hill is definitely one of the better video game adaptations (which is to say that it’s not great, but has some interesting ideas and captures the tone perfectly). It pretty much laid the blueprint for what a sequel would need to do: use the same brand of spooky, psychological of horror and aesthetic, but just have a stronger story this time and you’ll make a legitimately great film, guaranteed. Revelation didn’t give a shit about that. Released at the height of the garbage Silent Hill games and the 3D movie trend, Revelation discards its predecessor’s lessons entirely and instead dives face-first into a pile of shit. Gone is any attempt at psychological horror, this is just the most generic horror slop you could imagine. Seriously, this film is a total disaster: the writing, the acting, the special effects, the direction… everything. Like, I don’t want to be “that guy”, but I’m certain that even I could make a better Silent Hill film than this.

17. Alone in the Dark (2005)

Yet another Uwe Boll classic, Alone in the Dark gets us near the top of his game. Like BloodRayne, this film feels embarrassingly amateur. This can be felt the moment the film begins. Like, you know that a movie is going to be bad when it opens with a lengthy narration which explains the movie’s backstory. It just keeps going on and on to the point that it’s comical. Legend has it that this narration was added after test audiences said that they couldn’t understand what was going on in the film, which caused Boll to over-explain everything in response. The rest of the film isn’t much better, as it’s a horror movie that is direly short on scares. That said, there is one pretty cool moment halfway through where a bunch of soldiers have a shootout with a bunch of monsters in the dark, which is lit only by their muzzle flashes as they get swarmed. It’s the sort of cool sequence that makes the rest of the movie feel even more boring in comparison… like, you’re telling me you could have been doing that this entire time?

16. Vanished (2016)

Vanished was so bad when I watched it for this year’s Left Behind retrospective that it was legitimately shocking. It is just so cynical, stapling a gaggle of YA movie tropes onto a Walking Dead narrative, and then loosely tying it to Left Behind in an attempt to appeal to general audiences. That said, it’s hilarious that about 80% of this movie is a pissing contest between conservative evangelicals and conservative libertarians. That at least makes the movie kind of interesting, but the film is so badly made that it’s almost unwatchable. I legitimately think that Tim LaHaye was lying to his grandson when he said that he liked the movie, and the fact that he died shortly after watching it… well, I’m not gonna say that the movie did him in, but hopefully it left him with one more massive disappointment before the end.

15. God’s Not Dead 2 (2016)

God’s Not Dead 2 is a torturous watch. It’s the absolute worst example of the American evangelical Christian persecution complex in action, a propaganda piece which is so transparently cynical in its construction. Atheists are portrayed as a bunch of God-hating body snatchers who love nothing more than to ruin the lives of poor, innocent, put-upon Christians who never bothered anyone in their lives. The entire premise here is ridiculous, but even the filmmakers realize this, because after all their posturing about how the government and courts are biased against Christians… they end up siding with the Christians, because there’s literally no case here that can be made against them. The film doesn’t even make this out like there’s a big, clever twist that the Christians use to save themselves, it just fucking happens. Like… I can’t believe I’m defending Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist again, but at least that movie tries to justify its propaganda and persecution complex by having it be set in a nebulous near-future where the government has taken over everyone’s lives after an unprecedented emergency. Getting any enjoyment out of God’s Not Dead 2 requires you to be fucking deluded.

14. Fantasy Island (2020)

Oh, speaking of movies that shocked me with how bad they were… I wasn’t expecting much out of a Fantasy Island remake, but somehow this movie managed to be worse than I could ever have imagined. This is supposed to be a professionally-made film with big-name actors, an experienced director, and a great production studio, so how is this the result of all that talent!? The film is entirely bereft of any sort of scares or tension, which would be bad enough, but the writing is also incredibly dumb and the characters are paper-thin and uninteresting. About the only fun in this movie was when the two brothers were on screen because, while they were a couple of stereotypical “bro” types, they were at least enjoying themselves… so maybe I’m just jealous, because I sure as hell was not enjoying myself watching this shitty film.

13. Piranha 3DD (2012)

Piranha 3D is a surprisingly solid horror film, with some of the gnarliest gore I’ve ever seen in my life thanks to Alexandre Aja’s involvement. It’s also just really fun, bringing in creative kills, big set-piece carnage, and an unabashedly sleazy tone that we rarely get out of a big movie like this these days, all wrapped around a very competently told Jaws-like narrative.

