My Top 10 WORST Movies of 2015!

Well, it's that time of year again, the time to wipe the cinematic bird shit off the windshield of my mind. In 2015, I actively avoided a lot of junk, so you won't see any mentions of Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, Hot Pursuit, or Fifty Shades of Grey. However, you can't dodge 'em all. So, as part of my tradition, the first part of my annual retrospective begins, with my top 10 WORST movies of 2015!

A Few Films For Whom I Spared the Axe:
- Poltergeist
- Insidious: Chapter 3
- Chappie
- '71
- The Transporter Refueled

10) Project Almanac: This was last January's addition to the "_____-crossed-with-found-footage" genre. For a few years, horror was the only one paired with the style, but if it's easy to make and profit's all but guaranteed, why not spread the love?

Because the result is a time travel picture that's riddled not only with lazily-written archetypes and plot, but now features the additional hurdle of explaining why a camera is filming EVERYTHING.

Three teens (the smart one, the crude one, and the minority) build a time machine out of Xbox parts and partake in the wish fulfillment one expects: they get rich, get the girl, fight bullies, etc. Problem is, this only fills up twenty minutes, so in the span of a few scenes, the stakes go from "Can I date the girl?" to "Can I stop the implosion of the space-time continuum?" so fast, it causes whiplash. The latter half of this film is so sloppily laden with cliches and rip-offs from other films, that by the end, if only to prevent a migraine, I gave up trying to understand, and settled for one of the movie's twenty explanations that felt familiar. Familiar is not a synonym for satisfying.

9) The Last Witch Hunter: Didn't this kind of movie die in the mid-2000's? With Constantine, Van Helsing, and the Mummy series? Let's take an action hero and have him save the world from some poorly CGI'd supernatural forces - rinse, wash, and repeat. Welcome to The Last Witch Hunter.

I feel this film's running on autopilot, but Vin Diesel isn't. He genuinely seems excited to play this character, to swing around a fire sword and be the hero who punches rock spiders in the face; it wouldn't surprise me if Vin Diesel was the product of a Big-style wish, where he was twelve and wished to be a 30-year-old muscleman. The glee and exuberance he brings to this otherwise hackneyed, stale product is the film's only source of light.

Otherwise, there are one-liners, magic fights, a hot girl, some shallow backstory involving the death of family, a fish-out-of-water element; I've seen these things before, and the fact that Michael Caine is involved only cements the thought further in my mind that paychecks needed to be made, and the thought process behind it was nigh-bankrupt.

8) Max: What do you get when you cross the director of Remember the Titans and the writer of Rambo III? A heartwarming story about a boy, his PTSD-ridden dog, and an arms-smuggling cartel of course! Doesn't that sound like the greatest of family-friendly entertainment?

Max is a maddeningly stupid film with good intentions. It's important to recognize the work dogs in the military do, serving as scouts and trackers. The film's initial scenes, where Max helps his handler's troop sniff out weapons, being thrust into battle, laden with explosions and all sorts of gunfire, is hard to watch. It helps us understand the kind of trauma Max undergoes from war, especially when his handler dies.

If the film were focused solely on the relationship between the handler's brother and dog, each dealing with their grief and anxiety, the movie could turn out a touching drama. However, Max feels the need to waste time with a pointless love interest, a racist Mexican stereotype, and a forced '80s-era action subplot, masqueraded behind patriotic iconography and atmosphere, because apparently, the filmmakers think we'll find it impossible to criticize anything with an American flag on it.

It's in the last thirty minutes the film gets ridiculous, as Max and the boy take on cartel thugs (who happen to have their own Rottweilers, because the playing field needs to be even). The characters make the dumbest tactical decisions, not least of which being the boy's mom, who just lets he and his friends bike off alone into the forest without any police support. This latter conflict is completely unnecessary, and reeks of a screenwriter who lacks the confidence to let the strength of the drama play out naturally.

Max came out the same weekend as Ted 2, made in an attempt to grab all the box office from the anti-Ted crowd. It's a film that feels manipulative, tugging at heartstrings and using key images of patriotism, the Marines, and right-wing values in order to appease its market share, even if the story is lazily written and executed. War dogs don't deserve this kind of tribute.

