Return to Silent Hill (2026)

dir. Christophe Gans

Silent Hill is a franchise which has earned much praise and adoration. The genuinely scary games delve deep into psychological complexities interspersed with striking horror imagery and unforgettable characters. Return to Silent Hill does none of that. Protagonist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine, utilising maybe two facial expressions at absolute maximum) is struggling to come to terms with the disappearance of his wife Mary. When he receives a letter purported to be from her, he goes back to their former home town Silent Hill to find her, but the town is beset by supernatural horrors. The film’s attempts at unsettling imagery – a monster with a pyramid head wielding a knife, a group of jerky latex-suited nurses, a wide-eyed haunted “girl” (8 in the games, portrayed by an obvious late-teenager in the film) – come across comical at best, downright boring at worse. More egregious than the tired imagery is the script’s bizarre attempt to add depth to its lacklastre characters. A huge change to backstory is made which annihilates three compelling characters from the original story and creates plot holes and inconsistencies in this story. But with the lingering, loving way this reveal is made, it’s obvious writer-director Christophe Gans feels he made an improvement. He did not. Return to Silent Hill makes the audience wish they’d done anything but return.

Slender Man (2018)

dir. Sylvain White

Slender Man, based on the popular creepypasta, follows a group of high school girls tormented by the eponymous supernatural being. After they watch a video on how to summon the entity, one of the group disappears, and the rest of the movie follows the remaining friends as they seek to escape the monster. Unfortunately, not a single part of the film is remotely scary, as much as director Sylvain White clearly thinks jump cuts, sparse woods and flashing lights are the epitome of fright all on their own. Every single last actor left their performing skills at home, but then it’s hard to do anything but shrilly shriek out dialogue as poor as this (“[Slender Man is] like a computer virus that infects your hard drive, but instead of your hard drive, it’s your brain!”). The plot’s twists and turns are nonsensical – one character’s boyfriend seems to get heavily involved before disappearing for the rest of the movie, while the friends conveniently seem to know each other’s passwords and can log into anyone’s laptop (incidentally, the missing girl somewhat egotistically has a beaming picture of herself, by herself, as her desktop background). The movie tries to surprise its audience with a late reveal that one mysterious character only seen through message exchanges turns out to be, in actual fact… some complete stranger no one has any connection to. Slender Man became a phenomenon on the internet, but Slender Man became only a failure on screen.

Dr. T & the Women (2000)

dir. Robert Altman

Dr. T (Richard Gere) is a gynaecologist. Half his patients and staff are obsessed with him, because apparently some of these women find a medical vaginal examination a real turn-on. Meanwhile, Dr. T’s wife is suffering a state of childhood regression because people have loved her too much, or something. Dr. T therefore must run into the arms of golf instructor Bree (Helen Hunt) – but her independence and reasonableness send Dr. T running, laughing maniacally, into a tornado which has torn through his lesbian daughter’s shame wedding. At this point it’s somewhat fair to believe it’s all meant to be some kind of knowing parody, but what it’s a parody of is not at all clear. Nothing in this film is coherent, or compelling. Often it feels like some sort of bizarre hallucination; interweaving scenes cut rapidly back and forth, usually with next-to-nothing to do with each other, causing a strange psychological whiplash. This is only intensified during the countless, countless scenes which are just groups of women all talking over each other. It’s almost as though the moral of Dr. T & the Women is that women should just shut up – but this is advice the movie itself would be far better off heeding.

Camp Rock (2008)

dir. Matthew Diamond

Mitchie (Demi Lovato) is a young aspiring singer. When her chef mother gets a job catering for a musical summer camp, she takes the additional benefit of discounted fees and comes along. Mitchie’s main motivations in the film are a) singing, ideally more than the queen bee rival who’s obviously strutting around camp making everyone feel bad; b) ensnaring a Jonas brother love interest, and c) ensuring no one finds out her mother is the chef because that would be really embarrassing, or something. If Mitchie had any personality beyond periodically grinning like a maniac then maybe some of this would be interesting, but besides one disturbing scene when she throws a bunch of flour in her face to obscure her identity (and because everyone else is an idiot, this works), she has absolutely no features or experiences to distinguish her at all. Most of this trundles along as you’d expect: Mitchie’s confessed lies are pronounced more heinous than they really were then instantly forgiven, people sing wholesome songs about believing in yourself, and everyone is friends at the end. Camp Rock is a Disney Channel movie and never pretends – or aspires – to be anything else.

Raise Your Voice (2004)

dir. Sean McNamara

The tone of Raise Your Voice is set pretty quickly – Terri (Hilary Duff) and a bunch of others are looking deliriously happy while singing an unimpressive song. There is an unintentionally darker detour for a bit, involving Terri’s brother who seems so obsessed with her that it goes way beyond the realms of brotherly love, but this incestuous subtext is put to an abrupt end when the brother dies in a car crash. This trauma hangs over Terri as she decides to enrol in a music programme which could afford her a scholarship. The film goes swiftly back to its peppy vibes, but the seeds of a third-act conflict are sewn in a very contrived set-up where Terri and her mother lie to the father, claiming Terri is staying with her aunt instead. This is because the father is desperate for Terri to stay home and run his family restaurant instead, presumably for the rest of her life. None of this is particular compelling, and neither are the cast of clichéd characters at the music programme: the sassy black roommate, the spiky-haired love interest, the moody dark-haired girl, the all-knowing inspirational teacher. As a bonus, they also throw in an utterly obnoxious incel boy whose method of ensnaring the girl he likes involves being as loud and intrusive as possible (spoiler alert: it works). It doesn’t help that there seems to be no real knowledge of music, either, with many students learning painfully easy pieces and demonstrating limited talent, Terri’s underwhelming vocals (both before and after accepting the death of her brother) being the prime example. There’s kind of a religious theme, but even that is lazily dotted around here and there. From the story to the characters to the emotions, Raise Your Voice is predictably one-note.

Redemption for Easter (2021)

dir. Karlton T. Clay

Redemption for Easter makes its message very clear very early on. A pastor is delivering a Sunday sermon. His wife in attendance, but none of his five children are. In a montage as he tries to call them afterwards, it’s shown each of his children has succumbed to sin in one way or another: adultery, drug dealing, deceit, alcoholism, and – fascinatingly – practising yoga. When the pastor dies, his wife is remarried six months later, and his children continue to drift. So what can bring all these people back on the right track? Why, God, of course. The plot involves some strange pivots, including a marriage done only for a Green Card but also is actually based on love after all; a fake love affair to get extra commission on the selling of the family church; and a truly out-of-nowhere rape story (though the film seems keener to condemn the abortion that followed). The movie’s fundamental message is conveyed pretty succinctly in one scene where the yoga practitioner looks troubled, spontaneously decides yoga isn’t doing it for him anymore, and instead picks up the Bible that someone has handily placed on his bed. Of course, a film like this made as a passion project with so little money that most scenes are clearly filmed on cheap equipment in the cast or crew members’ actual houses, was never going to be good. But it could at least have been coherent. Instead, two of the five children allege they only began their so-called vices as a coping mechanism after the death of their father, even though the movie very clearly showed they were all cheating and dealing drugs and doing yoga (!) while their father was still alive. But, as a torturously long series of monologues towards the end hammers home, none of that matters because God forgives and loves everyone. Presumably the makers of Redemption for Easter truly believe that, because there’s no way they could think they’re getting redeemed for this otherwise.

Mary, Mother of Jesus (1999)

dir. Kevin Connor

Most made-for-TV films about Jesus are basically the same. Everyone who follows Jesus is good; those who deride and betray him are bad. Mary, Mother of Jesus at least tries to do something slightly different by purporting to portray the story from Mary’s perspective. But Mary is so bland and boring, this is akin to having no perspective at all. The younger Mary (Melinda Kinnaman) is especially dull, with her blank stares and breathy idioms. Older Mary (Pernilla August) tries to actually put in a good performance here and there, as does Christian Bale in a somewhat jarring appearance as Jesus, but even they can’t keep the quality up. In fairness, it must be difficult to act convincingly when you’re not in a remotely convincing set, with all the costumes and building exteriors looking almost adorably cheap. The filmmaking is just as hollow, with abrupt cuts to scenes in some places, and scenes which linger on and on and on for no reason in others. Mary, Mother of Jesus is not a well-known film, and there is no need to spread its gospel too far.

Snow White (2025)

dir. Marc Webb

1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is held in high regard as the first animated feature film produced in the US, the first cel-animated feature film in the world, and a huge leap forward for Disney and animation alike. With this live-action remake, it seems Disney were somehow ashamed of all this instead of proud, because every single aspect of 2025’s Snow White seems to spit on the quality, magic, and innovation of the original. Both the heroine and villain have confused, conflicting motivations and no depth whatsoever. Rachel Zegler is a blank and bland Snow White, whose proclamations about bravery and community somehow render her even less interesting than the literally two-dimensional version of 1937. Gal Gadot is astoundingly terrible as the Evil Queen, growling and barking and jerking her limbs around bizarrely. Yet even they are less odious to witness on-screen than the grotesque CGI aberrations that are the seven dwarves. With their bulging, dead eyes and contorted expressions, it’s no wonder they chose to leave these demon spawn out of the film’s title. Throw in a tepid romance, contrived escapes, cheap costumes, and cardboard cut-outs of supporting characters, and this remake is assuredly a downgrade rather than an upgrade. Snow White was supposed to be the cleverer, deeper version, yet apparently nothing was learned in almost 90 years.

Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

dir. Todd Phillips

2019’s Joker surprised audiences by being a reasonably engaging, different take on the Batman villain, after everyone thought there could be no interest in him again following Heath Ledger’s defining portrayal. But any goodwill Joker earned is swiftly annihilated with this pretentious, shallow sequel. Joaquin Phoenix reprises his role as Arthur Fleck / Joker, and Lady Gaga joins as his love interest Lee Quinzel. Very little of substance happens in the movie – at the end Arthur basically winds up exactly where he started, locked up in an institution, with just one consequential event in very final scene which really didn’t need over two hours of build up. Arthur goes on trial and it really makes no difference to anything at all, except that the audience is forced to sit through his erratic laughing and accent changes because these apparently make him “crazy”. Worse, the running time is unfortunately padded out even further by excruciatingly forced song numbers. Jukebox musicals ideally weave in the songs so they enhance the emotions of the story, but Folie à Deux seems to think the entire movie needs to pause to make way for the songs instead. The romance between Arthur and Lee is incredibly difficult to believe in, as none of them seems to have any reason to be drawn to the other – they just sing that that’s how they feel. As their connection is meant to be the backbone of the movie, obviously everything else around it fails. Joker: Folie à Deux is the ultimate proof that sometimes, one is enough.

The Adventures of Aladdin (2019)

dir. Glenn Campbell

The Adventures of Aladdin is another classic, obvious rip-off from the infamous Asylum production studio. And it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect. It’s a live action reimagining of Disney’s Aladdin tale, but with all the humour, charm and intelligence stripped out (again, classic Asylum). Aladdin in this version is an acrobat rather than a thief, and has a band of fellow acrobats rather than a monkey companion. Princess Jasmine is replaced with Sultana Shahzadi, and Jafar is now Maghreb. Aladdin is wide-eyed and bland; Shahzadi makes vacant statements as she flutters her eyelashes; Maghreb sneers and prances around, just short of “I AM EVIL” being stamped across his head. The school play levels of acting are matched by cheap costumes and shockingly poor special effects, so it’s feasible to believe this was done on next-to-no budget. On the other hand, The Adventures of Aladdin actually has a couple of small plus points: one of Aladdin’s friends loves him while he loves Shahzadi, providing a genuinely compelling conflict, and the movie actually gives the classic genie of the lamp a name. But none of this can justify the idiotic dialogue, a climax involving a giant CGI chameleon-dragon, and the whiplash-inducing realisation that the film’s entire plot – from village to cave of wonders to palace to another palace to desert trek to final battle – explicitly takes place within a single day. The Adventures of Aladdin is pretty blatant about what it is, and this is a definite case where it’s wise to judge a book by its cover.

The Sneak Over (2020)

dir. Brandon Bergin

The poster for The Sneak Over, with its lurid red ’80s-style title design accompanied by smirking young boys on bikes, makes no secret of the fact that this is an attempt to rip off Stranger Things. So essentially, The Sneak Over posits: what if the kids in Stranger Things were in a movie club, instead of a Dungeons and Dragons club? And what if instead of defending their friends against threats from a magical alternate reality, their biggest goal was to watch a supposedly “mythical” rare film (although somehow, there’s a ton of merchandise for this film no one is certain even exists)? On that note, what if instead of creatures of darkness, the big baddies of the story were actually two local weedy bullies, who of course have darker complexions than our milk-skinned heroes? And what if approximately every thirty seconds, one of the boys either farted, made a fart joke, or listened to a recording of fart sounds? And what if all the acting, from everyone, was pantomime levels of crude and unconvincing? And what if one of the boys’ dads seemed to be on some sort of blind date with a teenage girl, for some baffling and disturbing reason? And what if the whole thing was so cheap, half of it was conveyed through shoddy black-and-white comic book storyboards instead of actual film? Well, if all of this were true, it’s safe to say Stranger Things would not be a mega hit. Perhaps in that alternate reality, The Sneak Over would be the mega hit in its place – but we’re in this reality, and here, The Sneak Over just sucks.

The Fault in Our Stars (2014)

dir. Josh Boone

Based on the popular YA book by John Green, The Fault in Our Stars follows cancer patients Hazel (Shailene Woodley) and Gus (Ansel Elgort) as they navigate love, sickness, and death. One of the greatest hurdles is that Hazel and Gus are neither likeable nor compelling. They quote literature and hackneyed philosophy at each other a lot, but neither seems to have any genuine passions or interests. Their love story seems to be based on proximity and shared experience of illness, little else. The story also takes a very strange turn when the duo venture to Amsterdam at the invitation of an author they love; when they are rebuffed they wind up on a trip to the Anne Frank museum, and being applauded by strangers as they make out in the middle of an exhibit. As if that weren’t horrifying enough, we’re also forced to sit through the incel-adjacent rages of their friend Isaac (Nat Wolff), and watch the three band together to hurl eggs at the house of a poor innocent girl whose only crime was to break up with him. But no one calls them out, because they have cancer. The moral of the story seems to be that sick people can do anything they want without consequence, including keeping important and devastating secrets from their significant other, because they’re sick. Faults in character, faults in story, faults in message – if only it stopped at The Fault in Our Stars.

Patch Adams (1998)

dir. Tom Shadyac

Patch Adams purports to tell the story of real-life doctor Hunter Adams, but considering the subject’s vehement denouncement of the film, it’s easy to see that it’s anything but a faithful portrayal. Robin Williams plays Hunter “Patch” Adams, a man inspired to become a doctor after a depressive episode. He champions a “laughter is the best medicine” ethos, claiming his fellow doctors and medical students need to focus more on quality of life rather than delaying death. This would be commendable, if: a) Patch were not dangerously and irresponsibly practising medicine without a licence, b) Patch were not stealing medical supplies from a hospital, and fundamentally c) Patch was in any way remotely funny at all. But his stupid voices and antics never once cause a laugh – not for the audience, anyway, although the movie makes sure every last goggle-eyed spectator is enamoured by Patch’s charms. Few challenge his cavalier attitude, even when it leads to his love interest getting so involved with a patient that she is murdered. Even more egregiously, in real life this character was completely different – a man, not romantically involved with Patch in any way – showing this film’s prioritisation of mawkish sentimentality over anything real or meaningful. No wonder the real Hunter Adams summed up Patch Adams with: “I hate that movie.”

Christmas With the Singhs (2024)

dir. Panta Mosleh

Asha and Jake are old high school acquaintances who reunite and get together in adulthood. When Jake proposes, it’s time for them to meet each other’s families (which ideally would’ve happened much earlier, but that’s a whole other issue). And it’s Christmas! So Asha and Jake find themselves trying to appease both families’ traditions, both with Christmas and with celebrating the engagement. This could be a genuinely intriguing concept, except for the fact that almost every single individual in the film is deeply unlikeable. Jake is incredibly rude when meeting Asha’s family, looking constantly bewildered and loudly calling Indian traditions weird. Asha’s father is stone-faced and aggressive without being sympathetic at all. Jake’s dad interrogates the couple about whether they’ll have kids. Jake’s mum tells Asha she loves Eat, Pray Love, because that’s apparently a normal thing to randomly say to an Indian person. All of this could be given a pass if the central couple themselves seemed like a good match, but their rapport is completely lifeless. They don’t talk about important life decisions, and their bond shatters at the barest bit of challenge. It’s only a third-act personality switch from Asha’s dad which saves the day. Christmas With the Singhs is supposed to be a colourful clash of cultures, but it feels completely monochrome.

Hanukkah on the Rocks (2024)

dir. Séan Geraughty

Most of Hanukkah on the Rocks plays out exactly like a typical Hallmark holiday movie. Tori loses her job as a high-powered lawyer, but discovers a new lease of life when she becomes a bartender at a local bar. Of course, she meets an incredibly bland man there who becomes her passionate love interest despite having no personality at all. Most of this film is exactly what you’d expect, without particular pros or cons. Plus, it’s nice to see Hanukkah celebrated, and the blue-and-white decorations make a welcome visual change from Hallmark’s standard red-and-green Christmas fare. However, the last 12 minutes or so swerve hard into the “third act conflict” we’re all used to seeing, and said conflict is possibly the most contrived and confusing ever put to screen. For some reason, everyone is really shocked to learn that the man in charge of the bar, is in fact in charge of the bar. And although Tori had confided in her grandmother about her job loss, she kept it from her parents – so it’s bizarre that her grandmother encouraging the parents to come to the bar and discover Tori’s new occupation is not painted as a deeply villainous act. Grandma even exclaims, “I’m no snitch!”, and somehow this goes without challenge. But, in true Hallmark fashion, everything still gets resolved within minutes, just in time for a closing kiss. Hanukkah on the Rocks is absolutely wild in its closing moments, but overall, it’s nothing much to celebrate.

Waterworld (1995)

dir. Kevin Reynolds

In the future, the polar ice caps have melted, covering nearly all dry land. Humans struggle living on boats and atolls, struggling with scant resources and longing to reach the fabled Dryland. This could be a really compelling premise, were it not butchered so savagely by Waterworld‘s poor worldbuilding, inconsistent storytelling, and uninspiring characters. Kevin Costner plays the Mariner, who crosses nautical paths with a woman protecting a little girl with a tattoo in her back, said to be a map to Dryland. A herd of savage Smokers, led by the Deacon (Dennis Hopper), is hunting down the girl. No one acts in a way you’d expect in a post-apocalyptic, desperate future. Why does the loner Mariner help the woman and girl? No reason. Why, after kidnapping the girl, do the smokers not simply copy the tattoo or even peel it off her, as they have no reason to keep her alive? No reason. Why does the woman – after being pushed and shoved and bullied by the Mariner – fall in love with him? No reason. There is decent action movie pacing and some investment in the overall goal of reaching Dryland, but Waterworld is mostly a meandering mess of people doing things for no reason. And this is all before mentioning that the Mariner is a kind of mutant human who’s evolved to have gills and webbed feet, a fact which contributes basically nothing to the story and so just adds another question to the “Why?” list. Again, no reason. It was the most expensive film made at the time, but there are plenty of very obvious reasons Waterworld bombed.

War of the Worlds (2025)

dir. Rich Lee

H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is a classic, inspiring many adaptations due to its compelling narrative and complex sci-fi ideas. This War of the Worlds understands none of that, instead seeming to think the makings of a classic come in shouting clichéd one-liners (“Hell yeah!”), editing so fast it’s impossible to make out what’s on screen, and one-dimensional portrayals of everything from characters to government conspiracies. Ice Cube plays William, who works for a government department with inexplicable surveillance powers to spy on seemingly every single person on the planet. The movie’s gimmick is that it’s all told through William’s screen: WhatsApp calls, Teams messages, and hacking interfaces which just consist of clicking “sabotage” and asking faceless friends to generate passwords whenever it’s needed. The attacking aliens apparently wish to consume data (a concept conveyed so confusingly and inconsistently it’s not worth trying to understand), and William and his family must save the day via a handy USB stick and Amazon Prime drone. Somewhere in there is a baffling “twist” about the government being the baddies all along, but it makes no difference to anything. The characters certainly don’t seem to care, with Ice Cube never able to muster up more than roughly two and a half different facial expressions. More emotion is derived from the fact the film uses footage from real-life disasters and accidents where real people died, claiming it’s footage from the alien invasion – but this emotion is merely disbelieving outrage, and presumably not what the film was intending. War of the Worlds isn’t just idiotic, it’s egregious.