Piranha 3DD attempts to double down on the sleaze, the humour, and the cameos, but the resulting film is so much worse than its predecessor in every way imaginable. The humour and sleaze have been pushed to a point where it just makes the film stupid… like, the first movie had a guy get his dick bit off and then eaten and regurgitated by the piranhas, so in the sequel we need to have more penis trauma, right? How do they go about this? Well, a baby piranha… swims up a girl’s vagina… Somehow she does not really notice that there’s a fish swimming around in there, and this piranha doesn’t do what every other piranha in this series has done up to this point. Anyway, she has sex with her boyfriend, who gets a piranha biting him in the dick for his troubles. How does he deal with this problem? If you said “he grabs a knife and cuts his own dick off!”… then congrats, you’re as insane as the people who made this film. That’s the level of contrived, tired bullshit this fucking movie is subjecting you to.

12. The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)

Speaking of bad horror sequels to Alexandre Aja movies which double down on the things their predecessor did, The Hills Have Eyes 2 left me fucking infuriated. The Hills Have Eyes remake (and the original before it) is notorious for having a character get raped by the villainous mutant cannibals. It’s stomach-churning stuff, but it’s shot in a tasteful way that really emphasizes the horror of the act and its effect on the women involved. Anyway, want to take a guess what aspect of the first movie The Hills Have Eyes 2 doubles down on? Yeah, the movie opens with a woman, who has been raped who knows how many times by these cannibals, giving birth to a mutant baby, and then is immediately killed by the mutants. Oh yay, cheap, mean-spirited sexual abuse and violence against women, just what I wanted… Later on, we also get a full-on rape scene after the cannibals capture one of the main characters. It’s infuriating, because the film makes you think she’s going to fight her way out before anything can actually happen to her, but no, right after she beats up her attempted rapist, a stronger cannibal immediately shows up and then he rapes her. Making matters even more despicable, the goddamn thing’s shot like a fucking porno.

The movie isn’t just shit for the ham-fisted and juvenile handling of sexual violence though. This movie attempts to follow the Aliens sequel template by having a bunch of marines fight against these mutants… but, my God, these are the worst soldiers I have ever seen on-screen. They act like a bunch of children in a Call of Duty lobby, rather than actual trained soldiers. I don’t care how much these cannibals know the terrain, they got killed by a dog and a pissed off nerd in the last film, they wouldn’t stand a chance against a squad of trained marines with guns. Fuck this piece of shit movie, I despise it.

11. Lost City Raiders (2008)

We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Lost City Raiders is a TV movie about a bunch of Indiana Jones-style adventurers who look for relics after global warming has flooded most of the Earth. As you’d expect, the acting, effects, and narrative are terrible. Unfortunately, it also has a budget which would make a shoestring take pity on it. This film’s big MacGuffin is an ancient staff which is obviously made of plastic. At least it’s somewhat entertaining, but this movie is so painfully far from its ambitions that it’s downright pitiful.

10. Noobz (2012)

Man… 2013 was a different time. In a pre-Trump, pre-Gamergate, pre-anti-woke grifter world, Noobz legitimately seemed like an outdated portrayal of gamer stereotypes. Not even a year later, it would turn out that a large contingent of gamers actually were proud of being racists, homophobes, and general assholes and wanted you to know it. So… yeah, Noobz is basically Gamergate: The Movie. Even if that wasn’t enough to turn you off, the “comedy” here is awful, just a bunch of “edgy” stuff that sounds like it was cooked up by a teenager. Like… I don’t care how much you want to offend people, if the bulk of your comedy revolves around constantly making fun of a character’s life-threatening disability, and making fun of a character for being really obviously gay, you really need to diversify your jokes and get some actual fucking taste. This movie was pathetic in 2012. Now it’s just annoying in a world where fuckwits like Grummz exist to jerk off the losers who look at Noobz and think that it speaks to them.

9. Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt? (2014)

I really cannot understate just how badly made Atlas Shrugged Part III is. As bad as its predecessors were, you can at least tell that John Aglialoro and company were trying to make something good – they just were too inept to actually pull it off. However, after bleeding tens of millions of dollars on those movies, it feels like Part III exists only out of obligation and pure spite. Part III is cheap and shoddy to a shocking degree, to the point where I was constantly having to pause the film to take notes about some ridiculous detail I noticed. This happened so frequently that I ended up doubling the film’s runtime from all the notes I took. It’s not even like the film itself is all that interesting: it’s mostly just a bunch of time wasting to try to fill out a feature length and then get it all over with. The politics also get downright insane, ending with a scene where Dagny shoots a guard who would rather discuss a toddler’s understanding of the philosophy of free will rather than just get the fuck out of the way when told to… oh, and we’re supposed to think Dagny is righteous for doing this. If there was ever an indictment of Randian philosophy, there can be no clearer example than Atlas Shrugged Part III. It comprehensively shits all over the entire philosophy in both narrative and in its tawdry execution.

