2014 had tons of wonderful movies, and I’ll talk about them next week. But it also had lots of bad movies too — the kind of awful, unsanitary features that make you question how they got made and sometimes your faith in humanity.
Oh yes, it’s time to get my revenge on all the terrible movies that punished my eyeballs and brain for two —sometimes plus— hours. Though I, of course, didn’t get to see everything — I’m looking at you, Ouija, America, Horns, The Identical, Atlas Shrugged: Part III and Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas — I suffered through plenty of bad movies this year to make clunkers like Transcendence appear to be a walk in the park.
Without further ado, let’s look at cinema’s top 10 biggest catastrophes this year. But before we get started, some (dis)honorable mentions: Endless Love; Archaeology of a Woman; Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return; Left Behind; Brick Mansions; God’s Not Dead; Think Like a Man Too; The Single Moms’ Club; Persecuted; Maleficent; Transformers: Age of Extinction; Sabotage; Pompeii; Third Person; and Blended.
10. Vampire Academy
If the Hot Topic-wearing hipster in the back of the class making unfunny, unwitty, sarcastic remarks to everyone’s chagrin were a movie, it would be Vampire Academy.
The movie is so unbelievably unoriginal, it can’t even see how stupid and cloying it really is; it’s the kind of movie that treats its target audience like idiots and everyone else like they’re equally oblivious to obvious observations and social commentary. But we’re not, and at the end of the Vampire Academy, the filmmakers are the only ones moronic enough to think it’s intelligent, thoughtful or original.
9. When the Game Stands Tall
If every high school and sports movies’ clichés were collected into one giant roll of toilet paper, you’d get When the Game Stands Tall. The kind of “inspirational” Christian dogma the Lifetime channel would say is beneath them — it’s the most annoying and boring kind of movie, where every character is flat, every motivation is predictable and every emotion seems false.
It’s an embarrassment on its own, but remembering that it stars Jim Caviezel, Laura Dern and Michael Chiklis too is just a tragedy.
8. A Haunted House 2
Who honestly thinks Marlon Wayans is funny? I don’t mean to make you feel bad, I just genuinely want to know who likes this crap? Who finds it funny when Wayans has graphic sex with an 18th century doll four times in an 87-minute movie, or when he screams, cries and runs around naked for an hour and a half? I’d just like to know to find some unresolved peace. Thank you.
7. A Merry Friggin’ Christmas
To waste a cast including Joel McHale, Lauren Graham, Clarke Duke and Oliver Platt is already bad enough, but to have something this terrible be one of Robin Williams’ last films is an absolute crime. A Merry Friggin’ Christmas is a miserable, agonizing mess, with production values below TV movies, a script basically non-existent and a cast of characters as unlikable as the next.
Even at a mere 83 minutes (and that includes credits) this feels like a three-hour journey. The fact that it’s the directorial debut of Community director Tristram Shapeero is just baffling.
6. Child of God
No, this is not another Christian movie, but it’s equally as unholy. Continuing to steer into writer/actor/director’s James Franco’s warped perception of grandeur, Child of God is the most pretentious and tedious art-house film I’ve seen in years. It’s the kind of movie where you see a man literally shitting in the woods, and a subplot with him participating in necrophilia later on because, hey, it’s art! Right?!
Listen, Franco, just because you can adapt Cormac McCarthy doesn’t mean you should. His work lends itself to the artistry of the page so beautifully for a reason, and to remove that with your lens is to lose both its point and any meaning. Without his lyrical elegance, all you got was a movie about a mentally ill man in the woods with fake teeth and no motivation, and that’s not a movie.
5. Walk of Shame
Elizabeth Banks has proven herself a versatile and funny actress, but you wouldn’t know it from Walk of Shame. The kind of comedy which makes endlessly cheap gags at stereotypes — both racially and narratively — and misguided attempts at relevance, Walk of Shame is an absolutely lazy and meandering movie that, when all else fails, decides to go for gigantic leaps in logic and lots of yelling. What can you expect from two of the filmmakers behind Movie 43?
4. Back in the Day
Every actor seemingly wants to direct, and if any of them are as clueless and incompetent behind the camera as Michael Rosenbaum, it’s a good thing only a few get the chance.
Rosenbaum’s film is meant to be an autobiographical raunchy comedy in the vein as American Pie. But its misunderstanding of that film’s appeal creates countlessly painful bathroom gags and a cast full of unlikable and unrelatable characters. If this is what high school reunions are going to be like, I’ll make sure never to RSVP.
3. The Hungover Games
From the “brilliant” mind of Jamie Kennedy comes The Hungover Games, a movie so disgustingly and pointlessly removed from good comedy that it somehow pushes the parody genre back even further. There’s absolutely nothing original or likable about this comedy, and its dependency to not write jokes and just coast by on half-assed movie references is not only dated, but beneath even the filmmakers who started this terrible sub-genre. It would be horrid had it come out during this genre’s popularity, but now it’s not only pathetic, but abominable in every way possible.
2. The Other Woman
The Other Woman is a completely disgusting movie. It’s a slap in the face to feminists everywhere, and it’s one of the most infuriating and unlikable mainstream “comedies” in years. Pulling all the worst traits from its cast, it pretends as though it’s a rousing female empowerment tale, but is really a falsely disguised studio picture that believes women are only the sum of their body parts and are merely pieces of meat meant to think about men and being with them.
It’s the worst kind of movie — one that always gets continuously worse and is never endearing or likable. Oh yeah, it’s also completely unfunny, horribly acted and terribly made.
1. Not Cool
I didn’t know who YouTube “celebrity” Shane Dawson was before this, but if I ever see him in person I’m going to punch him in the face. Not Cool is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life. There’s literally nothing in this movie I liked. First of all, every character is a stereotype and never engages in any believable behavior. It spends most of its time without a plot so that it can make fun of everyone who isn’t white and good-looking like Dawson, and it also feels like it comes from the mind of a sociopathic 11-year-old boy.
It makes Adam Sandler’s latest comedies look like Shakespeare. It’s an absolutely vile, ugly, disgruntling movie that makes you give up hope in humanity, or anyone who thinks it’s funny watching a man eating his own shit several times. To know it was filmed in my hometown of Pittsburgh makes me want to punch a wall until I lose feeling in my arm.
Will Ashton is a senior studying journalism and a culture writer for The Post. Email him at wa054010@ohio.edu or find him on Twitter at @thewillofash.
