The 9th Annual Reel Stinkers Awards

As the final hours of 2014 tick down to the new year, it's time for a little tradition I have here at Reel Opinions.  It's time to take one last look back at the films that stole my time, and the time of anyone else unfortunate enough to watch them.  It's time to list the worst films of the past year, as well as the dishonorable mentions, and the individual awards I give every year to "honor" what I feel were the worst pieces of cinema that I forced myself to sit through.

I saw 134 movies in the past year, and while there were some pretty big stinkers, the good outweighed the bad.  As always, the top awards given out in this article are the films that I either absolutely despised, or left me scratching my head wondering what the filmmakers were thinking.

As always, my "best of" list is still in the works.  There are still some major movies stuck in limited release, and will expand throughout January, so I'm holding off on it for just a little while.

So, with that all said, it's time to carve some cinematic turkeys, and hope that everyone involved with them gets to do a good movie in 2015.


THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2014:

10. TRANSCENDENCE - Here is a movie full of big ideas, but it lacks the focus to really concentrate on them, or the heart to make us care about them.  This is an oddly impersonal movie, filled with talented actors giving off key performances, particularly Johnny Depp, who gives a strangely mute and indifferent performance here as a computer genius who, when he is near death, has his consciousness uploaded to an advanced super computer so his mind can live on after his body expires.  The real test of any Science Fiction film is does it allow the audience to completely follow its technology and premise, far-fetched as they may seem?  For a while, I was intrigued, and wanted the movie to tell me more about this process.  Unfortunately, once Will is hooked into the computer, the movie takes a predictable turn into thriller territory. The performances are stilted and wooden, the characters are idiotic, and while Transcendence has aspirations of being an intelligent Sci-Fi thriller, it lets itself down by being too dumb and underwritten to be compelling.

09. I, FRANKENSTEIN - It's been a long time since I've seen a movie as ugly, loud, and inept as I, Frankenstein.  Don't let the film's title trick you into thinking that it's an in-depth look into the mind of the famous mad scientist, or some kind of new spin on the classic tale by Mary Shelly.  Rather, this is the story about his Monster, played by Aaron Eckhart (usually a reliable actor, but here he gives a performance destined to be remembered at next year's Razzie Awards), and how he got sucked into a battle between gargoyles and demons.  This attempt to reinvent Frankenstein's Monster into some sort of modern day superhero who protects a city from demons is unintentionally laughable at just about every angle.  Not even the special effects look right, as the monsters he fight look inexplicably like actors wearing rubber masks over their heads.  There's a sense of gloom that hangs over this production, and not all of it is intentional.  It's the kind of gloom you sense when talented actors know they're trapped in a turkey.

08. SEX TAPE -  It's never nice to laugh at people less fortunate than you, and that's probably the main reason I never laughed once while watching Sex Tape.  The people in this movie are dumber than dirt.  The film stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, who can both be effortlessly charming with the right material, but here come across as blithering morons as they play a married couple who film a sex tape of themselves on their iPad, forget to delete it, and then it accidentally gets sent out to all their friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers, etc.  The two spend the rest of the movie acting like idiots as they race around, trying to steal everyone's mobile device, so they can't watch the tape.  This is the kind of movie that makes you ask if the filmmakers even know how technology works.  Not only is it not funny at any time, but it also pulls off the miracle of not even being that racy or sexy, which is what the ad campaign sold itself on.  Sex Tape is a bafflingly idiotic movie, with characters who are too stupid to live.

07. LABOR DAY - The once-reliable filmmaker, Jason Reitman (best known for films like Thank You for Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air), had a very rough 2014, which kicked off with this unintentionally hilarious and just plain ludicrous romantic melodrama.  The film follows a reclusive woman (Kate Winslet) and her son who seldom leave their home ever since the woman's husband walked out on them.  The one rare occasion they do go out to get some groceries, they run into an escaped convict (Josh Brolin), who takes them hostage, but then winds up falling in love with the woman.  He spends the entire time there fixing up the house, teaching the kid to play baseball, and having one of the most hilariously absurd "sensual" moments ever caught on film, as he and the mother get freaky with each other while making fruit pie filling.  Labor Day was originally intended to be an Oscar contender for the studio, but when it was laughed at by audiences at film festivals last year, its award aspirations were dashed, and the studio dumped it in theaters with little fanfare, where it quickly died at the box office with hardly anyone noticing.  This is romantic melodrama at its worst.

