20. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (21%)
I honestly thought this wouldn't make it onto my "Most Hated" list this year. It was pretty awful, but it could have been worse, I guess... maybe... I don't know. The biggest problem of this reboot wasn't just the rewriting of the genesis of the Turtles, but how utterly stupid you had to be to not find holes in every detail about it. The design of the heroes was poorly thought out, and Splinter was downright creepy, but it was Shredder who got the worst of the redesign. Johnathan Liebsman turned him into one of Michael Bay's Transformers, and made him a toadie to William Fichtner's evil CEO. Why?
Most Embarrassing Moment: Every detail about the Turtles' back story.
19.God's Not Dead (17%)
I often wonder, when a film has this little basis in the real world, if people know they are making a terrible film. Every one of the countless plot lines in this garbage college drama feel completely disingenuous, and seemed to do as little fact checking as they could get by with. Or none. The running theme of Christian persecution is entirely laughable, because the mustache twirling villains of this piece have so little shading to their characters that they don't act like actual people. It is funny that what other people see as trying to be part of the American dream, is what some Christians see as persecution.
18. Winter's Tale (13%)
This is such a misguided attempt at a romance with some sort of mystical flare. Colin Farrell is a thief who falls in love with a dying rich girl he tries to rob, and he is on the run from a gangster, played by Russell Crowe, who is a demon. a literal demon. The romance blossoms as the demons begin to descend upon them. The story begins to fall further and further into the sewers (also a little literal) when the young woman dies, and Farrell's thief is thrust into the future for reasons I don't remember, and the convoluted writing just continues to grate on the audience's nerves.
17. Dracula Untold (22%)
What a pile of farts.
16. Ouija (7%)
And another pile of farts.
15. The Pyramid (6%)
More horror farts.
14. Sex Tape (17%)
Why is this the second project that Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz have done together, and the second one that was just absolute garbage? This time the two play a married couple who decide to make a sex tape (video file?) together (in case you missed the title), and it ends up released over all of the Apple devices that they have given out to all of their friends and family. Now the two are in boring race to erase the video before everyone they know sees them getting nasty with each other. The two have so little chemistry together that they feel believable, and situations they get themselves in to become increasingly preposterous. To the point that it comes off as stretching for at least a couple of laughs. Laughs that never manifest.
Most Embarrassing Moment: A family B&E turns into a lecture from YouPorn owner Jack Black.
13. Back in the Day (0%)
Michael Rosenbaum (Lex Luthor from "Smallville") wrote/directed/starred in this misguided big-fish-revisits-his-old-small-pond comedy. Playing an actor, living in California, who comes home to his twenty year high school reunion in order to win back his first love. With ill-timed, and very badly written, poop jokes and characters who aren't at all interesting, played by actors who seem to just be phoning it in. The plot plays much like a dumbed down version of the already less-than-stellar "American Reunion", except you don't have the benefit of already knowing the characters over three previous films.
Most Embarrassing Moment: Harland Williams teaches his son how to fart in his hand, and throw it at people. Not as funny as it sounds...
12. Pompeii (29%)
Paul W.S. Anderson makes a lot of awful movies. Sometimes they are really fun bad movies, and sometimes they are "Pompeii". This is a CG spectacle so bad, and so cartoony, that it is a wonder that anybody thought this would be a good idea. It takes a very Roland Emmerich/Michael Bay disaster film approach to a story that, with some major rewrites, could have been really interesting. Instead, just like James Cameron's "Titanic", it follows a pair of fictional lovers (played by Kit Harrinton and Emily Browning) that manage to survive right up until the very end of the tragedy, and it is never (at any point) interesting to watch them. Their romance is rushed, and the script relies entirely too much on the special effects to convey the plot, instead of focusing on anything substantial. We are given a convenient villain in Kiefer Sutherland's senator, who is over-the-top slimey in order to make you really hate him, but he is a mustache-twirl shy of being Snidley Whiplash. I would have preferred if would have tied someone to some train tracks. Preferably, Paul W.S. Anderson.
