Son of Celluloid Picks The 5 Worst Movies of 2014

This is where I usually say “Oh, come on guys.  This year in horror wasn’t THAT bad.”  I won’t be saying that this year.  Why?  Because it was.  In 2014, the good was great.  Unfortunately, despite my Best Of list being the longest it’s ever been, a higher percentage of the year’s releases were pure crap.   So…much…crap.  To be honest, there was a long period of 2014 where I didn’t watch any new stuff, only my old favorites.  My need to see everything wasn’t as strong this year, therefore I avoided a lot of stuff that I knew was gonna be rotten.  Had I been more of a cinematic masochist, the ratio of badassery to sucktitude might be even worse.  However, in an attempt to be positive about the year, I’m doing a Top 13 instead of a Top 10 while keeping my Worst list at the same number.  So let’s rid ourselves of these five cinematic turds before we celebrate the killer flicks that came out last year, shall we?

Note: I couldn’t bring myself to watch Ouija, Annabelle, or As Above So Below.  I’d be willing to bet that my list may look different if I had.

Dishonorable Mentions: Leprechaun Origins, SX Tape, Camp Dread, Deliver Us From Evil, Stage Fright, Housebound, all of those flicks in the found footage resurgence.

5. Tie: Sharknado 2/Sharktopus vs Pteracuda

It happens all the time on sitcoms; a character does something that catches on with the audience so the writers then zero in on it, overuse it, and make it annoying.  Such is the case here.  I liked the first Sharknado, and I LOVE me some Sharktopus.  Hell, I love most of Syfy’s intentionally bad movies.  The problem with the follow ups to their two most successful shark flicks is that they were too self-aware.  These types of movies are usually so much fun because, despite the ludicrous situations, they’re played straight.  The movie doesn’t acknowledge that it’s bad.  These two traded that deadly-earnest delivery for a whole lot of “wink-wink-nudge-nudge.”  They veered off into spoof territory and lost all of their bite in the process.  It’s a damn shame too.  I was pretty damn excited for a second helping of ‘Pus.

4. Devil’s Due

Facebook: Early January

 Me - The trailer for Devil's Due looks terrible. I have a feeling it's gonna suck.

Everyone else - Shut up Nathan. It looks great. You're just a horror elitist. You don't want to like it because it's a Hollywood flick.

Me - No, it just looks like a bad movie.

Facebook: Two Weeks Later

 Everyone else - Devil's Due sucked! I can't believe I spent money on that!

Me - I tried to tell...

Everyone else - Shut up, Nathan.

For the third consecutive time (Texas Chainsaw 3D - 2013, The Devil Inside – 2012), the first major horror release of the year has made my worst list.  Woman in Black 2, this does not bode well for you.

3. Dracula Untold

More like Dracula Unwatchable.  Am I right?  Let’s see, where to start?  The laughable acting?  The hilariously melodramatic atmosphere? The hordes of CGI bats?  Dracula suddenly being able to control the weather like a Halle Berry?  Drac’s lore being shat upon by adding a silver vulnerability?  Oh, I know.  How about the horribly lazy script?  For example:  in one climactic scene, when he is called “Impaler” Vlad screams “That is no longer my name!  I am Dracula, son of the devil!”  Minutes later, he impales someone and says “You forget who I am.”  But didn’t you just say… oh, forget it.  This just sucked.  Not in the way the King of the Vampires is supposed to suck either.  The Twilighting of Dracula.  Ugh.

2. I, Frankenstein

I get that some of you are into that Underworld “loud, dumb CGI action flick with horror elements” thing.  Good on ‘ya.  Just leave classic, beloved, complex characters out of your mindless fun.  I’ve long held the belief that there is no such thing as a movie with no redeeming value.   I may have been wrong.  I cannot, for the life of me, find anything to like about this shitfest.  It’s too bad to even be unintentionally entertaining.  Even Aaron freakin’ Eckhart was bad in this.  With the announcement that Universal wants to take their classic monster franchises in a more action oriented direction, I, Frankenstein is exactly what I’m afraid of.  This tale told by an idiot proves that a flick doesn’t even need to be all that loud or furious to signify nothing.  If you have no idea what I just referenced, you probably dug I, Frankenstein.  Hell, Dracula Untold too for that matter.

