My Top 15 Least Favourite Movies

   Well, anyone who saw the list of my favourite movies last week is probably wondering what's at the other end of the spectrum. It's time to count down the absolute worst movies I've ever seen.
   Now, keep in mind, this is a personal list. So you're not going to see The Room on here, or Plan 9 from Outer Space or Troll 2 or Manos: The Hands of Fate or any of the statistical worst movies ever made. Maybe they would be in the running if I'd actually seen them, but it seems many of them are so bad they're hilarious. No. These are the ones where just thinking about them makes me cringe; they hit me in my deepest core of anger!
   Keep in mind also that this is going purely by what I've seen to date. There are a fair few movies I haven't seen that look like they'd be deserving of a spot on this list, like Baby Geniuses, Catwoman and the entire oeuvre of Seltzerberg.
   This was originally just a standard top ten list, but I came up with five close runners-up, so I had to make it a top fifteen instead.
   Now, usually with my lists, I limit the captions to about a hundred words except for number one. But in this case, I just had to break that mould for number two as well, because I feel so passionate about both the top two here.
   Oh, well. Let's get this over with. These are the top fifteen movies I hate the most.

#15 = Journey Back to Oz (1974) – not to be confused with Return to Oz (1985)

An animated sequel to the classic Wizard of Oz, with Liza Minnelli taking over the role of Dorothy from her mother Judy Garland. Sounds ideal? It's not! This is a movie that's very obviously intended only for kids. Very little kids – toddlers! The dialogue is at an infantile level, which, even for me watching it as a kid, was insufferable to listen to. It's a shame, because the story itself is actually pretty well set up and put together. But the dialogue is so bad, so obviously marketing only to its intended audience, that it really does make for an irritating experience.


#14 = Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

This is about as low as a sequel can get! :) Everything about it, right down to the premise, is utterly moronic. One moment that really sums it up is when the shark is giving chase by wriggling through a passageway in a shipwreck: it's just too stupid even to laugh at. Really, the extent of imagination in this movie is having it take place at Christmas instead of in the summer. :) The fourth instalment in a film series very rarely works anyway, but this has to be one of the worst offenders. It's a movie that makes you feel dumber for sitting through it.


#13 = Boa vs. Python (2004)

This is another movie where you really shouldn't expect much – it's a monster movie with giant snakes – but it hits rock bottom so disastrously that it can't even be enjoyed as a genre flick. The story, for the most part, plays out like a typical creature feature, but what kills it is how terribly made the movie is. The acting is awful, the CGI is cartoonish, and worst of all is the random editing. There's just no enjoyment to be gained from its ineptitude. But the movie's absolute nadir is when an eighty-foot reptile eats a woman out before, you know, eating her!


#12 = The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

I only became aware of this movie because of the Nostalgia Critic's review. I don't venomously hate it the way Doug does, but it's still one of the most unpleasant movies I've ever seen that's supposedly intended for kids. The whole movie's shot in the dark, characters are constantly trying to be cruel in some way, and the story is almost nonexistent, often focusing on the Kids just doing nothing. But worst of all is the "romance" between the little boy and the subadult girl, which is wrong on so many levels! It just makes for a very miserable experience.


#11 = Sucker Punch (2011)

Just, and I mean just, escaping the top ten is this loathsome action fantasy co-written and directed by Zack Snyder. I already talked about it in my least favourite movies of 2011 list, so I don't want to repeat myself too much. It's just so downright mean-spirited that it really left a scar in my soul. I know the idea is that this girl retreats into her mind to escape the cruel world, but she never gives us a reason to like her as a person in the first place, so it just comes off like the filmmakers being cruel for the sake of it.



#10 = The Cavern [AKA WIthIN] (2005)

This was the directorial debut of Olatunde Osunsanmi – and it won't be his last appearance on this list! :) Much like Boa vs. Python, this is a movie so disastrously inept that it's not even funny. The performances are all God-awful, and the writing is outrageously stupid, so that's already bad enough. But worst of all is how the exposure or focus or whatever is handled: there's so much colour bleeding that the picture is simply ugly to look at. Just because it's a low-budget movie is no excuse to get basic filmmaking techniques wrong. Oh, and the ending is absolutely deplorable!

#9 = BloodRayne (2005)

Director Uwe Boll loves to adapt popular video games into abysmal movies, and the entire Internet hates him for it. This and Alone in the Dark are the definitive examples of why he's so terrible, but the main reason I hate this one more is because I'd seen a review of Alone in the Dark before the movie itself, which somewhat lessened the effect for me. But I knew nothing about BloodRayne going in, which is why I was royally pissed off at how awful it was. Bad editing, horrendous acting (Ben Kingsley is somehow the worst of all) and a poorly written story.


#8 = Bad Boys (1995)

I've seldom been more flat-out annoyed by a movie. During the first half, I was literally tearing at my hair every five minutes! And that's before we even get to Marcus's lie that dominates the storyline – the photographs scene being perhaps the worst of all the resulting embarrassingly forced scenarios! The second half goes from excruciating to straight-up boring, but one thing consistently drove me nuts: half the dialogue is yelling, usually for no reason at all. Michael Bay is by far my most hated director – he's the bane of my existence – and talk about being doomed from the very start!