8. House of the Dead (2003)

House of the Dead is our final Uwe Boll entry and another shocking example of a movie that got a theatrical release. I legitimately do not understand how someone could see this movie and then say “people need to see this in theaters!” In a lot of ways, it’s an incredibly generic 2000s teen horror movie, but Boll packs in some proper batshit insanity which make this movie unintentionally hilarious. My jaw was agape so many times while watching this movie because I couldn’t believe that Uwe Boll had actually put something so ridiculous to film. We’re talking action sequences which are filmed on a turntable, so Boll can get copious amounts of slo-mo shots while the camera spins around the actors, and there are even sequences of the video game spliced into the film at complete random. While it may be easily one of the worst video game movies ever made, it’s also incredibly watchable and a lot of fun mock.

7. The Room (2003)

The Room is legendary for its poor quality and insane writing. The subsequent decades, and the release of The Disaster Artist, have pulled back the curtain on this film’s bizarre aspects in a way that actually makes the entire thing an interesting exploration of Tommy Wiseau’s own psychology. However, even with that in mind, The Room is legendarily bad for a reason and deserves every bit of its reputation, even if it is one of the most fascinating and unintentionally funny bad movies of all-time.

6. Teenage Zombies (1959)

Again, here’s a temperature check so you understand just how far down on this list we are in terms of quality: Teenage Zombies is a no-budget, Z-grade sci-fi movie from the 50s with basically no filmmaking talent to speak of. Hell, long stretches of it are shot more like a stage play than a movie… not for any stylistic reason, just because everyone involved had no idea what the fuck they were doing. The film also features the world’s worst gorilla costume, and the poor guy inside has clearly been given no direction, so he just kind of stands there awkwardly and wriggles around every once in a while as the camera just lingers on him pathetically. It’s not even particularly fun either, it’s just boring. A friend of mine actually bought this movie on DVD when we were in high school, and it turned out that the DVD distributor had inserted a softcore porn feature at the start of the film. I don’t know if that was just put in to try to try to sell copies of the DVD, but I am certain that that was infinitely more enjoyable than Teenage Zombies.

5. Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009)

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus was my warning to never again trust movies that sell themselves as “so bad it’s good”. This movie was infamous on release for its ridiculous scenes of giant sharks jumping out of the ocean to catch passing jet liners. These scenes are indeed hilarious… but they are also where literally all of the money has been spent, because they are intended to go viral and sell copies of the film to the morbidly curious. However, there are no funny secrets hiding here waiting to be discovered: it’s just a bunch of wheel-spinning and constantly reused CGI shots until they can get to the ending. I bought this for five dollars on DVD, because I figured it would be funny-bad. It wasn’t. It was soul-crushingly awful. They even forgot to key out the green screen at one point! Did literally no one even watch the movie before releasing it!? I’m not even kidding here, I want my ninety minutes and five dollars back.

4. Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

Another legendarily bad “classic”, Birdemic is a surreal experience. It’s basically like if someone ripped off The Birds, but shot the whole thing on a handicam, hired the world’s worst actors, and then used literal animated gifs for the birds. There is actually a legitimate message here about environmentalism and love, so you can tell that writer-director James Nguyen really believed in this movie… he just has zero talent, so instead we get this. It’s also just really fucking dull for the first half, wasting so much time on a weirdly chaste romance that no one gives a single shit about… only to suddenly cut to a bunch of looping gifs of birds flying around and exploding. I nearly ran out of breath from laughing when this first happened, and some of the bird attacks are hilariously pathetic (they fight them with goddamn coat hangers!), but Birdemic is mostly just dull. Truly one of the worst movies ever made, but at least it made me laugh, which is more than I can say for…

3. Project X (2012)

I was not kidding back in the day when I said that I loathed Project X. A found footage film released at the height of that trend, Project X follows a group of teens who try to throw the biggest, craziest party of all-time. You’d think that this would be a formula for some fun hijinks, but Project X‘s cast of assholes make the whole affair insufferable. Costas is still the most infuriating character in cinema, up there with Dolores Umbridge in that class of characters that even Mother Theresa would murder with her bare hands if she met them. It literally nothing more than eighty-eight minutes of douche bags being douche bags, with no redeeming qualities. Even the party aspects aren’t that entertaining. Oh hey, it’s teenagers drinking, doing drugs, and… uh… pissing on each other and throwing Martin Klebba in an oven, because making fun of little people is always good for a laugh, right? Fuck this fucking piece of shit movie.