1.The Sacrament

Did you hear that?  That was all of the horror hipsters mustering up just enough anger to be pissed at me but still look cool and unaffected.  Sounded a lot like a tape getting eaten by a VCR, didn’t it?  Anyway, just about every Top 10 Of 2014 list I’ve seen has contained the worst flick of the year.  I’ll try to be brief about why this movie is 2014’s epitome of suck here since I’ve already gone on lengthy rants on the Picking Brains Podcast (check out those episodes HERE and HERE).  Basically, the film begins as a found footage film, then proceeds to do a multitude of things to betray that setup; including but not limited to dolly shots, lighting tricks, multiple camera angles occurring simultaneously when there is only one camera present, a shot/reverse shot conversation, and half of the movie consisting of footage from a camera that was destroyed on screen.  It completely fails as a movie through a complete lack of any continuity or logic.  Ti West was either too lazy and sloppy to fix the obvious issues with his film or insulted the audience’s intelligence by assuming that they wouldn’t notice.  To me, neither of those things are forgivable, especially from an indie horror darling who is supposed to be the future of the genre.  What perturbs me more than the actual ineptitude of The Sacrament, however, is the fact that no one seems to have noticed.  The two good performances and glacially slow pace (aka what passes for suspense these days) seem to have been enough to throw the majority of the horror audience off the trail of West’s inability to hold the film’s basic premise together.   Ask any of the Westophiles about the glaring lack of attention to detail and they either respond with an Idiocracy-level “Uh, I didn’t notice” or a passive-aggressively accusatory “I didn’t nitpick and let it ruin the movie for me.”  Yet these were the same people lambasting TCM3D for its screwed up timeline.  The Sacrament is the worst film of the year not only because it displayed a complete disregard for the art of filmmaking, but because it brought me to the realization that quality truly does not matter to the majority of moviegoers anymore and that horror fans, as a whole, are deserving of the insult that Ti West hurled at them.  We have been force fed crap for so long that most moviegoers consider it the standard.  THAT, Cellmates, is the true horror of The Sacrament.

The Five Worst Horror Flicks of 2013

Before we move on to my top 10 films of the last year, I feel that a little air clearing is in order.  I need to get my thoughts about these five cinematic atrocities out of my system so I can get back to being positive.  2013 was by no means a bad year for horror, but there were certainly some flicks that just plain pissed me off and I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let my loyal and beloved readers wander into these pitfalls uninformed, now would I?  I would never do that to you.  So, here are 5 shitty movies that I watched so you don’t have to.  Cellmates, I present to you The Five Worst Horror Flicks Of 2013.

#5 - Texas Chainsaw 3D

For the record, I did enjoy the way Leatherface was portrayed in this flick.  He was exactly what I would imagine an older Bubba Sawyer to be – a wiser, slower, and more deliberate killer.  It made perfect sense.  Unfortunately, that’s where the “making sense” stops.  In the interest of brevity, I’m going to skip the acting non-skills of pop stars and the much touted but completely unsatisfying cameos and get straight to the two most glaring, unforgivable screw-ups.  The movie opens with a scene that supposedly takes place shortly after the first TCM flick ends.  That would make it 1973.  Then we flash forward to “20 years later.”  That would make it when, class?  That’s right, 1993.  Yet gas is almost 4 bucks a gallon and people are using Facetime on their iphones.  That would make it 2013.  Maybe the “20 Years” was a typo.  Nope.  We saw the heroine as a baby in the first scene, so in that case she would have to be 40.  She’s obviously in her mid 20’s though.  If they were playing at some kind of time shift nonsense it would be stupid but semi-logical.  In actuality, it’s just plain ‘ol sloppy writing that should have never made it out of the first production meeting.  That may seem like a nitpick, but when it’s the entire setup for the flick, it’s kind of a big deal.  Inexcusable.  Then Leatherface runs through a Carnival full of people and doesn’t kill anyone.  Read that last sentence again.  Need I say more? This flick earns its place on the list for blowing an opportunity for one of horror cinema’s all time classic bloodbaths and assuming that no one in the audience could do math.

