Top 10 Worst Movies of 2011

 It was neither the best of years nor the worst of years, but just as there were a number of great movies hiding in the misasma of 2011, there were some absolutely wretched movies. And while there were a stunning number of completely useless mainstream flicks, there were an equally stunning number of mean-spirited, entertainment-free indie films shooting for art or notoreity and instead just triggering my gag reflex.

I’m not one to linger on the awful, so here’s the puddle of vomit that was 2011′s worst films. Now that I’ve purged, I can head on into 2012 with a settled stomach and hope for the future. 

 The Eli Roth Uwe Boll Memorial Award:

 Outstanding Achievement in Embarassing Tastelessness

Hobo With a Shotgun

I’d like to blame Tarantino, Grindhouse, Aint-it-cool-news, and I’d really like to blame the director Jason Eisner. The truth is, this was never going to be anything different than it was, and I mostly have myself to blame for opting to watch it. Hobo achieves and accomplishes every single thing it sets out to do, which sets it apart from the films mentioned below. It’s absolutely effective at what it wants to be, and that somehow makes it worse than anything else on this list. This one is diseased all the way down to its DNA, and on top of that its pathetic, like a rabid, leprous puppy aggressively seeking affection. That Rutger Hauer wasted actual energy to turn in a performance on this thing is embarrassing, and the tepid attempts to engender some kind of emotion into these leftover scraps of Street Trash is the worst kind of negligent. A pox on all involved, and shame on me for thinking this would have been tolerable.

10. Season of the Witch  Runner-Up: Drive Angry

When B-movies get Cagey

The endless descent of Nick Cage continued with a vengeance in 2011. The patron saint of the mutilated hairpiece churned out three frustratingly junky films over the course of the year, but Witch and Angry qualify as the worst because of their squandered potential. Both could have been cheerfully fun B-movies, and while each had moments, both of them insulted the viewer with a lack of joy and far too much haphazard, rushed filmmaking. Not even the crazy hobo glare of Cage in full-on ‘get out of debt’ mode could save them. When films featuring Ron Perlman head-butting the devil or Cage drinking whiskey out of his enemy’s cracked skull can’t muster any real entertainment, you know you have done something wrong.

9.   Mr. Popper’s Penguins Runner-up: Arthur

Comedians kidnapping source material and drowning it in a lake

There’s so much wrong with both of these movies that walking out of the theater I was forced to contemplate how I had managed even a meager bit of hope for them beforehand. Although one is a remake and one an adaptation of a classic children’s book, both demonstrate an utter lack of understanding or respect for their source material that borders on hugely arrogant and culturally incompetent.  Why choose these two stories—man gets a troop of penguins and trains them to perform and lovable drunk seeks out love—if you are going to remove both of the things that made them halfway work in the first place? Popper doesn’t do anything of interest with his penguins—certainly the plot involving the tap-dancing birds has been removed completely—and the new Arthur seems to have less of an alcohol problem than young Shirley Temple. What we get left with is two self-proclaimed funnymen grinding away at any of the remaining goodwill they have in plots that torturously annihilate all positive traits of their source material. Both actors are so aggressive in their shticks that they must have been aware they were in competition for the Robin Williams ‘Destroyed Mojo’ award of the year.

8. Apollo 18  Runner-up: The Darkest Hour

Sigh-fi and missing monsters

Science fiction monster movies are my personal cinematic weakness.  You can do a lot in this particular subgenre and I will still forgive you. I found things to like in both last year’s anemic Skyline and this year’s clunky Sector 7. So, when you make something this astonishingly boring and dreary that makes even me check my watch, you deserve some sort of attention. Preferably the kind that makes sure you never get a chance to try it again. I’ll give Darkest Hour’s Chris Goran a pass as director because there’s much that’s wrong with this production that doesn’t seemingly have anything to do with him, and he does manage a capable sense of dread even with the pathetic meat puppets the script gives him to work with. However, the makers of Apollo 18 should hang their heads in shame for ever attempting to take their concept seriously and for managing to make even that black sheep of a script nearly incomprehensible as filmed action. Also, here’s a tip when making monster movies; include some creatures that don’t get laughed off the screen. Both movies have camouflaged beasties—static cling and moon rocks? Oh no!– for most of their running time. When they get revealed, we realize why they were hidden in the first place.

