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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.

Quick Fix: Updates

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

I apologize in advance, this is going to be a pretty brief post. I’m right in the middle of final assignments period here, I have at least ~21 pages to write in the next 5 days, so that’s gonna be fun. However, there are a few interesting updates that I want to bring up so feel free to read on.

First of all, I’m paintballing on the 13th of April at the PRZ (Picton Recreational Zone). It’s an amazing field that I’d been wanting to attend for 3 years now – it’s about 2 hours from where I live inside of an abandoned asylum. It’s going to be epic, there’ll be around 400 people all fighting for it, including my team, The Stormrunners, and other affiliated scenario teams, such as Citrus Connection and The Sentinels. I’ll be recording the footage on my Contour HD helmet cam, so if you’re interested, the footage should be uploaded to Youtube around the 20th. You can view my channel here, and don’t forget to like and subscribe!

Secondly, I plan on starting the next retrospective exactly 1 week from now. This gives you a date to look ahead to, and it gives me a deadline. With papers starting to wind down at that point, it should be very do-able for me! Be sure to check them out, this is going to be a very fun series you won’t want to miss.

The last thing to mention is something… disgusting. After writing my post on Project X, I was looking up some more info on the movie when I discovered something horrific. J.B., the useless fat kid who contributed absolutely nothing to the movie, has entered the porn industry. This immediately set off two thoughts in my mind:

  1. I’m surprised that he fell into the industry so quickly, I would have figured that he’d at least get 2 or 3 crappy roles before having to fall back on porn.
  2. The fat kid? Ew. Gross. No. I’m not posting any pictures of that.
WHAT DID I JUST SAY!?!?!
So… umm… yeah. Do your best not to picture that.
Oh God, I can’t not see it now…

Movie Review; Project X (2012)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to preface this review with a bit of a personal event which happened to me recently. On Saturday, March 16th around 9pm, I was riding the bus on way home. Shortly into the trip, the bus stopped to pick up a dozen teenagers just dicking around together. When they got on, they were loud, they were brash and they were disrespectful. And that’s before they started throwing ice at the bus driver. The bus driver tried to get them to stop being morons and let him get on with his job, but they started taunting him. Meanwhile, a couple of them which had already gotten aboard started holding the back door open so their friends could get on for free (as if the driver would let them on board after that…). Soon enough, they driver kicked all of the teens off the bus and started driving away as they started to punch and threw ice at the bus. The thing is, I knew when I saw that big crowd of kids that nothing good could come of it. Sure, while that might be prejudice on my part against teens, and while they are subjected to that sort of prejudice on a frequent basis, it’s not exactly unearned. In general, teens (especially groups of teens) are f–king self-absorbed morons.

What does that have to do with Project X? Basically everything, as you’ll soon see.

 

As a bit of background, I had heard about Project X being like the found-footage version of American Pie, but it didn’t really interest me. But then, much like with Noobz, I read an article about how the movie was really, really terrible on multiple levels. Maybe I’m a bit of a cinematic masochist, but I find this sort of indictment irresistible. Nevertheless, even I wasn’t prepared for exactly what it was that I was signing up for.

I’m not even going to mince words or build up any sort of uncertainty about what I thought about this movie, but rather I’m just going to state it upfront and outright: I absolutely loathed it. I was taking notes as I was watching it, and these notes read like a descent into madness – my first note was literally “less than 1 minute in, when the guy does a crotch grab and then starts yelling ‘HEY, I WANT SOME PUSSSSSSAY!!’ I know I am going to hate this”. By the end, my notes have lost coherence, becoming little more than garbled swear words decrying the movie, its characters and the filmmakers. The only consolation is that I get to write this review to try to capture why I hated it so much… I hope you enjoy this, because I know that I am going to.