2. Scary Movie 5 (2013)

All of the other Scary Movie films were really bad, but they at least had the occasional laughs and the presence of such comedic talent as Anna Faris, Regina Hall, and Leslie Nielsen would help elevate the proceedings immensely. Scary Movie 5 has none of these qualities, making it a pathetic film to watch. The jokes are tired, stupid and go on for way too long. About the only good thing that I can say about this movie is that, for once in this franchise, at least it doesn’t lean into mean-spirited homophobia, transphobia, and making fun of people with disabilities… but, like, I shouldn’t have to congratulate the movie on that. The Zucker spoof movie was well and truly dead long before Scary Movie 5 came out, and the fact that this movie was still this bad after all that is just an indictment on humanity as a whole.

1. Howling: New Moon Rising (1995)

I cannot conceive of a movie worse than Howling: New Moon Rising. In every single way imaginable, this movie is abysmal. It is, allegedly, a werewolf movie which has more country music line dancing sequences than it does scenes with werewolves. The entire cast are extras… like, full-stop, there are no actors here. The film reuses copious amounts of footage from previous Howling movies in order to pad out its runtime. Nothing fucking happens in this movie until the last couple minutes, at which point we get the world’s worst werewolf costume and then the townsfolk immediately shoot it to death. There is literally nothing redeeming about this movie, it is pure garbage and makes the other Howling sequels look like fucking masterpieces in comparison.

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10 Worst Movies of the 2010s

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

As you can probably tell if you’ve frequented this blog, you’ll know that I have a thing for bad movies. There’s a special sort of film-going experience that you can only get from a crap-tacular film, be that stunned disbelief or pure rage. Then there’s the true bottom of the barrel. Most of the films on this list are so bad that I would never want to subject myself to them again, and even several years removed from watching them they still leave an awful taste in my mouth. So let’s go down memory lane and exhume some of the worst movies of the entire decade and show off their rotting putridity for all to see?

Honourable Mentions

Birdemic: Shock and Terror (February 27, 2010)
You would be remiss to mention bad movies of the 2010s and leave out Birdemic, a rip-off of The Birds that’s so legendarily incompetent that it became a meme. Director James Nguyen really wanted to make a positive film about environmentalism and pacifism, all wrapped up in an epic love story, but good God he failed spectacularly. For the most part, the film is just boring, but then suddenly the clip art GIF-quality birds attack and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I swear to God I laughed for at least a minute straight when they started dive bombing and literally exploding. Even with everything else wrong with this film, that alone made it at least hilarious and so-bad-it’s-good enough that it’s more enjoyable than any of the movies that made this list. Still, for the sheer ineptitude on display, this film deserves at least a mention on this list.

Dogman (November 6, 2012)
I’ve always been highly intrigued by the legend of the Michigan Dogman, so when I found out that someone made a movie about this creature I was excited to see what they would come up with. I even saw a Blu-ray copy of the film on sale and even though it was going for freaking $35 I was tempted. However, I ultimately decided that I’d better find out if it was good or not before dropping that much on it… and thank God I did, because I dodged a freaking bullet. Dogman is clearly a no-budget film and what we do get on screen is just boring. I can’t really remember much more about it than being extremely disappointed that nothing happens, so I can’t really justify putting it on the list proper (and like hell I’m rewatching it).

The Predator (Septemer 14, 2018)
The Predator isn’t *quite* bad enough to actually make this list, but it is easily one of my most hated films of the decade. I don’t often advocate for films to be written out of continuity, but the Predator franchise is absolutely dead in the water if this film is allowed to dictate the franchise’s future. And why did they feel the need to reboot the franchise anyway? Predators was awesome and went over most of the ideas this film tries to pass off as new anyway.

So with those dishonourable mentions out of the way, let’s get on to the list…

10) Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt? (September 14, 2014)
If you read my Atlas Shrugged retrospective series, you might have expected to see this film on here. Atlas Shrugged Part III fails on so many levels that it’s frankly impressive. Even setting aside the shitty philosophy and morality at this film’s rotten core, the filmmaking is distractingly bad. Like, almost every scene has something distracting – from terrible editing, to bad lighting, to bargain-basement props, to time wasting stock footage, one can’t help but feel like the filmmakers just didn’t give a shit anymore after losing more than $45 million on this franchise. Oh and the acting is the worst in the franchise, which is even funnier when you realize everyone was recast in all three parts. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this movie is on a level of filmmaking incompetence that rivals The Room. I saw a copy of this movie on DVD at a store once and I was sorely tempted to buy it, I had that much fun at its expense (the only reason I didn’t buy it is because like hell I’m going to financially support the bastards in the Randian community). Literally the only reason I didn’t rank this movie lower was because it was such a hoot to watch, but it is unquestionably one of the worst movies of the decade.