#4 - Dracula 3D

It really does hurt to put this one on the list, ‘cause I do love me some Dario.  I remember being psyched when I heard about it.  But, just like The Misfits, Argento continues to drag his legacy as a master and innovator of the craft through the mud.  Where to start with this one?  Maybe the fact that it took four screenwriters to pen crap like “I am but an out of tune chord in the divine symphony?”  Or we could discuss just how awful the CGI is.  That credits sequence where the camera is zooming around an animated village looked like it was lifted directly out of Tenchu: Stealth Assassins for the PS1.  That’s right, Rikimaru, bitches!  I can’t imagine how bad it looked in 3D.  Then there’s the godawful acting.  It’s like they just said “Keanu Reeves was great as Harker!  Go find us a Spanish version of him.”  It also seems that working with Argento these days drags other greats down, because the score might be the worst work of Claudio Simonetti’s career.  Even Rutger Hauer looks like he’d rather be anywhere but on that set, and he’s what I was looking forward to the most.  The only things that keep it from being a total loss are the ample glimpses of Asia Argento and the gorgeous Miriam Giovanelli in all of their undressed glory and a completely batshit scene where Dracula turns into a giant praying mantis.  Yes, you read that right. Dracula 3D makes the list for making me weep for what could have been.  Can you imagine the badassery of a Dracula flick directed by the Argento of the early 80’s?

#3 - Apartment 1303

There are very few things I dislike more than American remakes of J-horror.  I’m not big on J-horror to begin with (I love Japanese gore flicks but their ghost movies don’t do it for me), but in American hands they’re atrocious more often than not.  I haven’t seen the original, which I’ve been told is a bottom of the barrel Grudge clone.  The remake, however, is about as bad as it gets.  All of the clichés are here; from the creepy kid as harbinger of doom to the wet-haired, jerky CGI ghost to the “young woman in peril must figure out what happened to the last young woman in peril” setup.  There’s no creep factor at all.  No gore.  No scares.  That’s the problem, there’s just nothing to this movie.  Well, there is the unintentional comedy of Rebecca De Mornay’s performance and Julianne Michelle’s hilarious lip quiver thing whenever she cries, but that’s about it.  It’s just a paint-by-numbers generic ghost rehash.  Apartment 1303 makes the list as a recipient of the “Cold Creepy Feeling” award for boring me to tears.

#2 - Embrace of the Vampire

This flick is number two in more ways than one.  You knew we weren’t gonna get through this list without a remake, and this may be the most unnecessary remake of all time.  The main purpose of remakes is to draw casual horror fans in with name recognition, but how many casual horror fans (aside from the Mr. Skin aficionados with a hard-on for Alyssa Milano) even know that movie exists?  Why remake it?  Just… why?   As for the movie itself, it reminded me of those commercials I see for CW dramas; slickly produced but utterly vapid.  The boring cinematography refuses to make the most of a quite picturesque backdrop.  It does that irritating “oh, things are speeding up so something scary must be about to happen” thing that insults the audience’s intelligence.  The vampires look hokey.  Do I need to mention the CGI?  The vampire lore is slightly interesting, but comes into play way too late to save the proceedings.  Hell, even the ample gratuitous nudity couldn’t save them considering they’re all dime-a-dozen anorexic starlet types.  I know that it’s a matter of personal preference, but if you’re gonna watch an awful flick just for the boobs this year, make it Dracula 3-D.  That’s your public service announcement.  This flick is an absolutely braindead exercise in tedium.   Embrace of the Vampire makes the list for sucking more than all of its on screen vampires combined.