7) Taken 3: The budget for Taken 3 was around $48 million. $20 million went to Liam Neeson. Say what you want about the film, the man knows how to get paid.

Taken 3 reminds me of a short film I made for a class sophomore year, where I showed a character going up the stairs in two steps - from the floor to the stair and the stair to the second floor. In my mind, I had to use two cuts to convey one motion. I didn't give my audience enough credit to understand what I meant; I was in high school and had never made a film. So why does Olivier Megaton, director of Taken 2, Colombiana, and Transporter 3, films produced for commercial release, with million-dollar budgets, think he can get away with using SEVEN cuts to show Liam Neeson jumping a fence?

This is the worst-directed action film I have ever seen, with camerawork that makes it look like the operator's undergoing a gang initiation, lifeless fight sequences, and a cast who's making it too apparent they're there to collect a paycheck. There's a highway chase that's filmed so incomprehensibly, I let the seizure of 18-wheelers and sports car squeals wash over me, without any attempt to make sense of it. By the end, my friend had a migraine.

It bodes worse for Taken 3 that not four months had passed before Run All Night, the gruff, hard "R" mafia/cop chase flick brought Neeson back to form. That film is no masterpiece, but he shows more life, personality, and dirty charm than in both Taken sequels combined. And the best part is the camera stays still.


6) Jupiter Ascending: February's Jupiter Ascending is an anti-masterpiece, an infinitely ambitious, completely misguided, cosmically beautiful and bloated mess of a film. Made on a $176 million budget and grossing only $47 million, this was 2015's first truly colossal bomb.

Honestly, there's a soft spot in my heart for it, because the movie is directed by the Wachowskis (The Matrix), so the production design, costuming, makeup, and visual effects (as far as backgrounds go), are top notch. This duo is so good at building a world, showing an audience something that's both inspired by science fiction of the past, but done in a completely new way. The film has a gloss that feels right at home with what would be something like a soap opera set in space.

Unfortunately, that soap opera element is what plagues Jupiter Ascending. For all intents and purposes, this is a $176 million version of Dallas set in space. The basic plot involves Mary Sue - I mean, Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) - being whisked from alien bounty hunter to alien half-wolf/half-human hero (Channing Tatum) as she learns she's the genetic owner of a load of planets (including Earth) and star systems in the galaxy. That's weird, but not too hard to follow...until you add in three siblings and their subplots involving each of their attempts to swindle, steal, or otherwise influence Jupiter to give them her planets. There's a lot of space law mumbo-jumbo (even a scene set in this world's version of the DMV), erratically dorky metaphors (all of Earth's bees surround her in a protective cloud armor because bees can, ya know, sense royalty), and some of the most cringe-worthy and yet, wholly wonderfully quotable lines of the decade.

Had this film been trimmed down half an hour and the plot kept relatively simple, I could recommend this as a great movie to riff, but in a packed theater on a Friday night, I found myself bored, confused, and eventually annoyed. Eddie Redmayne, mere weeks before he would win the Best Actor Oscar for The Theory of Everything, gives a performance that suggests the Wachowskis slipped quaaludes and speed in his drinks before every scene; he goes from an effeminate cooing lull to a psychotic rage in the snap of a finger. Needless to say, he's the best part of the movie - a dash of goofiness in a film that takes itself too seriously.


5) Youth: Welcome back, Michael Caine, to your second inclusion on the list. This choice may be my greatest point of contention with the general populace, because Rotten Tomatoes gives this a 75%, the film's earned Golden Globes and Palme D'Or nominations, in a film that thoroughly reeks of pretension and apathy.

Caine plays a retired composer on vacation with his daughter (Rachel Weisz) at a Swiss mountain resort. Along with Caine is his best friend, an auteur director player by Harvey Keitel, who's working with his team of twenty-somethings on the last draft of his "testament", his legacy project. They come across a cast of strange characters, including a mustachioed actor known only for voicing a robot (Paul Dano), a stupidly-rich, rotund South American (Roly Serrano), and an always-horny, Just Dance-playing massuese (Luna Zimic Mijovic).