9) Pompeii (February 21, 2014)
I could say that this movie was a bigger disaster than the real-life eruption of Vesuvius which the film is based on, but that would just be insensitive, stupid and uninspired… coincidentally, all of those words could be used to describe Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii adequately though. Pompeii is a disaster-romance in the same sort of vein as Pearl Harbour, where far too much time is dedicated to a dull romance and the disaster is just dumb spectacle. Kit Harrington is here at his absolute blandest and poor Emily Browning is saddled with a lifeless damsel in distress role. About the only notable thing about this movie is Kiefer Sutherland who seems to be having an absolute blast hamming it up as a cartoonishly evil Roman senator. I personally thought that he was the one entertaining bit in this film, but I can see others thinking that his acting is just plain bad so who knows – you might think that this film’s even worse than I did. Really though, there’s so much potential for a great film about the eruption of Vesuvius, even from the dramatic accounts that still survive to this day. Unfortunately, Pompeii struggles to even survive in the DVD bargain bin in 2019.

8) I, Frankenstein (January 24, 2014)
Some movies are so bad that you wonder how they even managed to get greenlit, let alone released. I, Frankenstein is just that kind of film. Who in their right mind thought that a 65 million dollar film about a monster-hunting Frankenstein’s monster would be a success? Turns out that that would be the production company and co-creator of the Underworld franchise, which should be incredibly obvious to anyone who has actually seen this film because it feels like a cheap knock-off of Underworld (which is, in itself, a cheap knockoff of White Wolf’s RPGs), only years after people stopped giving a shit about the franchise. Okay, fine, the idea is shit, but how did they then manage to rope Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, Yvonne Strahovski, Miranda Otto and even Jai Courtney into this!?! Even then, there could be some campy enjoyment if the film was at least in on the joke, but the film is embarrassingly self-serious, full of mythologizing about angels and demons and the status of Frankenstein’s soul… it’s just bad, everyone who’s even heard of the film knows it, I’m not sure what else there is to say.

7) Osombie (May 5, 2012)
Okay, I remember being moderately excited for this movie back when it came out due to the bonkers premise alone, but my memory is a bit hazy at this point (and like hell I’ll watch it again). I do remember being incredibly disappointed by the film though, which just plays out like all of the other  lazy zombie movies which were infesting video shelves at the time. The zombie Osama bin Laden gimmick isn’t even that well utilized either – instead of having him as this Dead Snow-like monster, I distinctly remember that he kind of just shows up every once in a while and is ultimately pretty inconsequential, not to mention that the film isn’t really all that interested in having a campy or over-the-top laugh. The film’s characters are also incredibly stupid, with its “special forces” cast being clearly modelled from someone’s Call of Duty expertise. Oh, and in case it wasn’t obvious, it’s also pretty goddamn insensitive to make a movie like this when Afghanistan was (and still is) a warzone at the time. Osombie is one of those films whose premise should have just been a dumb laugh between a group of friends and then been allowed to fade into the night instead of something that everyone involved is going to have to explain to their grandchildren one day.

6) The Cloverfield Paradox (February 4, 2018)
The Cloverfield Paradox has to be one of the most deflating films of all time. After 10 Cloverfield Lane there was legitimate hype for Cloverfield as a franchise and then The Cloverfield Paradox gets surprise announced and released in the middle of the Super Bowl? Holy shit! But good God were we ever duped because this film sucks ass. Seriously, there are few films which I have hated with such vitriol more than The Cloverfield Paradox. To put it simply, in The Cloverfield Paradox, shit just happens for no reason. Early on it seems like they’re setting up a mystery with all the weird things happening, but no, it’s just happening because that’s what the writers want to happen. There are absolutely no rules to ground everything and it just makes the film frustrating to watch. Oh and don’t even get me started on that damn ending, which just makes for a cocktease since it reveals that we’re missing everything that we actually wanted to see. Ugh, fuck this film.

