The 16th Annual Reel Stinkers Awards

It's New Year's Eve.  And as the clock ticks down the final moments of 2022, and everybody gets to look to the year ahead, I get to go back in time, and look at the movies that stole my money and my time the past year.

Yes, it's time once again for the Reel Stinkers Awards.  A time when I get to "honor" the worst of the worst that I sat through.  As you all know, bad movies come in all forms.  We've got blockbuster bombs, comedies with no laughs, thrillers that couldn't startle a mouse, unnecessary sequels, star vanity projects that went horribly wrong, and so much more!  I try to pick through the garbage, and find the really big stinkers.  Sure, I could easily make an entire list of cheap exploitation and low budget horror films, but where would the fun in that be?  I want to look back on the films that were big, or at least supposed to be big, and featured big talent, but still managed to fail.

As always, my "Best of the Year" article will likely come around February or so, as there are some late year releases still stuck in limited release at the moment, and will go wider during January and February.  I want to see and review as many of them as I can, so I always hold off on my Best list until then.

So, with all that out of the way, it's time to carve some cinematic turkeys!  Here's hoping that you didn't waste your money and time on them, and let us also hope that everyone involved with them will get to work on a good movie in 2023!

And now, I'm proud to give you...

 

THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2022:

 

10. BLACK ADAM - I did not see this in the theater, as I had undergone foot surgery the weekend it came out.  I did however catch up with it later on at home, and found an outdated and bombastic comic book film that drowns the usually likable and charismatic Dwayne Johnson with a moody character, and equally bombastic action scenes.  With its cliched script and characters, dialogue only a screenwriter could love, and overload of mindless CG action, it's no wonder that it probably inspired the studio to go in a different direction with their DC Comics film property.

 

09. UNCHARTED -  Stuck in Development Hell for over 10 years, and based on the long-running Sony PlayStation franchise, Uncharted joins the long list of video game adaptations that should be home runs on the silver screen, but instead end up merely being mediocre.  The problem with adapting something like Uncharted is that in the original video game, the storytellers have hours to tell their story and develop their characters.  And because a player spends hours at the controls of the main character, they feel a connection with them and the supporting cast by the time it's done.  Trying to cram that experience into a narrative that runs just under two hours is not going to quite be the same to the fan base.  But there are deeper problems than inherent ones here.  There's the casting, the overly green-screened action set pieces that seem as artificial as anything seen in the past few Fast & Furious movies, and the weak adventure that is supposed to hold everything together.  Watching Uncharted, you get the sense that you are watching a product, not a movie with a soul.  It's lost all identity, and is now just a brand name to bring in an existing audience.  They will come to see their favorite characters brought to life, and will walk away with an empty shell of an experience.  

 

08. JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION -  Any child with a decent imagination could see what is wrong with the Jurassic World franchise as a whole, and Dominion in particular.  You don't take a wondrous idea, and turn it into a thriller.  You let the audience be awed from time to time.  Here we have a screenplay written on autopilot built up of one dino attack and forced crisis after another.  Jurassic World: Dominion is a shabby piece of goods dressed up with the best special effects money can buy, and a soundtrack that is constantly blasting away at your senses until you just submit, and watch the movie with weary indifference.  It treats the dinosaurs like special effects or targets in a video game, simply running about the screen, and interacting with the human actors as little as possible.  What we're left with are some fleeting feelings of nostalgia, a bit of wonder now and then, and a whole lot of expensive stunt work and effects that don't add up to anything.  Jurassic World: Dominion promises us wonder and spectacle, but its center is dead, cynical and mechanical.

 

07. AMSTERDAM -  There are many who will say that Amsterdam is a bad movie, but I'm here to set the record straight.  The latest from writer-director David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) is much too ambitious to be awful, and therefore, it must be labeled as a disappointment.  There's a big-name cast and a clear effort being made here, but it's all at the expense of a muddled story that is too complicated to be fun, and nowhere near the effort to figure out.   It's overstuffed with plot and character, yet meanders and crawls its way through its own labyrinth that it creates for itself, until the audience either succumbs to its weak charms, or simply drops off and stop paying attention.  Here is a movie with a cast that most directors would kill to work with.  Put Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Chris Rock, Robert De Niro, Zoe Saldana, Taylor Swift and Anya Taylor-Joy up on the screen, and you're sure to draw attention, and it does for a while.  The problem is Russell has given us all these great actors, and never got around to giving them interesting characters, or putting them in a plot worth giving a damn about.  Maybe all this star-power is supposed to distract us from how poorly put together the film itself is.  It's been a while since I found myself asking myself, "Just what is this movie trying to say, and where is it going"?  Sometimes that can be a fun experience if you're watching something truly amateur and wondering what the filmmakers thought they were doing when they made it.  But, I'm afraid Amsterdam was made with the best of intentions, and the movie is worse for that.

