So here is my list of my least favorite movies of the year. I need to note that I have not seen all the movies this year and for the most part I try to avoid festering pieces of shit (which is why there is no mention of Jonah Hex or the Last Airbender on the list) so your mileage may very here depending on how completely you got fucked at the theater this year. I worked this out off a list of thirteen movies so shout outs go to Salt, Predators and the Tourist for not being quite shitty enough to make the cut. As usual I would love to see your comments, disagreements, agreements and your own list in the appropriate section below.

10. Takers

If the Town is everything I wanted in a heist movie, Takers is mostly the stuff I didn’t want. It favors style over substance, cheesy writing, a massively cliched story and some seriously hammy acting. There is some good here but it is buried under a mountain of hackneyed devices from better movies and the bluest filter you’ve ever seen on a lens. This thing is seriously blue. It also features a domestic violence specialist trying to be the likable little brother character and, sadly, he pulls it off even if his suit sleeves are pushed up for a disturbing amount of screen time. You won’t find anything new or notable here but it is unintentionally funny as hell and has some genuinely cool action scenes.  Be drunk with friends when watching this.

09. I’m Still Here

This bizarre mockumentary started years ago as Joaquin Phoenix appeared to go around the bend. He grew a beard, said he was quitting acting and started a really bad rap career. Plenty of people called it as a hoax but, to his credit, Phoenix really ran with it and brother-in-law director Casey Affleck filmed and directed all of it. This year they offered up this film as the finished product and while it has its moments the resounding question that must be answered here is simply: why?  What this movie essentially amounts to is an inside joke between Phoenix and Affleck that they have released into the world that no one else really gets. There isn’t anything hard hitting here. There isn’t an overall message. It isn’t really all that funny. It just exists. While I admire the overall commitment, I can’t say that I get or care for the final product. Sure Sacha Baron Cohen does this kind of stuff all the time but his stuff is funny. This just has Phoenix being literally shit on. Not worth the effort they took it to make nor the effort for you to watch.

08. Karate Kid

Remakes are a tricky business. If you stay too close to the source material you look useless and creatively bankrupt and if you stray too far you alienate the core audience. For me, a big fan of the original, this new Karate Kid was hamstrung by its reliance on the original film but doing things to undermine the effort. If it had been its own film and just given occasional homages to the original it would have been much more successful but as it is, the movie fumbles the familiar sections severely and leaves them devoid of life or feeling. The moments when it strays into its own territory are much, much better and I think there could have been a great movie here. As it is we are left with a pale imitation of a campy original with the added bonus of disturbing images of children trying to kill each other while their parents cheer on. Not a horrible movie really but still a miss.

07. Resident Evil: Afterlife

Now we are getting into the nitty gritty of super shitty. It kind of horrifies me how high on the list this is when it sucks this much ass. A mish-mash of material that was better in other, more original horror movies and material ripped out of the games with no rhyme or reason, Resident Evil: Afterlife would have been better served dying out after Extinction. It makes me sad so many people apparently saw this as it is just going to keep reanimating a corpse that has been dead for three films now. This one tried to throw in some 3D and while it was actually shot with 3D cameras and planned with the effect in mind, it still felt kind of useless and didn’t do much to save the complete nonsense on the screen. Throwing in well loved characters from the game was a little bit cool until the viewer realizes that those characters are just tacked on and little is done with them. Only Wesker is worth a damn and that damn isn’t worth enough to make this watchable.

06. My Soul To Take

I am not sure what happened to Wes Craven with My Soul To Take but it wasn’t anything good. I think Craven was looking at his resume and decided that if he combined his two most successful horror films he would have a mega film that would be capable of leveling Tokyo. What he ended up with is a Frankenstein’s Monster made up of parts of Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream and bullshit pop psychology. Like Frankenstein’s Monster this one turned on its master and refused to do what it was told. This unholy jambalaya of nonsense features massively uneven acting, worthless 3D and a plot twist so flimsy they may as well have just given you note cards spoiling the movie with your tickets. Not that it really matters as you won’t give even a fraction of a shit about anyone in the movie after the first fifteen minutes or so. I hope to all that is right and just that Craven let an intern handle this while he was concentrating on how to make Scream 4 completely badass.