5) God’s Not Dead 2 (April 1, 2016)
Oh hey, another terrible film we covered in a retrospectives series! God’s Not Dead 2 is truly one of the most deluded and cloying films I’ve ever seen. Any attempt at nuance from the previous film is discarded entirely as atheists are outright portrayed as body snatcher-like monsters, all working to destroy Christianity in America, while the Christians are all portrayed as poor, innocent nobodies who never did anything to deserve such scorn. It’s just plain offensive and gets to the point of being conspiratorial. Even the evangelicals this film is directed at should feel dirty for getting their dicks sucked so hard by this film. That’s really the issue – you cannot separate this film’s politics from its story. It bashes you over the head with the message so much and demonizes everyone outside of its target audience that you either hate it or feel validated by it. There’s really no middle-ground and no other purpose to the film (other than, y’know, to sell bullshit Christian merch).

4) Project X (March 2, 2012)
I wrote a review about this film 6 years ago (!!!), and to this day I can still remember how much I hated it. A found footage teen sex comedy doesn’t sound like that bad of a premise (like… it sounds like shit, but not unbearably so, right?), but the main problem is that the characters in this film are all loathsome. I struggle to think of a character I hate more than Costa, a selfish jackass whose only concern is literally getting laid, everyone else be damned (even his “friends”). The unbearable characters are enough to tank this movie by themselves, but it also doesn’t help that this film is just plain offensive. Every female character exists only to be oogled by the camera, we get all sorts of mean-spirited gay and fat jokes, and there’s even a little person who only exists to get thrown into an oven while the teens just laugh about it. Wow. Did I mention that everyone in this movie sucks and I wish they all overdosed on the stolen ecstasy in the film? That would have probably earned a single laugh out of me in this deeply unfunny “comedy”.

3) Game Over, Man! (March 23, 2018)
Is anyone surprised that Neflix originals nabbed 2 of the 10 worst films of the decade? Game Over, Man! is easily the worst one that I’ve seen, which is especially criminal considering the fantastic premise – basically, it’s a comedic Die Hard knock-off where the “heroes” are a bunch of slacker hotel housekeepers. How can you screw that up? Well, by making a comedy which attempts to be so outrageously over-the-top that it’s just deeply unfunny. Like, let me paint the picture for you – the bad guys are closing in on our heroes. They need to do something to slip past them and Adam Devine announces he has a plan. Cue the bad guys finding him with his dick out in the closet, pretending he died of auto-erotic asphyxiation. I thought that he was going to use this surprising moment to get the drop on them, but no, they just think that auto-erotic asphyxiation is funny on its own merits, plus they get to have Adam Devine run around on screen for about 5 minutes straight with his dick flopping about everywhere. Oh, and then the bad guys start trying to make out, because oh my God guys, did you know that there are gay men who like other men! Yeah, there’s a shitload of gay jokes in this film and they’re all incredibly lazy. About the only funny part is when the bad guy tries to punish a dickhead celebrity by forcing him to eat out another hostage’s ass, but is then surprised and flustered when it turns out that they’re both into it. There, I’ve told you the one good part in this film, you don’t have to see it now, you can leave a thankful comment to me down below.

2) Noobz (January 25, 2013)
Noobz is kind of lucky that it came out in 2013, because in a post-GamerGate world, this already-painfully unfunny movie has aged worse than Bubsy 3D. Imagine a movie that takes the worst stereotypes about gamers – they’re all basement-dwelling nerds, they’re racist, they’re homophobic, they hate women and can’t believe that they play video games, etc. Now imagine that the movie plays this all straight and expects us to find it endearing. Bad news, Noobz, you suck and everyone in this movie sucks (except for poor Zelda Williams who finds herself in a hapless role as the personalityless, token object of affection for the douchebag “hero”). Like Game Over, Man!, Noobz thinks that there’s nothing funnier than a closeted gay character and the movie mines this one “joke” over and over to the point of insanity. Somehow, it even manages to one-up Game Over, Man! by also including a kid with severe asthma who almost dies several times when his breathing apparatus gets damaged (which is somehow less-offensive than how every aspect of his personality revolves around his disability). Everything in this film is just lazy, from the tired road-trip structure to the awful jokes. It doesn’t even have the decency to end in a satisfying manner, instead having the heroes all get a sponsorship from Mountain Dew… and then reveal 2 seconds later that the guy who signed them gets arrested for impersonating a Mountain Dew executive. It’s like an extra big middle finger to you, as if you didn’t already waste almost two hours of your life watching this movie to begin with.