 

06. HALLOWEEN ENDS - This is as joyless, dull, and idiotic a film as I have seen this year.  Even worse, this is intended to be the end of a legendary franchise.  If true, all I have to ask is, what were they thinking?  Halloween Ends is a surprisingly junky conclusion to a trilogy that started out with some faint promise in 2018, and quickly devolved into total crap with each passing film.  Now, here we are, with what is reported to be the final film.  I'm not buying it, but if it's true, what a kick in the teeth.  While it's always great to see Jamie Lee Curtis again, she's given little to do here by stand around and fret over her granddaughter going out with a guy she doesn't approve of, because she senses evil within him.  Think of how many years she has invested into this role and this franchise.  Don't you think they could give her some real scenes to play, or an interesting character moment?  Apparently that was too much to ask.  It doesn't have the decency to ratchet up any tension or suspense.  It's just uninspired, and plays like everyone involved wanted to get this entry over with so they could move on with their lives.  I felt the same way watching this, so at least I was feeling something with the actors, even though I felt nothing for the characters they were playing.

 

05. DON'T WORRY DARLING -  I'm trying to remember the last time an ending felt so uneventful that it caused me to groan out loud in disbelief.  Going through my memories and reviews, I believe it was The Turning from 2020.  Don't Worry Darling is a thriller that offers little during its roughly two hour run time, and then reaches a climax that makes you realize it had even less to say than you thought.  Three years ago, actress Olivia Wilde made her directing debut with the smart and funny coming of age comedy, Booksmart.  Here, she reunites with that film's screenwriter, Katie Silberman, but the intelligence of their earlier movie is completely absent here.  Instead, we get a thriller that is supposed to be keeping us guessing, but is surprisingly easy to figure out.  Watching the film, I felt like I was witnessing a magic show where the magician thinks they're concealing the secret behind the act, but it's plainly visible for the audience to see.  Don't Worry Darling has been handsomely shot, and Olivia Wilde continues to show her strength as a filmmaker.  It's the script that's at fault here.  The behind the scenes problems with making the film and feuds between the talent made more headlines than the movie itself, which tells you a documentary on the making of it would be more interesting to watch than the actual movie.

04. THE KING'S DAUGHTER - Shot back in 2014, and disowned by its original studio (Paramount), The King's Daughter is a star-studded mess of a fantasy film that should have remained hidden longer than it was.  Featuring a cheesy look, special effects that would have looked dated back in 2015 when it was originally planned to come out, choppy editing that has scenes suddenly starting and stopping on a whim, wooden performances, and questionable direction, this is a dead in the water fantasy film that was hardly worth dragging out long after most probably stopped caring.  The King's Daughter has an overall cheap look that features questionable CGI, and some truly ugly sets throughout.  Scenes that are supposed to fill the audience with wonder fail to create the slightest emotion, which is probably its biggest crime.  And what are we to make of the editing, which seems incredibly choppy, and with out of place music montages?  Simply glancing at a random ten minutes of the film is enough to tell you that this was a troubled production, and why Paramount lost so much faith in it.  Like Don't Worry Darling, perhaps one day The King's Daughter will inspire a fascinating documentary about the making of it, but it has not inspired a watchable movie.

 

03. THE MUNSTERS - Rob Zombie is probably not the first name you would think to direct a family-friendly update film of a beloved sitcom, but apparently he's a massive fan, and reveled in the chance to bring the characters back to life.  He's the only one who got any happiness out of this, and only showed why his expertise is not with comedy.   The movie features next to no plot as it jumps from one pointless scene to the next, a low budget look that makes your local small town spookhouse look like a multi-million dollar extravaganza, and performances that are more grating than funny.  Throw in a running time that edges close to two hours, and you have an endless and dreary experience.  You can see what Zombie is going for, but every attempt at fun is mishandled at best, and off putting at worst.  Zombie shows no sense of plotting or pacing with his take of The Munsters, as he is constantly being sidetracked or distracted with other things.  Yes, he faithfully recreates the show's look (though with garish colors, when black and white like the original would have been preferred) and corny humor, but nothing really lands.  He seems to be trying to make the most of the limited budget he was given here, but at the same time, he can't escape the fact that he has no story to tell, and a comedic and acting tone that came across like nails on a chalkboard to me. 

