Top 10 Worst Movies Of All Time

Oh, hi, Mark!

I've been itching to do a blog on the worst movies of all time for quite a while now, but I felt like something was missing. I hadn't done enough research - sure, I've seen plenty of awful movies for the purpose of filling out a top 10 on the subject, but I felt like I can't do such a list while being true to myself as long as I had avoided a certain experience. I knew what had to be done. I knew what I had to do in order to feel experienced and prepared enough to do this list.

So, I finally watched Cats (2019). It would've felt wrong to write about the worst movies ever without seeing the already-iconic terrible film that had everyone talking last year. Now that I've seen it - did it make my top 10? Or are there even worse movies out there? Read the list below to find out!

Here are my dishonorable mentions: A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010), Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008), Moonraker (1979), Rage (2014), The Room (2003)

10. Date Movie (2006)

Generally, I don't find the parody movies by Jason Seltzer and Jason Friedberg to be as bad as most movie buffs do: the Scary Movie franchise is legitimately funny, Epic Movie has its moments while being very sloppy as a whole, even Superhero Movie is worth watching once for some of its laughs. But Date Movie is unforgivable.

The film forgets that it's supposed to parody a certain genre and its tropes - unlike the other Seltzer & Friedberg films, this one doesn't have any clever commentary on the genre it's spoofing. They could have done a lot with rom-com clichés, but instead they go insanely overboard with the spoof genre's typical crude and simple humor, to the backdrop of a barely explored romantic "story". The films that it chooses to spoof don't even make any sense - King Kong (1933)? Kill Bill (2003)? X2 - X-Men United (2003)? In a date movie parody?? Jesus, what a mess.

9. Planet Of The Apes (2001)

First of all, one of my blog's most avid readers is a huge Tim Burton fan and I don't want to ruin our friendship, so hear me out: Tim Burton is a fantastic director. I love his work on most of the stuff I've seen from him. This film, however, is a glaring exception in my book.

Even here, Burton does a fine job directing, and the makeup department does an impressive job. But when a film's substance is aggressively bad (in my opinion), visual accomplishments and production quality aren't enough to redeem it. I'm a big fan of the original Planet Of The Apes (1968) and (most of) its sequels, and this remake is just so insulting to the original. Nothing in the story really works - gone is the thought-provoking substance, memorable dialogue and intriguing culture of the original, replaced by a film that fails miserably when it tries to be similar and ends up feeling like a poor copy, while also failing when it tries to be different as it isn't different in any particularly interesting ways. Mark Wahlberg is an awesome actor, but he is stiff and unnatural in this role - undoubtedly due to a bad casting choice or a poor script. And don't get me started on the film's ending - it tries to one-up the original's iconic twist ending by going for something that makes zero sense and really frustrates a viewer like myself.

8. Eragon (2006)

Christopher Paolini's Eragon (2002) is an awesome fantasy novel. Stefen Fangmeier's cinematic adaptation takes the character and place names from the book, and then tries to be Lord Of The Rings for 104 minutes. Chaotically disregarding the plot and the best parts from the source material and turning them into a wide array of fantasy clichés, Eragon was a very disappointing film to watch. The book itself isn't exactly revolutionary, but it does have interesting original characters and settings. The film turns all of the characters into shallow archetypes, and uses the places and story events of the book as equally shallow backgrounds to what feels like a weirdly serious parody of the fantasy genre.

7. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012)

Now, in Twilight's defense, I haven't seen any of the other films in the franchise except for this last one, which obviously isn't the right way to watch this. While most of the reasons why I intensely dislike this film still stand, I'm sure I would've appreciated it a bit more if I had seen the previous movies instead of getting a summary of their events from my friends before seeing this one. So, I'm biased, yet I still wanted to include this film on my list, because I do consider it to be one of my least favorite movies for a multitude of reasons.

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart are skillful actors, but they come across as extremely wooden and poorly directed in this film. The film's overall aesthetic and atmosphere feels weirdly off-putting. The villains are laughably stereotypical, and the big twist close to the end is the exact antithesis of a payoff. I know that it's a bit unfair of me to criticize a film without knowing its full context, but then again, I disliked the film so much that it destroyed all of my motivation to watch any of the other Twilight films, and that says something.