My Oxford Year (2025)

dir. Iain Morris

American student Anna arrives in Oxford to study Victorian poetry for a year. The very premise is already unconvincing due to the inconsistent picture of Anna. She’s a supposed literary genius, although her bookshelf seems to only consist of famous, obvious classics like Jane Eyre and Emma. When she goes to a fish and chip shop and is asked what kind of fish she wants, she somehow doesn’t seem to understand the question. Her observations in seminars are simple and perfunctory – yet they seem to capture the attention of her grad tutor Jamie. They fall in love quickly and with no discernible chemistry on screen. Somehow, none of the academic staff or students seem to care about this blatant power imbalance at all. The dubious ethics of a tutor potentially giving a student preferential treatment, or blackmailing her into a relationship by holding the prospect of bad grades over her head, are never even hinted at. But ethics clearly don’t matter to anyone in this film, with Jamie keeping a hugely important secret from Anna for months. Instead, the focus is much more on the antics of the various annoying side character stereotypes – every one more exceedingly British than the last – and ensuring they’re all paired up by the end of the movie. With its heightened clichés of England, lacklustre central romance, and goofy comic relief, My Oxford Year manages to feel a whole lot longer than a year.

Five Feet Apart (2019)

dir. Justin Baldoni

Stella and Will are two teenagers with cystic fibrosis, who must stay at least six feet away from each other (and any cystic fibrosis patient) for safety. When they meet on their hospital ward, they begin to fall in love. They fall in love despite Stella’s only personality trait being “controlling”, and Will not even really having a personality at all. They fall in love despite the tragedy of losing a fellow patient and friend about as one-dimensional as themselves, with his only personality trait appeared to be “gay”. And they fall in love despite the limitations imposed on them by the distancing rules, even though anyone watching can accurately glean that these rules have not been portrayed in a truthful way – and indeed, real doctors have denounced Five Feet Apart for how poorly it depicts the reality of living with cystic fibrosis. No one in the film is remotely likeable or relatable, meaning the primary focus of the film – Stella and Will’s love – is flimsy and unconvincing. Serious illness is downplayed and romanticised in favour of saccharine contrivances and tired platitudes (“I’m tired of living without really living”, “God, you are beautiful, and brave”). This film takes real-life difficulty and commoditises it, transforming it into something fluffy and digestible for the masses. Somewhat ironically, watching Five Feet Apart is a genuinely sickening experience.

Eragon (2006)

dir. Stefen Fangmeier

A young farm boy, Eragon, stumbles upon a mysterious blue stone which soon hatches into a dragon. Thus, he is pulled in to a great adventure to save the kingdom of Alagaësia from the evil Galbatorix. These two sentences characterise Eragon – top level exposition conveying the most shallow “chosen one” fantasy beats, hoping that bringing in a few funny-sounding names will create the illusion of depth. The plot is so formulaic as to essentially be Star Wars (the young hero’s mentor is killed while he searches to rescue a captured princess, and they also meet a loveable rogue). The abundance of funny-sounding names and vague references to elves and dwarves do nothing to convey the world as real or worth caring about. This is further underlined by the cinematography and CGI, where everything looks oddly saturated and constantly fake. With the exception of Robert Carlyle as a ridiculously camp villain, no one seems to put any effort into their acting; as Eragon, Ed Speleers seems to use one facial expression the entire time. There were obviously plans for sequels, but this film is so shallow and forgettable, it’s no surprise they didn’t happen. Eragon is about as effective, and utilises as much effort, as taking the word “dragon” and changing the “D” to an “E”.

The Return of the King (1980)

dir. Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin Jr

A recurring musical refrain in The Return of the King goes, “It’s so easy not to try.” It’s so easy to try and use that line to judge the film as a whole, but it’s not quite fair. Some trying went into it. The background animations are detailed and atmospheric, and the songs and narration occasionally have clever, evocative wordplay. But these glimpses of talent largely drown in a sea of confusion and sheer weirdness. Though the backgrounds look good, the characters look messy and unfinished. The story jumps around so much it’d be impossible for a Lord of the Rings newcomer to follow; the titular King isn’t even mentioned until the film is nearly over. Eowyn is an especially egregious example of a pivotal character appearing out of nowhere at the last minute. Much of the voice acting is very flat and lifeless, even when uttering such bafflingly bleak lines as “Die well, Samwise!” Though the songs have an occasional clever line, they’re hard to remember when the audience is assaulted by the repetition of other lines over and over and over again (“The wearer of the Ring, the bearer of the Ring!”). Overall, there’s some display of fondness for the source material, but when it comes to the character designs, the script, the voice acting, the repetitive music, the purpose of the film as a whole? Evidently, it’s so easy not to try.

The Shaggy Dog (2006)

dir. Brian Robbins

The premise of this reboot movie, The Shaggy Dog, sounds completely insane. Because it is. Tim Allen plays a man who is bitten by a sacred immortal dog. This means he is now able to transform into a dog, although only sometimes, and it’s never quite clear what exactly provokes the transformation. Nevertheless, he must use his power to reveal the evil workings of a sinister laboratory which is conducting bizarre experiments on mutant animals, run by a far-too-committed Robert Downey Jr. All of this is far beyond the realms of sanity, but what’s really frustrating about The Shaggy Dog is that despite all this, it really is the same boring story yet again. Allen’s character is a workaholic dad, who must use all these zany shenanigans to reset his priorities and remember the importance of family. It’s the same movie which has been made a thousand times already, just with the added aspect of creepy CGI to make the mutant animals the stuff of absolute nightmares. The plot is barely coherent, but except for Downey Jr, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares anyway. It has to be assumed the original instalments of the Shaggy Dog franchise are better than this, because it’s hard to imagine how they could be any worse.

Quigley / Daddy Dog Day (2003)

dir. William Byron Hillman

“Sarah, the dog’s cute, but this is ridiculous.” This line of dialogue pretty much sums up the entirety of Quigley, in which Gary Busey’s generic workaholic billionaire dies and gets turned into a dog named Quigley to make up for his sins. Much of the film has no real plot and just features the dog running around. Great! The dog’s cute – but this is ridiculous. It’s a Christian film, initially seeming as though it’s espousing the virtue of good deeds. But this is undermined, quite explicitly, as God announces heaven is not about good deeds, but faith. So it’s unclear why Quigley had to commit any of his good deeds at all. Then again, he didn’t actually do them after all, with the film culminating in an “It was all a dream” anti-climax. Put together with truly horrendous production values, stilted acting, awful background songs, and about a thousand supposedly humorous prat falls, Quigley does not offer anything of value comedically, spiritually or emotionally. The dog’s cute, but this is too, too ridiculous.

Bubble Boy (2001)

dir. Blair Hayes

Jimmy (Jake Gyllenhaal) has lived in a sterilised plastic dome since birth due to having no immune system. Due to his isolation and overbearing mother, he is stuck in a naive, childlike state throughout his life. When his friend says she is leaving to get married, Jimmy decides to leave his home for the first time in his life by putting together a sort of portable bubble with plastic and duct tape, and stop the wedding. Obviously Bubble Boy’s premise is already pretty stupid, but it constantly outdoes itself in terms of insanity. A biker gang! A Mormon-like cult called Bright and Shiny! A circus of freaks! A devout Hindu ice cream man! A mud wrestling competition! Old man twins who fly planes and seem to keep dying! The very end of Bubble Boy is predictable – Jimmy gets the girl and discovers his mother may not have been entirely truthful to him – but everything that comes before it is pretty much impossible to see coming. Though Bubble Boy is definitely, definitely not a good movie, it’s hard not to be entertained by its sheer madness.

Kinda Pregnant (2025)

dir. Tyler Spindel

In Kinda Pregnant, Lainy (Amy Schumer) plays a woman who straps a fake belly to herself and pretends to be pregnant. Rather than treating this as the psychological horror show that it is, Kinda Pregnant instead decides this is an adorably kooky and totally relatable way to behave, with Lainy being played off as sympathetic rather than disturbed or mind-bogglingly self-absorbed. The film’s emotional beats are genuinely offensive, with characters giving speeches about how all women want marriage and children without any alternative view ever even hinted at, and a love story so contrived it’s impossible to take seriously at any point. Even worse are the movie’s attempts at comedy, which include but are sadly not limited to: Lainy rubbing cake all over her own face in the middle of a restaurant; a sex scene in a garage somehow involving oven mitts; people falling into a swimming pool (original!); a small child running around with a knife and stabbing someone in the belly; Lainy stuffing a full cooked turkey up her dress. Every single attempt at a joke is resoundingly unfunny, and just makes the movie seem far longer than it actually is. Kinda Pregnant is simply kinda terrible.

The Electric State (2025)

dir. Anthony and Joe Russo

The graphic novel The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag is highly regarded as a great piece of fiction. Its best elements were ostensibly left behind in this one-dimensional, painfully shallow adaptation. In a dystopian alternative reality where humans and robots waged a devasting war, Millie Bobby Brown plays Michelle, a teenager who embarks on a journey alongside a robot she believes to house the consciousness of her supposedly dead brother. They encounter all sorts of quippy allies, from a drawling Chris Pratt to a host of horrifyingly ugly robots with eerie painted faces. There’s some incomprehensible nonsense about how Michelle’s brother has had his brain integrated with war technology, but it’s so stupid and hard to follow that it doesn’t result in much – all that matters is that he’s special, because that’s the one note the script has bestowed on him. Every single character, from hero to villain, is one-dimensional and possesses only a pale emulation of emotional expression over anything deep or sincere. This would be forgivable if it just applied to the robots, but the humans are somehow even harder to relate to as they’re so dull and predictable. It has to be assumed that the original story had better pacing and nuance to it, but as a film adaptation, The Electric State is no more than a lifeless imitation.

Taarzan: The Wonder Car (2004)

dir. Abbas-Mustan

Engineer Deven Chaudhary (Ajay Devgn) is locked into his car and drowned by a group of businessmen who want to steal his futuristic car designs. Twelve years later, Deven’s son Raj (Vatsal Sheth) happens upon the wreckage of the drowned car and rebuilds it in honour of his father. Somehow (it’s not really explained how), the spirit of Deven takes over the car, enabling it to come to life and embark upon a gruesome campaign of vengeance. In many ways, Taarzan: The Wonder Car is a typical Bollywood film – an earnest hero, a simpering love interest bereft of personality, a group of scowling villains, and a steady supply of song-and-dance numbers. But this film is set apart by being even more insane than the premise already suggests. Visuals of the wonder car include it emerging unscathed from an inferno, shrinking in order to glide underneath a truck, gliding effortlessly on water, and manoeuvring a small straw hut around. Each murder is more vicious and bizarre than the last. By the end, Deven appearing as a shimmering ghost and then ascending to heaven in a beam of light doesn’t seem remotely weird compared to what’s come before. Taarzan: The Wonder Car is utterly ridiculous from start to finish, but it is undoubtedly a fun ride.

The Watchers (2024)

dir. Ishana Night Shyamalan

In The Watchers, Mina (Dakota Fanning) – through a rather specific set of circumstances involving delivering a parrot – finds herself lost in an Irish forest. She soon meets up with other humans in a bunker who are stuck there, all at the whim of “The Watchers”, mysterious creatures who murder anyone who breaks the rules. Or, it’s claimed – rules including “Don’t turn your back to the mirror” and “Don’t go out at night” are frequently broken with little to no consequence. The creatures’ mythology is explored but nothing is very interesting, let alone scary. A chief problem is none of the characters in The Watchers behave remotely like relatable human beings; most, including Mina, are blank slates changing their desires and motivations depending on what the plot next requires. “Plot” is a bit of an overstatement as not a lot happens, and the classic Shyamalan family favourite of a closing twist is pretty ineffectual. It’s the watchers of The Watchers who really suffer.

Megalopolis (2024)

dir. Francis Ford Coppola

A misunderstood, maligned artistic genius has the vision and skill to save the world from itself, if only the people would listen. This not only describes the central premise of Megalopolis, but seemingly also Francis Ford Coppola’s conception of himself as he made this profoundly bizarre mess of a movie. Ego suffuses every overwritten, paradoxical and unnatural word of dialogue. Heavy-handed allusions to ancient Rome are as contrived as the characters’ motivations. Everyone’s grandiose gestures and pompous expressions make clear that Megalopolis is meant to be taken seriously – but how can anyone take the terrible visual effects and confusing excuse for a plot seriously? How can anyone take character names like “Wow Platinum” and “Vesta Sweetwater” seriously? How can anyone take lines like “I’m oral as hell,” “I won’t let time have dominion over my thoughts,” or “Time, stop!” seriously? From spontaneous bursts of sitar, to a baby floating on a tiny rug, to a near-imperceptible and surprisingly inconsequential nuclear incident, it is meant to be taken seriously. At one point a character takes the hat off his own head, drops it and barks at a minion to pick it up; the minion does the same to the minion behind him, and so on – and yet, even still, it is meant to be taken seriously. Coppola would presumably say that anyone who declares Megalopolis anything less than a work of genius is simply not operating at his cognitive level, but this is a cognitive level no sane human would ever want to be at.

Atlas (2024)

dir. Brad Peyton

Films have been exploring the impact of AI for decades, but few have done it quite as poorly as Atlas. The eponymous character (Jennifer Lopez) hates AI, and is keen to track down an AI robot who went rogue and killed millions of people. With Lopez wearing one blank facial expression for 99% of the runtime, Atlas herself has a thinner personality than a robot – two colleagues genuinely argue over whether she is “rigid and hostile” or “driven and determined”, though we never actually see her exhibit any defining traits except talking about how much she likes coffee. After a mission goes wrong, she must learn to trust AI before she can succeed, and the film hits pretty standard plot points with no innovations. The only surprise comes in the reveal that Atlas herself is responsible for unleashing the robot who’s killed millions. This in itself isn’t the surprise, as it’s obvious some dark event caused her mistrust of AI – the surprise is more that Atlas seems to suffer no trauma or even much lingering guilt over this. Sure, she was a child, but it seems bizarre that she was then able to proceed and build a relatively thriving life. It’s difficult to relate to Atlas’ fight against AI when she possesses less emotion than any computer programme out there. Much like AI itself right now, Atlas supposedly does a lot of clever important things but falls massively short of its creators’ intentions.

Our Drawings (2023)

dir. Calobi

With its incoherent story, horrendous animation, awful music, one-dimensional characters, and general mind-melting impact, it’s hard to even refer to Our Drawings as a film. The one-hour running time means the experience is mercifully short, but adds to the sense that it was in fact an amateur student’s animation project that should never have seen the light of day. The supposed “story” follows Paige Foster, a teenager – or possibly adult, this seems to change – who accesses an alternate reality through her drawings. This is due to her innate magical ability, or possibly a magic pen, or maybe happens when she’s in a coma – also unclear. The cognitive whirlwind is only compounded by features such as a beat-boxing dog, a sentient s’more, an evil art teacher, the fact that Paige’s sister is seemingly named “Pillow”, and the day being saved by repeatedly chanting what sounds like, um, “wrist waters on my neck”. That’s not the only line which is repeated, with several recorded sections of dialogue just being replayed multiple times at different points. Whether a line is uttered once or a billion times, the voice acting always sounds like AI screaming to be let free, especially during the ear-bleeding songs. Of course, our heroine Paige saves the world – although actually maybe it’s the sentient s’more who does, that isn’t clear either. The film is right that people’s attempts to make art can change lives; watching the disaster of Our Drawings is certainly a life-changing event.

The Master of Disguise (2002)

dir. Perry Andelin Blake

Why. Why does this exist. Dana Carvey plays the idiotically-named, and generally idiotic, Pistachio Disguisey. He spends most of his time doing dumb voices and staring goofily with his mouth hanging open, until he’s embroiled in a contrived adventure involving donning a variety of disguises to foil an evil mastermind who farts a lot. Sounds like a kids’ film, except for the neverending offensive stereotypes plus several references to women’s behinds and how Pistachio prefers them bigger. He’s consistently misogynistic, selfish, and stupid, so of course the gorgeous and intelligent love interest played by Jennifer Esposito falls head over heels for him. Perhaps she was taken with his many pointless disguises, from a brown-face Indian shouting “India” over and over again to a giant green turtle shouting “turtle” over and over again. The film overall feels like someone drilling a brain into your skull over and over again – and when it’s finally over, it still doesn’t grant any mercy, instead spewing countless extra scenes in the credits. Even more impressions surface here, and not a single one is good or funny. There are no laughs to be found in the entirety of The Master of Disguise, otherwise known as the longest eighty minutes ever experienced by humankind.

The Wrong Mommy (2019)

dir. David DeCoteau

The Wrong Mommy follows Melanie (Jessica Morris), who works in PR or marketing or advertising or, er, something like that, it’s never properly specified. She hires the confident Phoebe (Ashlynn Yennie) as her PA, unaware that Phoebe has ulterior motives. The movie ensures the audience is never unaware of Phoebe’s ulterior motives, though, by playing a dramatic sting every time she appears on screen, and cladding her in a dark hoodie as she broods around plotting her evil scheme. Her evil scheme is a bit confusing though, and the film isn’t really sure what it wants to focus on as Phoebe goes from flirting with Melanie’s husband, to strangling a man who’s sent her unsolicited pictures, to stabbing another guy in the shower. (Note: the shower guy previously spends an inordinately long time discussing auto-erotic asphyxiation, so it is an especially missed opportunity that he’s murdered through any method except asphyxiation.) Plus, it’s hard to sympathise with Melanie, who begins to suspect Phoebe of malign intent yet still blithely leaves her young daughter alone with her. The climax is fairly standard, even though the motives are incoherent and the characters lifeless. The Wrong Mommy is part of a series of The Wrong… movies, and if this is anything to go by, the most wrong thing about them is people decided to make them exist.

Christmas on Windmill Way (2023)

dir. Don McBrearty

When a movie has “windmill” in the title, it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a focus on windmills. And yet, there is just so much about windmills in Christmas on Windmill Way that it’s hard to be prepared. Mia (Christa Taylor Brown) works in a windmill that her great-grandfather built. Inside the windmill, they make small windmill models. There are in-depth windmill-related conversations, including the lumber used to make furniture in the windmill, the heritage of the windmill, safety checks of the windmill, and a clog-on-a-string messaging system within the windmill. Mia’s high school sweetheart Brady (Chad Michael Murray for some reason) returns to town, part of a realty group intent on knocking down the windmill. It all keeps coming back to the windmill. Oh, and it’s Christmas. With the classic “enemies to lovers” and “big bad corporation targets humble family business” themes, not to mention wooden acting, one-dimensional characters and awkward camerawork, this is a fairly typical Christmas film. Essentially, Christmas on Windmill Way is exactly what it sounds like – a clichéd Christmas rom-com, with an extra dose of windmills that no one asked for.

Irish Wish (2024)

dir. Janeen Damian

It’s a good start when, in a film called Irish Wish, neither the protagonist nor her two love interests is Irish. Lindsay Lohan plays Maddie, a book editor secretly in love with Paul (Alexander Vlahos), her bestselling author. But it seems Paul only has eyes for Maddie’s best friend. In Ireland for their wedding, Maddie goes for a wander to a non-descript but apparently magic stone, where the spirit of St Brigid appears wearing a sort of salwar kameez, and grants her her wish that she be marrying Paul instead. So far, so normal! But one of Irish Wish‘s great problems is that its key characters, including wildlife photographer James (Ed Speleers) as Maddie’s other love interest, are so bereft of personality that it’s hard to be invested in anything they do. Clunky dialogue (like Maddie fawning over the “dramatic vistas”), head-scratchingly hideous outfits, and mad aspects such as Maddie’s mother being stuck in Des Moines because clearly Jane Seymour didn’t have time to travel to the real set, are rare moments of interest. Otherwise, the characters and set-up are so tired that there’s very little to remember. Rather than wishing for a different life, Maddie should’ve wished Irish Wish had a different script.