#1 - The Purge

Sorry folks, but this is gonna be one angry rant.  How in the name of green dystopian hell do you take a premise that damn good and make a movie this damn bad?  Let’s put aside the fact that the main idea here is completely implausible.  If THAT’S your quibble with this movie, I fear that you have missed the point.  So much fun could have been had with a night of lawlessness, but all they gave us was a mix tape featuring the dumbed-down greatest hits of Straw Dogs, Panic Room, The Strangers, and a dozen other much-better home invasion flicks.  I’m normally pretty forgiving of horror characters doing dumb stuff.  Sometimes it’s necessary.  Not only did the things the characters in this one did not make sense in comparison with what an actual person with an IQ higher than their handgun caliber would do, they didn’t even make sense for the characters as written.  I lost count of the times I thought “there’s no way they’re gonna…” immediately before they did.  Stupid and predictable is a horrible combination.  Anyone that used the word “suspense” without preceding it with “not a shred of” when reviewing this obviously has never seen a horror movie.  There’s even plenty of shaky cam during the action sequences just to make sure we can check off almost everything on my “things I hate about modern Hollywood horror” list.  I think writer/director James DeMonaco had two goals with this film; beat the audience over the head with ham-fisted social commentary and see just how many times a character can be held at gunpoint and saved at the last second.  Seriously, I lost count of how many times they re-used that one.  Oh, and any flick with a 3 million dollar budget and Michael goddamn Bay listed among the producers that tries to pass itself off to the horror press as “the little low budget indie that could” before its release can kiss my ass.  Michael Bay's name should be considered a massively offensive expletive.  In fact, his name should just be a multi-use replacement for ALL expletives.  The Purge makes the list for being a predictable, dumb as Bay, suspenseless, nutless piece of Bay that squandered a Baying fantastic premise and made me want to beat Ethan Hawke, who I usually like, with a Baying crowbar.  What the Bay were they thinking?  Bay this movie.  Bay it up it’s stupid Bay.

The Five Worst Horror Flicks Of 2012

For the past two years, this is where I've been Mr. Positive and said “I don’t care if everyone else is proclaiming that this was an abysmal year for the horror genre, I thought it was great.”  This year, however, I’m on the “damn, it really was a bad horror year” side.  Don’t get me wrong, 2012 definitely produced some great flicks, but man did it give us a lot of foul film feces too.  I’ll happily take one for the team and sift through it all for you though, Cellmates; because I believe the old adage that without the dark, there is no light.  Without a villain, there can be no hero.  Without nu-metal, there can be no real metal.  In the world of horror flicks, it means that without sifting through a multitude of sucktitude, you wouldn’t find those precious nuggets of badassery.  I’m gonna share said badass nuggets with you starting tomorrow, but first, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least try to save you the trouble of watching these five atrocities.  Ladies, gentlemen, and everything in between…I present to you The Five Worst Horror Flicks Of 2012.

5. Detention

This is a very divisive movie.  It’s actually showing up on a lot of top 10 lists, but it lands on my worst flicks list for one main reason…I find most hipsters unbearably annoying.  Therefore, by proxy, I hate hipster humor and hipster movies like Napoleon Dynamite, Juno, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and Detention.  If hipsterism ever truly becomes mainstream, then this is what will happen to horror cinema.   That absolutely cannot be allowed to happen.  It’s a film awash in that style of comedy that continually pokes the audience to say “Hey, did ‘ya see that?  Wasn’t it funny?”  If you have to do that, then no, it wasn’t.  Basically, this flick is trying way too hard for snarky coolness.  It’s the cinematic equivalent of that 12 year old sporting a brand new “distressed look” Pink Floyd ’73 tour shirt his parents paid 35 bucks for at Hot Topic.

To be fair, it did have one inspired sequence (the detention room parade of teen eras), but getting to the end of this one became a war of attrition against the movie itself.  If you want to see how it’s possible cram as many references as possible into a flick and actually be funny about it, then watch The FP.  Otherwise, just find a couple of those guys with the skinny jeans and meticulously disheveled hair, get them jacked up on cocaine (note: it might have to be soy-coke) and whatever energy drink the mainstream hasn’t caught onto yet, then listen to them argue for an hour and a half.  That would be roughly the same experience as watching Detention.

