Time to air out the last of the dirty laundry as I delve
into the Top 20 worst features I had to sit through last year. Why Top 20?
Because how many Top 10 film lists have you seen with 10 'honourable mentions'?
Might as well cut out the middle man if I’m going to do that. Just like last
year, this list is comprised solely of theatrical releases: If it was released
during the year through DVD, NetFlix or elsewhere on the Web, it doesn’t get
counted. This is just reserved for the celluloid trash that the studios, in
their infinite wisdom, decided was worthy of getting a proper release. These
are my picks for the 20 worst films of 2015.
An incredibly dull sequel to an already dull original with
considerably worse writing. Really, this is a pain to sit through primarily because
you can actively see the filmmakers just struggling to come up with things for
the characters to do. Also, bonus failure points for ripping off Fawlty Towers
for a sub-plot, and a pretty damn weak sub-plot at that. I can only hope that
this didn’t make enough return to warrant another sequel because, quite
frankly, it was painful enough seeing this group of talented actors bomb
on-screen the first time around, let alone the second or a potential third time.
Given how well this film’s comedy works out, this probably
shouldn’t even be on this list. However, since it fails drama so badly on the
other hand, it outweighs whatever good can be found here. Unfortunately, this
isn’t the first time that an otherwise good film will be outdone on this list.
Between how badly it handles cancer, platonic and non-platonic relationships,
this is what the world thinks of whenever it hears the term "chick flick". It’s
just too damn sugary for its own good.
Someone paid someone else with hookers and blow to bring
this to theatres. With how unbelievably cheap everything looks and feels and
even smells somehow, even considering its budget, there is no other excuse
possible for how this film made it to screens at all. Watching it at home and
openly making fun of it with friends over a few drinks? Now
that I can understand and totally
endorse; this is probably the only film on this list that I could reasonably
recommend checking out for a cheap laugh.
An irritating and ultimately depressing experience of a
so-called ‘comedy’. It so badly wanted to appeal to both younger and older
audiences that, in the cross-fire, it feels like an extremely jumbled mess as a
result. It’s rather sad when the overly extended gay joke that is
Get Hard was
more tolerable than this thing; at least that one let Will Ferrell be funny in
a couple of scenes. Here, his weenie step-dad shtick gets really tired really
fucking quickly.
This is easily the most baffling failure on this entire
list. It had all the right pieces in place: Solid cast, a promising director,
good writers, camera crew, editors, composers; how the hell did this turn out
like this? It’s all done so ineptly that, if studio interference truly is to
blame for how this trainwreck, then that might be the
only thing about this film that makes sense. Rather than calling it
‘Fant-4-stic’ and endlessly mocking it like so many others have taken to doing,
I can’t help but feel sorry for this film; it’s some kind of anti-miracle that
this failed as badly as it did.
You know those annoying douchebags you always see at parties
who you would cross continents to avoid talking to? Imagine a whole movie about
them and that’s essentially what you’ve got here. What makes hanging out with
these assholes even worse is that, between their agent Ari and the constant
barrage of cameos, it kept reminding me of so many people and plots that I’d so
much rather be dealing with. Unless someone actually makes a Hyde movie, I never
want to hear from these clowns again.
10 kilos of nonsense in a 5 kilo bucket. Oh, and incredibly
bad-looking CGI as well; can’t forget that.
I could legitimately just leave it at that and the reasoning
is explained for me: A film so bad, even the people who made it already hate it.
Usually, it takes a few good years of hindsight for that to happen. However,
why this film is on my list at all isn’t for any of the obvious reasons. It
isn’t the sexism or misrepresentation of BDSM or even how much it wastes a
genuinely solid soundtrack. No, what
really
pisses me off about this film is that, through an unnecessary need to treat the
already lame-brained source material seriously, the filmmakers robbed the
public of what could have been one of the best worst movies of recent years. It’s
a terrible film because it isn’t terrible enough.
Pray the cheating husband away. It takes something special
to outdo Fifty Shades in terms of misogyny; well, how about misrepresenting
religious values at the same time as misrepresenting relationship values? Of
course, unlike Fifty Shades, there’s no chance of this crossing that threshold
into ‘enjoyable awful’: It’s too cheap in its production, too flimsy in its
script and too toxic in its ideals for that to happen.
It’s the naivety of this film that really gets to me. Here,
you have a film that keeps off-handedly making glib observations about family
togetherness, homosexuality and depression. And yet, it hides behind the veneer
of being an ‘innocent’ Christmas film on the off-chance that naysayers might
think that there are better wars to be fighting in. There are few things more
dangerous than blind idiocy, and it more than deserves to be brought to task.
That, and it just isn’t funny and contains annoying characters.