A Christmas Star (2015)

dir. Richard Mark Elson

Noelle is born on Christmas Day in a small Irish town. Growing up, she seems to have the power to perform miracles – specifically, to stop people fighting and make them care for each other instead. Her father works at the local snowglobe factory, and the entire town is shocked that such a vital business as a snowglobe factory in a small rural town is actually, somehow, failing. Of course, this provides a window for an evil corporate businessman to come in and suggest evil corporate things, like: get rid of the failing business and its archaic technology! Let the snowglobes be made somewhere else instead! Build a hotel and casino, promoting tourism and more jobs! All so utterly evil and corporate that Noelle must use her powers of love to save the day. It’s never clear if Noelle is really magic or not, as her supposed powers don’t at all feature in the climax. The story instead opts for a cringey showdown at Stormont where Noelle’s bunch of ragtag friends get together to expose the evil corporate businessman as evil and corporate. Naturally, this prompts Kylie Minogue to phone up and buy ten boxes of snowglobes, thus saving the factory. Cool! Hers isn’t the only jarring celebrity appearance, with performances by Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson so fleeting that they may well have literally phoned them in. A Christmas Star is an utterly baffling production, apparently aiming for the heavens but falling embarrassingly short.

Baking Up Love (2021)

dir. Candice T. Cain

Another one from the infamous director of Deck the Heart, with all the familiar low budget production and terrible acting we’ve come to know and love. One of the additional problems facing Baking Up Love is that it doesn’t really know what film it wants to be. Does it want to be a standard Hallmark rom-com, with two one-dimensional men competing for the affections of our simpering heroine? Or does it want to be about a spoiled teenage girl becoming more wholesome and free by learning to bake pumpkin pie with her aunt? Maybe it wants to be a Christian movie, because there are periodic sections dedicated to praising the local church. Maybe it wants to be about the minutiae of a pumpkin baking competition, not least because the film forces viewers to watch several random competitors in every category walk up onto a small stage and smile awkwardly for what feels like forever. There’s a lot of comic relief side characters popping up, almost a new one every scene – though that’s not as frequent an occurrence as someone proudly declaring Morton, Illinois to be “the pumpkin capital of the world”. So there’s a lot going on in this film. Unfortunately, Baking Up Love‘s fundamental biggest problem is that of all the movies it’s trying to be, not a single one of them is any good anyway.

Hot Frosty (2024)

dir. Jerry Ciccoritti

It was never going to be a good movie. The premise is simply “sexy snowman comes to life”; it was never going to be a good movie. And yet, somehow, Hot Frosty still manages to fall short of expectations. The story is beyond insane, but rather than whisking the audience away on a fun festive ride, it has so many inconsistencies and convoluted scenarios that question after question goes unanswered. Did Kathy (Lacey Chabert) putting the scarf on Jack the snowman (Dustin Milligan) bring him to life? Does he need to wear it to stay alive? If so, how do they know that? If not, how come he wears it all the time? How did he simply walk into a school and get a job when he has no paperwork or history? Is no one creeped out by Kathy, a fully-grown adult, having a romance with this childlike entity who was essentially “born” a matter of days ago and doesn’t know how remotes work or what cancer is? And why did Craig Robinson and Jo Lo Truglio, two known funny people, decide to leave all their comedic skills at home before performing the worst “comic relief cop” duo ever seen on screen? Hot Frosty was never going to be a good movie, but with its inane premise, contrivances, one-dimensional characters, and downright creepiness, it barely qualifies as a movie at all.

Uglies (2024)

dir. McG

In a dystopian future, people are forced to undergo cosmetic surgery to transform them from “Uglies” to “Pretties”. The criteria for “Ugly” and “Pretty” is a bit odd, seeing as the Uglies are all portrayed by classically beautiful actors, while the Pretties are just given make-up and CGI to bestow them with eerie golden eyes and washed-out skin akin to the vampires from Twilight. People are sent for the prettifying procedure when they’re sixteen, and live in a grey, cruelly restrictive, prison-like institution until then. Except actually it’s very easy to escape said institution, ride around on magnetic hoverboards and pretty much do whatever. The Pretty city is able to scan everyone’s faces and track their movements but somehow never actually identify escapees or catch them. From start to finish, Uglies is so stuffed with contradictions and inconsistent worldbuilding that it’s hard to keep up with it. Then again, for all its attempts at complexity, the story is simple: bad guys try to control good guys, good guys fight back. Perhaps the book it’s adapted from has more going for it, but as a film, this story about inner beauty has absolutely nothing going on beneath the surface.

It Ends with Us (2024)

dir. Justin Baldoni

“The roots are the most important part of the plant.” “Really?” “Yeah.” “I didn’t know that about roots. That’s cool.” This bizarre, contrived dialogue, which is meant to be taken completely seriously, pretty much sums up the entire experience of watching It Ends with Us, the domestic abuse drama adapted from Colleen Hoover’s novel. Lily Blossom Bloom (Blake Lively) is a florist, and the movie’s attempt to mock this nominative determinism doesn’t make it any less ridiculous to witness. The story charts her relationship with the equally idiotically named Ryle Siegfried Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, also directing), a charming neurosurgeon with violent tendencies. Will Lily find solace in her rekindled relationship with old boyfriend Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar)? Who cares? Every single character, despite their cartoony names, is so utterly one dimensional there’s nothing to feel invested in. Like the novel, the film is supposed to confront the horrors of domestic abuse and explore how a woman can escape such a hell. But the script is so hackneyed and simplistic, it does a better job of commodifying abuse than exposing it. Ranging from goofy to downright insulting, It Ends with Us would’ve been better off ending before it started.

Tarot (2024)

dir. Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg

A college student discovers a deck of Tarot cards, and performs readings for her group of friends. Shortly afterwards, one by one, they start dying. Each death is quite explicitly related to the Tarot reading they received: someone who was shown The Hanged Man is hanged themselves, someone else shown The Magician is sawn in half. Thus, it is extremely difficult – perhaps impossible – to be remotely frightened by anything which happens in Tarot. Everything is exactly as the cards predicted, so there are no surprises or scares. There is no inventiveness or even any gore to the deaths. Things are no more interesting among the living, where each character is utterly one-note and forgettable; the only exception is the comic relief character destined to die by the hand of The Fool, who is harder to forget purely by virtue of being so unbearably irritating. Possibly the only interesting thing about Tarot is the ending: the plot is wrapped up in a wholely unsatisfying way, and the end credits begin – only to reveal it was a fake-out and the real ending is still yet to come… but that real ending is only about fifteen more seconds, doubling down on what we’ve already seen and somehow making it even more underwhelming. Besides the bizarre execution of its banal ending, Tarot is utterly predictable down to the finest detail. No fortune telling or Tarot readings required to see what’s coming here.

They/Them (2022)

dir. John Logan

So much of They/Them is so inherently ridiculous, it’s easy to believe the whole thing was intended as a self-aware parody. Sadly, it was not. A group of LGBTQ teens are at a conversion camp, where camp leader Owen (Kevin Bacon) switches from smiling friendliness to threatening menace in a blink of an eye, often oscillating back and forth several times within the same minute. Every one of the teens is a tired stereotype. Whilst it’s nice to see such a diversely cast film, it would be much more heartening if a single member of the teen cast could actually act. Everyone makes idiotic decisions, such as throwing away weapons or exploring unfamiliar locations alone in the dark. Somehow, their stupidity ramps up even more when people start getting murdered. There are lots of grandiose speeches about the importance of being yourself, but this is then interspersed with cloying group singalongs or goofy electrical executions. It’s all intended to be a clever skewering of bigotry and conversion camps, but the script itself regularly comes across as more homophobic and transphobic than the actual villains. They/Them does not know what it is or wants to be at any point; this could be a clever example of identity exploration in action, but it’s much more likely it’s just bad writing.

White Chicks (2004)

dir. Keenen Ivory Wayans

It’s understandable that comedies from the early 2000s may not hold up so well decades ago, but White Chicks didn’t even hold up when it first landed. Marlon and Shawn Wayans play two FBI agent brothers who are charged with hunting down a kidnapper. The kidnapper is said to be targetting two sisters; very quickly, it’s decided the Wayans donning pale prosthetics and putting on squeaky voices to impersonate the girls is definitely the best thing to do. When this is the premise, it’s not a surprise that White Chicks’ humour falls flat on its face: sex jokes, toilet humour, funny faces, stereotyped behaviour, every hallmark of a bad 2000s comedy. It’s all underpinned with extremely weak stories following the brothers’ respective romantic plots. The worst thing, though, is while the film’s outlandish nature excuses lack of realism to some extent, the Wayans’ white prosthetic faces aren’t just unconvincing, they’re downright scary. Their stiff pale faces look like embalmed corpses. Their eyes are sunken yet shallow. Their mouths are rigid. It is impossible to laugh at any zany misunderstandings when the titular characters are so disturbing to look at. White Chicks already fails miserably at its premise; the failure just doubles down with execution.

Soul Plane (2004)

dir. Jessy Terrero

Soul Plane is not intended to be taken all that seriously. Our main character Nashawn (Kevin Hart) wins $100 million in damages after an aviation accident, and decides to start his own airline. Antics ensue. Essentially, this is supposed to be a black homage to Airplane!, and there is the occasional genuinely hilarious moment (the Destiny’s Child safety video, the horrified reaction when a Middle Eastern man boards the plane). But any actual humour is quickly drowned out by rampant misogyny and racism, toilet humour and stupid dancing, sexual references which range from gross to downright disturbing. Nashawn’s attempt to rekindle a romance with his ex is supposed to provide some heart to all the proceedings, but is so flat that the movie would’ve actually benefitted from omitting it altogether. Soul Plane is pretty much exactly what you would expect, and as a result, it’s impossible for it to ascend much above the ground.

IF (2024)

dir. John Krasinski

Understanding that an ‘IF’ is an Imaginary Friend, it feels reasonable to assume that John Krasinski came up with the title and then tried to build a film around it. There certainly isn’t anything else which warrants this movie being made. Our twelve-year-old protagonist Bea is living with her grandmother while her father has surgery, and winds up being in touch with a huge fantasy world where imagination is king and IFs run free. It’s never really clear what she’s trying to do: there’s talk of bringing IFs, whose old children have forgotten about them, to new children (because IFs are immortal, or something), but this endeavour is swiftly unsuccessful. Then the focus is on bringing IFs to their original, now grown-up creators, which involves a lot of red glowing lights but then goes nowhere. Is it all about Bea coming to terms with her father’s operation? Well, her father (Krasinski) is so constantly upbeat and blithe, there never seems to be much tension there. A lot of the culmination is about Bea getting in touch with her own imaginary friend, but it doesn’t lead to any revelations or growth. The CGI for the IFs themselves is underwhelming at best, downright obnoxious at worst, because all the different styles manage to clash without ever truly looking unique or different. Half of them are absolutely absurd anyway – a bubble? An apple? A glass of water? A child really made an imaginary friend out of a glass of water? There are quips and stupid jokes galore, but there’s nothing funny enough to actually capture attention. In summary, IF meanders around never really aiming for anything. Honestly, by the time it ends, the audience feels far less inclined to childlike wonder than when they first went in.

Ghoster (2022)

dir. Ryan Bellgardt

Just looking at the poorly designed CGI eponymous character, it’s obvious that this is a brazen attempt to rip off 1995’s Casper. This movie’s protagonist, though, comes with a much more convoluted backstory, as well as a much more convoluted story in the movie itself. The story: a man and his daughter move into sprawling, inherited mansion, planning to renovate and then sell in order to pay off the man’s debts. The daughter meets a friendly wide-eyed little ghost, Ghoster (whose 2022 CGI is sadly comparable to the 1995 CGI it’s ripping off). It would be unfair to say the plot is unclear per se, as characters loudly announce it several times over: Ghoster has been trapped in the house by a dragon named Yuto and needs to use a light knife to destroy a magic diamond to defeat Yuto and escape. It’s pure and utter nonsense, but that doesn’t stop the movie repeating it regularly, in an apparent attempt to make it make sense. Ghoster’s imprisonment is unbelievably inconsistent, as he quite regularly leaves the mansion and doesn’t seem to suffer any restriction of movement. At the movie’s climax, the much-discussed light knife is simply there, right there in front of them, with no explanation as to why or how. There is no respite to be found elsewhere – the daughter’s father’s situation is profoundly unsympathetic, as the majority of his efforts seem to be focused on evading banks and debt collectors, so it’s unclear why the audience would root for him. Ghoster is an unabashed rip-off, but the original elements it brings are so dreadful, it explains why they’d try to steal the success of a much more successful franchise.

The School for Good and Evil (2022)

dir. Paul Feig

There was a lot of buzz for this movie before it was released. A well-regarded director and a cast including the likes of Cate Blanchett, Laurence Fishburne, Charlize Theron and Michelle Yeoh, bringing to life the first in a highly popular series of books. Unfortunately, The School for Good and Evil has ambitions far beyond its capabilities. There is promise in the story: best friends Agatha (Sofia Wylie) and Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) have always been stereotyped as a witch and a princess, respectively. But when transported to the School for Good and Evil, Agatha is told she is “Good”, while Sophie is crestfallen to be cast as “Evil”. The story’s obvious intention is to obliterate the idea that good and evil are a hard binary, but unfortunately much of what it does only serves to reinforce the clichés. Agatha has very little personality beyond trying to help Sophie, while Sophie’s descent into “Evil” is largely defined by eyeliner and short hair. None of the school’s origins or processes make much sense, and besides approximately two or three funny lines, the dialogue is bland and expositional. And of course, there is a pretty straightforward happy ending. Perhaps the source material deals with the premise’s complexities better, and maybe this is why the movie attracted such a high-profile cast and director. But The School for Good and Evil just winds up being another tired example of the very tropes it’s trying to demolish.

Madame Web (2024)

dir. S. J. Clarkson

Superhero movies are becoming tiresome by default, but Madame Web takes it to a whole new level. Cassie (Dakota Johnson) embraces her spider powers, and strives to save three teenage girls who will also one day embrace their spider powers from a malevolent man who’s already embraced his spider powers. Said spider powers seem to range from defying gravity to premonitions and astral projection, depending on what works at that moment for the plot (though “plot” is a strong word for what is simply a series of people making ludicrous decisions for no reason). Each of the teenage girls is a one-dimensional stereotype, while it’s frustratingly convenient that all three of these chosen heroines happen to live in the same small area. They dutifully follow Cassie around despite her unhinged, erratic behaviour; it’s never clear whether super powers are widely accepted to exist in Madame Web or not, but precisely no one behaves naturally when forced to contend with them. The dialogue is almost entirely stilted exposition, and many story threads are randomly picked up then abandoned. A woman goes into labour – does she have her baby safely? Whatever happened to Cassie’s cat? But the biggest question, which lingers long after the movie’s close, is why Madame Web ever got made at all.

The Adventures of Jurassic Pet: The Lost Secret (2023)

dir. Ryan Bellgardt, Chris Hoyt

Because just one Adventure of Jurassic Pet wasn’t enough! The Lost Secret has all the familiar terrible effects, terrible acting, terrible story, and terrible characterisation of its predecessor, and then somehow manages to be even more terrible. There’s a baffling explanation about dinosaurs entering our world via a magic door which only appears at the full moon – although once a month doesn’t seem to be enough for anyone but our intrepid heroes to know about it. There’s a flying go-kart. There’s two evil comic henchmen whose antics are annoying at best, racist at worst. There’s a talking tree, and a talking dinosaur. There’s a scheming mayor who struts around in sunglasses, pontificating loudly about his evil plan to sedate an entire town in order to rob one bank. It’s like the creators wanted to see how much ridiculousness they could fit into 84 minutes, and how long it would take for someone to point it out. If the Jurassic Pet movies keep following the same trajectory, the planned third instalment will be too crazy for us mere mortals to cope with.

The Adventures of Jurassic Pet: Chapter 1 (2019)

dir. Ryan Bellgardt

The title alone is a good hint as to the levels of insanity in this film, although it’s far more bizarre than anyone could expect. A lot of it follows typical ’90s family film clichés – a school trip to a museum! A plucky kid! A knowing mentor figure! A pseudo-magical creature running around in the city! An evil scientist! The only thing missing is the actual ’90s, with this film astoungingly being made almost two decades into the twenty-first century. Most of the story is an extended chase sequence, with our hero following a newly hatched baby dinosaur through a museum, a supermarket, and the woods (honestly, a lot of these chases could have been avoided if the boy just learned to zip his backpack up), trying to save him from a camp full of the evil scientist’s minions. There’s no real attempt to explain how or why the dinosaur came to be among us – the knowing mentor figure, who is possibly a ghost, is clearly involved, but it’s fundamentally anyone’s guess. The effects are cheap, the acting is atrocious, and the film generally has no reason whatsoever to exist. No wonder, then that it’s the first of a planned trilogy.

Shallow Hal (2001)

dir. Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly

It is difficult to even discuss Shallow Hal without feeling queasy. The premise is bad enough. Hal (Jack Black) is hypnotised to see only people’s inner beauty, meaning he sees the overweight Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow) as a conventionally attractive, slim woman. Cue a plethora of pathetic fat jokes (made especially obscene by the fact that Rosemary’s true physical form isn’t even particularly fat). They’re not original; a chair that she’s sitting on breaks, more than once. But Shallow Hal manages to go much further than this. It is deeply misogynistic at its core, but also indulges in occasional racism, ableism and transphobia. The film’s attempted ruminations on shallowness and inner beauty are totally undermined when the protagonist is one of the most selfish, cruel, horrible people ever written and still purported to be the good guy. Bonuses: Jason Alexander has a gross little stubby tail, for some reason, and Rosemary’s father speaks in one of the worst Irish accents ever committed to film, for some reason. The Farrelly brothers have a truly mutated concept of what is and isn’t funny, but with Shallow Hal they were clearly attempting something with a shred of depth to it. They failed.

Cade: The Tortured Crossing (2023)

dir. Neil Breen

After so many disasters – Double Down, I Am Here… Now, Fateful Findings, Twisted Pair – it would be reasonable to assume that writer-director Neil Breen is aware of his reputation. Like lots of bad movie makers before him, it’s expected for him to fall into a bit of nudge-nudge, wink-wink, self-deprecating self-awareness. But if that’s true, then his Breenius goes beyond anything we could imagine, because Cade: The Tortured Crossing seems to have been made with just the same lack of resources, the same baffling approach to storytelling, and the same downright madness as his other movies – and all with the same sincerity. A sequel to Twisted Pair, Cade: The Tortured Crossing is almost impossible to describe. There’s a psychiatric hospital, and an evil corporation, and a castle. Street children are played by adult actors. So many scenes are repeated over and over, from Breen gathering empty syringes to various people writhing about on the floor while someone tries to drag them up. There’s a woman who doesn’t do much, but can turn into a white tiger, so there’s that. In one bizarre motif, a man jabs at an electronic keyboard, culminating in a short group dance which is never explained and never mentioned again. All of this, of course, is accompanied Breen’s trademark stock photo backgrounds, Clip Art special effects, stilted acting, and awful writing. Most bad movie makers become parodies of themselves over time, but Neil Breen’s authentic strangeness is as strong as ever.

Argylle (2024)

dir. Matthew Vaughan

Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a shy, unassuming writer who’s enjoyed success with her espionage series about a spy named Argylle. Suddenly, she’s dragged into a real-life spy story when it transpires her books reflect real-life events. This premise could be intriguing if executed correctly, but Argylle clearly wasn’t able to execute it correctly. Ridiculous twist after ridiculous twist, a contrived love story which has no passion to it whatsoever, action scenes set to jaunty pop music in a tired attempt at irony, an array of profoundly unflattering haircuts, and some of the absolute worst CGI ever committed to screen – these elements all combine to make Argylle a weird, borderline alarming experience. The characters are all ludicrous caricatures, speaking in highly affected idioms and vernacular which don’t feel remotely realistic. The action scenes are boring at best, idiotic at worst. And every plot development is even more inane than the last, with characters switching motivations and loyalties as the plot demands. Of course, perhaps this is all meant to be a parody of the spy genre, perhaps we are meant to be laughing with Argylle and not at it. But by the billionth awkward shot of a CGI cat pulling a stupid face, it’s hard to keep laughing at all.

Samurai Cop (1991)

dir. Amir Shervan

Samurai Cop is a classic disaster movie. Not in the sense that the plot revolves around a disaster, more that its entire concept and execution are themselves a total disaster. Joe is a cop who has allegedly been trained as a samurai, although his skills seem to amount to bulging his eyes and raising his fists. As he and his partner Frank aim to take down “the Katana gang” (this idiotic name for a Japanese crime group is somehow not the most racist thing in the movie), they indulge in pathetic action sequences – mostly either limp-wristed slap fights or relentless gunfire which almost never hits its target – and tepid car chases. This is all interspersed with slow lingering shots of softcore porn, fuelled by the fact that every single woman in Samurai Cop is depicted as desperately horny at all times. Samurai Cop is not as forgettable as a typical bad action film though, instead marking its uniqueness through bizarre moments like characters bursting into spontaneous laughter during a tense confrontation, utterly confounding racist and misogynistic lines which come out of nowhere, a heinously terrible wig, and a guy running around on fire in an over-the-top spectacle that was clearly not safe from a production perspective. A thoroughly entertaining disaster from beginning to end.