02. MORBIUS - In a time when movies based on comic books are routinely some of the better blockbusters to come out of Hollywood, Morbius is a sad throwback to an earlier time, when the studios didn't know what to do with all these costumed weirdos.  It's an aggressively bland film, littered with characters who have no motivation or consequence, and endless special effects sequences that are so overly digital they become numbing.  I've grown increasingly weary of movies that simply throw non-stop digital effects up on the screen.  Why hire actors if everything's just going to turn into a cartoon once the fists start flying?  Why not just make it animated to begin with?  Why pay the big bucks for Jared Leto to be your leading man, when you're not going to have him perform any stunts whatsoever?  Do action movies like this even need to hire stunt people?  I find myself asking these questions more often as blockbusters go on.  I'm not proud of that fact.  I want to be swept away by the images, and the illusion that the impossible is happening in front of me.  Instead, every time the action started to heat up, all I could think of was some effects guy sitting in a chair with his laptop, cranking out the next sequence.  Morbius offers no window into these characters, and no plot threads to grasp onto, until it eventually dissolves into a shapeless mass of special effects that are being thrown up on the screen endlessly.  This movie bored me to tears, as it has no desire to show us anything we haven't seen before, or give us some unique characters or lines of dialogue that could generate interest.

 

01. DISNEY'S PINOCCHIO (2022) -  Nobody sets out to make a bad movie.  I'm sure that this high tech remake of the 1940 animated classic, Pinocchio, was made with the best of intentions.  And while it follows the expected story beats of the Disney film, it still ends up being hollow, charmless, and about as unnecessary of a remake as that one time Vince Vaughn tried to step into Anthony Perkins' shoes and play Norman Bates.  This remake of the Disney film has been helmed by Robert Zemeckis, a director who has been famous for pushing the boundaries of special effects and animation, sometimes to brilliant effect (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), and sometimes to creepy, lifeless effect (The Polar Express, Welcome to Marwen).  His Pinocchio falls somewhere in the middle.  While the effects work here is impressive from time to time, it never quite seems convincing when the CG puppet, cat, fish, or whatever are interacting with human star Tom Hanks.  Despite the similarities to the film so many grew up with, this Pinocchio just feels as unnecessary as a remake has ever been.  The few things that have been added don't improve the story in any way, and everything just has this obnoxiously whimsical quality to it that feels forced instead of earned.  There is an emptiness here.  You know how you're supposed to be reacting to what the movie is showing you, but you don't, because it all feels so manipulative somehow.  It's ironic that a film about a wooden puppet who longs to be real and learns to love ends up being so dead inside.  Here is a movie that wants to warm our hearts, but is so mechanical in its manipulations, it ends up being artificial and completely unnecessary.  

 

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 355, Redeeming Love, Moonfall, Blacklight, Infinite Storm, Ambulance, Firestarter, Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank, Mack & Rita, Lyle Lyle Crocodile, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody

 

 

INDIVIDUAL REEL STINKERS AWARDS:

WORST SEQUEL:

Halloween Ends

MOST UNNECESSARY SEQUEL:

Jurassic World: Dominion

WORST PERFORMANCE BY AN A-LIST ACTOR/ACTRESS

Tom Hanks in Disney's Pinocchio

WORST OVERALL PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR/ACTRESS:

Diane Keaton in Mack & Rita

WORST IDEA FOR A MOVIE THAT NEVER COULD HAVE WORKED:

Taking a classic raunchy adult comedy like Blazing Saddles, and turning it into the uninspired animated kiddie film Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank.

REPEAT OFFENDERS (ACTORS WHO APPEARED IN MORE THAN ONE STINKER IN 2022):

Fan Bingbing in The 355 and The King's Daughter

Pierce Brosnan in The King's Daughter and Black Adam

WORST ON-SCREEN TEAM:

Jeff Daniel Phillips and Sheri Moon Zombie in The Munsters

STUDIO THAT RELEASED THE MOST STINKERS IN 2022:

Universal Studios for The 355, Redeeming Love, Firestarter, Jurassic World: Dominion, The Munsters, and Halloween Ends

Well, that's the worst of 2022 in a nutshell.  Time to look ahead to 2023, and hope for the best.  Have a wonderful and safe new year, everybody!

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