 

First of all, it should be noted that Project X is a part of the found-footage genre. Now despite what you might think, I actually am not a found-footage snob like some reviewers. In fact I have quite enjoyed the majority of the films I have seen in the genre, such as The Blair Witch Project(which was quite frightening), Cloverfield, REC and Chronicle (which, in my humble opinion, really represented an evolution of both the superhero and found-footage genres). In fact, the only found-footage movie I didn’t really like was Diary of the Dead, but not due to the filming style, but rather because of the weak story and characters. All of these films took a central gimmick (the hand-held camera) and kept it consistent, using it in interesting ways (especially Chronicle). However, I felt that Project X used its central gimmick incredibly ineffectually. For one thing, it feels like it is really nothing more than a gimmick, used because it’s popular right now (a la, Paranormal Activity) and costs less to make. While this is a more minor issue, the use of the camera doesn’t really have consistency – the perspective is largely based around a single camera, but without warning it jumps to someone else’s camera a few times during the movie. In Chronicle this made more sense because the singular camera wasn’t what was important, but rather surveillance in general, but it feels like little more than convenience in this film. Finally, and most importantly, the camera is used in an extremely unnatural way. I’m not talking the Cloverfield-style “put down the camera and run!” sort of unnatural – I can live with that. What I mean is that the cameraman will document stuff which makes absolutely no sense for him to capture as a guy who is filming for a party.The movie forces in “quiet moments” where two characters talk privately to one another (you can tell they’re emotional because no one is talking about banging bitchez) or parts where the camera is watching from far away and yet still perfectly captures the dialogue going on. Even little things like changing angles during a conversation are forced in and just break the illusion of consistency. Then there’s other issues – why do they have a cameraman documenting a party which hasn’t even been planned at the start? Why did they get a cameraman who they don’t even know? Why are they documenting using an expensive camera when they’re just a bunch of teenagers? Honestly, it doesn’t make any sense and really breaks the illusion.

Moving on to the characters, who happen to be some of the most obnoxious douchebags I’ve ever seen in a movie. The most grievous offender is Costa, a loathsome little shit whose only priority and care in life is getting laid. I think he was meant to be endearing in his selfishness, like Stifler in American Pie, but he just comes across as a massive asshole. Maybe that’s because Sean William Scott is a much better character actor than Oliver Cooper, or because Stifler always got his comeuppance, or maybe even because he had redeeming traits. Whatever the case, this does not apply to Costa. He is gleefully irresponsible, self-centred, sexist and homophobic, even playing pranks to get babies to cry for a laugh. Holy shit, no I did not watch the North Korean propaganda version of Project X by mistake, the guy I just described is one of the freaking heroes of the movie.

The other characters aren’t even worth going into detail on because they can be summed up in a sentence or two. The supposed protagonist, Thomas Kub, is basically just a geeky teenager caught up in a party that he can’t control. His friend, J.B. is a fat loser, and that’s literally all you need to know about him. Kirby is the generic love interest who Thomas (and his friends for that matter) somehow doesn’t notice is not only really hot, but also has a crush on him for whatever reason. Finally there’s Alexis, the popular girl at school who, again, wants to bang Thomas for some inexplicable reason. Alexis Knapp (the actors in the film share their characters’ names for the most part) claims that she wanted her character to be more than the typical “hot chick” archetype, but that didn’t come out in the movie at all.

Okay, so by my tally that leaves us with a cast of flat characters and then one massive asshole to round it out. Well that’s fine and dandy, but terrible characters alone don’t sink a movie – after all, I quite liked Final Destination 5, and the majority of the cast there were pricks. So what did I think of the movie itself then? Well let me put it simply: less than 15 minutes in, I wanted to turn it off. The characters were so obnoxious that it was painful to watch. Not only that but there’s also a lot of empty space filled with pointless stuff, such as the couple minutes in the film where the main characters corner Costa in a bathroom stall and dump garbage on him… never before has mean-spirited pranking been more boring. Or how about the part where Costa makes pelvic thrusting motions at a lawn gnome for 10 seconds before deciding to steal it in little more than an obvious plot contrivance (since it turns out that the gnome was filled with ecstasy). Then there’s the pointless stuff which was just plain gross – I thought it was screwed up enough that they decided to film a girl taking a piss on the driveway (which she didn’t seem to have a single problem with), but then they also show another guy getting gang pissed on. BLOODY HELL. Ha ha, teenage antics and all that, right?

Anyway, the party gets ridiculously out of hand, and the neighbours come to try to break it up because it’s 11:30pm and the guy can’t get his freaking baby to go to sleep because of all the damn teenagers being morons. Sounds like a pretty reasonable request to me, but then again I’m not an abhorrent dick like Costa. He basically tells the guy to screw off and then his security team freaking tasers the guy out of nowhere. WHAT THE HELL. This guy is then treated like he’s a massive dick, when he’s acting totally reasonably.