Guardians of Time (2022)

dir. Stephen Shimek

How to even describe Guardians of Time? Four cousins enter a magical kingdom. They conveniently find four pieces of medallion scattered right nearby and fit it together. They soon meet a friendly alien. Then they’re attacked by an evil rhinoceros. But it’s okay, because a tiny dinosaur comes to save them. There are magical time-controlling crystals, a sage warrior who speaks entirely in convoluted exposition, a dragon woman, and a potential chronological disaster fuelled entirely by the bitterness of a ten-year-old. Throughout, not a single character is remotely fazed by their bizarre situation. Instead, some characters spontaneously have a makeover, while another ages herself up a few years for no apparent reason at all. That’s all not to mention the awkward characterisation (“Theo has a photographic memory!” is conveniently uttered during the climactic scene), the overwritten musical score which refuses to ever shut up, and the fact the characters almost never look like they’re actually there due to the shockingly poor CGI. The movie’s villain appears in a painting in the cousins’ family manor, which isn’t really explained – instead we just periodically see their grandfather looking knowingly at clocks. And, after a barrage of events which make no sense, the ending somehow makes even less sense. There’s the odd pleasant surprise, like an unexpected hero-turned-villain, in more ways than one. But overall, Guardians of Time feels like someone had a meandering fever dream which they immediately decided had to be made into a movie. It is ridiculous, it is terrible, it is baffling, it is inconceivable, and it’s so so so much fun.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016)

dir. Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

In a fantasy kingdom, two sisters – one a queen with magical ice powers – must work through their estrangement and resentment. In the end, true love saves the day. It’s almost funny how obviously The Huntsman: Winter’s War rips off Frozen. Both a prequel and a sequel to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman, Winter’s War actually manages to be more faithful to Frozen’s story beats than its own predecessor’s, but the Disney cartoon undeniably has deeper themes and better characterisation. The titular Huntsman, Eric (Chris Hemsworth), is shown as a youth falling in love with Sara (Jessica Chastain), then witnessing her apparent murder. We then flash-forward through the events of the first film to find Eric still pining for Sara, then bewildered and delighted to learn she still lives. Winter’s War merrily skips over the fact that Eric’s love for Snow White in the original film was portrayed to be true and pure enough to save her life; this romance is simply not mentioned, the movie instead confusingly suggesting that Eric longed for Sara all along. This rewrite would be forgivable if the movie weren’t also encumbered with terrible CGI, irritating comic relief dwarves, and the most contrived method of resurrecting a previous film’s villain that’s ever been committed to screen. The ice queen and her sister’s relationship is initially set up to be the emotional core of the film, but it’s in fact Eric and Sara’s true love which saves the day – a true love which is never portrayed as anything but insipid and formulaic. Where Frozen managed to get away from that tired old trope, Winter’s War drags us right back to it.

Deadly Honeymoon (2010)

dir. Paul Shapiro

Lindsey (Summer Glau) and Trevor (Chris Carmack) go on a cruise for their honeymoon. But, as the title pretty much screams out, things don’t exactly go to plan. After Chris goes missing, an FBI agent (who is conveniently also on the ship) attempts to piece together what happened. Deadly Honeymoon is pretty confusing, trying to be gritty and bleak but just winding up utterly meandering. Through flashbacks and CCTV discovery, the movie wants to paint a complex picture of a toxic relationship, but it’s fundamentally quite simple: Trevor is a selfish dolt, and Lindsey isn’t a whole lot better. Meanwhile the FBI agent may be one of the absolute worst ever portrayed on film, only even starting to consider the possibility of Lindsey’s involvement in the disappearance ages and ages into the investigation. When it’s finally revealed exactly what happened to Trevor, it’s underwhelming to the point of incredulity. Not a single person seems to know how to act, either, although the script’s limpness could be to blame. Characters’ motivations aren’t remotely consistent, and everyone has to rely heavily on law enforcement constantly being very, very stupid. It doesn’t seem one iota of thought or effort went into Deadly Honeymoon, a film as lost and doomed as a man overboard.

Red, White & Royal Blue (2023)

dir. Matthew López

Red, White & Royal Blue is based on the successful 2019 YA novel of the same name. The film makes liberal use of familiar YA romance tropes, from “opposites attract” to a fascination with royalty, and with all the typical one-note supporting characters. As with every single other tale in this vein, the attraction between our leads is painfully forced: carefree Alex, son of the POTUS, has next-to-nothing in common with uptight Prince Henry, with their rapport largely developed through montages of them giggling at each other’s texts. Many of the laughs are cheap (“Oh no, they have cake all over them!”), and the dialogue is pretty stilted at times. This all being said, it’s refreshing (and still sadly rare) to see this standard formula applied to an LGBT story. Plus, some of the performances are genuinely engaging – with a notable exception in Uma Thurman and her bafflingly bad Texan accent as the POTUS. All in all, Red, White & Royal Blue isn’t so bad, though that doesn’t mean it’s so good, either. Through all the standard fare, at least it’s trying to do something a little different.

Deck the Heart (2021)

dir. Candice T. Cain

This film is written and directed by Candy Cain. Can much more be said than that? Because Deck the Heart is about as cloying and tiresome as its writer-director’s moniker – or, well, the idiotic name of the film itself. The baffling story follows Chris, a man who stands to inherit his grandfather’s idyllic Maine home, but only if he hosts a Christmas party there. A typical legal situation for anyone. Being a helpless man baby who can’t throw some tinsel around and order in a few trays of potatoes by himself, Chris hires professional event planner Merry (yes, their names are Merry and Chris) for a frankly extortionate fee. Naturally, they grow closer over the several weeks it inexplicably takes Merry to hang some lights up outside Chris’ house. Moments of tension include Merry locking herself out on a balcony, Chris being yelled at by his big mean Scrooge-like boss, and Merry’s otherwise affable parents not being enthusiastic enough about Christmas for Merry’s liking. The film is terrible in its lack of substance, but what also really grates is its lack of style, and that’s not just limited to Merry’s hideous choice of decorations. The filmmaking is worse than amateur, with many strangely composed shots of two stiff-armed people talking at each other, fade-ins and fade-outs to archival footage of duck ponds, and sudden jump cuts to crowds of people manifesting in a room in the blink of an eye. Every single plot point which happens in Deck the Heart is expected, and yet with its mind-boggling filmmaking, it manages to surprise in every scene.

After Everything (2023)

dir. Castille Landon

They’re still going. The only vague consolation to be had from this, the fifth entry in the hideous After saga (after After, After We Collided, After We Fell, and After Ever Happy) is that this is supposedly, finally, the last one. But that still doesn’t justify its wretched existence. After their millionth falling-out, Tessa and Hardin are no longer speaking. Much of the film follows Hardin brooding around Lisbon, hopping from party to boat to bar, wondering how to win back Tessa’s heart and suffering from a sophomore slump after his successful debut novel. To the audience, both pursuits seem a total joke, and hardly warranting a feature-length exploration. Tessa and Hardin’s relationship was unhealthy to the point of sheer lunacy, and Hardin’s continued whiny entitlement to her affections does nothing to change this. Meanwhile, his writing career is exemplified in snippets of nonsensical prose such as “It was an old sedan, years beyond its prime. The driver was quite the opposite.” Of course, After Everything continues the series’ penchant for passionless sex scenes, and character arcs so stunted they essentially move backwards: Tessa decides to forgive Hardin after a whole lot of absolutely nothing changing, while Hardin’s development is seemingly reflected through the fact that he becomes willing to drink smoothies. The After series is one film after another of the same mundanity, the same toxicity, and at their core the same creative and emotional black hole of nothingness. Thank God this one is, as per its poster, “The Final Chapter”.

The Flash (2023)

dir. Andy Muschietti

The Flash is genuinely remarkable, perhaps even impressive, in how it manages to get every single thing wrong. The plot is bad: time travel and musings on changing fate are used to fuel a storyline in which very little of consequence happens, and where the fundamental message is contradictory and confusing. The characters are bad: as if the whiny squealing of one Barry Allen / The Flash wasn’t enough, the movie forces the audience to spend the majority of the film having to deal with two of them. The pacing is bad: it’s baffling that this is two and a half hours while nothing of consequence happens, suggesting the film could’ve used a few tips from its fast-moving protagonist. The visuals are bad: most of the CGI, from time travel portals to babies falling from the sky, are so poorly done that the entire thing feels like a very cheap VR video game. The action is bad: every single fight is about as perfunctory as it’s possible to get, with little to no real stakes at any point. The music is bad: the themes written for respective superheroes all sound pretty much identical, as though the same four bars are essentially on repeat throughout the movie. The Flash is bad: it’s very, very bad.

The Portable Door (2023)

dir. Jeffrey Walker

It has to be hoped, even assumed, that the book on which The Portable Door is based has much more depth, character, and general sense to it than this film adaptation. Our protagonist Paul is shown as a perpetually late, hapless, bumbling sort who can’t work a toaster properly and goes on weedy rambling monologues about how terribly awkward he is. He achieves an intern position at a mysterious firm alongside a young woman named Sophie, and soon, magical antics ensue. The Portable Door vaguely touches on interesting fantasy concepts – the engineering of coincidences, control over someone’s soul, a door which can take you anywhere – and then completely undermines them via a complete lack of exploration or explanation. Why does the firm facilitate meet-cutes for people? Why do they decide to make Sophie like liquorice when she previously hated it? Why did they hire Paul based entirely on the fact that he saw some wall cracks which resembled a map of London? Why do the buildings’ secret goblins change allegiance on a whim? What is this strange fascination they all have with office stationery? Beyond this, goofy acting and bizarre cinematography, including the most blue-washed London ever seen by humankind, mean the film isn’t even competent on a technical level. Of course, in the end, Paul is a sort of “chosen one” who possesses power beyond comprehension and saves the day – unfortunately The Portable Door could not transport us to a realm beyond mundane cliché.

The House with a Clock in its Walls (2018)

dir. Eli Roth

John Bellairs’ 1973 mystery novel The House with a Clock in its Walls was lauded by critics and readers alike as a clever, compelling, creepy children’s mystery. Unfortunately this film adaptation does not manage to be clever or compelling, while its occasional creepy moments are so incongruous as to be more baffling than scary. The story follows 10-year-old orphaned Lewis as he moves in with his uncle Jonathan, who lives in a bizarre mansion full of clocks, sentient chairs and pianos, and other curious phenomena. The “enchantingly whimsy” atmosphere is frequently broken by unsettling imagery, like Jonathan smashing an axe into a wall à la The Shining, or an assortment of downright hideous dolls and puppets watching his every move. At moments like these, it fleetingly makes sense that horror veteran Eli Roth directed this – but then the movie returns to lukewarm elementary school hijinks, characters stumbling over their own quirky catchphrases, and a plot so bizarre and convoluted that even young children would question its sanity. It doesn’t help that Lewis himself is obnoxious, spitting out thesaurus synonyms in lieu of having a real personality, while some of the filming it’s so erratic it’s difficult to tell what’s even going on. The House with a Clock in its Walls can’t decide whether it wants to be enchanting or unnerving; by trying to balance both it simply winds up being underwhelming.

Mafia Mamma (2023)

dir. Catherine Hardwicke

As her son departs for college and she discovers her husband’s been having an affair, Kristen (Toni Collette) decides something needs to change. She learns her estranged grandfather has died and travels to Italy for the funeral, only to discover his wish that Kristen take over his mafia empire. Hijinks, predictably, ensue. Though Mafia Mamma earns half a point for the occasional, brief foray into actual violence and gore, the movie largely plays it frustratingly safe. Toni Collette is all wide eyes and girly shrieks as she stumbles around accidentally outwitting her opponents. The script seems to think humour is best achieved by drilling repetitive phrases into the audience’s heads until they’re begging for mercy – by the hundredth reference to Eat, Pray, Love it starts to feel like Mafia Mamma was simply an advert for it all along. Vague attempts to circumvent cliché around Kristen’s romantic life are completely undermined when the film relies on tired tropes like a sassy black best friend and chauvinistic corporate bigwigs. Mafia Mamma is simultaneously utterly ridiculous and typically mundane, and it’s hard to understand why an acting heavyweight like Toni Collette would ever have gone anywhere near it.

Blackbird (2018)

dir. Michael Flatley

It is near-impossible to sum up the plot of Blackbird, primarily because it doesn’t really have one. Our protagonist Victor Blackley (Michael Flatley) runs a luxury resort in the Caribbean. The prologue and ensuing erratic split-second flashbacks indicate he’s tortured by the memory of failing to save his wife from being murdered by… terrorists? Arms dealers? Some sort of mad jungle cult? It’s never really clear. Blackley now spends his days staring listlessly into middle-distance while scantily-clad women half his age hurl themselves against him. This is but one of many blatant signs that this movie – directed by, written by, produced by, and starring Flatley – is little beyond a shameless vanity project. Unfortunately this means Flatley carried out his vision unfettered, complete with hackneyed dialogue (the Riverdance alumnus saw fit to kick off a climactic shooting spree by having Blackley mutter, “Shall we dance?”) and pathetic attempts to emulate Bond through non-sequitur torture scenes and “high-stakes” poker games. Every single attempt at intrigue or intensity falls devastatingly flat, and in the end, Blackbird is but a thinly-drawn fantasy of what a spy thriller should look like. It proves with no room for doubt that Flatley should have stuck to actual dance.

Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle (2022)

dir. James Nguyen

After the lightning-in-a-bottle insanity of Birdemic was followed by the still entertaining but notably more self-aware Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, it was easy to believe that Birdemic 3 may be a little too on-the-nose for enjoyment. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, James Nguyen’s capacity for self-awareness is strictly limited. There’s the odd flat moment in this closing instalment of the trilogy, like when someone yet again grabs a coat hanger to attack a poorly-rendered GIF of a bird. But despite that, Sea Eagle manages to be brimming with noteworthy scenes. Inexplicably, there’s even less of a plot than in the first two movies. There are lengthy sequences of our main character silently driving, silently walking slowly around a beach, silently staring at a monotonous climate change protest, even silently watching the news. One scene consists of him and his love interest dancing merrily to a bizarrely upbeat song which contains lyrics like “Conditions dire, world’s on fire” and “People are dying”. As ever, Nguyen’s attempt to warn the world about global warming is barely comprehensible through the mess of hideous visuals, jarring sound mixing, atrocious acting, and barely believable writing. One victim of the eponymous murderous birds whispers, “Forgive the birds…” upon his demise. Perhaps, one day, we will forgive the birds – but it will be harder to forgive James Nguyen.

Beast (2022)

dir. Baltasar Kormákur

In Beast, Nate (Idris Elba) and his daughters are besieged by a lion. Not just any lion, either – a lion which seems to have no sense of smell (as it seems unable to detect a human who is simply the other side of a tree), no peripheral vision (ditto the above), the ability to change size (one moment it’s trying to get through a car window, the next it’s the size of the entire car), and is also fireproof (there is very little else to say except that this lion can survive being engulfed by an inferno, with nothing to show for it except a few blackened patches of fur). Meanwhile, although this particular lion seems to be an unstoppable killing machine, it’s balanced out by the other, heroic, playful, human-loving lions who save the day. Ostensibly, according to Beast, lions are either pure good or pure evil. Even more unbelievable than the lions, though, are the humans. Each person manages to make worse and worse decisions thoughout the film. Oh, we don’t know where we are? Let’s just drive randomly, further away from where we knew people would be! Oh, there are dangerous creatures in the water? Let’s go in the water! Oh, the car’s the only safe place right now? Let’s leave the car! Beast is not a particularly compelling action or horror, but it is a fascinating portrayal of humankind at its most stupid.

Dungeons and Dragons (2000)

dir. Courtney Solomon

Even though Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t have the adventurous spirit of the role-playing game it’s named after, there’s one curious way they can be compared. In the role-playing game, players are encouraged to be as creative as possible, which makes for a varied and exciting gaming experience. This movie strangely has the feeling of several different people going away and coming up with their own campaigns, before they’re mashed together in an attempt to make a single cohesive storyline. Unfortunately, the attempt fails. The empress of a fantasy land wants to grant equal rights to all people, commoner or mage, but is opposed by the evil Profion (Jeremy Irons, having all the fun in the world as a deranged, trembling, screaming megalomaniac). Two common thieves are embroiled in the epic struggle and find themselves embarking on a quest to retrieve a magical sceptre which can control red dragons. They’re accompanied by a librarian-mage, a dwarf and an elf, all of whom pop in and out of the storyline arbitrarily. Everything seems so randomly put together that it’s easy to blink and miss the current thread of the plot. The one common thread among our rag-tag band of heroes, though, is that every single character is more irritating and over-acted than the last, from the smirking hero to the wide-eyed love interest. The script is an absolute joke, with evil henchmen muttering the most bafflingly idiotic lines: “Just like you thieves – always taking things that don’t belong to you.” Even worse is the hideous CGI, with the dungeons and the dragons alike looking like the stilted renderings of a mid-90s CD-ROM game – though that’s arguably better than the cheap plastic props used for important ancient relics. Dungeons and Dragons is certainly an entertaining experience, but it has none of the grand scale or compelling narrative it’s supposed to.

Run (2020)

dir. Aneesh Chaganty

It’s about Munchausen’s. That’s not even a spoiler – or it shouldn’t be, because Diane’s (Sarah Paulson) systematic abuse of her chronically ill daughter Chloe (Kiera Allen) is obvious about four minutes into the movie. Yet Run draws this out for an incredibly long time. It starts getting baffling pretty quickly, from implausible phone conversations to spontaneous shootings, but nothing of substance truly happens. Run has a habit of setting up a potential point of intrigue and then defusing it almost immediately (for example, Chloe is locked in her room and then breaks out straightaway), so nothing is allowed to simmer or build. Kiera Allen puts in a genuinely good performance, but she’s not enough to salvage the idiotic plot, which culminates in a twist so boring and irrelevant that it might as well not be in the film at all. Run is worth staying far away from.

The Village (2004)

dir. M. Night Shyamalan

In a remote village, seemingly circa 19th century, inhabitants are terrorised by violent creatures dwelling in the surrounding woods. When it’s necessary to get medicine for an injured resident, Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) ventures out to find it. The fact she’s blind is handled extremely poorly – she seems to see everything she needs to, with no use of her walking stick at all most of the time. But as she veers closer to the truth about the woods’ creatures, the plot veers entirely off the rails. A Shyamalan film from the 2000s was all but guaranteed to contain some kind of twist ending, and this habit is arguably at its worst in The Village, where shock value was quite obviously prized over plotting or credibility. Yet even before this, the stereotyped characters, stilted dialogue and formulaic camera movements suck any intrigue out of The Village. It is hard to have an effective twist when the world is so mundane in the first place.

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

dir. Stephen Chbosky

Dear Evan Hansen might well be the best ever example of a film trying so hard to be seen saying something that it says nothing at all. Its musings on teen drama, suicide, mental health, love, family, and maturity are completely undermined by its tick-box approach to each of these concepts. Our high school protagonist Evan (played distractingly by an actor quite obviously in his mid-to-late twenties) cuts an infuriating figure, whose deceit and manipulation are supposed to be excused by his depression and social awkwardness. He lies about a dead person, objectifies his love interest, abandons his friends, and is hideously rude to his mother; his singing bland songs with wide-eyed angst does not mitigate his toxic behaviour, no matter what the movie might think. Of course, Evan’s not the only one with bland songs – with a glaring sole exception (which actually dares to use humour), every single song is a cut-and-paste of typical modern ballad fare. None of this even touches on the film’s strange approach to LGBTQ+ issues; where the connotations of a gay relationship could very obviously have been established and explored, the movie instead shies away and sticks to firmly heterosexual ground. The stage musical it’s based on can’t be much better, but at least that starred a lead actor of an appropriate age. Largely pathetic, and often disturbing, Dear Evan Hansen is about as performative as a film can get.

