Normally my Worst Ten movies lists will all be truly terrible movies, but that’s when I see 100 titles a year. For 2019, but my count is currently at 62, and I avoided a lot of movies I was iffy on. So I didn’t see a lot of truly bad movies. For instance, I never saw such universally panned titles as Replicas, Miss Bala, Hellboy, The Intruder, Poms, Brightburn, Shaft, Stuber, The Kitchen, The Goldfinch, Rambo: Last Blood, Jexi, Gemini Man, Playing with Fire, Charlie’s Angels, Playmobil, Black Christmas, or Cats.
So of what I have seen, these are the 53rd to 62nd best I’ve seen, i.e. the Ten Worst:
10. GLASS - I loved Unbreakable, I liked Split, and I had high hopes this would work. And I really enjoyed the first half or so. But man, that third act.. It became disjointed and self-indulgent the way the worst of M. Night Shyamalan can. He should have asked for another $10 million for his budget so he could have had a better ending. One should not leave a movie going "Man, I really wanted to like it..."
9. CHILD’S PLAY - It’s nice and grisly, but it also doesn’t quite capture the campy charm of the original. Instead of demonic possession involved, Chucky is a doll with an AI chip that goes haywire. Thing is, in the beginning Chucky doesn’t look like a doll any sane person would buy.
8. UNDER THE SILVER LAKE - There’s undeniable talent behind this movie written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, who made It Follows. It’s a swooping David Lynch type mystery, with strange characters, off-kilter angles, and weird stuff that happens for no reason and is never eluded to again. At the center is Sam (Andrew Garfield), a slacker who gets a crush on a neighbor girl who promptly disappears. The finale is a letdown, and even then it doesn’t wrap up half of what’s going on. So if this is all it was, why is it 2 hours and 19 minutes long?
7. ANNABELLE COME HOME - Not as bad as the original Annabelle, but not as good as Annabelle: Creation, this is another Conjuring spinoff where the jump scares all feel the same. And with this, we go for almost an hour before it even tries to be scary. I’ll admit I’d enjoy a Ferry Man spinoff, but I also thought I’d like a Nun spinoff, and that was awful.
6. DARK PHOENIX - The final X-Men movie (with this cast) goes out not with a bang but with a whimper. I loved First Class, liked Days of Future Past, and found Apocalypse to be meh, and this is the weakest of the four. It centers on Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), and it redoes the Dark Phoenix plot that X-Men: Last Stand tried. Also weirdly, this takes place in the 1990’s, so Xavier and Magneto are supposed to be just 5-6 year away from looking like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, but they haven’t aged much.
5. CAPTIVE STATE - Intriguing premise poorly executed. Aliens have occupied the Earth, and they demand allegiance in thought. The movie is mostly about a possible resistance against them, but when we got to the last five minutes, I realized that’s what the halfway mark should have been instead of most of the earlier stuff we wasted our time on.
4. GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS - Most of the original cast didn’t return, and this has one of the lamest terrorist motivations yet. They want to unleash all of the titans to destroy the vast majority of humanity in order to… save humanity? Bradley Whitford gets the thankless role as the sarcastic guy who’s actually in charge of giving tons of expository dialogue, Kyle Chandler is in permanent grimace mode, and while some of the titans’ special effects are cool, we don’t care about the characters.
3. THE DIRT - Since we’re supposed to treat Netflix like real movies…. This Motley Crue biopic is ultimately a paint-by-numbers lazy approach to the music band biopic formula. It’s cool to see Game of Thrones’ Iwan Rheon (Ramsay) as Mick Mars, Machine Gun Kelly as Tommy Lee, etc., but it’s a really a relay of “this happened, then this happened, then this happened” while subplots like Lee’s domestic violence problems or Vince Neil’s daughter dying barely get mentioned so as to avoid emotional impact. We’re left wondering why Crue was ever a big deal. Or were they even?
2. THE PRODIGY - Cliched horror movie that betrays its own logic. It’s about a boy possessed by a serial killer, but it takes everyone else in the movie an hour to catch up to this while the audience is shown this in the beginning.
1. SERENITY - The movie sets up itself as a potboiler, a thriller about an old flame (Anne Hathaway) who’s come back into the life of her fisherman ex-husband (Matthew McConaughey) with a favor to ask - that he kills her current husband (Jason Clarke) and makes it look like an accident. The first half of the movie is about this… and then it changes into a completely different movie that feels like a cheat. It’s a crazy twist that might have worked in the final five minutes of a movie, but to do it halfway through, we get 45 minutes to contemplate how stupid this is.