05. Twilight Saga: Eclipse

You can tell it is a shitty year for movies when a Twilight film shows up in the middle of the worst 10. To its credit, Eclipse is the best of the Twilight movies so far. Of course that is like saying that was the best instance of getting racked in the balls. And when I say that I mean the time that required like 5 stitches instead of 8. It looked a lot better than previous films partially due to having a worthwhile directer but I don’t care who you get, no director is good enough to rescue the source material. The characters continue to be vapid and worthless with a plot that makes no sense of any kind because you are dealing with a Mary Sue sex fantasy that hasn’t gotten around to the sex but rather focuses on abusive relationships and homoeroticism. I know how the next book ends but I still think at this point Edward and Jacob should just have it off with each other and settle the whole damn thing. Maybe that would bring some life to Bella’s dead, dead eyes.

04. Little Fockers

I was hoping for some decent comedy out of Little Fockers but what I found was a shameless tie in made up of nothing but substandard shoe-horned material delivered with all the passion and interest of a pile of firewood. The trade mark awkward humor went way over the top to make for the most cringe worthy film of the year which is really saying something since we also had Greenberg. Unlike that film, however, the awkwardness was never really funny and despite some jokes hitting their mark the whole thing was a big disappointment. The plot developments never even approach plausible and it gets more and more asinine as the film progressed. As much as I liked the previous two films and the characters contained therein, I found very little to like here and it makes me sick that it seems to be making a decent amount of money. Hopefully we won’t be subjected to another cheap cash in but given that it is Hollywood I know that is a very false hope.

03. Skyline

While watching Skyline a question kept popping in to my head over and over which was ‘what in the hell did they think they were doing?’ followed quickly by ‘How can this have aliens blowing shit up and ripping brains out of heads and be this boring?’ It is a riddle for the ages but the Brothers Strauss not only made a horrible piece of crap with Skyline but they managed to alienate Sony in the process. They are great at special effects and seemed to be doing just fine but now they have damaged their reputation by thinking they could do this kind of thing on their own. I love Donald Faison, David Zayas and Eric Balfour but there is absolutely nothing they could do to save this movie and the must have known it since they never looked like they were even trying. I can’t blame them.  I think I would have already had extensive plastic surgery and a name change if I did craft services on this thing let alone starred in it. The plot and aliens made very little sense and while the effects were great the designs looked much better when they were used in the Matrix. This is a severely flawed movie from beginning to end and it isn’t even really interesting enough to make fun of.

02. Clash of the Titans

The original was cheesy, melodramatic fun. This one was a complete mess of conflicting ideas and a limp hero who let pretty much everyone die just to prove a point that he could do something without help that he very clearly could not do. The effects, marred by a quicky 3D hatchet job, looked muddled and shitty and could do nothing to help a plot that didn’t stick to its own rules let alone the rules of logic. Perseus is such a whiny, self absorbed douche that I wouldn’t want to spend any time watching him without the added burden of him not having any idea who to be pissed at or what the hell he is doing. As it is I want to scream whenever someone even mentions this movie. In fairness, I did watch it again on blu-ray and with out the 3D the effects and action looked a lot cooler and more convincing but not even close to enough to save the trainwreck that is the story. Also, the acting is uneven and I wonder how much it cost to replace all the scenery that Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson chewed their way through. Pretty much every thought the filmmakers had about this movie was flawed and it comes through in the finished product. I can’t really say enough bad things about this thing and it is best avoided at all costs.

01. Catfish

Okay so here is the thing about Catfish: there is an alternate universe somewhere in which the marketing team for the movie wasn’t completely retarded and didn’t bill the thing as a horror movie. In that universe the movie received scores of at least a six and it would be vaguely watchable if you were flipping channels and landed on TLC some afternoon after deciding that you can’t take any more Jersey Shore reruns on MTV. Sadly, we do not live in that universe. The universe we live in found this film billed as the most shocking horror film of the year and then delivered a documentary about a dude who finds himself in an internet relationship over Facebook with someone who doesn’t exist. As the movie ramps up you are bracing for something truly shocking but instead are let down in the worst possible way. It starts out promising with flashes of humor and intrigue but honestly the main character creeped me out way more than the lying internet bitch. There was an episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit that shared the same plot and it was much more intriguing because things actually happened. The marketing really did this movie in and made me hate it a lot. If all things had been equal I would have hated it a lot less . As it is I would like to invite the filmmakers and their marketing team to go have sex with themselves and to for godsakes not film it.