The Magic Pudding (2000)

dir. Karl Zwicky

Horrendous. It is just horrendous. The Magic Pudding is based on a beloved Australian children’s classic book, and one can only hope the source material isn’t as horrendous as the adaptation. The story is horrendous: a koala bear goes in search of his lost parents, only to encounter a magical pudding which can morph and regenerate, thereby potentially solving world hunger, although of course the koala and his new pirate and penguin friends don’t consider this for a second. The animation is horrendous: the pudding has a perpetual red-eyed frowny expression conveying either fury or chronic alcoholism, but he does match the generally shoddy look of everything else in the movie. The characterisation is horrendous: everyone changes motivation constantly, and no one does anything for a discernible reason. The songs are horrendous: tuneless shrieking and nonsensical lyrics, with respite only being offered when songs finish as abruptly as they begin (“It’s Worse than Weevils” is a particularly grating song which only clocks in at a total of 38 seconds, although 38 seconds of silence would have been far preferable). The resolution is horrendous: the koala and his parents don’t even recognise each other, until they spontaneously do – it truly makes no sense. There is no other word for it. The Magic Pudding is horrendous, horrendous, horrendous.

Dream Horse (2020)

dir. Euros Lyn

Dream Horse is an absolutely confounding film. Based on a true story, it tells the tale of Dream Alliance, a racehorse bred in a village who beat the odds to become a champion. The film swiftly loses appeal for anyone who is not very, very interested in horseracing, because the attempts to convey universal concepts – determination, belief, care, pride – are all utterly hollow. It is astounding that Toni Collette chose to take on this role, as her character Jan genuinely displays significantly less character than the voiceless horse she raises. The portrayal of a kooky band of Welsh villagers is irritating at best, and alarming at worst. One of the villagers has a crippling alcohol problem which is played for laughs when it really shouldn’t be; meanwhile an accountant’s chronic gambling dependency is downplayed, because apparently believing in Dream Alliance is all that matters. It is highly likely the true story contains more interesting moments and fewer abhorrent characters, but as it stands, Dream Horse veers close to being the stuff of nightmares.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Story (2007)

dir. Uwe Boll

While being somewhat based on the Dungeon Siege video games, a more egregious attempt to rip off The Lord of the Rings than In the Name of the King is hard to come by. A king returning to claim his throne, hulking orc rip-offs, and ethereal wood-dwellers are but some of the obvious Tolkien tropes. Yet In the Name of the King doesn’t even manage to be interesting, despite trying to mimic one of the greatest cinematic triumphs ever made. The story follows a typically wooden Jason Statham, whose facial expression does not alter whether he’s living his happy farming life, grieving his murdered son, or fighting a grim battle. The world, known as Ehb, is so thinly drawn it’s hard to care whether it’s saved or not. The tone shifts are erratic, with no semblance of balance – one moment John Rhys-Davies is grimly pontificating, the next Matthew Lillard is goofily prancing around. Battle after battle (all of which, again, very obviously mirror particular battle sequences from The Lord of the Rings), there are no stakes, no decent action, and thus no investment from the audience whatsoever. At over two hours long, not a single minute of In the Name of the King is worth remembering.

Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer (2000)

dir. Phil Roman

Watching this Christmas television movie is genuinely one of the most bizarre viewing experiences possible. Based on the irritating novelty song of the same name, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer manages to fit an unprecedented amount of insanity in less than an hour. When young Jake sees his grandma hit by Santa’s sleigh he goes on a quest to prove it; this quest involves confusing timelines (Jake ostensibly waits several months before deciding to find his grandma), the shoddiest animation of all time (during a dance motion, one character’s legs actually switch places), confounding character choices (from an ostensibly Jewish Santa Claus to an evil attorney named I. M. Slime), awkward pacing (the movie often freezes in place for several seconds after an attempted punchline), and arguably the worst Christmas special songs ever written (usually introduced by an utterly contrived segue, if there is a segue at all). From cop banter to courtroom bickering, this film contains a lot. Incredibly not a single iota of it makes any sense.

Arthur and the Minimoys / Arthur and the Invisibles (2006)

dir. Luc Besson

Luc Besson wrote a series of fantasy novels for children, featuring young boy protagonist Arthur and his adventures with the miniature creatures named Minimoys. If the first film adaptation – naturally helmed by Besson himself – is anything to go by, these books simply cannot be any good. Blending live action and animation, the film veers from the perplexing to the downright disturbing. The plot is a mess; if the story solely focused on Arthur trying to save his grandmother’s farm, it might have worked. But unfortunately it’s closely accompanied by: tiny creatures living in the garden who are terrorised by a villain who’s been corrupted by a weevil (this is never really explained); members of a vague African tribe who randomly materialise in Arthur’s garden through no discernible method to dispense advice; an extremely forced and possibly age-inappropriate romance; and some of the most downright terrifying animation that has ever been created. Astoundingly, Besson continued making further films and a TV series, perhaps proving that abundant passion is not enough to justify any project.

Die Wolf-Gäng / The Magic Kids: Three Unlikely Heroes (2020)

dir. Tim Trageser

A young boy joins a school for magical people and makes swift friends with an awkward ginger boy and an over-achieving smart girl. Their obstacles include a troll, a forbidden library, a chamber of magical puzzles, and bullying from their snide blonde classmate and his two hulking cronies. The extent to which The Magic Kids tries to mimic the Harry Potter series is so egregious it’s almost not even funny (almost). Of course, it contains none of the charm of that series, and instead its bland, forgettable characters meander from plot hole to plot hole like they’re painting by numbers. Throwing in vampires and werewolves and fairies does nothing to bulk up this Hogwarts Lite.

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

dir. Ralph Bakshi

The 1970s weren’t exactly a prolific time for animation, meaning audiences were looking for the next big thing in the medium. The Lord of the Rings was not it. Based on the Tolkien trilogy – though only going as far as part-way through the second book, with its planned sequel never coming to light – it’s hard to find a single aspect which works consistently. Some of the backdrops are animated beautifully, while others look like archival footage shoved in at the last minute. The rotoscoping style used for the characters renders their movements awkward, lumbering, and erratic, made even more jarring by the constantly changing style of animation over the top, practically jolting between flat 2D and flat-out live action. The voice acting is dismal, with moaning, creaking Nazgûl and stilted reads from every single person. It’s hard to focus on any of this, though, seeing as endless distractions come in the form of the background characters, who either jerk around bizarrely or stay completely, eerily stock still. Though a reasonably limited budget excuses some of the issues, many of the problems could have been entirely avoided with a bit more creativity and care. It’s said The Lord of the Rings was a labour of love; in the end product, the laziness and irregularities belie that there was any labour or love at all.

Pottersville (2017)

dir. Seth Henrikson

Watching Pottersville is, quite frankly, a dizzying experience. The plot is utterly off the rails, beginning with the owner of a general store in idyllic Pottersville discovering his wife is a furry, part of a “furry sex club” along with the town sheriff and many other locals. As this wasn’t already bizarre enough, said store owner then drunkenly decides to run around town in a gorilla suit by way of response. Then, after he’s mistaken for Bigfoot, he (soberly) decides to just keep on doing it. For no discernible reason at all. The film tries to suggest it’s some warm-hearted attempt to “help the town” – how this is supposed to work is not remotely clear. Meanwhile a celebrity monster-hunter comes to town to hunt down Bigfoot, and mostly struts around shouting lazy one-liners over and over again in the worst Australian accent ever known to man. In fact, almost every single attempted joke in Pottersville is inexplicably repeated several times over, as though the makers believed insipid observations somehow get funnier if they’re said five or six times. All of this is made even more insane, even more alarming, by the calibre of the cast involved. Michael Shannon, Ian McShane, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman and Judy Greer must have all accrued some devastating gambling debts in 2017, because there is no other conceivable reason they’d willingly be involved in such a deranged mess as Pottersville.

Amsterdam (2022)

dir. David O. Russell

Amsterdam is an absolutely inexplicable film, in that it’s very difficult to understand what on earth is going on at any given moment. The twisting, turning plot somehow manages to be convoluted and completely boring at the same time. The characters are so thinly drawn that it’s impossible to care what’s happening, whether Taylor Swift’s getting shoved in front of a car or Christian Bale’s spending the entire movie at a bizarre sideways neck bend as though it’s a personality trait. It is absolutely stunning that so many otherwise talented actors are in this film, because no one turns in a decent performance. Everyone’s acting has the melodramatic quality of a telenovela, except Amsterdam is supposed to be taken as a wry, witty take on a serious matter, the Business Plot conspiracy theory. If you knew nothing about the Business Plot before, you are guaranteed to leave Amsterdam somehow knowing even less.

Soul Man (1986)

dir. Steve Miner

Soul Man follows Mark, a graduate applying to Harvard Law School who takes skin-tanning pills in order to black up and falsely claim a scholarship for African American students. The film is exactly as horrendous, as unbelievable, as obscene as that sounds. None of the comedy lands, not even for a moment, not even as people stand and stare blankly at each other after every ill-conceived one-liner quite obviously waiting for the audience to laugh. None of the emotional parts land, with the insufferably entitled Mark apparently only beginning to consider the plights of ethnic minorities when he goes through a teeny tiny fraction of them personally. It is hideous to look at, with Mark’s blackface provoking utter shock and contempt from any vaguely sane audience member. The fact that comedy and acting legends show up in this – James Earl Jones! Leslie Nielsen! Julia Louis Dreyfus! Melora Hardin! – just adds to the burgeoning sense of disbelief. Soul Man is a frankly disgusting movie, to the extent it feels offensive to the very institution of cinema to refer to it as a movie at all.

We Are Your Friends (2015)

dir. Max Joseph

There are many films which revolve around a close-knit group of friends – it’s a fairly typical set-up. We Are Your Friends sets itself apart by containing quite possibly the most obnoxious, brash, self-entitled group of friends ever depicted in a movie before. At the centre is Cole (Zac Efron), intent on becoming a successful DJ, even though his musical skills are questionable at best. The film is scene after scene of everyone getting drunk and high and jumping around to generic beats, with essentially no development for the majority of the story until there’s a sudden attempt at a dramatic twist. It, predictably, falls flat, and then the rest of the movie essentially continues on as before. Although We Are Your Friends clearly wants to be a searing portrait of youth culture, drugs and partying, it’s simply a grating, repetitive, headache-inducing pulsating from beginning to end. Trainspotting, it ain’t.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 (2015)

dir. Andy Fickman

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is pretty much identical to Paul Blart: Mall Cop, except this time he’s in a Vegas hotel instead of mall. There’s also a brief, bizarre moment of respite featuring a pianist smiling in a garden, playing serene music while Kevin James is attacked by a bird, but besides this arbitrary inclusion, the sequel is pretty much indistinguishable from the first one. No further time or thought needs to be spent on Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 – which is why it’s thoroughly depressing and terrifying that there are rumours of a Paul Blart: Mall Cop 3 in the works. What a terrible time we live in.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009)

dir. Steve Carr

Paul Blart: Mall Cop is 90 minutes of Kevin James rolling around on a Segway, saving a mall from bad guys in between making fat jokes and being generally useless. It is extremely bad. Nothing is funny, and no one is likeable. There is nothing else to be said about Paul Blart: Mall Cop, because fundamentally, Paul Blart: Mall Cop is exactly what one would think a movie called Paul Blart: Mall Cop would be, and no more. No further time or thought needs to be spent on Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

Disenchanted (2022)

dir. Adam Shankman

Considering that Disney’s 2007 fairy-tale send-up Enchanted is a genuinely clever, charming film, it’s even more disappointing that its sequel is so rushed, lazy and uninspired. Set ten years after the original, fairy-tale protagonist Giselle (Amy Adams) lives happily with her family in New York, but soon after moving to suburbia, she finds she longs for the dreamlike spark of her old home. After making a wish – through a type of magic which very suddenly, very conveniently exists – she renders her world a fairy-tale, and quickly realises it was a mistake as she’s forced to embrace the wicked stepmother trope. Though the idea is genuinely a good one, its execution is so boring and unoriginal that it’s difficult to believe this film has anything to do with Enchanted. The performances are earnest, but the plot points are by rote. The songs are completely forgettable: Idina Menzel shrieks the words “love power” like they’re supposed to be meaningful, and the film’s signature song repeatedly belts out the words “even more enchanted” as though that’ll somehow mean the original film’s essence is recaptured. The stark difference in impact between Enchanted and Disenchanted can be pretty accurately summed up by the titles themselves.

Iron Sky (2012)

dir. Timo Vuorensola

Iron Sky is about as depressingly on-the-nose as a self-aware pastiche can get. With a premise that essentially boils down to “Nazis on the moon”, it’s obvious how much it’s trying to fit into the “so bad it’s good” genre. But with its coarse attempts at edginess (the Nazis white up a black man!), social commentary (“All presidents who start a war in their first term get re-elected!” barks the Sarah Palin lookalike), and downright zaniness (after all, the core theme is “Nazis on the moon”, and there is essentially no plot or hook beyond this), Iron Sky largely comes across as boring and uninspired. Nothing is remotely as funny as it thinks it is, and it makes the entire film feel about ten times longer than it truly is. Iron Sky‘s desperate attempts to be so bad it’s good result in it simply being so bad, full stop.

The Cell (2000)

dir. Tarsem Singh

It is genuinely embarrassing to see how much The Cell is trying versus how little it actually achieves. The story follows child psychologist Catherine (Jennifer Lopez, about as ineffectual as you can imagine) who uses special technology to delve into her patients’ minds through a realm akin to virtual reality. Her skills are required when notorious serial killer Carl (Vincent D’Onofrio) is caught but is in a coma, meaning the only way to find the location of his current, live victim is by examining his psyche. While the premise of exploring a serial killer’s mind is intriguing, The Cell just indulges in the most basic, obvious imagery and tropes: torture, child abuse, dismembered dolls, the whole thing almost feels perfunctory, to the extent there’s no real impact. This is also done through a distinct but oozingly pretentious aesthetic, with bizarre colours and sets and costumes which look stylish, but add absolutely no substance. The real kick in the teeth is the plot is fundamentally pointless – saving Carl’s victim winds up having nothing to do with the secrets in his subconscious, while his final confrontation with Catherine leads to far, far more questions than answers. Though it’s obvious The Cell is trying to be deep and gritty, it’s fundamentally just empty.

Wicker Park (2004)

dir. Paul McGuigan

This should be a fairly simple, straightforward romance about a man becoming reacquainted with his lost love, but Wicker Park turns its central premise into a dizzying rollercoaster ride of insane plot twists, confusing character motivations and terrible direction. A non-linear timeline structure reveals Matt (Josh Harnett) and Lisa (Diane Kruger) broke up some years prior, for reasons so stupid and nonsensical that even the movie seems unable to acknowledge them for long. There’s also the reveal that a jealous neighbour, Alex (Rose Byrne), harbours an obsession with Matt, which manifests in ways both nefarious and benevolent. Alex is an especially egregious example of a character whose desires, beliefs, and fundamental personality seem to alter from minute to minute, meaning none of her choices make a shred of sense. The whole movie is buoyed along by choppy camera work, strange zoom-ins and freezes, and obnoxiously lurid colour saturation. It’s obvious Wicker Park thinks it’s telling a much grander, more sweeping story than it really is.

Look Both Ways (2022)

dir. Wanuri Kahiu

Look Both Ways is but the latest take on the Sliding Doors concept of a person’s life branching off in different potential directions. The movie follows college graduate Natalie across two potential realities: one where she has a baby, and one where she doesn’t. Her life with her baby-daddy is more domestic, while the timeline where she doesn’t have a baby is more glamorous but unstable. Of course the movie states that she winds up happy either way, and actually even takes a rare step of letting Natalie find different love interests rather than indicating one particular person is her soulmate. But this vague good work is momentously undone when the very premise of the film is so infuriating. Because it’s not that Natalie chooses whether or not to have a baby, it’s that she simply is pregnant in one timeline and isn’t in the other. So it’s not about free will or the choices you make – it’s more that life happens to you and you have to go along with it, which is an utterly absurd message to send to any young woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. Along with the banal characters, idiotic dialogue, and frankly unbelievable conceit that Natalie’s incredibly shoddy art could lend her professional success in any imaginable universe, Look Both Ways is far better not looked at at all.

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Final Alchemy (2022)

dir. Fumihiko Sori

The Final Alchemy, in a way, achieves something absolutely spectacular. Because Fullmetal Alchemist already had very bad CGI. The Revenge of Scar continued that tradition and boasted similarly terrible CGI. But despite the bar already being so low it’s being melted by the Earth’s core, The Final Alchemy impressively manages to contain even worse CGI than its predecessors. It’s sort of stunning, just how unrealistic the Homunculi and monsters look. The visuals do serve to distract from the simultaneously confusing and insipid storytelling, though, which somehow manages to take the epic complexity of the manga and anime and turn it into dull, paint-by-numbers box-ticking: “This happens, then this happens, then this happens.” By the story’s climax there is absolutely no reason to care about a single character, and therefore there’s no reason to care about anything which happens to them. The only good thing about The Final Alchemy is the relief that it is, in fact, the final one.

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Revenge of Scar (2022)

dir. Fumihiko Sori

Unbelievably, despite the 2017 live-action Fullmetal Alchemist adaptation being horrendously subpar, somehow it was decided that the saga would continue. The Revenge of Scar continues its predecessor’s penchant for bad wigs, underwhelming action and shoddy CGI. In this instalment we’re following the supposedly epic journey of our villain-turned-ally Scar, whose ceaseless rage our protagonists Ed and Al come to understand is somewhat justifiable. This is a hard existential journey to follow when the creators thought it would be a good idea to daub orange-looking fake tan on Scar’s face in an embarrassing attempt to make the actor look like he’s a different race. The lack of emotional nuance and understanding only worsens with each passing scene: bereavements and massacres are conveyed with all the emotional heft of a splinter. Depressingly, they didn’t stop here – The Revenge of Scar precedes yet another tacky adaptation in The Final Alchemy.

Unstoppable (2010)

dir. Tony Scott

If it weren’t for the fact that it genuinely did happen in real life, this story of two men chasing down a runaway freight train full of toxic chemicals would be too absurd to take seriously. Credit where it’s due, the core story is told pretty faithfully, and it’s a pretty remarkable tale of bravery conquering ineptitude and unfortunate circumstance. However, reluctant to let the story speak for itself, Unstoppable really lays on the melodrama thick. Our two heroes have to wax lyrical about the woes and tribulations of their lives, to really hit home how determined and courageous they are. Every single character is painted as either good or bad, competent or useless, eager to save lives or eager to save profits – there is no room for any nuance in this film. Most of all, the direction and editing of Unstoppable are absolutely obnoxious. Not a single shot lasts for more than five seconds; jerky zooms and panning create the illusion that nothing pauses for a mere moment. This would make more sense if limited to the action scenes chasing the train, but quiet conversations in rooms and even the simple act of a man getting off a sofa are subjected to abrupt cuts and wild camera work. Unstoppable may have been a decent film if it bothered to, just occasionally, stop.

After Ever Happy (2022)

dir. Castille Landon

Quite unbelievably, After Ever Happy is the fourth installment in the miserable After series, following After, After We Collided, and After We Fell. Even more unbelievably, the worst thing about After Ever Happy is not its asinine title, but the movie that comes with it, during which our star-crossed duo Tessa and Hardin continue their toxic dynamic full of yelling, stalking, sexual manipulation, and in one particularly disturbing scene, arson. More unbelievable still, After Ever Happy continues the series’ insistence that these two deranged and destructive characters are in fact destined to be together; when Tessa insists they need some time apart, Hardin’s refusal to listen is not meant to be sinister or inappropriate but, instead, romantic. Most unbelievable of all, despite initial reports to the contrary and the implication of its own ludicrous title, After Ever Happy is not in fact the final part of the series, and ends with yet another “To be continued” title card, as though any of us really needed to see more of this unhealthy, unhinged relationship. Unbelievable.

Slaxx (2020)

dir. Elza Kephart

A possessed pair of jeans begins a bloody crusade to murder the staff of a clothing store. From the premise alone, it’s obvious Slaxx is not meant to be taken seriously. Instead it’s one of those nudge-nudge, wink-wink, ostensibly self-aware films which revels in its own insanity. To an extent, it works. Images of the jeans forming a sharp-toothed mouth, or dancing around when distracted by music, are pretty funny. But Slaxx unfortunately banks on the assumption that this premise can be stretched out for seventy-seven minutes. However, it cannot. The acting is all so over-the-top as to become irritating very quickly, while the humour inherent in “some jeans kill a person” is quickly diluted with every victim claimed. There’s also an uncomfortable portrayal of Indian culture, including the jeans sliding themselves onto a mannequin which has a dot on its head supposedly representing a bindi, not to mention conversations conducted in technically shaky Hindi. By the time the bindi-adorned mannequin is dancing around to Bollywood music, it just feels a bit racist. It’s clear what Slaxx was trying to do, but unfortunately it doesn’t succeed for very long at all.