1) Scary Movie 5 (April 12, 2013)
As you have probably noticed by now, there’s not much worse than a terrible comedy, hence why they’ve captured the top 4 spots on this countdown. Scary Movie 5 might just be the worst comedy I’ve ever seen, let alone one of the most unenjoyable films I’ve ever subjected myself to. Don’t get me wrong, all of the other Scary Movie films were already REALLY shitty, but they at least had the occasional laugh and the comedic talents of Anna Faris, Regina Hall and Leslie Nielson to at least keep things somewhat respectable. Scary Movie 5 has none of that, and the results are just pathetic to watch. The jokes are tired, stupid, predictable and just plain unfunny. There was no good reason for this franchise to come back to life after a 7 year hiatus and we are well and truly fucked if David Zucker decides to trot out the franchise again in 2020. Literally the only good thing that I can say about this movie is that, for once in this franchise, at least it doesn’t lean into mean-spirited homophobia, transphobia and making fun of people with disabilities… but, like, that’s not something I should have to congratulate the film for.

Movie Review: Noobz

~ Barloq ~ 2 Comments

So recently I stumbled across this review of a video-game movie called Noobz. Normally this wouldn’t excite me all that much, except this particular review ravaged the film. As a bit of a purveyor of bad cinema and crappy-movie lover, I instantly knew that I had to track down this film and review it for myself. Was it really as bad as Dan Ryckert said? Well, read on and find out…

So what exactly is Noobz? Well it’s supposed to be a comedic road-trip movie about a clan of gamers trying to get to the biggest gaming tournament in the country, celebrating gaming culture along the way. Honestly, that’s a bit of a rote scenario for an independent film (see Fanboys for Star Wars, One Week for supposedly “Canadian” culture, etc), and Noobz really doesn’t distinguish itself from the other similar movies in the genre… well, not in a positive way anyway. Why not? Well for one thing, it does a really, really poor job capturing gamer culture. While I didn’t like Fanboys, its one redeeming feature was that it captured the Star Wars geek culture pretty well. Noobz is closer to One Week in that it shows a really stereotypical view of its subject matter… except, in the case of Noobz, this is a really BAD representation. The director and star, Blake Freeman, was actually a professional gamer… a decade ago. Based on the content of the movie, it seems like this is where all of Freeman’s “research” came from, because it’s a woefully outdated and portrays gaming as the domain of anti-social nerds. This MIGHT have flown back then, but this is 2013: basically everyone games now, and nerds are actually coming in vogue as well. You’d swear this movie was made by CNN or something based on the way it portrays gamers, not someone who is apparently one himself. Furthermore, he just completely fails to capture gaming culture in general. One of the most glaring examples of this is that there’s a Frogger tournament at the same tournament that the main characters are at. However, only 2 people enter it because coin-op gaming isn’t “cool” anymore. Now it doesn’t take a lot of research to know that retro gaming is a huge subculture right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if such a tournament actually had more competition than a modern shooter. Another issue is covered here:

“There’s a passing mention of Frogger, but the only gameplay footage from the fictional Cyberbowl video gaming championship is based exclusively on Gears of War 3. While it’s clearly a form of product placement, it’s a bizarre choice at that: Gears of War 3 isn’t a championship level game by any means (especially with the atrocious host-advantage issues in multiplayer).”

Watching the movie, I actually speculated that this was the case, but it’s nice to see it confirmed. That said, I’m not really all that knowledgeable about tournament-level gaming (I’d imagine that PC gaming, particularly Counter-Strike, would be probably the #1 choice for competitive play…?), but it’s notable that this stuck out as clearly as it did.

In addition, Freeman shows only the worst aspects of gamer culture. You know that douche bag 12-year-old screaming racist and homophobic slurs on your headset every time you boot up a first-person shooter? Basically every character in this movie is that kid, except that they’re like that 24/7 and not when they’ve got the anonymity that a headset provides. Sure, some of them probably are douche bags like that in real life, but Noobz disproportionately presents every gamer as someone with some sort of major personality flaw. The “heroes” are stereotypical dicks living the Jersey Shore lifestyle (with the “dudes” and “bros” thrown around CONSTANTLY throughout to cement this), and every single female character is either a grotesque hag or a sex object. And, of course, everyone is shocked to discover that the girl gamers are actually good at video games… this, unfortunately, is probably a stereotype which actually persists in this culture, but Freeman isn’t exactly putting this part in here to make any sort of statement. I think the worst part about all this though is that Blake Freeman really seems to think that he’s portraying gamers in a positive manner, because you get this sense all the time when the character Andy spouts off his ramblings about how major league gaming should be considered a real sport. While I’m not entirely sure I’d call them “athletes”, pro gaming clearly takes a lot of skill and deserves some respect, but Noobz isn’t doing this culture any favours.