4. The Devil Inside

I just went back and looked at my initial review of this flick from January, and I was WAY too generous.  I gave it one severed thumb up.  What the hell was I thinking?  I still stand by my opinion that there is a 20 minute or so stretch of this film that is pretty good.  Unfortunately, it’s preceded by an unoriginal and entirely tepid first hour.  What follows the good portion is what makes it deserving of the vitrol spewed at it by horror fans and its place on this list though; the worst rip-off ending of the year.  Hell, it might be the worst ending in horror history. It just stopped.  No logical conclusion, no closure, no well crafted cliffhanger, nothing.  It just stops.  They actually expected viewers to go to the film’s website for the rest of the story.  As I said in my original review, “Screw that, screw you, screw your ending; and god help us, if that was your way of setting up a sequel, screw The Devil Inside Strikes Back too!”

3. Cold Creepy Feeling

I hate deriding this kind of micro-budget “labor of love” type of flick, but this one was just plain boring.  The problem was that NOTHING happened.  For the first half hour, we watch tedious vacation style “found footage” of a couple driving to their new house.  Then we watch as they explore the grounds and settle in.  Then they start in on a little hanky panky in a haunted house.  Time for the spooky stuff to kick in right?  Not by a long shot.  A spider pulls a little coitus interruptus, and the couple goes to a bar for the next 10 minutes.  When they get home, the girl has a slightly unsettling dream, so we’re treated to them spending 8 more minutes taking turns reading from an online paranormal forum.  Get the picture?  When the film finally gets to the point in the last 10 minutes, it’s too little too late.  The title is the only cold, creepy feeling to be had here.  For the record, this was my first, and to date only, actual two severed thumbs down review.

2. Chernobyl Diaries

You know that third person shaky cam that I always bitch about?  This is the epitome of everything I loathe about that style.  Honestly, after watching the trailer, how many of you thought this was a found footage flick?  Yeah, I did too.  It’s not, but it’s shot like one.  Why would anyone do that you ask?  For the same reason most movies employ this cheap blight on modern cinematography; they’re attempting to create artificial action and tension to cover up for the fact that the filmmakers failed to create any within the actual story.  That alone would be enough to call it one of the worst flicks of the year.  But wait, there’s more.

Leah, my most frequent movie watching companion, is my scare meter.  She’s a pretty easy startle.  After thousands of horror flicks and almost 20 years in the haunt business, I’m too jaded to be a good judge of the effectiveness of jump scares, so I use her for that purpose.  She didn’t jump once.  If you can’t get a rise out of her, you have officially failed in the scare department.  That’s still not the end of the suckage to be had here.

Chernobyl Diaries had one thing, and only one thing, going for it; that great setting.  Chernobyl is creepy as hell.  So what did the filmmakers do?  They set the second half of the flick in a dark underground labyrinth, effectively nullifying the one selling point of the film.  While we were in the ruined city, it was at least kinda cool to look at.  Then again, as spastic as the camera was during all of the “action,” we wouldn’t have been able to get a good look at anything anyway.  Chernobyl is a killer setting for a horror movie.  Hopefully someone makes a decent one there someday.  I saw this one at the discount theater, where tickets are $1.99, and still felt ripped off.

And the winner, er, loser...

1. Area 407

I should have known better.  I told myself that I wasn’t going to subject myself to any more found footage movies outside of the PA series.  I loathe the vast majority of them.  Notice how 3 of my top 5 are found footage flicks and one might as well have been?  Point made.  How did they get me to break my oath and watch a FFF?  They promised me dinosaurs.  It had to be dinosaurs.  You bastards.  Dinosaurs are, like Nazis, bad movie kryptonite to the Son of Celluloid.  I love dinosaurs.  Led by my dino-love, I gave this flick a chance against my better judgment.  Wouldn’t you know it, it turned out to be a bait and switch.  There are less than 10 seconds of dinosaur footage in this movie.  Yes, less than 10 seconds.  To make matters worse, every last shot of the dinosaur(s?) is in the damn trailer!  It’s a dinosaur-less dinosaur movie.  So, if less than .1% - not 1% mind you, but POINT ONE PERCENT - of this flick contains dinosaurs, then what in the green hell could the rest of the movie possibly consist of? 