The Boy Next Door (2015)

dir. Rob Cohen

It’s almost impressive just how little of The Boy Next Door works. Recently separated Claire (a woefully underwhelming Jennifer Lopez) finds herself seduced, then stalked, by the eponymous young lad Noah (a hilariously terrible Ryan Guzman). Calling Ryan a “boy” is laughable considering the actor is quite obviously in his late twenties; scenes where he hangs out with Claire’s teenage son are more uncomfortable than his dalliance with Claire herself. The sex scenes are depressingly devoid of passion, and Ryan’s obsession is founded on so little of substance (the less said about the baffling moment where he gifts classics expert Claire a “first edition” of The Iliad, the better) that it’s all but impossible to accept the alleged intensity of the pair’s relationship. Claire’s resolute refusal to do anything sensible like ask for help or call the police gets more frustrating with every passing minute. In addition, this is hopefully the first and last movie to employ the “epipen used as a weapon” trope, or at least the only one where it’s supposed to be taken seriously. The Boy Next Door obviously thinks of itself as a beguiling erotic thriller, but it plays much more like a parody of one.

Just Like Heaven (2005)

dir. Mark Waters

The set-up of Just Like Heaven shouldn’t, theoretically, be all that complicated. The movie certainly ticks a few boxes in its opening scenes: we meet our frazzled workaholic Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon), whose life revolves around her job as a doctor. Despite supposedly being an incredibly accomplished physician, she is ostensibly completely useless at such tasks requiring basic hand-eye coordination as changing her car radio’s volume, to the extent that it results in a serious road crash. David (Mark Ruffalo) is then shown moving into Elizabeth’s conveniently vacated apartment, but it’s not long before he’s experiencing strange visions and movements that no one else can see. That, along with the word “heaven” being in the film’s very title, should surely indicate some sense of what comes next – but Just Like Heaven manages to surprise, and not in a good way. It seems the film wanted to do a story with a ghostly romance, but also wanted a happy ending with two live, breathing characters. So it elected to do both. It’s a poor film with an almost offensively contrived storyline, and it leaves you wishing there truly was at least as much death in the movie as the title implies.

North (1994)

dir. Rob Reiner

North already hinges on a stupid premise: a kid named North (Elijah Wood) is fed-up of being underappreciated by his parents, so he legally “divorces” them. Nevermind that the parents demonstrably lavish all sorts of attention and affection on North – the film’s opening credits are set to a montage of his many many toys, for God’s sake, plus he clearly is given resources to pursue all manner of hobbies, and he always has food to eat and a warm, giant home to live in. Yet apparently, because the parents sometimes argue and ignore North, their egregious negligence must be punished. So off North goes, in search of new parents to live with. This all leads to a bizarrely diabolical child-journalist to lead a kind of fascist uprising of children divorcing their parents, with North as the movement’s figurehead – but this isn’t actually the focus of the film. No, North‘s focus seems to be on stereotyping and insulting as many cultures as humanly possible. The Texans love to eat food and get fat. The Hawaiians have low self-esteem (which somehow also takes the form of horrible jokes about infertility and paedophilia). The Alaskans send their elderly out to sea to die. The Amish all have the same names and don’t use electricity. In former Zaire, no one wears clothes. In China, North is immediately worshipped as a lord. In Paris, everyone drinks wine and watches 24/7 Jerry Lewis. All throughout, Bruce Willis pops up as North’s pseudo-guardian angel, making trite observations and narrating North’s winding journey to realising, even when he’s with a seemingly perfect (white and conservative) family in New York, that there’s no place like home. Why there needed to be such a series of shockingly offensive caricatures to get North to this point is anyone’s guess. It’s hard to understand what the ultimate point is really supposed to be – “There’s no place like home”, sure, but is the result that your home is where your biological family is? Is North fundamentally anti-adoption? Regardless, the film manages to do the ultimate cop-out with an “it was all a dream” shtick, which boosts the general, overwhelming feeling that this film would be better off had it never happened at all.

Norm of the North (2016)

dir. Trevor Wall

There’s a lot of really obvious stuff to despise about Norm of the North, a film about the eponymous polar bear’s wacky adventures in the course of finding his true self. There’s the lazy animation, in which characters’ textures often look stiff and rubbery, and the same boring, flailing polar bear dance sequence is repeated no fewer than five times. There’s the grating voice acting, which granted isn’t a surprise when the main character is played by Rob Schneider. There’s the stupid puerile jokes, which revolve around farting and pissing way, way, way more than even the most idiotic kids’ films usually do. There’s the uncomfortable stereotypes, including a cackling supervillain who seems to embody Chinese tropes for no discernible reason. All of these are very, very good reasons to despite Norm of the North, but to add insult to injury, even the barest bones of the film’s plot manage to make no sense. It should be easy to do a coming-of-age children’s story about a polar bear, no matter how generic or clichéd, but Norm of the North doesn’t even muster up a film that makes sense. Does Norm hate humans or like them? Are polar bears’ language and English always mutually intelligible or only sometimes? Do polar bears need to become more like humans, or less like them? Also, what is the point of doing an obvious fake-out about Norm’s mentor-grandpa dying, twice? It’s a genuine struggle to understand what’s going on in this film most of the time, which fundamentally means there is not a single remnant of a saving grace in the entire thing.

The Lorax (2012)

dir. Chris Renaud

The whole point of Dr Seuss’ stories was to use simple imagery and engaging language to tell a profound moral. Sadly, this adaptation of The Lorax instead uses garbage imagery and garbage language to tell a garbage moral. The songs are loud and basic and annoying; the characters are loud and basic and annoying; the animation is loud and basic and annoying. From the painfully obvious Minions rip-offs to the tired hipster references and clichés, there’s nothing remotely resembling subtlety in this. The original talks about how there’s no real easy answer to saving the planet, and how much of the balance between industrialism and environmentalism is a grey area. However, in this there’s just a simple portrayal of good vs evil, no room for nuance or ambiguity – and thus no room for the audience themselves to remotely consider that they could, however inadvertently, be contributing to the problem. The original tale is about not succumbing to consumerism, yet this version of The Lorax is, arguably, consumerism defined.

Fatal Affair (2020)

dir. Peter Sullivan

In Fatal Affair, a successful woman named Ellie meets an old college friend, David. They engage in a very brief amorous encounter before Ellie resists and returns to her life with her husband and daughter. However, David is instantly obsessed, and begins stalking Ellie, basically pursuing every available avenue to get her back. Fatal Affair is about as predictable as a film like this gets. Of course our protagonist is painted as completely good and moral, while our antagonist is irredeemably twisted and evil. Perhaps this could have been more interesting if either of them had a shred of personality beyond the stereotypical roles they’ve been cast in, but alas and alack, Fatal Affair forgoes character in favour of over-the-top murders and silly tension sequences (there’s a particularly stupid moment where David somehow doesn’t see Ellie despite her being directly in front of him). There are no surprises or twists at all; the whole thing is a paint-by-numbers domestic thriller, indistinguishable from the rest of them.

The Switch (2010)

dir. Will Speck, Josh Gordon

The Switch is quite frankly a disgusting film. Disgusting in a moral sense, disgusting in a physical sense – just an all-round nauseating experience. Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) is in her late thirties and keen to have a child, so she decides to search for a sperm donor. Her best friend and ex Wally (Jason Bateman) objects to this vehemently. Clearly this is because he still harbours romantic feelings for her, and seems to believe this therefore makes Kassie his property. Yet, apparently, the audience is supposed to like and support him. We’re supposed to like and support him while he drunkenly spills Kassie’s existing sperm donation into the toilet (why she just has it lying around in her bathroom in the first place is anyone’s guess). We’re supposed to like and support him as he decides to replace the sperm with his own sample instead. We’re supposed to like and support him as the film fast-forwards several years – Wally’s knowledge of his own paternity supposedly blotted out by his inebriation at the time – to Kassie raising a son whose progeny is a complete lie. We’re supposed to like and support him as he blunders around, seeing the kid’s similarities to himself, and alternately eschews responsibility and barges in where he’s not wanted. All this means that when Wally finally gets the girl, it’s supposed to be a happy ending. But instead, it just feels hollow and unpleasant. The Switch apparently took all possible charm, joy and affection, and switched it for sheer ugliness.

Love Actually (2003)

dir. Richard Curtis

There is very little to be said about Love Actually‘s many glaring flaws that hasn’t all been said before, but considering this vapid, cloying, frankly harmful film’s still-enduring popularity, much of it bears repeating. Love Actually is almost entirely hinged on the idea of self-deluded men being chronically arrogant, selfish, and shallow, and practically being gifted a woman as a result. There’s the foppish prime minister who stares at his employee, eschewing all problems of a power dynamic and instead manipulating her career as he sees fit (and the less said about the ridiculous fat jokes against this perfectly healthy woman, the better). There’s the company boss who has to do absolutely nothing at all in order to get his secretary leering at him every chance she gets. There’s the little boy who’s encouraged to learn an instrument just to get a girl he’s never spoken to to like him – and it works. There’s the creepy stalker man who’s obsessed with his best friend’s wife, and is for some reason rewarded with affection and sympathy. There’s the obnoxious, sexist, random annoying guy who whines that British girls are too stuck-up to like him, so he jets off for merry threesomes in the US instead. Perhaps most egregiously of all, there’s the husband who’s cheated on and finds refuge abroad, only to fall for his Portuguese maid. The fact they don’t understand each other at all is deemed totally irrelevant, as love apparently has nothing to do with conversation or communication. Then they get married. They don’t even go on a date – they just instantly get married, and it’s supposed to be a happy ending. In reality, the ending is about as far from happy as you can get. From start to finish, Love Actually is one of the all-time worst representations of love, sex, or relationships ever put to film.

Deep Water (2022)

dir. Adrian Lyne

Deep Water is just a thoroughly unpleasant film. The story follows Vic (Ben Affleck), the wealthy husband of the alluring and mysterious Melinda (Ana de Armas). They have a young daughter (and they also adopt a dog, who is very cute but contributes nothing to the film at all except making it longer). The movie is never entirely clear, but it seems as though Vic and Melinda have a marital deal which means Melinda is permitted to have as many extra-marital affairs as she wants, but she can never leave the family. Why has this deal been made? It’s not particularly clear. Between Vic’s dead-eyed staring and Melinda’s habitual screaming fits, no one seems particularly happy with the status quo. There’s also a big question around why Melinda doesn’t simply leave, then sleep with whoever she wants. Deep Water is stuffed with totally irrelevant details which are focused on for inordinate amounts of time (the aforementioned dog; the source of Vic’s wealth being drone technology; Vic’s bizarre obsession with snails), presumably all in an effort to distract the audience from the fact that the core plot, despite its many supposed jealousy-driven murders, actually has nothing of substance to offer at all. Right down to the casting of Ben Affleck, Deep Water feels like the Gone Girl fanfic sequel that absolutely no one asked for.

Fear of Rain (2021)

dir. Castille Landon

17-year-old Rain is suffering from early on-set schizophrenia. A new boy at school seems to develop a spontaneous interest in her, but while she’s suffering with chronic delusions, how can Rain know whether he exists or not? This is the premise of an insufferably predictive movie which is far, far less clever than it thinks it is. The movie’s central “twist” can be seen coming off several miles away, so when it finally lands, it causes no impact whatsoever. In addition, Rain is obsessed with the idea that her next-door neighbour has kidnapped a child; this particular storyline involves such coarse stereotyping and demonising of an older single woman that it’s a wonder any self-respecting actor chose to take the role on. All the acting, writing, and directing are so phoned-in, yet so bizarrely smug in their execution, that it’s obvious Castille Landon believed this was the world’s next great psychological thriller phenomenon. Instead, this film will deservedly be lost in time, like tears in rain.

The Perfect Date (2019)

dir. Chris Nelson

High school student Brooks Rattigan is absolutely obsessed with the idea of going to Yale University, but is worried he can’t afford it. He therefore gets his geeky best friend to set up an app, essentially pimping Brooks out as an escort (but a nicely sanitised, teen movie-friendly one who’s never once targeted by a pervert or rapist, and simply goes on wholesome home-before-midnight sojourns). Of course, there’s a whole thing around how the woman he truly wanted to spend time with was there all along. So far, so standard teen rom-com, and really that’s all The Perfect Date is. One remarkable feature, though, is just how much Brooks talks about money. He seems to work a strange bitterness into every single conversation he has, pointing out affluence at every opportunity, while still living in obvious comfort himself. It lends a slightly awkward edge to the whole movie – but granted, it would never have been a good film anyway.

The Dish & the Spoon (2011)

dir. Alison Bagnall

It is genuinely difficult to sum up The Dish & the Spoon in mere words, but some options would include: hideous; disgusting; offensive; baffling; infuriating. The story – far too kind a word – follows late-twenty-something Rose, played by mumblecore darling Greta Gerwig, who’s just discovered her husband has been having an affair. The film pretty quickly establishes Rose as entirely unhinged, as she screams and wails down the phone incoherently and makes frequent threats of violence. Then she discovers an English boy (Olly Alexander), clarified to be definitely over 18 but definitely under 21, and sort of pseudo-adopts him as a plaything. The boy, who’s been jilted by a girlfriend, clearly has no money or any real options at all, and is helpless as he goes along with dressing up, fishing, participating in fake wedding photos, and lying in a burial plot, all at Rose’s absolutely catastrophic whims. If the audience is meant to relate to Rose as a meandering millennial heroine then this doesn’t work at all, as she’s so detestable from start to finish. The age and power difference between the two characters makes any attempt at charm or affection an utter, utter failure. Case in point: the boy in the lighthouse never even gets a name in this film. If the audience is actually supposed to hate Rose, then mission swiftly accomplished, but there’s no joy to be had in sitting through ninety minutes of her relentless garbage. This film should quite frankly never have been made,

The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (2004)

dir. Peter Winther

The Librarian might well be one of the all-time oddest franchises to ever exist. The so-called “Librarian” is actually a retriever and keeper of a series of magical historic artifacts – in this inaugural feature these are revealed to include Pandora’s Box, Excalibur, and the Golden Fleece, among many others. Our newly initiated Librarian Flynn – apparently hired into the role because he has an irritatingly exaggerated Sherlock Holmes-type ability to glance at a person and immediately recite their entire history – is charged with hunting down the three pieces of the Spear of Destiny. Cue a story so obviously trying to be Indiana Jones that it’s almost adorable. Almost. Unfortunately, The Librarian trips itself up with ludicrous plot twists and turns, including story beats around the language of the birds and Shangri-La. It’s as though The Librarian was so preoccupied with stuffing in as many references as possible, it forgot that good characters are integral to a story too. Instead, this features a frankly insufferable protagonist who never shuts up about his own awkwardness, a femme fatale love interest completely lacking in any personality, and a villain so suffused by bad intentions he does little but smirk and prance around. Yet, this pathetic excuse for an adventure film managed to spawn an entire franchise of related material, including sequels, comics, and a TV show. Apparently a heavily diluted Indiana Jones is a more popular idea than one would’ve hoped.

300 (2006)

dir. Zack Snyder

Few people can do testosterone-fuelled nonsensical violence like Zack Snyder. 300, his very loose retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, is filled with all the classic Snyder tropes. Unnecessarily saturated colour! Going slow-motion then fast-motion then slow-motion again! Men yelling about blood and honour! A single woman given a shred of character at all, and even then she’s mostly a vacuous waste of space! A moral system based on ugly people being bad and attractive people being good! General pervasive racist and xenophobic tones throughout! 300 is so bad that its obvious ambition and near-imposing scale don’t do much to excuse its existence. It’s a shame so many otherwise talented people were involved – 300 shot Gerard Butler and Lena Headey to A-list prominence, but also features the likes of Dominic West, Rodrigo Santoro, David Wenham, and even the film debut of Michael friggin’ Fassbender. All this potential talent, squandered on a film so utterly devoid of substance it’s a wonder it didn’t float up into the heavens – but that is quite clearly where Snyder believes this purported masterpiece belongs.

Dominator (2003)

dir. Tony Luke

The fact that Dominator even exists is an absolute mind-bend. It’s based on what is purported to be the first British manga (a questionable claim in itself), which revolves around Dominator, a demonic entity who is unleashed from hell when a trio of unsuspecting hot girls play a forbidden chord on their guitars. Dominator has stolen the key to hell, and decides to use his newfound power and freedom to essentially bum around London having sex and playing metal concerts. The story, what little there is, is beyond ludicrous, and it’s genuinely difficult to discern what’s supposed to be going on at any one time. All that’s unquestionably clear is that every single female character can’t help but swoon in fits of desire whenever Dominator’s around. That said, in Dominator’s defence, it occasionally hints that it knows what it’s doing. The odd genuinely funny line or overtly exaggerated vocal performance seem to suggest the whole thing is a joke on us, sometimes. Just sometimes. But it doesn’t matter, because Dominator‘s animation is so eye-wateringly bad that it’s beyond anything which could be excused as parody. Blank staring eyes, stiff limbs, utterly inscrutable backgrounds – every single individual frame hurts the eyes. Whatever Dominator is or isn’t trying to be, there is no realm on Earth or in hell in which it could be classified as anything but insanely bad.

Press Play (2022)

dir. Greg Björkman

Unless they’re willing to put in a lot of thought, research and effort, scriptwriters should generally stay away from time travel. Unfortunately, it does not seem as though the writers of Press Play put in even the barest amount of time, research or effort. Some years after Laura’s boyfriend has died, she finds an old mixtape they made; listening to a particular song takes her back in time to when they first heard the song together, giving Laura a chance to potentially save his life. The time travel stuff unravels extremely quickly – does Laura remember her universe-altering forays or not? Is she jumping universe when she does it? Just how many Lauras are there supposed to be? – but the film also suffers from a tepid love story, and aged tropes like “two-dimensional best friend” and “mystical black advisor”. The film’s overall moral is also very confusing, as it seems the movie is fundamentally saying you truly can change the past, if you just go far back enough. Not a particularly helpful message for those grieving loved ones. There is no good reason whatsoever to bother pressing play on Press Play.

Dunston Checks In (1996)

dir. Ken Kwapis

Imagine Home Alone, but with all the charm and intelligence removed, and replaced instead with an orangutan running around a hotel. That’s, essentially, Dunston Checks In. Two boys live with their father in the hotel he runs, but oh no, a jewel thief and his sidekick orangutan arrive to cause mischief and mayhem. The score, direction and acting all scream “zany antics” throughout, but the movie’s hijinks are so perfunctory, so underwhelming, that it’s hard to imagine even very young children being entertained. The main little boy is obnoxious, and most of the adult performances aren’t much more bearable. Granted, the orangutan’s acting is genuinely impressive, but it’s massively undermined by the thought of what this poor thing had to go through in captivity, during training, and on set. There can surely be no worse fate for an endangered creature than being a part of Dunston Checks In.

The Baker (2007)

dir. Gareth Lewis

A professional assassin wants a new life, and so he finds refuge by pretending to be a baker in a rural Welsh village. He’s got another assassin hot on his trail, and a bunch of murderous neighbours who’ve discovered his past and want to entail his services to kill their friends and family. The Baker is billed as a black comedy, sure, but the comedy is sorely lacking in this truly baffling film. Ostensibly, it’s supposed to be hilarious when our main character starts having sex with his love interest in a pile of food, rubbing butter all over each other because apparently that’s their fetish, but for the several arduous minutes this goes on for it’s never once funny, it’s just gross. Every single villager is an exaggerated caricature, so it’s hard to imagine any Welsh person finding these portrayals affectionate or insightful (which could again be forgiven if they elicited but one laugh). And some of the attempts at going “dark” are quite disturbing; The Baker proves that few films besides Four Lions can make exploding livestock funny. There are some valiant attempts at good acting – Damian Lewis is clearly doing his writer-director brother a massive favour here – but no amount of acting talent or enthusiasm can make this weird little film actually work.

Stuart Little (1999)

dir. Rob Minkoff

It’s relatively easy to accept the premise of Stuart Little – a mouse gets adopted by a human family – because so much else of the movie is so nuts. The original book it’s based on is supposed to be pretty off-kilter too, but surely it’s not as weird as this. Why is it that all the mice talk and interact with humans, but the cats seem to keep their speaking abilities a secret? So mice are adopted, but cats are pets? Meanwhile, why does a mouse couple pretend to be Stuart’s biological parents and spirit him away, only to just amicably let him go again? Why did Stuart listlessly go with them in the first place? And why is everyone in this community so preoccupied with a mini boat racing contest? Of course Stuart Little requires some suspension of disbelief, and in its defence it’s a perfectly harmless family movie. But the bizarre situations and ensuing questions seem almost inevitable, considering this adaptation was co-written by M. Night Shyamalan. What a twist!

Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007)

dir. Tim Hill

This imagining of Alvin and the Chipmunks came to the fore during a peak period for terrible children’s films. In this one, our vacuous protagonist Dave meets Alvin, Simon and Theodore – our titular chipmunks, digitally added in so badly that it’s regularly extremely obvious the live action actors are speaking to thin air – and they do the usual things of trashing his house, sabotaging his job and generally being a nuisance. But of course, they warm his heart along the way. This movie follows every last lazy cliché, takes every lowest possible road, squeezes every last potential drop of imagination from the story, and is simply an irritating bore to sit through. The chipmunks’ sped up squeaky voices wind up barely making an impact, and are somehow the least annoying part of the movie. Instead, you’re too busy wondering whether on earth talking chipmunks are meant to be a novelty or not, seeing as everyone accepts the trio as their new popstar overlords pretty quickly. The emotional impact is supposed to be around whether or not Dave accepts the chipmunks as his sons – except he does vocally call them his sons, very early on, yet they subsequently go on and on about whether he’s willing to do it. This was always going to be a stupid film, but it’s somehow even more stupid than it seems.

Pentagram (2019)

dir. Steve Lawson

Pentagram is about as paint-by-numbers as it’s possible for a budget horror film to be. A group of wayward teens – none of whom, incidentally, look remotely as though they’re played by actual teenagers – stumble upon a cursed pentagram in an abandoned house. Once they’ve entered the pentagram, they cannot leave without being killed and devoured by an unknown demonic entity (which is manifest by some of the worst, clip art-like special effects imaginable). Or, much like The Ring, they have to perform a sacrifice of someone else before they can be freed. But there’s no real horror or intrigue here. We have to sit and watch the characters try to loop together their garments in order to lasso themselves some candles, for an arduously long time. None of the characters is likeable or relatable, so it’s hard to get invested. The climax at the end of the movie is for a character so lifeless, so vapid, that it’s hard to feel anything at all. Making this pathetic movie was probably faster and easier than scribbling a pentagram on a piece of paper and simply shoving that in front of a camera for eighty minutes.

The Odd Life of Timothy Green (2012)

dir. Peter Hedges

What an utterly bizarre idea for a story. Cindy (Jennifer Garner) and Jim (Joel Edgerton) are unable to conceive, and in their grief, they write a bunch of notes describing their dream child and bury them in the garden. Soon, an unfamiliar boy with leaves growing on his legs has popped up in their home, embodying all the traits they wished for. Rather than calling the police, or an exorcist at the very least, Cindy and Jim decide to simply claim ownership of the boy, Timothy. They then spend the rest of the movie being the absolute worst parents imaginable – holding an entirely unjustified grudge against his crush, pushing him to play sport and music when he doesn’t want to, and never asking him a single question about himself – and for some reason, the movie seems to believe they are showing their growth by never learning a thing. The film is preoccupied with forced quirkiness, too. The entire town is obsessed with pencils, a detail which adds little to the film beyond a contrived plot point about manufacturing sustainable pencils, which also tragically serves as the story’s exciting climax. At one point, a character declares, in all seriousness and solemnity: “If this boy can have a leaf on his ankle, then we can make a pencil out of leaves.” The Odd Life of Timothy Green eschewed the sane stance that no movie in the history of the universe should ever have this line in it, and instead decided to base an entire story around it. Awful story, awful parenting, awful film.

Psycho Stripper / Stripped / Bridal Nightmare (2019)

dir. Jake Helgren

It’s seldom a good sign when a movie can’t even decide on its own name, but Psycho Stripper is still pretty straightforward. It’s exactly what its title(s) say it is. Our sweet boring protagonist Amber meets a stripper on her bachelorette party who winds up harbouring a dangerous obsession with her. There’s some murder and some sex and some screaming, but it’s all heavily sanitised for a cosy Hallmark-type audience. There’s a bit of bizarre twisting and turning around the stripper’s past, linking him back to Amber, but it’s rendered next-to-useless as the insight doesn’t actually change anything about the plot. He goes after our heroes, and they run and fight. It doesn’t matter whether he’s pursuing vengeance, or really is just some psycho stripper – it’s still obvious how it’s going to end. Pretty typical Lifetime made-for-TV fare.

The Sky Princess (2018)

dir. Dara Harper

The Sky Princess is, frankly, a shame. There are some real glimmers of potential in it, here and there. Parts of the animation, like a patterned headdress here or a gleaming jewel earring there, look incredible. Some of the mythological concepts seem interesting, including the interplay of the sun and moon tribes, and the movie almost lets itself foray into some genuinely dark concepts around captivity and depression. There’s even the odd well-written, funny line of dialogue. Unfortunately, these rare diamonds are lost in a colossal, overwhelming haze of rough. So much of the movie quite simply makes no sense whatsoever. Our eighteen-year-old protagonist dreams of being a princess and sits on a bench, so she’s now subject to the whims of a mystical owl. What? There’s also an incredible lack of focus, with the movie resolutely still continuing for quite a while even after all the main story is concluded. And most of all, most obviously of all, the majority of the animation is truly hideous. Heads rock about on spindly necks, eyes go akimbo, the backgrounds are frequently one untextured colour at a time: the weird angles and bulges all come together to make something very very ugly. Perhaps, in another universe, The Sky Princess is a masterpiece – but in this one, it’s a catastrophe.

The Princess (2022)

dir. Le-Van Kiet

A princess (Joey King) wakes up at the top of a tower and has to use her martial arts skills to battle herself to freedom and save her family. There’s a whole lot of confusion around the story itself – a nobleman is trying to force the princess to marry him so he can gain power, but he also has no qualms about holding the royal family captive? Why not just kill them and take the throne, then? But to The Princess’ credit, it’s not really trying to be anything intelligent or profound. It’s just mindless fight sequences with a bit of a “girl power” undercurrent clumsily thrown in. The action sequences aren’t terrible, but they’re pretty perfunctory. The acting isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty perfunctory. The set design isn’t – actually, it often is quite terrible, betraying the medieval setting and instead being obviously designed and built in contemporary times. The feminism angle is handled very amateurishly (is it really a victory if a woman has to fight and cheat death a hundred times over before she’s granted agency over her own life?), but hey, at least it’s there. The Princess is loud and dumb, but it knows it, so it’s hard to get agitated over it.

Crash (2004)

dir. Paul Haggis

With contenders like American Beauty, Green Book and CODA, it’s hard to say with absolute certainty what the all-time worst winner of the Oscar for Best Picture is. But there is a very, very strong argument to be made for Crash earning that title. Loosely interconnecting stories bring concepts of bigotry and prejudice to the surface; with the cloying sentimentality, on-the-nose script, and incredibly unsubtle direction, it might as well be called Racism Actually. It’s hard to tell what the fundamental point of Crash is even supposed to be. That we should give sexual abusers and racists a pass if they’re acting as a carer for their infirm parent? That you should completely forgive a man who assaulted you if he, later and separately, saves your life? Parts of the story seem to suggest that anyone is susceptible to becoming a racially-motivated murderer, which isn’t necessarily untrue, but then Crash also seems to conclude that there’s barely any point fighting injustice at all. The only (adult) character in the entire movie who doesn’t come across as selfish, manipulative or hypocritical is the one man who never loses his temper or lashes out, and also conveniently has a cute little daughter to look after. So is the moral of the story that everyone is either perfect all the time, or part of the problem? It seems more likely that sanctimonious, pretentious and shallow productions like Crash are truly part of the problem.

Morbius (2022)

dir. Daniel Espinosa

What can possibly be said about Morbius that hasn’t already been said? This adaptation of a Marvel superhero who tries to cure a blood disease and turns himself into a vampire instead has already been lambasted on every corner of the internet, and rightfully so. It is nonsensical – what plot there is is so insipid, so basic, that you regularly forget what’s happened minutes after it has. It is poorly acted, with every single performance either so overdone or underdone, it’s difficult to accept these are actual living human beings turning in professional performances. It is confusing, with the rules and abilities of the vampire creatures changing according to whatever best serves our protagonist at that time. It is, often, boring, with no action sequence holding any attention or interest. It is also bizarrely dark – not in tone (try though it might) but in actual colour, begging the audience to squint to see anything at all half the time. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in Morbius worth seeing. No wonder it bombed at the box office, twice.

A Wrinkle in Time (2003)

dir. John Kent Harrison

Presumably the 1962 novel by Madeleine L’Engle A Wrinkle in Time has some real merit to it, especially considering it spawned a big budget adaptation in 2018. Before that, there was this 2003 made-for-TV version. But whatever impressive features the novel may have, it’s difficult to imagine considering the poor quality of both these adaptations. Like the 2018 version, 2003’s A Wrinkle in Time suffers from a convoluted plot, cloyingly twee supernatural figures, and utterly unimaginative worlds. The characters are still so simple and boring, it’s hard to work out what the moral of the story is supposed to be. This 2003 version is arguably the worse adaptation, though, bogged down as it is by a terrible score (for a few scenes, the music is simply the same staccato note over and over and over), shoddy acting (the protagonist’s facial expression scarcely changes throughout), and some of the all-time worst CGI ever committed to film (what is this human-equine monstrosity with no torso, and how was something that looks like this released in the same year as The Return of the King?!). While it’s understandable that a limited budget probably impacted some choices, it still doesn’t excuse A Wrinkle of Time’s lack of creativity.

365 Dni: Ten Dzień / 365 Days: This Day (2022)

dir. Barbara Białowąs, Tomasz Mandes

This sequel to the abominable 365 Days is, quite frankly, remarkable. Not because of its central toxic relationship, in which abuse, coercion and manipulation are cast as sexy and desirable. Not because of the silly mobster antics in the background which sometimes seem more like kids play-acting at gangsters than a legitimate threat. Not because of the totally absurd plot, which actually relies on the “secret identical twin” trope more suited to Bollywood or telenovelas than to a purported erotic thriller that’s meant to be taken seriously. No, the remarkable thing about This Day is the fact that it’s not a movie, not really. It’s more like a jukebox musical – at least, you’d think so, considering just how often a generic autotuned pop song starts playing, accompanying a montage of characters sailing or having sex or doing anything else which prevents them from needing to actually share dialogue. A boring, breath song like this starts playing in This Day, in lieu of an actual script, no fewer than 25 times. 25! In less than two hours! Not that a 365 Days script would be any good, but at least it would show some vague semblance of actually trying. This Day is genuinely shocking in terms of just how obviously it’s just not trying at all.

The Kissing Booth 3 (2021)

dir. Vince Marcello

Exactly how and why two sequels to The Kissing Booth got made is anyone’s guess, but this third film is probably the worst of the lot. What little story there is once more revolves around Elle (Joey King), her creepy whiny incel best friend Lee (Joel Courtney), and his brother who’s also Elle’s boyfriend Noah (Jacob Elordi). The brothers’ parents are selling their old holiday beach house, and in a profoundly pathetic bout of selfishness and entitlement, the kids decide this simply won’t do. The sentiment of their beach house memories may have carried more weight had said beach house been even vaguely alluded to in an earlier movie; alas, it’s simply written it to give them something to complain about. The ensuing story is the same as the previous movies: Elle trying to placate Lee and Noah whilst developing no personality of her own; stupid vignettes of people dressing up in costumes and doing dumb stuff to use up runtime; and the random insertion of a kissing booth at the end of the movie (although this one does also incorporate an awkward time skip). At least The Kissing Booth 2 had the ridiculous dancing competition as a focal point – the worst thing about The Kissing Booth 3 is how utterly forgettable it is.

xXx (2002)

dir. Rob Cohen

In xXx‘s defence, it doesn’t exactly purport to be highbrow fare. Xander Cage (an almost giddily happy and invested Vin Diesel) is some kind of extreme sports professional-slash-protester (it’s not fully clear), who’s recruited to become a National Security Agency spy. Like in many spy films before it and since, xXx‘s chief peril comes courtesy of generically evil Russians doing generically evil things, this time wanting to set off a biochemical weapon. Cage fights on the roads, in snow, and in water to save the day, and also strikes up a romance with Russian spy Yelena (Asia Argento). Because what spy movie would be complete without a hot femme fatale on the sidelines? The plot honestly doesn’t make much sense, with Cage basically moving from location to location and getting embroiled in conflicts that don’t obviously further the story at all. The action also beggars belief sometimes – no matter how strong and agile Cage is, he definitely should die about ten times at least in this movie, most notably by the avalanche he deliberately causes to come cascading down on himself. xXx is basically what you’d expect: loud, dumb, and relentless.

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

dir. Ava DuVernay

It makes no sense. It just makes no sense. A Wrinkle in Time is based on a children’s book which spawned an entire series, so you have to hope it makes more sense than this inscrutable film. The story follows Meg, a young girl whose scientist father has been missing for four years. Meg, her younger brother and her best friend are soon visited by three magical beings: Mrs Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), who is cloyingly whimsical and can transform into a hideous flying cabbage dragon; Mrs Who (Mindy Kaling), who speaks in quotations from other people at the height of her powers but resorts to normal speech when she is weak, but then also uses normal speech at times when she’s strong again; and Mrs Which, who is Oprah Winfrey but giant. There’s a lot of incredibly vague talk about Meg’s father being lost “in the universe”, so our young heroes are transported from world to world in their quest to find him. The fantasy worlds are disappointingly uninventive – one is a just a big meadow, while another is just Stepford – and the CGI is pretty poor overall (see the aforementioned hideous flying cabbage dragon). The conflict between good and evil is extremely difficult to understand, and it’s hard to grasp what Meg is really fighting for at any given moment. It’s a pretty idiotic movie which obviously banks on children being easily distracted by bright colours and a hero complex. Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely A Wrinkle in Time captivates many people at all, young or old.

Fantasy Island (2020)

dir. Jeff Wadlow

A horror reinvention of the 1970s TV show, Fantasy Island operates on the basic, very well-trodden premise of “Be careful what you wish for”. A group of strangers arrive on the eponymous island, having been promised it has the power to make their deepest dream come true. Of course, everything winds up twisted, with tinges of death and torment coming to the surface pretty quickly. Fantasy Island is so predictable in a lot of ways, with many story beats being obvious a mile off. But it gets even worse when it tries to engineer a “twist” (perhaps these strangers… aren’t exactly strangers after all?!) and seriously jumps the shark in its closing moments as the true antagonist is revealed. The scares and gore are entirely underwhelming (which isn’t a massive surprise, considering one of the key fantastical villains they’re running from is called something as inventive as “Dr Torture”), and the whole monkey’s paw idea has already been done to death – if you will – anyway. Absolutely nothing to see here on Fantasy Island.

Good Mourning (2022)

dir. Machine Gun Kelly, Mod Sun

A day in the life of London (Machine Gun Kelly), an actor and stoner who gets a very slightly odd text from his girlfriend one morning and subsequently goes into a tailspin complete with wacky adventures. The big conflict of Good Mourning is London deciding whether to go to his girlfriend’s house or to a professional meeting. Any halfway-functioning human being could probably work something out here, but London and his idiotic friends are so childish and goofy that everything seems to culminate in a giant spliff and/or imprisonment. Utterly banal ideas are focused on for minute after arduous minute: someone confused oat milk for goat milk! Someone keeps actual gloves in their car’s glove compartment! Here’s Danny Trejo briefly, for some reason! The movie is stuffed with such random asides and non-sequiturs, but they’re largely forgotten the second they’re over, they’re that boring and inconsequential. It’s all supposed to be funny, of course, but Good Mourning is so awkward and contrived that in the end it’s difficult to laugh either with or at it. There is no good to be found in Good Mourning, and the only mourning is for the death of laughter.

Dracula 2000 (2000)

dir. Patrick Lussier

A group of thieves infiltrate a highly secured underground vault, expecting to find valuables. Instead, they discover a coffin. Dracula has been restrained here, but now he’s been unleashed upon the world again. So far, so Dracula – but Dracula 2000 takes the story of the famous vampires to absolutely ludicrous places. There’s Van Helsing using leeches to consume Dracula’s blood and become ageless. There’s Van Helsing’s daughter, who Dracula is compelled to because she shares his blood (but apparently Van Helsing himself doesn’t, even though he… literally shares his blood?). There’s a bunch of specific rules and guidelines regarding what Dracula and his ilk can and can’t do. Dracula can apparently turn into a wolf, and also into bats. He can’t stand sunlight, or silver. He also despises Christianity – but Christian things make him angry rather than weak. This last rule is explained in the film’s climax with a twist so insane, so unbelievable, it’s near-impossible to fathom how someone came up with it. But it’s all so much fun – Gerard Butler is quite obviously having a blast as Dracula, prancing around making manic vampire faces. Dracula 2000 is a serious trip for the audience as well.

Rings (2017)

dir. F. Javier Gutiérrez

Like so many horror sequels before and since, Rings hinges on the idea that the essence of a good horror film (like The Ring) can be emulated and exploited by trying to squeeze every single conceivable plot spin-off from it that can possibly be dreamt up. In Rings, college student Julia and her boyfriend are embroiled in Samara’s vengeance. They watch her infamous video, although this time there are small changes which supposedly suggest that Samara’s after something else this time. Julia’s search takes her to all manner of creepy people, including an obsessive college professor who somehow believes Samara’s curse can prove the existence of the soul, and a blind ex-priest who for all the subtlety he possesses might as well spend his scenes shouting “I’m not a very nice guy”. Julia’s desperate search for answers might hold somewhat more weight did Julia herself not seem just as devoid of life as the abused girl she’s trying to save. As it stands, Rings is probably much better regarded as fan fiction rather than a legitimate Ring sequel.

Love and Gelato (2022)

dir. Brandon Camp

In Love and Gelato, high school graduate Lina grants her deceased mother’s wishes by visiting Italy the summer before she starts college. Cue a clichéd, cloying adventure in which she finds herself, and quite possibly true love too. Lina is the absolute peak the of frazzled rom-com “every girl” heroine archetype: she bumps into people, spouts off idiotic rambles, spontaneously falls down, and even at one point yelps out “I’m too awkward for this!”, just in case anyone in the audience still hasn’t gleaned the single note of her character. Her love interests are both pretty unappealing, while Lina’s search for her mystery father has no stakes whatsoever because the audience has no idea what impact his absence has left on Lina’s life. So why should anyone care about his presence, either? All this against the backdrop of Italy, a wonderful land where people swan about doing nothing but eating, drinking, and generally being utterly carefree. It’s all secret bakeries, magical gelato and giddy romance in Italy, it turns out. Thank you for the cultural teachings, Love and Gelato.

365 dni / 365 Days (2020)

dir. Barbara Białowąs, Tomasz Mandes

Fifty Shades of Grey really does have a lot to answer for. Had it never existed, perhaps we wouldn’t be saddled with the likes of 365 Days, a movie based around the idea that kidnapping, abuse and coercion aren’t immoral, abhorrent, or harmful – they’re sexy! Our protagonist Laura is bored with her boyfriend, so naturally when she’s abducted by obsessive crime lord, human trafficker and general all-round monster Massimo, the audience is ostensibly compelled to say, “Well, at least she’s not bored.” The sex scenes are downright uncomfortable; besides the inherent unease of watching a captive woman claiming to enjoy sex with her captor, the visuals of dead-eyed women jerking their heads around towards the bottom of the screen while Massimo grunts and gasps above them are cringeworthy at best, nauseating at worst. Of course there’s such a thing as a healthy sub-dom sexual relationship, but 365 Days has no idea what that looks like. It also doesn’t seem to know what basic character or plotting look like. It’s pretty much devoid of character – Laura’s boring boyfriend is a good match for her vacant personality, in all honesty – while the ‘story’, what little there is, abruptly ends in one of the most unclear depictions of tragedy ever committed to film. It’s less than two hours long, but the excruciating 365 Days certainly feels like it lasts a year.

The Purge (2013)

dir. James DeMonaco

The Purge managed to achieve almost instant fame when it came out. To its vague credit, it’s a memorable premise. In the America of the future (as far away as 2022, no less), all crime has been eradicated except for one legally mandated night a year, during which violence and murder are permitted without punishment. Of course, the vague credit crumbles when the premise is thought about for more than a split-second. Is all human aggression seriously tempered if we’re promised one night a year to let loose? What about white collar crimes? What about stealing bread to feed your starving family, does that simply not happen anymore because of the Purge? If the relatively stupid starting point is accepted, though, The Purge still doesn’t work. The central family consists of idiots making stupid decision after stupid decision. The band of youths terrorising them are so gleefully performative with their giggles and masks and strutting around that they’re less threatening and more hilarious. One has to wonder why these wannabe criminals spend their entire night waiting around for one family instead of running riot and targeting literally anyone else. By the end of the movie, nothing has changed, no lessons have been learned – ninety minutes have simply been lost. How this total misfire managed to spawn a whole movie series is anyone’s guess, but The Purge is a complete joke of a horror movie.