I think it’s also worthwhile to go deeper into each of the characters… because boy do they ever deserve to be torn apart. Each and every one of them is a one-dimensional stereotype: there’s Cody, the slacker with major anger management issues. Next is Andy the optimistic dude-bro who’s in love (read: wants to screw) with Rickie, a girl gamer on the other team (who isn’t really given much characterization beyond “is hot”). After that is Oliver, the massive screw-up who is also an extremely flamboyantly closeted gay (the movie tries to make his sexuality ambiguous, but the scenes where he runs around in lipstick, screams like a girl, constantly tries to suck his friends’ dicks, etc pretty much destroy any possible sense of ambiguity that they could have tried to foster, instead turning him into a hugely offensive stereotype). Finally, there’s Hollywood, a disabled kid who I believe has a severe form of asthma… of course, everything about him revolves around his juvenile sexual fantasies and his breathing apparatus (apparently it’s supposed to be funny when his air supply gets cut off and the kid is freaking dying in front of us). Seriously, even in the end credits he apparently writes a hit hip-hop single called “Let Me Breathe”, because everything in his life apparently revolves around his disability.

As you can probably glean from the descriptions of the main characters, Noobz is offensive as a bus full of dead babies, but you don’t know the half of it. The portrayals of Oliver and Hollywood are really the worst of the bunch (apparently gays aren’t considered “men” in this), but there’s also plenty of casual racism and sexism. Did you see the picture above of the black kid with the comb in his hair? I’m pretty sure you can guess exactly how they portrayed him in this. There’s also a scene where an Indian gas station attendant acts like a ridiculously racist caricature, and tells the cops he’s white so they won’t discriminate against him. It seems like Freeman thinks that he’s being clever and satirical, but it really doesn’t come across that way: I mean, is are we really supposed to believe that he is making fun of racists by being racist and then simultaneously calling out racial profiling at the same time in some sort of inverse-satire cluster-f–k? Short answer: no. Instead, I really get the feeling that Blake Freeman is just a hardcore opponent of political correctness, suggested by the scene where the douchey little black kid gets a free ride on “DeezNuts Airlines” (“thank you for riding DeezNuts!” …I did not make that up) because he claims that he’s being racially profiled by a white attendant. While I hate political correctness as much as the next guy, Freeman isn’t using offensive material to make a statement or to be satirical… he seems to just find offensive things funny for no other reason than it’s offensive. Even in this department, they fail because they recycle the same old offensive jokes over and over and over again.

In fact, for a supposed “comedy”, Noobz is deathly short on laughs. I can honestly say that I did not laugh at any of the jokes in this film, which is pretty pathetic. The only times I did laugh were in sheer disbelief as I literally yelled out “WTF, did they seriously put something that stupid in the movie?!?” This is pretty brutal in the scenes with Greg Lipstein (a play on Billy Mitchell) which might have been funny for the crew but translate really awkwardly to the rest of the audience who are sitting here thinking “what the hell is wrong with this guy?” Furthermore, the comedic set-pieces are really tenuously constructed. Take, for example, the scene I mentioned earlier with the Indian gas station attendant. Cody goes into the gas station to pay for their gas and get some snacks, but comes across this little shit of a girl. Of course, the two begin going at it, insulting each other with dialogue that doesn’t reflect human speech in the slightest (that might be an odd criticism, but the dialogue in this scene is just totally out of tone with the rest of the film). Then the girl’s mother believes that, because Cody is hugging her daughter, that he must be a pedophile and proceeds to taser him without explanation. Then the Indian gas station attendant launches into his ridiculous shtick. This is honestly some of the most contrived comedy I’ve seen in a movie, and it’s just not handled very well (uhh, no pedo).

Anyway, in the end the “heroes” lose to the girl gamers (who were far more deserving of the prize money anyway), but get signed to Mountain Dew… except they don’t, because 2 seconds later in the credits they reveal that the guy was arrested for impersonating a Mountain Dew executive (WTF!? Is that even a crime?!!), but I’m not really sure that I care, because the main characters were such huge douche bags and they didn’t learn or earn anything from the events of the movie… so it makes things completely pointless. Congratulations, you just wasted an hour and forty minutes of your life!

Bottom-line: the only positive thing I can say is that Freeman is a competent enough director, but he severely needs some better material if he ever wants to amount to anything. Noobz is not that material. It has a bland story, non-existent comedy, garishly offensive and doesn’t even portray its own subject matter with any sort of reverence. Unless you’re looking for a really bad movie like I was, stay away!

0.5/10