Most Embarrassing Moment: Kit Harrington's character wastes time to explain why he hates an already detained Kiefer Sutherland, instead of fleeing the city.
11. 300: Rise of an Empire (42%)
Frank Miller had two dud sequels come out this year, and this one was so limply put together that it hardly registers as an action movie.
Most Embarrassing Moment: Pick any poor shot battle scene.
10. Nurse 3D (69%)
This film wants to be a cult classic so bad, you can see the not-give-a-shit all over the screen. Paz de la Huerta stars as a nurse who stalks cheating husbands and kills them; a concept which is bizarre enough, but is pretty much the B-story of this movie. The main focus of the film revolves around her lusting after her trainee, played by "30 Rock's" Katrina Bowden, who spurns her advances because she is engaged to "High School Musical's" Corbin Bleu. Not a single performance in this movie is above par, and de la Huerta's performance was so bad, that this may be her career killer. The script is filled with goofy, overtly sexual dialogue, and the 3D effects are the kind of schlock that made the technique such a throw-away for so long. People are going to enjoy this film ironically, but that doesn't make it worth a better spot in this list.
Most Embarrassing Moment: Have you ever seen Paz de la Huerta try to act?
9. Left Behind (2%)
A friend of mine said of this film, "If Nicolas Cage is the sanest character of your movie, you know you're in trouble." Sure enough, Vic Armstrong's remake of the Kirk Cameron film (from fourteen years ago) was in dire need of a complete overhaul. The acting was stale from the top down, and the dialogue was so toxic that the words died upon any utterance.
Most Embarrassing Moment: The complete waste of Lea Thompson. She deserves so much better...
8. Transformers: Age of Extinction (17%)
I'm beginning to think I don't even need to watch Michael Bay movies to review them anymore. A lot of bad acting, too much CGI, dialogue that sounds like it was written by a group of third graders trying to sound tough. Every single film he makes just feels like a complete affront to film making as a whole. There is nothing in this film that is salvageable, or worthy of praise. It is one bad scene after another, with terribly shot action sequences, and an over use of slow motion in shots where it barely makes sense. The "good guys" are just as callous and mean as the "bad guys", and not in the fun anti-hero sort of way. By the time they got to the poorly designed Dinobots (over two hours into the movie), it is hard to muster up any emotion toward them. This is a marathon of a movie trying to be cool, and only coming off as a pale imitator of the other horrible films before it.
Most Embarrassing Moment: The creepy incest overtones of Mark Wahlberg's relationship with his daughter.
7. Tusk (39%)
Kevin Smith, where have you gone? Why was this movie made? You unleashed upon us the story of a man who kidnaps a shock-jock podcaster, and turns him into Walrus, and it is a clunky, joyless mess of a movie that fails at any sort of genre it seems to be striving for. Horror? There is never any tension to make the audience uneasy. Cult classic? It feels to intentionally bad to ever contain a moment of even ironic enjoyment. Parody? It never yields any decent laughs to be a sufficient spoof of "The Human Centipede". Every actor seems to be phoning in performances, except Justin Long, who is trying way too hard to be over-the-top. Skip this one, and revisit "Clerks" or "Dogma" again.
Most Embarrassing Moment: So hard to choose from the film itself, but the podcast this film was born from playing over the credits was pretty bad.
6. Dumb and Dumber To (28%)
Twenty years is how long it took to think of this sequel. In that 20 years, and a fistful of other films (a couple of them great), you would think the Farrelly Brothers could have thought up some different jokes to put in the script. Instead, they thought rehashing every single gag from the first movie would be the best way to welcome back their fans. Let's see the check list: Blind kid with dead pets? Check. Most annoying sound in the world? Check. Road trip with a person who is trying to kill them? Check. Showing up at their destination, and wearing a goofy outfit to try to fit in? Check! On top of all of this, they put a bunch of photos from the first movie over the credits to remind you of a much better film. I never thought I would long to watch the mismanaged prequel, "Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd". Thank you for that, Farrellys...