#7 = Bloodrayne II: Deliverance (2007)

As much as I hated the first BloodRayne, it is God in comparison to this movie! This sequel, also directed by Boll, is so fucking bad it gives me a headache! The camera work is distractingly shoddy, with the camera always swaying around like the cameraman's drunk! The story bears no connection whatsoever to the first movie, and yet acts like we're supposed to know who characters are. Some scenes drag on for so long that the movie grinds to a complete halt. And worse than all of that, it's boring! It's sinfully boring! It's only a hundred minutes, but it feels like five hours!


#6 = Postal (2007)

Okay, I swear this is the last Uwe Boll movie! :) Of the few movies of his that I've seen, I view this as easily the worst, because it's supposed to be a comedy. Whereas his other movies can be enjoyed because they're unintentionally funny, this one is just uncomfortable, because there's nothing worse than when a joke falls flat and you're left sitting in awkward silence. It's a movie that thinks overweight women are funny, people fucking overweight women is funny, children getting gunned down is funny, a baby in a pram getting smushed by a truck is funny, and other similar distasteful jokes.

#5 = The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002)

I haven't seen many of the direct-to-video Disney sequels, but it looks like most of them are definitely worth avoiding. I actually didn't voluntarily watch this one – I happened to be in the room when someone else put it on – and it was one of the most unwelcome experiences of my life! It's just like Journey Back to Oz: it's playing to the lowest common denominator and making the dialogue so kid-friendly that it just made me cringe listening to it. Not to mention, it completely ruins the subtlety of the original film. It's a movie that thinks kids are stupid enough to watch anything.

#4 = Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (2000)

I've long since grown out of the first Rugrats movie, but I can at least give it credit that it did its job: it appealed to fans of the original show and upped the ante. Rugrats in Paris is the real deal. It sucks! Oh, God, it sucks! It's a movie so childish that the grown-ups sometimes talk more like children than the actual children! Of course, all the French characters are played by American actors and speak English twenty-four-seven. The animation is admittedly good, especially the moody shadows in some scenes, but it's just not an interesting adventure. And the climax is embarrassingly silly.

   All right, now we're getting to the ones that I positively loathe with a fiery passion! And it just so happens that the top three worst movies I've ever seen all came out in 2009! Now, there's an unfortunate coincidence! :)

#3 = The Ugly Truth (2009)

This movie is despicable! It's a shockingly sexist romantic comedy that's offensive to both men and women. All women are portrayed as shrewish control freaks who can only liberate themselves sexually, and all men are portrayed as base simpletons who only care about sex because they don't know any better. I know it's a comedy and it's meant to be exaggerated, but does this movie exist in any realm of reality?! I think the reason that annoys me so much in this case is because it's all to do with sex, and to me, that's a subject you don't fuck around with.


#2 = The Fourth Kind (2009)

Olatunde Osunsanmi again! :) This movie definitely elicited my most violent reaction watching a movie. I was so pissed off by the time it was over – just felt so downright insulted and angry – that it took me a whole week to recover from the shock! I was so offended that I'd been expected to enjoy that, let alone take it seriously! It's bad enough that the acting is horrendous and the story is so vapid and slow-moving, but the movie boasts a stupid running gimmick where it tries to claim it's real by playing the supposed "documentary" footage alongside the dramatisation, which is one of the most distracting things I've ever come across! I've never seen a gimmick just completely take you out of the movie like that does!

And the #1 absolute worst movie I've ever seen is… Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Good God! There's no way I'm sticking to my hundred-word limit on this one! I could write a whole dissertation on how shitty this movie is! Honestly, I'd rather watch any of the other movies I just listed than Transformers 2. I'd rather watch a marathon of all those other movies than sit through Transformers 2 again! I hate this movie so much it's palpable! If they could somehow make power plants out of hatred, then my disdain for Transformers 2 could power the entire Eastern Seaboard for the next five hundred years! Why? Because it's a movie that has no respect whatsoever for its audience's intelligence, treating them like sheep who'll mindlessly flock to see anything with the Transformers name on it. It's insultingly stupid (and I mean way beyond stupid!), it's long, it's vapid, it's manipulative, it's unfocused, it's terribly shot, it's terribly acted, it's terribly written, it's insufferably boring… Everything that defines a bad movie for me is on display here! And the fact that it had such a big budget makes it even worse! It cost two hundred million dollars! There's no excuse! No fucking excuse! Transformers 2 is the perfect example of my seething hatred for Michael Bay. Fuck him – and this movie in particular – right… to… HELL!!!

   …Phew! Wow, I really ranted a lot in that last one! :) But it's no exaggeration; Transformers 2 really is the ultimate fuel for my rage!
   So now I'm going to go and take a big deep breath, 'cos I was getting so angry there!

   Well, that's my last full top ten list, I'm afraid. But obviously I don't want to end on such a negative note, so next week I'll share a couple of the unfinished lists with you – maybe what I've got so far for my favourite books, TV shows and musicians/bands.