10 Worst Films of 2015

2015 was a wonderful year for cinema and I still have so many potentially great films to see before I put out my best of the year list. It's impossible for me to catch up with all the award worthy work released so late in the year by the beginning of the new year, so typically sometime in February the top 50 of the year will be rolled out.

The worst though...I can only hope I am done with that. If anything I watch over the next few weeks actually ends up being a bigger disaster than the ten films listed here, I will be severely disappointed.

So I can comfortably say, here are the ten worst films of 2015:

10. Poltergeist

It's essentially the exact same movie as the original, only bad this time. Really, really bad. Across the board bad. Frankly, I don't really remember anything good about it. Even as a Sam Rockwell fan, I've got nothing. A waste of time and money, people seem to get offended when a remake makes changes, I get offended when it doesn't change enough. Why watch the same movie, only made worse? Give me something to make it a memorable experience or else it is just a lazy attempt at using the title to make some fast cash. 

9. Monsters: Dark Continent

I loved the original Monsters so much. The sequel? A terrible follow up completely lacking the thematic subtlety of the original, taking the idea of the "monsters" occupying the Mexico - U.S. border and moving it to the Middle East. Soldiers celebrating destroying those "monsters"? Painfully on the nose. Just a seen it all before war film with some giant creatures tossed in.

8. Chappie

I can barely remember 2009 and the reaction I had to District 9. Perhaps I need to revisit it soon to remind myself of the potential I saw in Neill Blomkamp. Actually, it was beyond just potential: I was so damn excited. I thought for sure we were witnessing a truly exciting new voice in science fiction cinema, the type of director that you wouldn't even need to watch a trailer to buy a ticket to his next work. The name alone would suffice.

Elysium wasn't very good, but it all hit a new, awful low with Chappie, a film so tonally strange and awkwardly unlikable that it's hard to put into words what the experience of witnessing it was like. I would love to believe that Blomkamp will wow me again someday and renew my faith in his vision, but right now it's impossible now to consider the man a one hit wonder. 

7. The Wedding Ringer

Ah, what a way to start the year. I can only hope 2016 gets off to a better start than 2015. See, The Wedding Ringer was the first film I saw in 2015, which is a shame. The reason it is ranked here rather than farther down the list, when things go from ugly to embarrassing, is because it is merely bad rather than offensively bad. This movie didn't do anything memorable. It's just painfully unfunny and features a performance from Kaley Cuoco that makes me sincerely question whether she just phoned it in here for a paycheck or if she has zero talent at all. It was like she was reading all of her lines off a cue card just to the side of the camera.

6. The Cobbler

Fun fact: this is not the worst Adam Sandler driven film on this list, and I didn't even watch that The Ridiculous Six thing on Netflix over fear of a bottom ten riddled with redundancy. 

Another fun fact: the director of this film is Thomas McCarthy, who previously crafted The Station Agent, which is a wonderful movie, and may have made the film that wins Best Picture this year with Spotlight. Given this information, I don't know how The Cobbler happened. I don't want to know, actually. I will just try to forget about it and move on.

5. The Loft

So these married bros all have a key to this loft, and it's the place where they take the women who aren't their wives to bang in secret. One winds up dead there. It's a real whodunit! 

For me, very early on, it's a real who gives a shit. Painfully bad script and performances, it is impossible to care about the story enough to even notice when they finally reveal the elusive answers no one was waiting for. 

4. Pixels

I promised you more Sandler! You knew it was coming!

I also could have put the same fun fact above with The Wedding Ringer regarding Josh Gad, but I didn't because no one really gives a hoot about Josh Gad. You may not even know who he is. He's the guy who did the voice of the snowman in Frozen. 

Yes, Peter Dinklage is also in Pixels. He is amazingly talented. He is wasted in a piss poor film like this.

The premise at least could have ended up resulting in a fun film, video game characters coming down to destroy Earth and thus champion level gamers have to step in to save the day. Nothing about Pixels is fun. It's just a head scratching waste of time.

3. Unfriended

My number 3 worst film of the year is bound to make a few peoples best lists. To each their own. I have come across those that want to throw bouquets at the feet of Unfriended because of the unique way it goes about delivering its narrative. Cool, I guess. Here's the thing though: regardless of whether or not it has been done before doesn't mean it should have been done. It's like 90 minutes of watching shitty teenagers with apparently no parents Skype each other to death. They just argue and scream and say dumb crap, and while I was watching I kept thinking, if these turds were in the room with me I would run out screaming after a couple of minutes, and not because of the horrific deaths. As soon as they opened their mouths I would be in my car crying, begging for forgiveness from whatever God I offended to deserve hearing it.

In case you were wondering, I specified no parents because these are high school kids who talk about homework like it's a school night, and yet when they are literally screaming for their lives and dying brutal deaths no one even shows up to try to help. No one. Perhaps their elders are just extremely deep sleepers.

Do watch the kid jam his hand in a blender on repeat though. Brilliant prop comedy executed to perfection, I couldn't stop laughing.

2. Fifty Shades of Grey

I kept hearing about these books. What a big deal, these pornographic novels. I certainly wasn't going to devote the time to read them, but a film adaptation, sure. I can get all sexy with the whips and chains and whatnot. Let's do this. 

So boring. They found the two people with the worst chemistry imaginable and decided to tell a tale of sexy romance about them. It was like watching two pieces of cardboard trying to hump each other. The performances are dreadful, the writing is ridiculous, and honestly I think the most egregious thing about this film is that nothing about it is sexy or even really all that scandalous. Every other scene is him rubbing her with an ice cube and her making a little squeak sound. The most pornographic noise going on during these parts was the rhythm of me punching myself in the groin over and over to make sure that part of my anatomy had not died from the experience. 

1. Mortdecai

So on the one hand, fuck everything about this movie.

On the other hand, fuck me. I'm the one who watched the whole thing. Well, almost, I do think I may have checked out with a few minutes to spare, but at that point the damage was done and it was a self inflicted wound. I didn't have to do this to myself. No one should. 

During every second of this nightmare I was wondering if comedy had died. Not so much the genre, but inside myself. Perhaps because of Mortdecai I would never be able to laugh again. My entire life would be like those images of sad, weepy clowns. Example below.

Just don't watch it. Be better than me. 

Well, that's it. Those are the worst films I witnessed that were released in 2015. As I said earlier, it will still be a bit before I start to unveil the films that deserve admiration from the year, as I still have so much to see during the next month. I will make sure to have it all posted before the Oscars are handed out though, so make sure to check out my 50 favorite films of the year. There will be some surprises on the list and also some that are not so surprising (I love Star Wars).