6. Noah (2014)

No matter what your own religious views are, the tale of Noah's Ark is a very interesting story. It's also a short one - it would make for a great short film or TV movie. It does not make for a great over-2-hour film. The film essentially takes the key events of the Noah's Ark story, and fills in the blanks with a whole bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with making money with Hollywood clichés that feel totally out of place in this context. For devout Christians, this is insulting to their scripture, and for non-Christians who just like good movies, it's insulting to the art of storytelling and adaptations.

Between the weird rock monsters, the wide array of characters that either don't exist or are barely mentioned in the Bible, the terrible dialogue and the overall bleak and boring atmosphere, I didn't find really anything to enjoy in this mess of a film. Even the parts that could've been good (I was actually quite excited to see this film beforehand) were ruined by how much the film was dominated by bad writing and off-putting style choices.

5. Cats (2019)

Congratulations, this Jellicle musical made it to the top five!

Where to even start with this one...watching it was in a way an enjoyable experience, but that is one hundred per cent thanks to the company I watched it in and the amusement we got from how bad the film was. I haven't seen the original musical, but from what I've gathered, the original is the reason for my favorite part of the film (some of the songs are musically okay - yes, that's the best part of the entire movie) but also my least favorite part of the film (the "plot" being absolutely frustrating). Of course it could be that the plot works better on stage - all I can say is that it most definitely does not work on the silver screen. It's just a bunch of one-dimensional characters introducing themselves one by one, singing about the one trait they have, and then not doing anything for the rest of the film.

Also, the visual effects haunt me to this day. To be fair, creating cat-human hybrids that look natural in a film is a very hard task - but surely they could've done a better job than this? The characters just look so very wrong. And to think that this came from the guy who directed The King's Speech (2010).

4. Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach (1988)

No other film franchise has had as much of a systematic drop in quality with each film than Police Academy. The first one is a downright hilarious comedy classic. The second one is significantly sloppier, but features a lot of good humor and a satisfying final act. The third one is already a real mess, but still with a few moments of good comedy. The fourth one has one or two genuine laughs to the backdrop of an extremely lazy plot and many unfunny attempts at humor. And then there's this one - I haven't seen parts 6 or 7, because Assignment: Miami Beach was the final straw for me.

First of all, a big chunk of the iconic original cast had gotten the sense to metaphorically jump out the car before it runs off a cliff. Gone is Steve Guttenberg's Mahoney, gone is Bruce Mahler's Fackler, gone is Kim Cattrall's Thompson. The ones that are left, such as David Graf's Tackleberry and Bubba Smith's Hightower, have long overstayed their welcome - they were once hilarious characters, and now just tired actors doing the same jokes over and over again for their paycheck. I recall zero legitimately funny moments from this film - now that I think about it, I have no idea how I got all the way through it. I'm getting bored just thinking about the movie.

3. Home Alone 4 (2002)

Home Alone (1990) and Home Alone 2: Lost In New York (1992) were my absolute favorites during my childhood (to be honest, they still are: I watch one or the other every year around Christmas and they never fail to move me to tears of blissful childhood nostalgia). Home Alone 4 was my first (and worst) ever experience of bad sequels. When I saw it at the video rental store as a little kid I got excited and wanted to rent it for movie night with my dad, and my dad tried his best to talk me out of it - he had enough life experience to know that Home Alone 4 might not be a great film. But little Veikko loved the first two movies and couldn't imagine why the fourth one would be any different, and thus insisted on getting the film. Dad, if you're reading this - I really should've listened to you.

Even as a little kid I was able to tell that this was just a badly made movie. Everything felt so lazy and messy. After Macauly Culkin had left the franchise, well, they should've stopped making Home Alone movies, but instead they had done a third one with a different lead actor playing a different character. Then, inexplicably, Home Alone 4 is about the same character, Kevin McCallister, but played by a different actor? And one of the two villains from the original films returns even though he is played by a different actor? And this sequel to films that people love for a) the awesome booby traps and b) the feeling of Christmas magic has zero awesome booby traps and no magical Christmas atmosphere? I'll leave it at that since I'm getting a headache from thinking about this movie.