 

You might notice that I haven’t really focused that much on the actual party that the movie revolves around. Well, what can I say? It’s a video of a party. There’s lots of time spent watching people drinking, doing drugs, running around naked and just acting generally irresponsible. It’s like watching a video of fireworks – sure, it might have been cool to watch for real, but do you really care about it when it’s just a video? For that matter though, how the hell did no one die at this party? J.B. does a freaking roof jump and breaks his pinky finger like it’s no big deal (he’s literally laughing about it), and a guy with a freaking FLAMETHROWER shows up and starts torching everything. But beyond the ridiculous things which happened in the movie, there were a ton of ways in which one of these idiots could have killed themselves, from overdoses to the parts where people are blowing up f–king beer bottles on the stove all over each other.

As for other issues with this movie, there are many. I could mention that the only reason that the movie features a midget (or, uh, I think little person might be the proper term now?) is so they can throw him in the oven for a cheap laugh. I could focus on homophobia, but I think that it’s really a minor issue in regards to this particular movie. No, the real focus should be on the ridiculous amount of sexism. With the exception of Thomas’ mother and a store clerk, literally every woman in this movie boils down to two things:

  1. Tits, and
  2. Ass

Remember when I was talking about Kirby being the love interest earlier? Normally in a teen comedy of this ilk, such as American Pie, the love interest will generally be fleshed out as something more than the T&A which most of the girls are shown as in the movie, if only by a little bit (in the case of American Pie, think Heather in comparison to Natalia). Kirby barely falls into this category – she’s completely undeveloped and really only serves as T&A half of the time anyway (quite, uh, literally at one particular moment where she steps out of the pool). Of course, she walks in on Thomas with Alexis, but she gets over it at the end because apparently if a guy’s sorry and you throw an epic party then you can get away with anything. Kirby’s hardly the exception though, since every other girl in the movie is ridiculously good looking and overtly sexualized. As far as we’re concerned, they all came to the party to have sex, full-stop. Even the freaking news anchor at the end of the movie is nothing more than a pair of boobs.

 

By the end of the movie, the characters have caused hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions of dollars worth of damage, but there’s hardly any acknowledgement of the consequences of their actions. Thomas’ dad barely even seems to care that his son burned down his house and destroyed his car (in fact he’s almost impressed). The epilogue claims that Thomas is the only one who actually suffered any sort of retribution for his actions (although it’s softened in that he gets Kirby), whereas Costa and J.B. get off completely scott-free. If you actually threw a party like that, you can be sure you’ll be getting a criminal record and probably arrested as well, which doesn’t exactly look great on a resume (not to mention the lack of a degree due to all the fines you had to pay). Possibly worst of all, Thomas is turned into something of a martyr – he was just trying to have a bit of fun with 1500 other people! Why should he get in trouble for that? Putting aside the obvious, this is an extremely irresponsible line of thought, and has already had its consequences – in the wake of the movie’s release, lots of total dumbasses decided to throw their own Project X Parties. The consequences of this should be pretty freaking obvious: millions of dollars of damage has already been caused and at least one person has died. I will reiterate what I said at the start of this review: teenagers are morons. Especially when they get together.

To put a point on things, Project Xwas horrendous. To people who defend this movie by saying that it’s just fun, that it’s not going for any Oscars or anything, I must say this: Terminator 2 is also fun. The difference is though, that Terminator 2 is an awesome movie, whereas Project X is a massive pile of shit. Why watch Project X when you could watch Terminator 2? If you think that’s an unfair comparison, then try this: Shoot ‘Em Up is a stupid movie, but it’s incredibly fun to watch. Project Xwas abysmal. Rather than try to explain just how bad it was, here’s a link to Thesaurus’ entry for “horrible”. There’s only one other movie I’ve seen that I hated more than Project X (and I’m going to withhold it for now because I want to write a retrospective on it sometime in the future).

 
And worst of all?
 
They’re making a sequel.
 
No words can express how I feel quite so adequately…
 
0/10
 
(If you think my score is pretty harsh, then I’ll consider this – even if I didn’t ding the movie an irredeemable piece of shit because of its ethics and treatment of minorities, I’d still harp on it for its awful characters, poor filmmaking and generic story. I think the very best I could muster if I was feeling generous would be a 2/10. So, either way you slice it, it’s still a cake made of shit.)