The movie slugs around aimlessly, as Caine and Keitel engage in conversations about how life isn't what it used to be, artists search for the truth, and music requires not experience or understanding to appreciate it. None of these mini think pieces feel connected, and are inter-cut with odd musical performances or abstract transitions, filled with gorgeously composed shots - "a tale...full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

In reflection, I'm grasping at straws to find how each person's story and adventure relates back to youth, but in the grand scheme, the film is such an ordeal to watch, that when a scene featuring Caine and Keitel spying on an elderly couple having sex in the forest appears...what the hell do you even say to that?


4) Scouts' Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: The night my friends and I went to go see Scouts' Guide, the theater I work at wasn't playing it, so I couldn't get in for free. That night, I spent $33 on three tickets for me, my girlfriend, and friend. I'm pretty sure this was the worst financial decision I've ever made.

Scouts is an idiotic film, and if you enjoy such winning jokes as taking selfies with a topless zombie cop, or an undead Cloris Leachman licking a teenage anus, you may be able to nestle comfortably in its chokehold of stupidity. The film was sold as a balls-to-the-wall goofy horror-comedy, where the main characters' scouting skills would be put to perfect use against the zombies, full of D.I.Y. weaponry. Sadly, this only takes up about ten minutes of the climax. Watching the boys kick ass is fun, when the cinematography is intelligible, a feat achieved about 30% of the time. Devoid of the cheerful slapstick featured in something like Evil Dead II, this film relies on its characters: vapid, disgusting, misogynistic stereotypes of millenials.

As a zombie film, it breaks its already arbitrary rules to create an unconvincing invasion. As a comedy, the jokes fall flat, when they don't appeal to anyone who finds genitalia the apex of humor. The horror is non-existent, left only to a smattering of jumpscares. When the film tries to have a heart and be earnest about friendship, it's awkward, because the bulk of the film is spent with characters who could really give a rat's ass about each other. As Paramount heavily promoted the trailer in the middle of the ending credits of Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, the true intentions for Scouts' Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse are revealed: to make a buck - quick, cheap, and effortless.

3) Unfriended: Any novelty that Unfriended has will die within the next three years. With the quickening pace of technology, the demise of a program like Skype, in favor of some hologram or virtual reality communication simulator is all but certain. So, if a movie based entirely on watching someone's computer screen, navigating between Skype, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube is going to be old news in a couple years, the only thing that could propel Unfriended into long-term relevance is its quality as a movie - characters, plot, cinematography, dialogue, etc.

There's not a chance in hell.

Unfriended director Levan Gabriadze and writer Nelson Greaves take inspiration from the kind of film criticism that dismissed Friday the 13th as a misanthropic youth's torture porn. A horror audience, in their minds, is only there to revel in murder, playing out high school revenge fantasies, so in order to really get a crowd worked up, Gabriadze and Greaves make their characters petty, loathsome, and obnoxious. They reduce teenagers to hormonal sociopaths, who, when faced with the prospect of death, will place more attention on eating-disorder rumors and "Never Have I Ever" than the creepy Skype ghost killing off their friends one by one.

It's not like awful teenagers in horror movies are uncommon, though I must admit, these stereotypes have gotten more extreme since the films of the '80s. Where Unfriended steps out of "obnoxious" and into "insulting" is when it tries to interject an anti-bullying message. The awful teens are getting their fair dose of karma, and at the end, it looks as if the last person standing will have to bear the weight and scope of the consequences, stemming off of a stupid and vicious joke.

Or the ghost will just lash out at the screen and kill them. The end.

To trade out an ending, that while not executed effectively, belies the promise of some sense of morality, for a cheap scare; to trade out significant commentary about cyber-bullying, an act which serves as one of the motives for the approximately 4,600 suicides of youth aged between 10 and 24 (TEN YEARS OLD), for a ten-second spook, is morally condemning.

And the fact it sits at a "fresh" 62% on Rotten Tomatoes sickens me.

2) Love the Coopers: I had a tough time debating between this and my #1 choice; I'll tease the next spot with this - I never thought I would leave a movie theater as angry throughout the latter half of 2015 as I did leaving the next film in the list. Love the Coopers missed being the year's worst by the skin of its ass.