Most Embarrassing Moment: Harry visits his parents, who are Asian, and doesn't realize he is adopted.
5. A Haunted House 2 (8%)
The Wayans Brothers have made some truly awful films ("White Chicks", "Scary Movie 2"), but this one most likely claims the prize as the worst film ever made by a Wayans. Marlon Wayans assumes he is being funny, and edgy, by joking about race and sex, but most of it feels like tired rehashes of jokes made by much funnier comedians and film makers throughout the last 40-50 years. There is a scene in which Wayans has sex, in multiple positions, with the doll from "The Conjuring". This goes on for at least five minutes. If this isn't bad enough, that scene sets up a story line for the rest of the movie. If that sounds awful to you, you are in for this kind of comedy for a rousing 86 minutes.
Most Embarrassing Moment: They loved killing the dog so much in the first one, that they did it twice in this one
4. Best Night Ever (0%)
Last year, Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg managed to get a film into my 20 Most Hated List with "The Starving Games" (#12). This year they somehow made an even worse film by scraping the parody model they are known for, and creating an "original" film. This is the sad product of two men who have spent their entire careers making films based off of the work of other people, and it shows in this laughless found footage mash-up of "Bridesmaids" and "The Hangover". The performances are grating, the cinematography takes found footage to its absolute lowest, and the dialogue is forced and strained. I sure hope the title was meant to be ironic, because watching this made for a perfectly awful night.
Most Embarrassing Moment: The lack of a single likable character.
3. The Devil's Due (21%)
I'm willing to admit a bias against "found footage" films, but when crap like this continues to get released, it is hard to figure out why they keep getting realeased (aside from monetary reasons). Lindsay Devlin's script offers so few scares that this could hardly even be considered a horror film, and the direction is so bad, that any impending scare is telegraphed so far in advanced that when it happens, you had imagined something far more terrifying. Zach Gilford is quickly burning up his "Friday Night Lights" good will with me. I hope he finds a good vehicle soon, because I like him too much to not like him.
Most Embarrassing Moment: The last scene of the film sets up for a sequel I hope nobody is interested in seeing.
2. Vampire Academy (11%)
Everybody is trying so hard to make the next "Twilight", and just like "Twilight", they keep making bland, safe, boring supernatural teen romance films. In this latest attempt, a young girl named Rose (Zoey Deutch) is the chosen guardian of an undead princess (Lucy Fry), and they go to a special school together (like Hogwarts, but in Montana), where they deal with vampire bullying. "Vampire Academy" hits every cliche on the way down: best friends turning on each other, the person who seems to be most on the protagonist's side turning out to be the baddest of them all, the public revenge on the high school bully. Duetch and Fry are so dreadful together, and separately, that they make this movie almost impossible to watch. How this film was written by the man who wrote "Heathers", and directed by the man who directed "Mean Girls", the two best girls in high school films I have had the pleasure of seeing, and wound up this bad, I will never know.
Most Embarrassing Moment: Every time Rose's vision links with the princess', and she thinks out loud.
1. The Legend of Hercules (3%)
Everything that Renny Harlin does is a new reason to run from the theatre screaming in terror (there are exceptions). This year he brought us a comically horrible movie based off of none other than Greek demi-god, Hercules. His actors were stiff, his script was tacky, and his cinematography was poor, to say the least. Poorly made action sequences and special effects make every second worse than the last, and the bad attempt at an emotional ending had me out of the auditorium before the credits even started. There really isn't anything salvageable in this movie. At all.
Most Embarrassing Moment: Kellan Lutz's expressionless face.
0. Saving Christmas
I was hoping to see Kirk Cameron's "Saving Christmas", but I had to drive about an hour to see it, and that seemed a little excessive. So, we'll give it an honorary spot until I actually see it.
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