There’s a horror film (“The Mouse Trap”) on our worst list this year. No surprise there; a lot of contemporary horror is bottom of the barrel. Yet it strikes us that a worst movies of the year roster is always, on some level, a list of horror films — movies that aren’t just mediocre or even flat-out bad. No, we’re talking movies that can horrify you with their ineptitude and tedium, films that leave you squirming in your seat, that take you into a dark hole of unwatchability. There are critical standards that deem a film a contender to be on this list. Here are the 10 that most spectacularly made the (failing) grade.
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Owen Gleiberman’s 5 Worst Films
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1. Poolman
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection
Even if you’re a fan of Chris Pine, you may stare slack-jawed at this absurdist disaster of an L.A. noir, which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in. He plays a frowsy, long-haired pool cleaner who’s sort of like the Dude, except he’s a Dude whose brains are leaking out his ears. Pine doesn’t stage scenes, exactly. It’s all dithering half-jokes and wispy warped asides, wrapped around a conspiracy plot that has the same relation to “Chinatown” that boxed wine has to Chateau Lafite Rothschild.
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2. Rumours
Image Credit: Courtesy of Bleecker Street
There have always been critical darlings, but then there’s that rare category of film directors who are treated as aesthetic saints. The whimsical hermetic Canadian experimental cinephile prankster Guy Maddin is one of them. True confession: I cannot stand his films. But this one (codirected by Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson), in which a group of world leaders, led by Cate Blanchett as some sort of haughty Angela Merkel knockoff, meet at the G7 summit and then get lost in the woods, where they wind up talking, talking, talking in the most phantasmagorically dull way, is a political “satire” that turns into top-heavy satirical torture.
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3. Reagan
Image Credit: Showbiz Direct /Courtesy Everett Collection
Released just in time to grease the wheels for Trump’s victory, this schlock Ronald Reagan biopic was a hit in theaters, playing to an audience of make-TV-movies-bad-again nostalgists. Dennis Quaid, one twinkly grin and shambling “way-ll” after another, plays Reagan as the hero of a fairy tale. For the entire film, he’s driven by exactly one issue — fighting Communism — and the movie, cutting historical corners right and left, turns him into the ranch-hand superhero who singlehandedly defeated it. It makes a hash of everything else, to the point that even the Iran-Contra scandal is spun as the bad people who hated Ronnie trying to destroy him. It’s like watching an infomercial for an aw-shucks cult leader. The Reagan we see has here no inner conflict, and neither does the movie.
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4. The End
Image Credit: Courtesy of Thessaloniki Film Festival
Joshua Oppenheimer’s stultifying post-apocalyptic left-wing chamber-drama musical is set entirely in a bunker, and it’s the kind of movie that makes you feel like time itself has stopped. (Or maybe it’s just your watch.) Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton are the corrupt parents of a wealthy family who’ve been living, for 20 years, in the mockup of a luxe home embedded in an underground salt mine. They exchange pensées, airing their guilty treachery in song (it turns out that Shannon’s character, an energy honcho, may have been responsible for earth’s demise). A couple of the numbers are pretty, but most of them sound like Sondheim rejects, fueling the claustrophobic sensation that this is a movie with too much on its mind that somehow goes nowhere…for two hours and 28 minutes.
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5. Lisa Frankenstein
Image Credit: ©Focus Features/Courtesy Everet
Horror comedy that’s as flat as day-old soda is not a pretty thing. But what’s shockingly lame about this teen-girl-raises-boyfriend-from-the-dead camp jape, scripted by Diablo Cody, is that it’s predicated on the “God, the suburbs are hell!” pose of middle-class superiority that was already tired by the time of “Desperately Seeking Susan.” It’s an undead teenage slasher romance that feels like the world’s most needlessly overcomplicated “SNL” sketch.
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Peter Debruge’s 5 Worst Films
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1. Dogman
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection
While audiences are divided about “Emilía Perez,” Netflix’s culturally questionable celebration of a trans cartel boss, leave it to Luc Besson to demonstrate how such an audacious tightrope act could have turned out much, much worse. Embodying the lead role of a cross-dressing, wheelchair-using antihero who can will street dogs to do his bidding, Caleb Landry Jones is one of the most fearless actors of his generation. But Besson’s third-rate “Joker” rip-off is ill-conceived on every level — a convoluted act of misplaced empathy in which a police psychologist struggles to tame a deeply traumatized outsider who was literally raised in a doghouse. “This is the work of an artist,” insists one character, who clearly saw a different movie than I did.
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2. The Mouse Trap
There must be an upside to beloved cultural icons entering the public domain after 95 years of corporate control. So far, all we’ve gotten is schlocky slasher movies from hack filmmakers looking to make a quick buck. This year, “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” got a sequel (and threats of an expanded “Poohniverse” involving Peter Pan, Bambi and Pinocchio in 2025), while a lazy group of Canadians shot a dreary horror movie about a dude who goes homicidal after watching “Steamboat Willie.” The film provides zero scares and countless questions, like why can he teleport, and why would anyone scream after seeing a guy in a Mickey Mouse mask?
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3. Not Another Church Movie
Haters gonna hate. Nineteen years after Tyler Perry’s clumsy “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” showed Hollywood he could make bank all by himself, the self-made media mogul has been churning out the same sermonizing sausage. That makes the cross-dressing comic (homophobically rechristened “Pherry” here) an easy target for envy and scorn, and yet, he deserves better than Johnny Mack’s crude, incompetent satire, which hectors everyone from Oprah to Judge Hatchett, squandering cameos from Jamie Foxx as God and Mickey Rourke as a sickly-looking Satan in a red cape and lingerie.
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4. Harold and the Purple Crayon
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sony
In Crockett Johnson’s picture book, a boy draws whatever comes to mind, conjuring adventures and imaginary friends out of thin air. Adapting it for the big screen could have gone a million creative directions (I had high hopes when Spike Jonze was attached many years back that we might get something akin to “Duck Amuck,” the Looney Tunes short where Daffy battles it out with a prankish pencil). Instead, Sony repeats the tired idea — recycled by everything from “Sonic” to “The Smurfs” — of bringing cartoon characters into the “real world,” translating adorable Harold into allergic-to-the-eyes Zachary Levi. Why is it that children’s movies so often preach to us about the importance of imagination, but when it comes to showing any, they come up bereft?
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5. Rebel Moon: Director’s Cut
Image Credit: Chris Strother/Netflix
Honestly, can you think of anything more gratuitous or unnecessary than a two-part “Star Wars” knockoff directed by pop-culture remix artist Zack Snyder? How about a bloodier (but weirdly sexless) six-hour director’s cut of that same movie. For all its supposedly visionary, wank-bank addition to the “Heavy Metal” genre of battle droids and scantily clad warrior babes, very little of the movie lingers in my memory (apart from a showdown with Jena Malone’s spider-like ogumo and the shredded “Game of Thrones” guy who travels the galaxy without ever needing a shirt). As I reported at the time: “we find Snyder attempting to out-imagine all the sci-fi minds who’ve come before, but ultimately limited by his fascination with boobies. It’s like watching an ambitious kid world-building with borrowed Legos.”
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