After the plane crash 15 minutes in, it’s 75 minutes of people pointing into the darkness and screaming “What was that?” and “Did you see that?”  Yes, that’s really all it is.  The whole point of a FFF is realism, right?  Well, let’s just say that you’re in a large, dark area with unknown monsters and someone panics, points into the darkness, and yells “what the hell is that?” What would you do instinctively?  Right, you’d look too.  Not in this flick. The camera never leaves the survivors.  Never.  It’s painfully obvious that the camera operators were instructed to do everything in their power not to catch any of the action, or anything interesting at all for that matter, in the frame.  All of the deaths occur offscreen.  Yup, every last one of ‘em.  Literally all we see is annoying characters yelling at each other, pointing at things we don’t get to see, freaking out, crying, and running in the dark.  It’s as if someone bet the director that he couldn’t make a movie entirely out of reaction shots. 

What we end up with is a movie that not only epitomizes every overwrought, overdone, and played out weakness of the found footage subgenre; but cheats the viewer out of the promised hook, which was the only reason to watch the movie in the first place.  Congratulations Area 407, you are the worst horror movie of the year.  Think about that for a minute.  You were worse than every remake released in 2012.  You were worse than every neutered PG-13 teen thriller that the major studios vomited forth this year.  In fact, you are the first indie flick that this staunch indie horror supporter has named “Worst Horror Flick of the Year!”  I would much rather slap Hollywood around, so don’t ever make me do that again, please.  Basically, I can sum up my feelings about Area 407 with a quote from a REAL dinosaur movie…”That is one big pile of shit!”

2010: The year in Horror Part 1: The Worst

As I look around the internet, I’m seeing an almost unanimous opinion that 2010 was a terrible year for horror. I’m constantly reading people saying there weren’t enough good movies to make a top 10. With this, my first foray into this whole horror blogging thing, I say COME ON PEOPLE! 2010 was no worse than any other year. True, a lot of crap came out, but what year hasn’t. 2009, which everyone seems to be lauding as infinitely better than this year, sure as hell did. Everyone remembers it fondly now for its bumper crop of good stuff i.e. Paranormal Activity, Zombieland, Laid to Rest, Dead Snow, Trick r Treat, etc. Folks, did we forget about the other side of the coin; about the pain of sitting through Jennifer’s Body, The Final Destination, Children of the Corn, The Box, Sorority Row, Saw 6, The Stepfather or that godawful Last House on the Left remake? 2010 was the same story as it’s been for at least the last 10 years, more bad theatrical flicks than good, but enough great independent and foreign product to make up for it. If you sift through all of 2010’s lame remakes, bad sequels, uninspired Hollywood fare and indie pretension, there is a lot of worthwhile stuff and even a few nuggets of greatness.

In 2010 Hollywood continued to have a tough time coming up with any original ideas. The remake train kept a rollin’. There were a few bright spots though. For every Nightmare on Elm Street or Wolfman atrocity we saw, there was a Piranha or Crazies. I think the epitome of this remake nonsense was Let Me In. I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t say if worked or not, but I can say with utmost certainty that it was completely unnecessary. Let the Right One In is a masterpiece. It’s a sad fact that Hollywood remade it only 3 years after its release simply because most American moviegoers won’t go see foreign language films. Then again, the same thing happened with all of the J-horror remakes a few years ago. I also hear people bemoaning the amount of sequels this year. There really weren't any more than usual, but they were definitely a mixed bag as far as quality goes. In fact, 3 of my Worst 5 list of the year were sequels. Then again, so is my #1 best.

There seemed to be a few trends emerging this year. Led by grindhouse throwbacks Piranha and Machete, a lot of movies were released that seemed to be less concerned with being “good” than with being “fun.” In both of these cases, they succeeded. I, for one, am all for a good, mindless, gory romp. Speaking of Machete, this year there was some serious genre line blurring. Machete, an action flick, let the guts fly more than 90% of 2010’s horror, and Shutter Island and Black Swan, a couple of big budget psychological thrillers, skirted the boundary and were embraced by horror fans.