7. Hall Pass Runner up: Your Highness

Vulgar comedy straight from the toilet

I’ve long since tired of the raunchy comedy trend that’s been running for the last decade or so. Usually, these movies rely on shock or simple crass imagery as opposed to wit and imagination. Your Highness and Hall Pass are like picture-perfect examples of this very problem and what makes them worse is a kind of pervasive smugness that insists that if you don’t enjoy, you are a prude. The real killer though is that the directors of both—Gordon Green and the Farrelly’s—have  demonstrated all the necessary traits to turn out something that elevates the genre. Instead we get movies that made me embarrassed for the actors on screen, not because of the ribald displays with which they were involved, but for the utter lack of energy and conviction with which they were performed. Being able to pronounce the f-word with the speed and precision of an auctioneer or standing next to an FX monster penis without smirking does not equal comic timing and charisma. I’d like to believe both directors will get out of their funk, but the storms on the cinematic horizon suggest otherwise. Three Stooges anyone?

6.The Three Musketeers Runner-up: The Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides 

Stealing the rich and making it poor

On paper, these look like sublimely brainless but pleasing projects. Big budgets, fun, irreverent takes on swashbuckling concepts, and casts that usually can sleepwalk through these things and still make them great entertainments. And yet, with all that going for them, Pirates and Musketeers are big wet rags instead of buoyant popcorn delight. With On Stranger Tides, Marshall fails to get any kind of chemistry or connection from Depp and Cruz and completely sidelines the natural, ornery kookiness of Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbosa. The set pieces are uninspiring and yawn-inducing, save for a strangely truncated attack involving carnivorous mermaids. An attempt to make Jack Sparrow the main character causes the entire miasma to collapse in upon itself. Anderson’s Three Musketeers may be more energetic but it’s also more haphazard and shockingly bland. No film should feature this much corset-fu, flying airships and scowling Christoph Waltz and be this lacking in joy. A complete mess whose biggest sin is making literary irreverence tame and boring.

5. Melancholia  Runner-up: Beyond the Black Rainbow

When mind candy causes cavities

Visually mesmerizing, moody explorations of sci-fi existentialism can sometimes be just what the doctor ordered. Unfortunately, Melancholia and Black Rainbow end up being more the ailment than the cure.  There are some interesting sights to see on both pretentious dream rides but the price of admission (our time and patience) and the rough management of the audience make them too tedious and frustrating for general consumption. Von Trier’s Melancholia plays like a gag reel of outtakes from some of the director’s more overbearing experiments, leaving space for assumed depth that really isn’t there.  At least he has the good sense to put all of the eye candy in the opening scene, allowing connoisseurs of that brand of sensory crack to indulge and then seek another high. Beyond the Black Rainbow is more akin to a bad cinematic trip that just keeps stuttering along from weird vision to weird vision without achieving any kind of sense or purpose, be that narrative, emotional or visceral. The result is a pair of films that are agitating and aggravating when they should be transporting and engrossing.

4.  11-11-11   Runner-up: Shelter

The Devil made ‘em do it

Which subgenre produces the most routinely terrible movies? It’s probably a toss-up between sick/dead teenager flicks and biblically-inspired supernatural thrillers. Since this year gave us the likable Restless in the former category, 2011’s winner is most definitely the latter. I can’t think of a pair of more blatantly absurd movies than these two, and when 11-11-11’s odious mix of gnostic gospels, internet conspiracy sites, and dime-store bogeymen trumped Shelter’s body-hopping satanic mountain witches, it was something of a hat trick. Neither film has anything compelling to say about the intersection of faith and reason, always clipping the wings of the agnostics so they come out looking stupid for ignoring the great beyond, and making the faithful seem like straw men spewing fortune-cookie platitudes. Both films are poorly made clap-trap that wallow in medieval superstition while pretending theological/philosophical depth. Although both seemingly want to be pro-faith, you would assume according to Shelter and 11-11-11 that it’s the Antichrist who has the ‘greatest story ever told.’