06. NO GOOD DEED - Was there no one on the set of No Good Deed to tell Taraji P. Henson and Idris Elba that they were too good for this?  No one to sit them down and ask what they were doing starring in this exploitive, nasty thriller that is far below their talents?  This is a film that is built around repeated scenes of women being beaten, maimed, tortured and murdered.  Henson plays a woman alone in her house one night who lets a stranger (Elba) in when he says his car has broken down.  Of course, before he shows up at her door, we have seen the man murder a pair of prison guards, then make his way to his ex-girlfriend's house, where he breaks in, waits for her to come home and then strangles her to death with his bare hands and smashes her head with a lamp.  He later bludgeons another woman to death with a shovel, frequently beats and torments the female lead character, and holds a cute little five year old girl and her baby brother hostage at gun point.  It's made even more vile by the fact that the film has been sanitized just enough so that it can receive a "family friendly" PG-13.  No Good Deed is offensive dreck, but it doesn't even have the courtesy to be interesting offensive dreck.  It's slow, boring and fails to generate any tension.  All it does manage to create is a sense of disgust, and a sense of pity that talented actors like Henson and Elba are forced to endure it.

05. GOD'S NOT DEAD - A surprise hit at the box office with Christian moviegoers, God's Not Dead is a movie that starts with an intriguing premise, then does as little as possible with it, choosing instead to distract us with characters who barely reach two dimensions, plenty of dumb subplots, and pointless cameos by two of the stars of TV's Duck Dynasty, and the Christian Rock group, Newsboys.  The film's main plot centers on a young college student who is challenged by his philosophy professor (former Hercules TV star, Kevin Sorbo) to prove the existence of God, after the professor proclaims that God is dead, and the student objects to the statement.  The movie is obviously intended to create debate, but it's so one-sided on the kid's side, it barely touches on the other view.  It doesn't help that the professor is seen as a monster, who threatens the kid in the hall, and frequently ridicules his Christian girlfriend.  The film seems to be emulating the style of Magnolia or Crash, movies that took multiple storylines and characters, and wove them together into one narrative.  God's Not Dead bungles this ambition early on, with thin characters and storytelling so sloppy, some of the plots don't even get any real resolution or closure.  The characters who inhabit these stories are either stereotypes, or comically underwritten.  This is a movie that not only preaches to a preexisting audience, but it doesn't even seem to know a lot about the argument it's trying to make in the first place.

04. AS ABOVE/SO BELOW - 2014 had plenty of examples of bad 'found footage" horror films, but As Above/So Below was easily the worst of the lot.  This was a confusing and muddled film that barely had a plot, or characters we could give a damn about.  To the best of my knowledge, the film is about a bunch of explorers who are searching for the Philosopher's Stone, which is believed to have supernatural powers, and they think is located in the catacombs underneath Paris.  The deeper they explore, the individual members of the team are haunted by hallucinations of their inner demons.  There are also ghosts, I think, and some satanic worshipers roaming around down there.  As Above/So Below is not really concerned with explaining itself.  I think the basic idea is that these characters are supposed to be descending into Hell the deeper they go into the caverns, but it's never quite clear.  What is apparent is that the movie is not intense or terrifying at any point or time.  I don't know how you film an entire movie in a decrepit and dank cavern, and not create a sense of claustrophobia, but somehow the filmmakers have done just that.  If you want to recreate the experience of this movie at home, turn off the lights, grab a camera, and fumble around blindly.  Have a friend or neighbor waiting in the dark somewhere to throw an object at your camera at random, while you shake the camera violently, screaming "Oh my God, what is that??".  Not only will you have saved yourself the price of a ticket, but you'll probably be having more fun than you would watching this.

03. THE OTHER WOMAN - Cameron Diaz makes her second appearance on this list with this idiotic and witless comedy targeting women.  The Other Woman follows three women (played by Diaz, Leslie Mann and swimsuit model Kate Upton) who find out that the man they think they're in love with individually has been seeing all 3 of them at the same time.  They get revenge, and hilarity is supposed to ensue, but the only thing we get is another one of those disposable movies that depicts supposedly successful middle aged women as shrieking and obnoxious morons who can't walk without tripping over themselves, or falling into something as a result of some tired pratfall.  The humor plays at the lowest possible level.  It starts at dog poop jokes, and works its way up to a scene where a guy violates a toilet with a fury of the brown stuff, as extremely loud and exaggerated fart and poop sound effects blast on the theater speakers.  Crude, simple-minded and containing some of the worst comedic performances of the year, this movie ended up being an endurance test like few films this year.

02. TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION - This is coming from someone who used to cherish his Transformer toys as a child, and views the 1986 animated Transformers movie as a nostalgic memory - Michael Bay's live action Transformers series has to be some of the worst summer blockbusters ever made.  I can think of very few films that come close to this series' ineptitude.  Age of Extinction is quite possibly the worst of the lot.  This is an aggressive movie in so many ways.  It's aggressively bad, and seems to have been written in such a way that the characters do intentionally stupid things in order for there to even be a plot.  It's aggressively long, with a torturous running time of almost three hours.  It's aggressively loud, with endless and mindless action sequences emphasizing noise over comprehension.  Finally, it's aggressively ugly.  The Transformers themselves still look like towering piles of junk, and are about the most unappealing CG creations in memory.  Michael Bay returns to the director's chair, and hasn't seemed to have learned much from the past films.  Why should he, with each movie breaking box office records?  He says that these movies are for the kid in all of us.  As long as that child has the attention span of a gnat, and holds absolutely no desire other than to see things blow up and CG junk run across the screen, then yes, I agree.

01. A HAUNTED HOUSE 2 - A rushed out sequel to last year's surprise hit horror spoof, A Haunted House 2 was the single worst experience I had at the movies this year.  The movie surpasses being merely bad, and achieves a certain level of cinematic torture that I hope never to have to sit through again.  Am I exaggerating?  Well, let me tell you, that's all I could think to myself during the scene when Marlon Wayans spots a creepy doll named Abigail (a spoof of the Annabelle doll from The Conjuring) sitting on his bed, and he immediately throws off his clothes, and starts having wild sex with it for a good three minutes straight.  And then, later on, we get to see him do it to the doll again.  By the third time the movie was forcing me to watch him violate the damn doll, I was willing to pay someone good money as long as they would promise me I'd never have to look at Marlon Wayans' naked rear end ever again.  Look, I've long resigned myself to the fact that parody movies no longer actually parody elements of films, but rather just borrow famous scenes from them, and then add jokes about oral sex and bodily fluids.  But this movie doesn't even seem to be trying in any way.  There are no rules to the game that this movie wants to play.  It's just a series of scenes based on other movies, and the filmmakers hope we will laugh out of recognition, and then laugh even more when Marlon Wayans starts having nasty sex with something or someone.  We don't laugh, but the movie just keeps on trying, almost as if it thinks we're missing the point.  This kind of repetition is fatal to a comedy, and doubly so for a spoof.  Imagine if Mel Brooks just kept on doing the same jokes over and over in his movies.  Do you think Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein would be remembered as classics today?  Those movies were smart, and knew what satirical targets they were aiming for.  This movie doesn't even know what it's trying to do most of the time.


Well, that covers the Top 10, but I am far from finished.  It's time to cover the Dishonorable Mentions, the films that were bad, but not quite bad enough to break into the top spots.  Don't let that fool you into thinking these movies are somehow better than what's come before, however.  You should avoid any and all movies that appear on this list.  With that said, let's roll out the next batch of stinkers!


DISHONORABLE MENTIONS:

The Legend of Hercules, Devil's Due, Ride Along, 300: Rise of an Empire, Sabotage, Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return, Blended, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Earth to Echo, Deliver Us From Evil, The Expendables 3, The Giver, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Dracula Untold, The Best of Me, Ouija, Horrible Bosses 2, Annie, Unbroken

INDIVIDUAL REEL STINKERS AWARDS:

WORST SEQUEL:

A Haunted House 2

MOST UNNECESSARY SEQUEL:

Horrible Bosses 2

WORST REMAKE:

Annie

WORST PERFORMANCE BY AN A-LIST ACTOR/ACTRESS:

Johnny Depp in Transcendence

WORST OVERALL PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR/ACTRESS:

Marlon Wayans in A Haunted House 2

WORST IDEA FOR A MOVIE THAT NEVER COULD HAVE WORKED:

I , Frankenstein

REPEAT OFFENDERS (ACTORS WHO WERE INVOLVED IN MORE THAN ONE STINKER IN 2014):

Kelsey Grammer in Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return, Transformers: Age of Extinction and The Expendables 3

Cameron Diaz in The Other Woman, Sex Tape and Annie

Joel McHale in Blended and Deliver Us From Evil

Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sabotage and The Expendables 3

WORST ON SCREEN TEAM:

Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis in Horrible Bosses 2

WORST CELEBRITY STUNT CASTING:

God's Not Dead, for its pointless cameos of the Duck Dynasty guys

STUDIO THAT BROUGHT US THE MOST STINKERS IN 2014:

 Universal Studios, who brought us As Above/So Below, Ride Along, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Dracula Untold, Ouija and Unbroken.

Well, that's the worst of 2014 in a nutshell.  Time to look ahead to 2015, and hope for the best.  Have a wonderful and safe new year, everybody!

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