At face value, this should've been something I loved. For those who don't know, my favorite movie is A Christmas Story. In particular, I'm a fan of its realistic portrayal of all sorts of people's sentiments about the holiday - good, bad, and even the "Bah, humbug!" I'm also just a sucker for Christmas movies in general; I love the wintry atmosphere and even with a crude or adult-oriented flick like Bad Santa, the heart and joy of the holiday manages to squeak out. I enjoy movies based around an ensemble: Birdman, Silver Linings Playbook, Love Actually, Trumbo, Reservoir Dogs, 12 Angry Men, Valentine's Day. Damn it, I get a kick out of freakin' VALENTINE'S DAY, a kitschy, star-studded holiday movie. Why do I hate Love the Coopers so much?

After thinking about it in bursts of fury for a couple months, I think the film is indecisive on what it wants to be. It tries to present Christmas in the way all kinds of people think about it, but its characters are all offensive, punchable stereotypes: Olivia Munn is an alcoholic failed writer who demonizes a soldier, without provocation, for his Christian and Republican beliefs; Marisa Tomei squawks and chatters in the back of Anthony Mackie's cop car as a woman whose petty jealousy towards her sister leads her to steal a brooch and walk out the store with it in her mouth; the final straw to break John Goodman's forty-year marriage to Diane Keaton is their inability to take a safari trip to Africa (oh, boo-hoo). These characters aren't charming or funny, given any redeeming qualities to help me overlook their pathetic attitudes towards their families.

And I wouldn't have quite the problem I do if the film was meant as a complete lambaste on the fake smiles we give each other at the holiday table ever year, but in the last half-hour, the movie tries to go sincere, and it doesn't earn it. It doesn't matter how cute the resolution is; I had to sit through eighty minutes of people being absolutely awful to each other. I'm just saying, if you punch me in the face, a candy cane won't make it any better. Love the Coopers was an absolute slog to sit through; luckily, I got to see Spotlight afterwards, and all was right with the world.

1) The Gallows: If you've been reading my work since July, any time I make reference to horror, I use this film as a benchmark. In a strange admission, I have to thank this movie for giving a name to my pain, an example of everything that is wrong with this genre. The Gallows is moronic like Scouts and maddening like Unfriended, but the contempt it holds for an audience condemns it further, not as just a failure, but rather an affront to all moviegoers.

A ghost haunts a high school; stupid teens are rummaging around at night. Add some found-footage and a heap of jack-in-the-box jumps at the screen, and you've got a 2000's-era scary movie. However, The Gallows adds Ryan.

Ryan (Ryan Shoos) is a repugnant, morally bankrupt bully, picking on "geeks" like it's the '80s, with the most infuriating, snide, crackling whine in recorded history (if Whitey's from Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights is the 8th circle of Hell, Ryan's is the 10th). He is the person the movie follows for 80% of the running time, and we also have the misfortune of having him as our camera operator. My blood is about to evaporate.

The ghost's motive makes no sense; neither does our heroes' (I feel dirty writing that) solution. It doesn't take a master of metaphysics to realize correlation doesn't equal causation - just because the ghost kills using the gallows doesn't mean it's a good idea to go over there and abandon the open door to freedom. And with that move, the movie spits in our faces, mocking us by acknowledging their writing is shoddy and refusing to fix our suspension of disbelief; they don't care about the story, but rather the width of their wallets.

What hurts me the most about The Gallows is that in 2015, like every year, there were imaginative films, like Room, Turbo Kid, It Follows, and Ex Machina, who received little to nothing in the way of support from major production companies or distributors. The Gallows was released by New Line Cinema, distributed by Warner Bros.

I bring this up to urge you all: vote with your wallets. If you love a movie, don't pirate it. Go to the theater and enjoy an unique experience. When we support art, and support can be anything from sales to time to promotion, the business side takes notice, and gives us more of what we want. When we pay to see crap, crap is what we get; isn't that common sense? Show business is a two-way street, so let's make sure ours is clean before we start complaining.

Thank you all for reading throughout this last year; I'm the Man Without a Plan, more appreciative of anyone who's stuck around to the end of this than anyone will truly ever know, signing off.