  3.  New Year’s Eve  Runner-up:The Son of No One  

These two gems remind me of an exchange from Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. The infamously incompetent schlock-maker is trying to sell George Weiss on his picture by promising a recognizable face (Lugosi) for the audience. Weiss points out that he makes crap not big studio pictures, and Wood says ‘but if you take that crap and put a star in it, then you’ve got something.’ Weiss looks at him dumbfounded; ‘yea, crap with a star.’ That last line feels like the pitch for both of these movies, except that one star wasn’t good enough to seal the deal, it required the participation of a whole village of them. I can scarcely believe that milquetoast personalities like Channing Tatum, Katie Holmes and Alyssa Milano signed on for these generic-to-the core, sap-infested melodramas, let alone once respectable names like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Halle Barry, Juliette Binoche, Ray Liotta, Cary Elwes, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Son of No One wants to be a police-procedural drama, but doesn’t attend to the details of its case, which isn’t really a mystery as it’s revealed in the first scene. The director then keeps porting actors in and out to build tension, oblivious to the fact we don’t care about a single person on screen. Watching Al Pacino try to rescue a completely misconceived character, who unconvincingly attempts to convey a 30 year age difference, is a textbook exercise in futility. Still, he doesn’t have to play a dying man trying to get his final wish as his compadre Bobby Deniro must do in New Year’s Eve, one of several fine actors made to jump through hoops that have grown even smaller and shabbier since 2010’s Valentine’s Day. There’s plenty of star power in both disasters, but none of it means anything because there’s no single vision or hand guiding anyone or anything in either movie. They are the worst kinds of leftovers, reheating formulas that weren’t particularly tasty to begin with; by the time they end up on the plate they have been nuked to a hard, dry and inedible crust.

2. Sucker Punch   Red Riding Hood

I am woman, watch me bore

Female heroics in genre filmmaking took a massive kick in the non-existent junk this year with both of these outrageously idiotic and infuriatingly addled movies. To be fair, they don’t even really deserve the generous moniker of movie, as both only avoid being clunky, over-produced commercial spots by virtue of the fact they run feature length. And yet, there was promise for both had they shot straight and true. Instead, directors Catherine Hardwicke (Riding Hood) and Zack Snyder (Sucker Punch) stepped in and created vacuous, laughable shades of entertainment that infuriated with their warped, shallow sense of mythmaking and ridiculous attempts at expressing universal girl power. Red just gawks at Seyfried’s big puppy eyes while staging obviously hokey medieval rituals as if they were an incoherent mix of a Garbage video and a Ricola commercial.  The love story only inspired one thought from me; where does one find so much Vidal Sassoon in a medieval European village? Sucker Punch is miraculously worse than that, looking like the aftermath of a geek culture enema; only in the mind of Charlie Sheen would this amalgamation of women-in-prison flicks and unsavory skirt shots play like a treatise for female empowerment. The fantastical outings fall flat because they aren’t even happening in context of the story. Baby Doll leaps through the air and slashes at a towering, red-eyed samurai carrying a bazooka. As an audience we should be identifying with her triumph as she casts off the metaphorical, rocky giants that have been opening fire on her all her life.  Instead, we just wait for a digital cry of ‘Finish him!’ The poorest excuse for a ‘fun movie’ I’ve seen in some time. Loathsome in quite nearly every way.

1.      I Melt With You   Runner-up: Sleeping Beauty

Night of the raging yuppies

If movies were people, these two would be sociopaths in serious need of a beating and then lock-up. They hide behind the usually critic-proof veil of edginess and dramatic nihilism, but even subterfuge can’t mask their rotten cores. Emily Browning managed to star in not one but two sickening and soulless bouts of misogyny in 2011 that exploited her nubile and impossibly young features, but Sleeping Beauty bests the other, Sucker Punch, for both insincerity and icky intent.  Beauty follows Browning’s poor college student who ends up letting a madam drug her for older men who then go about indulging with her prone, unconscious body. What makes the whole ordeal worse is that director Julia Leigh pretends to craft a feminist screed, using a lot of static photography to voyeuristically capture it’s subject’s degradation. Even if there is a salient point to this morally bankrupt exercise, it’s all washed away by the way the film wallows in its imagery. It might as well be Mary Poppins when compared to Mark Pellington’s hateful, odious invocation of middle-aged douchebaggery, I Melt with You. I can’t think of a movie in recent years I have wanted to physically punch more than this one. Imagine Chuck Palahniuk by way of Ayn Rand, loaded down with a pack of male actors who should all know better. Thomas Jane, Rob Lowe, Christian McKay and Jeremy Piven mope around and hit the drugs and lament an earlier debauch that left them all regretful. Forget Very Bad Things, this movie is the pompous art-house version of that concept, if director Peter Berg had opted  for a  tear-stained weepie about male inadequacy instead of the dark comedy we got. These characters couldn’t kill themselves fastest enough for my tastes. Therein lies the problem with both Beauty and Melt; films aiming for emotional devastation must engender empathy and grace for their misfortunate characters. All we get here are a confederacy of a-holes.