Moonfall (2022)

dir. Roland Emmerich

Roland Emmerich, king of unhinged disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, has inexplicably managed to outdo even himself with Moonfall. The plot is centred around the moon going off orbit and falling towards the Earth, causing all manner of disasters like tsunamis, comets – and a gravitational aberration which is especially hilariously manifest by characters skipping around like they’re playing a nursery game. This premise alone would have been ridiculous enough, but Moonfall is accompanied by such delightful inclusions as: an irritating conspiracy theorist who waxes lyrical about the moon being an artificial construct; sentient nanotechnology which operates on bizarre rules of only being able to identify organic life if it is near certain types of technology; and of course, the standard simpering “left behind” civilians who struggle through snow and flame to achieve very little until they’re reunited with the heroes journeying to the moon. The icing on the cake is when the supposedly deluded conspiracy theorist is revealed to have been more right all along than anyone could have thought. Whether Emmerich is trying to say that he believes the moon is fake, or that we’re simply in constant danger from superior life-forms lightyears away (who incidentally were able to eradicate all war, but not control their own computers), Moonfall fundamentally doesn’t really say anything coherent at all.

The Swan Princess: A Royal Wedding (2020)

dir. Richard Rich

How 1994’s underwhelming animated movie The Swan Princess became a fully-fledged franchise is a mystery lost to the ages. Regardless, with A Royal Wedding they made it to the tenth instalment. The original film’s central couple, Princess Odette and Price Derek, are now having adventures in historic China alongside their talking animal friends. The film gets some credit for occasional glimpses of authentic Chinese inspiration – meticulously designed hair ornaments, a song sung in Mandarin – but fundamentally the standard white saviour tropes settle in as expected. Most of the story refuses to just make basic sense. The young and beautiful Princess Mei Li is transformed into an old woman by a sorceress; why would Odette and Derek, whose original story was based on Odette being transformed into a swan, have any hesitation in believing Mei Li’s story? Especially when the sorceress is prone to loudly shouting about her diabolical deeds at whim, providing a uniquely grating kind of comic relief. This is a harmless movie which is quite obviously for small children, but it’s hard not to laugh at the inclusion of magical tears, jerky animation, and one character’s especially dumb decision to simply take the evil, conniving sorceress at her word instead of shutting down her powers. This tenth iteration of an already-basic children’s movie is exactly what one would expect.

Scottish Mussel (2015)

dir. Talulah Riley

The mere existence of Scottish Mussel beggars belief. Talulah Riley, star of St Trinian’s and twice ex-wife of Elon Musk, decided to write, direct, and star in a romantic comedy about a Glaswegian slacker and his zany sidekicks who enter the high-stakes world of illegal mussel pearl theft. Our protagonist falls hopelessly in love with Riley’s English upper-class conservationist when he sees her in a bikini – in fairness, she has so little personality that it would be difficult to build an attraction based on actual compatibility or chemistry. Humour is provided courtesy of dimwitted homophobia – a man wearing pink, how novel! – while mild peril is contributed by Glaswegian thugs and Ukrainian gangsters embroiled in the aforementioned high-stakes world of illegal mussel pearl theft. The amount of excruciatingly poor Scottish accents is keenly balanced by the amount of absurd side plots, including the schoolteacher and librarian who confess their love for one another, demanding serious audience investment after about two dilute scenes together. Why Riley believed anyone would root for the bumbling main characters, who seem to feel they’re owed vast riches and comforts whilst putting in no effort whatsoever, and also seem to think it’s acceptable to hang around a school playground for extended periods of time, is anyone’s guess. Why Scottish Mussel exists is anyone’s guess.

Pinocchio: A True Story (2021)

dir. Vasiliy Rovenskiy

The USA English-language dub of Pinocchio: A True Story achieved online fame when the trailer was widely shared by disbelieving viewers. “Father,” intones Pauly Shore in a robotic monotone, before culminating in a lilting whinge with “when can I leave to be on my ooowwwn? I’ve got the whole worrrld to see.” The voice acting is certainly a notably baffling part of the movie – Shore frequently sounds like he’s only just learned how to speak, to the extent where it’s easier to believe he’s trolling the film on purpose – but it’s full of other confusing choices. The dubbing doesn’t remotely make an effort to match the animation, but it’s hard to be fussed when the animation itself is so awkward and amateur that it feels twenty years older than it is; underserving the Pinocchio story’s key novelty factor, Pinocchio the wooden boy looks identical to all the human characters. Meanwhile his bland love interest sings two bland songs within the space of ten minutes, then there are no other songs until the finale. So does Pinocchio: A True Story qualify as a musical? Well, it barely qualifies as a story full-stop. At one point Pinocchio’s equine companion Tybalt boldly announces he must depart to complete an important errand, yet it’s never confirmed what he does. Characters routinely shift personalities and motivations. One person’s tragic backstory of a long-lost daughter is only hurriedly revealed in the last ten minutes yet provides a crucial plot pivot. So many weird decisions, inconsistencies, unbelievable moments – the whole film is like a giant question mark incarnate.

The Truth About Emanuel (2013)

dir. Francesca Gregorini

Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario) is a supposedly edgy – indicated by how much she likes to roll her eyes and yell about jerking off – teenager, who has never truly dealt with her feelings of guilt over her birth coinciding with her mother’s death. When Linda (Jessica Biel) moves in next-door with her infant daughter, Emanuel agrees to babysit, promptly discovering that Linda’s baby is actually a lifeless doll. Cue essentially the entirety of the rest of the movie being comprised of people making the absolute worst decision possible in any given situation. Rather than trying to get Linda the professional help she needs, Emanuel chooses to hide the situation from all responsible adults – and can’t even do that effectively for long. It’s implied that there’s some cosmic connection between Emanuel’s mother and Linda’s actual deceased daughter, though this is so shoehorned in it’s hard to feel any investment, despite the manufactured sentimentality such as when Emanuel’s imagining herself and the doll swimming alongside a bunch of fish (why, is anyone’s guess). It’s blatant The Truth About Emanuel is meant to be a hard-hitting psychological exploration, but it just uses generic tropes to tell a generic message which leaves no memorable impact.

The Water Man (2020)

dir. David Oyelowo

The strange thing about The Water Man isn’t that somewhere in there, there’s a half-decent film. It’s more that somewhere in there, there are several different half-decent films. There’s a half-decent coming-of-age movie about a boy facing his understanding of mortality. There’s a half-decent movie about the boy exploring his life and emotions through his burgeoning love of designing graphic novels. There’s a half-decent fantasy romp where an outcast boy meets an outcast girl and they embark on an adventure fueled by their collective imagination. There’s a half-decent exploration of the much-whispered about Water Man, and whether he is a myth or a reality. There’s a half-decent domestic family drama as a couple struggles to keep their family together in the face of tragedy. The problem is, all these elements do not come together to make a half-decent film, with The Water Man’s tone and focus shifting so often and so erratically that it’s never possible to feel immersed. Nothing is really explained or justified, it’s simply a series of vaguely connected events which go on for a while then just stop. With acting, producing and directing credits, all signs point to this having been a passion project for David Oyelowo, except the final product doesn’t contain much discernible passion at all.

Old (2021)

dir. M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night Shyamalan was having a half-decent run in his partnership with Universal Pictures, releasing the likes of The Visit, Split, and Glass – hardly groundbreaking, but generally well-received. No wonder Old had to come along to mess it all up. The premise is peak Shyamalan madness: a beach makes people old. That is, tragically, the crux of it. An assortment of merry holidaymakers go to a beach, and start ageing rapidly. They cannot just leave the beach, because something something something. There’s a trademark final-act Shyamalan twist, but the reveal’s impact is somewhat hindered by a) it being heavily indicated at several points through the movie, entirely removing the surprise of it, and b) it making no sense whatsoever to begin with. A lot of Old makes no sense whatsoever – one character dies due to the time quickly passing, and them receiving no nurturing, food or attention in the few minutes equating several years, in order to sustain their life. Why doesn’t this lack of care affect the other characters, who are ageing at the same rate, and also not eating, drinking, or resting? No idea, it’s never explained. This is all quite aside from the abject weirdness of certain parts, like toddlers growing into horny teenagers and acting on their hormone-driven impulses, despite still only technically being toddlers. Old is an entertaining explosion of Shyamalan mayhem, and predictably contains none of the gravitas or incisive social commentary its creator seems to think it does.

The King’s Daughter (2022)

dir. Sean McNamara

The King’s Daughter is ostensibly based on beloved 1997 fantasy novel The Moon and the Sun, but it’s extremely difficult to place the two in the same regard. The book, for example, delved into immersive plotlines to forage meaningful character arcs and relationships. Meanwhile, the film portrays the extent of our heroine Marie-Josèphe’s (Kaya Scodelario) complexity by letting her clumsily fall into a fountain, in between her general dead-eyed staring. The book portrays its mysterious sea creature as intelligent and sympathetic; the film slaps some atrocious CGI on Fan Bingbing and shows her zipping round and round in the water. In the book, the setting and details feel true to 17th century France, while the movie’s patchy special effects, eye-wateringly bright cinematography, and shoddy fragmented costuming make it feel like it’s set in the future. Most tellingly, in the book, Marie-Josèphe isn’t even the king’s daughter – the film layered on this detail, granting it title-worthy importance, even though it adds precisely nothing except confusion and, sometimes, unease. Like moments of dancing or pseudo-flirting when Marie-Josèphe’s relationship with the king seems a little too close. How this film garnered a high profile cast including the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Pablo Schreiber and Rachel Griffiths is anyone’s guess, but the eight year gap between production and release shows a deeply flawed process yields a deeply flawed result.

Basmati Blues (2017)

dir. Danny Baron

When an American rom-com musical elects to call itself Basmati Blues, there’s no pretending it’s going to be anything other than insipid racist garbage. Perhaps there’s a noble intent somewhere in there to emulate the spectacle and glamour of Bollywood, but Basmati Blues trades in any mere hope of spectacle or glamour for relentless mundanity and unpleasantness. Our heroine Linda (Brie Larson, for some reason) is journeying to India to sell a new type of self-propagating rice on behalf of her corporate overlords, completely damning the local farmers in the process. It’s assumed that poor Linda is but an unwitting pawn in a bigger, crueler game – until it’s made abundantly clear that she knows she’s eviscerating a community and she’s absolutely fine with it. Her burgeoning love story with local man Rajit (Utkarsh Ambudkar) is consequently founded on little but deceit, manipulation, and general abrasive bickering. Basmati Blues is supposed to be a musical, but the songs are unbelievably tuneless and uninspired. “But love is blind / And I don’t mind / If we fumble in the dark / Two love songs / One big foolish heart”, bleats one particularly idiotic duet. Of course, the movie’s portrayal of India is condescending at best, irredeemably offensive at worst; the same idiotic duet croons “If I had a hundred arms…” because the movie enjoys doubling down on its fundamental premise that Indians are weird and their gods are weird. No wonder Linda merrily subscribes to the Emily in Paris model of not bothering to learn any shred of the customs or languages of the place she’s inhabiting for an extended period of time. There is no blues music in Basmati Blues, so the title is unfathomable – unless it’s supposed to be indicative of the audience’s mental state after watching such an egregious mess.

The Possession of Hannah Grace / Cadaver (2018)

dir. Diederik van Rooijen

The worst thing about The Possession of Hannah Grace isn’t its cheap scares. Yes, the movie primarily deals in shrieks and underwhelming body horror more likely to provoke shouts of laughter than of terror – but this isn’t the worst thing. And the worst thing about it isn’t its ill-defined, boring characters. Our protagonist, a plucky young former policewoman who goes to work in a morgue, leaves so little an impact that her supposed pill addiction is forgotten as soon as it’s revealed – but this isn’t the worst thing. And the worst thing about it isn’t its awful performances. Some actors ostensibly put in next-to-no effort, coming across stilted and wooden, while others overact so much that you’d think their popping eyes and flailing limbs constitute the story’s possessed individual, rather than the eponymous cadaver – but this isn’t the worst thing. No, the worst thing about The Possession of Hannah Grace is its reveal of why Hannah Grace was possessed. The film is emphatic that it wasn’t mere chance or coincidence, but that Hannah was in such a depressed state that the preying demon was able to take advantage of her. In other words: don’t want to get possessed by a murderous, malignant demon? Well then, better not get depressed! It’s so insulting to sufferers of mental health conditions that it’s a wonder so many people – actors, crew, producers – read the script and gave it a pass. The worst thing about The Possession of Hannah Grace takes it from being merely bad and renders it downright offensive.

Christmas is Cancelled (2021)

dir. Prarthana Mohan

In Christmas is Cancelled, twenty-something-year-old Emma is appalled to discover her fifty-something-year-old widower father Jack has been dating her former neighbour, high school classmate and “frenemy”, twenty-something-year-old Brandy. Rather than treating Emma’s shock with sensitivity and patience, Jack and Brandy instead practically bludgeon her over the head with this new state of affairs, by forcing her to participate in their Christmas plans while Brandy casually does such things as blithely wearing Emma’s dead mother’s apron. The movie somehow manages to get even worse from this already grotesque premise. The humour falls flat every single time, whether it’s derived from stupid costumes or a disturbing lack thereof as Jack tears off his shirt for an awkward and entirely unnecessary bar brawl. Not a single character is likeable – certainly not the self-involved Jack or Brandy, while Emma and her best friend’s quippy, forced dialogue makes them seem less like real people and more like lazy SNL caricatures of millennials. Emma is treated like she’s worth nothing, yet it’s hard to feel bad for her when she goes ahead and treats her own love interest like a lapdog who only exists to be used and manipulated for her own gain. There is no heart or soul to Christmas is Cancelled, no loving or giving – just selfishness and bitterness galore.

The Haunting (1999)

dir. Jan de Bont

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has proved itself successful fodder for screen adaptations, from the 1963 movie The Haunting through to the 2018 TV series The Haunting of Hill House. Unfortunately, 1999’s cinematic iteration managed to produce the antithesis of these retellings: it is devoid of likeable characters, devoid of scares, and devoid of anything which makes much sense at all. In all versions, a group of people are brought together to Hill House; for some reason 1999’s The Haunting decides that paranormal investigator Dr Marrow (Liam Neeson) has bamboozled his guests into attending by claiming it’s a sleep study, and not to investigate the paranormal. This change contributes nothing, and is especially aggravating because the film clearly shows such events as pianos attacking people and ghosts emerging from net curtains; how the majority of the characters can still blindly think it’s a mere sleep study is anybody’s guess. The characters themselves never rise beyond caricature: Nell (Lili Taylor) is wan, shy and awkward; Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is flamboyant and so overtly flirtatious she may as well scream “I’m bisexual!” in every scene she’s in; and Luke (Owen Wilson) primarily spends his scenes wide-eyed and slack-jawed. The terrible CGI only accentuates that The Haunting is a cheap attempt to tell a story as lazily as possible by sacrificing all hints of depth.

Father Christmas is Back (2021)

dir. Philippe Martinez and Mick Davis

Classic Christmas films, from It’s a Wonderful Life to Home Alone, are centred around the joy and warmth of family. After all, Christmas is supposed to be a time of giving, goodwill, and love. So why Father Christmas is Back decided to base a Christmas film around the most obnoxious, selfish, shrill, manipulative, deceitful and downright irritating family in existence is a mystery surely lost to the ages. Kelsey Grammer, clearly slowly killing his career before it can be offed once and for all by the Frasier reboot, plays the titular father. He brings his trophy girlfriend to meet his family – four sisters, each a more poorly sketched stereotype than the last (the uptight one! The rebellious one! The shallow one! The one who talks about nothing except The Beatles!), plus their mother, the titular father’s brother, and various romantic interests and children in tow. It is as though Father Christmas is Back specifically tried to suck out any chance of liking or respecting a single character. They lie, they cheat, they steal, they fly into unwarranted rages, they lounge around their impossibly huge castle-mansion and moan about how difficult life is, and then they all sing along and pub karaoke and wish each other a merry Christmas. Apparently the most cruel and barbaric emotional treatment can be forgiven if you don a Christmas jumper and go to the school nativity play. Indeed, the only halfway-likeable character is the sweet, enthusiastic trophy girlfriend, so naturally she’s subjected to mocking and undermining at every turn. Father Christmas is Back is an insult to Christmas, an insult to comedy, and an insult to humanity in general.

The Core (2003)

dir. Jon Amiel

The premise of The Core is so profoundly stupid that it’s hard not to laugh. The liquid outer core of the Earth has stopped spinning, so a team of hero scientists needs to drill down to the centre of the planet and set off some nuclear bombs to restore rotation. Incredibly convenient plot elements include the adverse impact of the ceased rotation to only affect a few places sometimes, while our heroes can continue their very important science unimpeded, almost as if there’s not actually an impending disaster at all. Of course our heroes are American, with no other country in The Core able to even discern what the problem is, let alone contribute to a solution. The solution is based on “unobtanium”, which in this movie signifies a material which is impervious to the heat at the centre of the Earth. So a couple of our intrepid scientists even manage to return home at the end. Even allowing for significant suspension of disbelief, The Core doesn’t even bother to do the barest research before plunging into insanity – for example, the team is logged as having travelled over 2,000 miles into the planet to reach the core, even though the distance between the Earth’s surface and its core is 1,800 miles. The Core is utterly stupid from start to finish, but with a premise like that, it was always going to be.

Ma (2019)

dir. Tate Taylor

Ma was always advertised as a film where a group of teenagers decide to party out in a woman’s basement, only for the woman to barricade them in and torment them. As a premise, this genuinely isn’t bad. The claustrophobic setting of the basement adds to the dread, only compounded by the characters’ regret – of course they must be desperately wishing they’d never come in the basement. Except, the problem with Ma is that it’s drawn out over a much longer and frankly weirder story, over which the teenagers and their friends come and go from Ma’s abode, several times over, even returning when she’s done utterly insane things like forcing a teenager to strip at gunpoint. It is extremely difficult to sympathise with these teenagers when they keep willingly returning to spend time with a demonstrably unhinged, violent person. Despite flashbacks to her childhood where she’s bullied and sexually abused, it’s also extremely difficult to sympathise with the Ma character, considering she, you know, forces teenagers to strip at gunpoint. Not to mention the casual drugging and Munchausen by proxy. The whole story is very tired – it’s obvious from the get-go that the teenagers’ parents were Ma’s school contemporaries, so their involvement in her bullying is far from a shock. Whether the conclusion is meant to be a kind of bittersweet tragedy is up for debate, but mostly it just continues the head-scratching and shrugging shoulders provoked by the rest of the movie.

Love Hard (2021)

dir. Hernán Jiménez

Churning out insipid rom-coms is practically a compulsion for Netflix, so the existence of Love Hard comes as no surprise. A woman on the west coast matches with a man on the east coast in a dating app, only to spontaneously visit him and learn he looks nothing like he claimed. And why shouldn’t catfishing, deceit and manipulation be the foundation of an enduring romance? As the two pretend to be a couple to fool his family, a real affection grows. Of course she finds herself slowly falling irrevocably for the man, even though he’s not the handsome heartthrob he claimed (he still looks absolutely fine, he just dresses like a teenager with a stupid haircut). Thus his lies are excused as a bumbling nerdy mistake, rather than the kind of tactics which routinely lead to abuse, rape, and murder in real life. Same old, same old, but with dating apps thrown in to make it appear modern.

Next (2007)

dir. Lee Tamahori

Next is an extremely difficult film to discuss. Not because it’s remotely complicated, although the film oozes self-importance over its own convoluted premise. Nicolas Cage plays a magician who can see a few minutes into his own future, although he acknowledges any future he sees cannot happen because he’s seen it, and also being around his love interest played by Jessica Biel lets him see further into the future than just a few minutes, and also for some reason the FBI firmly believe this magician is their key in fighting an impending nuclear threat. No, despite this twisting and turning and self-contradicting narrative, the film itself is not remotely complicated at all. The reason Next is difficult to talk about is because its ending is so cheap, so smug, so insulting, that it’s near impossible to discuss the movie without entering a fit of blind rage. No audience could ever see this film and feel satisfied or impressed. It is the absolute peak definition of a movie where nothing of substance happens – genuinely, nothing. An infuriating experience.