Horror documentaries came into their own this year, with the release of Never Sleep Again, Best Worst Movie, American Grindhouse, and many others. Unrated films challenged the MPAA, unsuccessfully unfortunately, as Hatchet 2 and I Spit On Your Grave both saw short uncut theatrical releases. Of all this years trends, this is the one I most want to see continue. I think this year’s biggest story in horror, however, was the rise of horror on TV. The Walking Dead became a phenomenon, pulling in amazing ratings, while True Blood, Vampire Diaries, Dexter, and Supernatural all continued to do great numbers.

All in all 2010 was a mixed bag, but if you look hard enough, there was a lot to enjoy. So without further ado, lets get these lists out of the way. Since, when it comes to horror, I try to be twice as positive as negative, I did a 10 best and 5 worst list. Lets get the worst out of the way first, shall we? By the way, Nathan says do not check these out.

5 Worst:

5. Paranormal Activity 2 : Or, as I like to call it, PA2: Book of Shadows. If you get that reference, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is what happens when a big studio takes a great low budget horror flick and tries to improve on the formula. Everything that worked in PA1 is overdone and ruined here, because Hollywood doesn’t understand suspense or subtlety, the main 2 ingredients in PA1’s effectiveness. Katie basically turns into Michael Myers at the end. Need I say more?

4. Saw 3D/7: The plot was even thinner than usual, the twist made even less sense, the traps were just ok, and so little was done with the 3D that I forgot I was watching a 3D movie at all halfway through. The last good Saw movie was still 3, but at least this one was better than 5. By the way, for those of you who have been duped into believing that this was the end of the franchise, I only have one thing to say: Friday the 13^th 4: The Final Chapter.

3. 30 Days of Night: Dark Days: Oh man, where do I start? There is nothing about this flick that isn’t cliché. The 28 Days Later style 3^rd person shaky cam/rapid fire editing (don’t get me started on 28 Days Later) is here, as is the awful acting, the worst fake blood since Hammer films, one of the most ridiculously tacked on bad sex scenes ever, and a plot that I had figured out 10 minutes in. Did I mention the acting? Ok then. I only paid a buck to rent this crap and felt ripped off.

2. Legion: I’ve always said that I can forgive a lot of things when it comes to movies, but there is one thing I will never forgive a movie for being…boring. Legion is boring. All of the good stuff is in the trailer. Add to that about an hour of people talking, 5 minutes of shots of people shooting guns, 10 minutes of people crying, and an ending that’s an angelic rip off of Terminator 2, and you’ve got Legion. If the next movie hadn’t been not only a bad movie, but an act of heresy, Legion would have been #1.

1. Nightmare on Elm Street: I have been accused of not judging this movie fairly because it is a remake of one of my favorites, so I’m going to forget for a moment that it’s even a remake and tell you why it sucks on its own. Jackie Earl Haley is good as the killer. I’ll give them that. The rest of the cast apparently went to the Twilight acting school, in which looking bored and constipated counts as emoting. The characters themselves are so annoying that you can't wait for them to die. The CGI is absolutely awful. Just look at the “Freddy through the wall” shot or the final claw through the face and you’ll see what I mean. You’d think they could afford decent effects with Platinum Dunes money. The director and writers tried to compensate for their inability to build suspense or even interest by relying on constant cheap jump scares. I stopped counting at 50 and the movie wasn’t even halfway over. The Freddy makeup, while looking a bit more like an actual burn victim, also makes our supposedly frightening villain look like a rubber frog with down syndrome. Add to that the fact that they did, in fact, take a giant steaming dump on everything fans loved about the classic film and its iconic story and characters, and you have the worst cinematic travesty in a long time. If there was ever a movie I would use the cliche EPIC FAIL for, it’s this one. Die Michael Bay, die!

Enough about the bad movies of the year, come back tomorrow for part one of my Top 10.