A PG-rated film should not make me think that I dropped acid
without my own knowledge to justify what’s happening on screen. Easily the most
horrifyingly bad film of the year, this behemoth of lazy production values,
uneven acting and mind-bogglingly dumb decisions is the supposed beginning of a
series that will hopefully never see fruition. This film is just lucky that
Montage Of Heck also came out this year to offset how much it besmirched
Nirvana’s name.
The sequel to the worst film of last year, it’s even worse…
and it only made #9 on this list. That alone should tell you how bad 2015 was
in comparison to 2014. Yet another feather in the cap of hack extraordinaire
Akiva Goldsman, this film not only failed to make sense of the sheer lunacy of
the world the previous film left for it, it proceeded to have it make even
less sense. This is still probably the
most competently made film on this list, but the script is still bad enough to
negate any of that. Oh, I cannot wait to see how much further down they can
drag this story with the
two-part finale.
This is the cinematic equivalent of the guy who plays the
guitar just so that he can get laid: Sentimentality very badly trying to hide a
need for self-satisfaction. Everything, from the acting to the script to the
plot itself both in and out of universe, feels fabricated. This just further
cemented my hatred for Kevin Hart and, while I definitely welcome the day that
he brings something watchable to the screen, I will remain sceptical that that
will even happen.
Bill Murray and Alex Baldwin, bless their hearts, are
seriously trying to make this film palatable and, to their credit, they are
easily the best parts of the entire film. Unfortunately, they are too easily
drowned out by the rest of the charmless acting, the saccharine dialogue and
the fact that the entire production itself feels like it was cobbled together
over a single weekend. It tries for so many different thematic ideas and
utterly fails at all of them. It’s sad when a film can make Emma Stone, who I
think was genetically engineered to have chemistry with everyone on planet
Earth, look miscast as a romantic lead.
I am not expecting anyone else to react to this film as
violently as I did. Hell, I’ll admit that this is probably the film that
elicited the least actual anger from me on this list. However, as someone who
knows far better than I would like just how bad certain mental ailments can
get, this film’s attitude to the main character getting treatment just floods
my system with bile. The fact that this has such a high approval rating with
critics, while it gives
this broken a
perspective on the matter, honestly frightens me a little.
[2018 Edit: My feelings have definitely softened on this one since first seeing it. The perspective of just how helpless it can be seeing someone else in the hospital, wanting to help them but ultimately unable to do anything, is a lot more valid than I gave it credit for. However, because of how blisteringly annoying the production values are, I'm still justifying its place on this list.]
The worst of horror’s past did the fusion dance with the
worst of horror’s present to create a particularly foul addition to the canon
of found footage films. The characters are obnoxious, the camera work is a joke
and the scares are practically non-existent, completely wasting the admittedly
decent idea of how scary an abandoned school can be. Knowing that this style of
filmmaking is quickly approaching its death knell, I can only hope that it
doesn’t get much worse than this.
I barely even remember what happened in this film, outside
of Reese Witherspoon’s atrocious Southern accent and Sofia Vergara abrasively
screeching in every scene. All I can really recall about this film is the
extremely negative experience it was to watch it, with my strength sapping from
me every time a joke bombed… which was consistent for its entire running time.
It is a film that is not only a waste of time in terms of enjoyment, but also
because it immediately left my memory within hours of watching it.
This was an absolute fucking betrayal of a film. After going
through the original Hot Tub Time Machine and seeing how well they managed to
do at making me root for a frankly unsavoury character in Rob Corddry’s Lou, it
is astounding how thoroughly loathsome they made him in this film. The entire
film is about trying to stop him from getting killed, and neither the
filmmakers, the characters or even the audience is able to sympathize with that
goal. Add to that comedy that makes light of
rape of all bloody things and never once is capable of being
anything but pointlessly offensive, and I can easily understand how this nearly
didn’t get a proper release over here at all.
Who in the hell thought this was a good idea? A forced relocation
plot played up for laughs, acted out by painfully underutilised performers whom
have been given some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard in a feature film.
This is the epitome of the mindset that says kids are stupid and will accept
anything given to them in terms of entertainment, and it is easily one of the
worst results from that particularly hazardous fallacy.
This will go down in my own personal history as the first
film to officially break me; a film so bad that I couldn’t even review it
properly and had to use narrative to portray just how crushing an experience it
was to watch it. I legitimately felt like I was going insane as I sat through
it, and I think I had a mental breakdown in the process. Its style of what
these insipid filmmakers think is humour thinks that going for “darkest sketch,
darkest sketch” is enough to be funny. They seem to have forgotten that just
bringing up Ass-burgers, incredibly fake-looking erections and casual attempted
murder isn’t in it of itself funny. To think that the people who brought us
this, fucking
this, are the ones who are also going to make the next
incarnation of Spider-Man on film… yeah, all of a sudden, Amazing Spider-Man 2
doesn’t look so fucking bad now, does it?! Until the unfortunate day that
something worse comes along, this is the single worst film I have ever seen in
my entire life.
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