2. Sharkenstein (2006)

I'm a bit bitter towards a certain friend of mine who insisted we quit watching Birdemic: Shock And Terror* (2010) when I wanted to watch a bad movie for fun, but who later made me sit through this majestic piece of crap.

The Syfy channel has a whole subculture of cheap and terrible monster movies that have absolutely amazing titles - Piranhaconda (2012), Mega Shark Vs. Mecha Shark (2014), Lavalantula (2015) and its sequel 2 Lava 2 Lantula (2016) - you name it. The only one I've actually seen from start to finish is Sharkenstein, and it did an effective job in keeping me far away from the rest of Syfy's monster movie offerings.

It's the classic story, a tale as old as time, of scientists cloning Hitler's brain and imposing it on a shark who then goes on a rampage and kills a bunch of people while being called Sharkenstein. The acting is absolutely horrendous, only to be vastly outdone by the egregious quality of the CGI. The film's most memorable part is undoubtedly the scene where the runtime is shamelessly padded by having one of the characters literally recite titles of monster movies for several minutes, without any particular reason or logic to it. It goes without saying that this supposed horror film is zero per cent scary. The cinematography and editing are absolutely awful. The directing is appalling, and the script is just as good as you might expect from a Syfy movie about a shark with Hitler's brain.

*Based on the first two thirds of Birdemic, it would definitely be a top contender for this list - but I can't include it in the ranking because I haven't seen the whole thing.

1. The Emoji Movie (2017)

Step 1: Take a typical Disney film for children.

Step 2: Remove all of the humor, all of the emotion and soul, all of the heart, all of the positive lessons, all of the likable characters, all of the creativity in the animation, all of the exciting worldbuilding, and all of the magic.

Step 3: Replace everything you removed with a whole bunch of shameless and blatant product placement.

After seeing The Emoji Movie, I'm 100% sure that this was how it was made. I'm a glass-half-full viewer, so it takes a lot from a movie for me to call it "bad". Many films are flawed but still good, so only about 1 movie in every 50 I see are ones that I'd characterize as bad. The rest of the films on this list are bad (in my opinion), but this is something more. The Emoji Movie is evil. Bad movies can be fun to watch due to them being ridiculous - hence the phrase "So bad that it's good". I had moments of amusement when watching Sharkenstein or Cats. Watching The Emoji Movie simply filled me with rage.

It's just the world's most shameless product placement disguised as a kid's movie. Sure, The Lego Movie (2014) has product placement in it, but so what - it also has awesome characters, clever humor and good lessons. If there's any lesson to be found in the soulless joyride of The Emoji Movie, it's "People are slaves to their smartphones and that's a good thing" or "Purchase as many apps you can" or "Tell your parents to purchase these apps for your device, we want to make money and really don't care". The movie is a fucking disgrace. I don't usually use expletives on my blog, but it doesn't do the Emoji Movie justice to talk about it without some profanity. The Emoji Movie is the absolute antithesis of Disney and children's cinema, it's the most aggressive cash grab I've ever seen, it's insulting and unsettling and depressing to watch, and it's easily the worst movie I've ever seen.

I've never given a 1/10 rating to any film, because in my personal rating philosophy, a 1/10 would be literally the worst possible film - it could have NO redeeming qualities and every aspect would have to be as bad as can be. The Emoji Movie is the only film I considered giving a 1/10 rating to - in the end, it was saved by having one okay joke in the midst of the terrible attempts at humor, as well as the animating being partially good (while very subpar). Think about how awful a feature length film has to be when the best part of the film is that there is ONE JOKE that is remotely amusing. Everything else is garbage. I can't recommend any of the films on this list, but the other 9 you can watch out of morbid curiosity if you want to. This one - do not watch it under any circumstances.

Well, I finally got that off my chest! Cleansing is good for the soul. Tune in next week for a significantly less aggressive tone as I rank the movies in the X-Men franchise!