feature: worst films of the decade (2000 – 2009)

January 12, 2010   //    8 Comments

So my friend Julian asked me to do a worst films of the decade post… I had thought about it before but since I was asked I decided I may as well get it together… I didn’t want to commit myself to picking 10 though because I don’t want to put in merely bad films just for the sake of it. I want this to be a list of the truly awful films I’ve seen this decade.

I may as well warn you now. There are spoilers in this article. I didn’t think I could really impress upon you how bad some of these films are without giving away the “plots” of some of them. You really shouldn’t watch them anyway so I figured it would be ok..

Unfortunately there are a few contenders like Komodo vs. Cobra and Shark Attack 3: Megalogon that won’t be making the list simply because I didn’t see the full film. I don’t think it’s fair to judge if I haven’t seen the whole film. Suffice to say that the parts I did see of those films looked appalling.

As with my Top 10 films of the decade article the scores in brackets are my IMDb ratings.

So, without further ado and all that… here are my worst films of the decade.

7. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous (2005)

Oh Sandra, what were you thinking?

I quite liked Miss Congeniality. It was sweet and funny and Ms. Bullock is a great slapstick actress when tasked with it, but this was just crap. Surely she had a look at the script before agreeing to the sequel? Or then again maybe not, maybe they got her on a two picture deal but not the writers… they should have to got the writers too.

Wait a minute, I can check that… looking at the credits they got one of the three writers of the original. I guess he wasn’t one of the funny ones.

Turns out he’s the writer/director behind Did You Hear About The Morgans? as well… Well, I’ve heard about the Morgans alright…

(4/10)

6. Flightplan (2005)

Another good actress, another terrible movie. This time it’s Jodie Foster.

I really just thought this film was ridiculous, laughable.  I don’t understand how we were meant to take the whole thing seriously.  It actually started off ok… ish… kind of… there was a slight bit of atmosphere there… but it quickly descended into stupidity. I saw this with a mate of mine in a cinema with I’d say about 10 people in it and I have to say I was somewhat embarrassed. Mainly because we kept laughing out loud at it.

The starting concept is alright, a woman gets on a plane with her child and half way through the flight the child disappears and everyone denies the child was ever on the plane.  A film charting a woman’s descent into madness. Fair enough.  Except that’s not what this is.  What it actually was was a film charting one woman’s extremely self-righteous crusade to terrorise everyone else on a plane until she gets to the bottom of what’s going on. And when you finally get to find out what’s going on it’s just… stupid.

I have make a special complaint about one particular aspect of the film.  At one point she attacks some men of… let’s say Middle-Eastern descent, accusing them of stealing her child.  They in turn get pounced upon by a few other passengers and basically get beaten up.  For no reason.  They had nothing to do it. So that’s bad enough but at no point later on in the film does she apologise to them. In fact later, they end up meekly handing the hero her luggage. So, first unjustly accused of being terrorists then, treated like slaves! Great! It’s 5 years later but that scene still riles me.

The more I think about it the more I realise how awful this film is…

(4/10)

5. Hostel (2005)

I don’t know if it’s just that I happen to see a lot of horror films or if there’s actually a higher proportion of crap in the genre but for whatever. This is the first of a few desperate horror films on this list.

I have no issue with Eli Roth in general. Ok, this is the only film he’s directed that I’ve seen, and I hated it, but I did like him in Inglourious Basterds so it’s pretty much square as far as I’m concerned. That’s not going to stop me complaining about his movie though.

Basically I hated pretty much all the main characters in this film and I couldn’t give a toss about what happened to them. Plus there was really nothing subtle or interesting about the film. There are some great horror films out there; filled with tension and… well, horror. This was just a mindless bloodfest. Which is fine, when all the people you hate get killed, but if they don’t then what’s the point?

It’s like that 2009 Friday the 13th. Why have a wood chipper in a film if you aren’t going to use it? There’s a film that should be on this list too…

In fact. I’ll put Friday the 13th here too… for pretty much exactly the same reason as Hostel… so no point in writing any more about it.

Hostel – (5/10)
Friday the 13th (2009) – (3/10)

4. Jeepers Creepers (2001)

The other problem with bad horror films is that they all tend to be bad for the same kinds of reasons… so there’s not that much to say about them.

What particularly stood out for me on this one though was the extremely poor quality of the monster. They spend ages trying to convince us that this guy is bad-ass, then when he finally turns up he looks like a dude in a sack and a black bin bag. Are you serious?

(3/10)

3. Monster Man (2003)

Another bad horror. This one was billed as Jeepers Creepers meets Duel in Texas Chainsaw country.

When they say “meets Duel” they really just mean that there’s a truck in it. And when they say “Texas Chainsaw country” I assume they are talking about the 2006 prequel. You already know what I thought of Jeepers Creepers.

As you can imagine.  This does not bode well.  There’s also a particular vile scene with a dead cat. Actually it’s kind of funny if you’re feeling pretty sick yourself.  Personally I looked away a bit but I did laugh too… it was just so manky. Also the rest of the film was so incredibly boring so anything happening was good.

I guess they were trying to build the suspense like Spielberg did in Duel or something… or maybe not. I’m really not sure because I think in a way it was meant to be a comedy. It’s really hard to tell… and care.

(3/10)

2. The Aryan Couple (2004)

I imagine not that many people have heard of this film.  It only has 373 votes on IMDb so generally that would imply that it did not get much of a release.  I only went to see it because I didn’t have a film in mind to see and it was showing in Cineworld when I got there.  It had Martin Landau in it and a couple of those leaf crown looking things on the poster that you get from film festivals so I thought it could be good. Looking on IMDb it actually won 5 awards. Mind you, not at any film festivals you would have heard of.

This is the film that taught me that film festival awards mean nothing.

It’s set in the Holocaust and it’s about a rich German/Jewish industrialist (Landau) and how he attempts to buy his and his family’s way out of Nazi Germany… except that, as with so many bad films, this simple story gets twisted and convoluted into some awful mess. It turns out that the Aryan couple that he has working for him as housekeepers are actually part of the Jewish resistance. What follows is a half-assed, mawkish, melodramatic, over-sentimental (and I realise these words mean approximately the same thing but I want to get this across) and overly complicated treatment of what could have been a been a solid simple story.  Paradoxically it’s an extremely simplistic story as well, the whole Holocaust thing is really not dealt with in any kind of intelligent manner.

Also it had one of the worst scores I have ever heard. Honestly. I’m not even into movie scores but this one was so insidiously bad it was impossible to ignore. It made a terrible film exponentially worse and hence here it is as the second worst film of the decade.

(2/10)

1. Reeker (2005)

This isn’t just the worst film of the decade. It’s the worst film I’ve ever seen… and I’ve seen more than one Uwe Boll travesty. Reeker is another horror film and it’s so bad it’s offensive. I can’t entirely remember everything that happened but basically this is the gist of it…

There are some young folks travelling at night in a car / SUV type thing, it breaks down and they stop in a motel. Mysteriously people start dying and all the deaths are preceded by a horrible smell.

That’s right. They are being murdered by a smell.

There’s also a blind guy who can smell particularly well so he can tell when the smell is coming. So far so silly….

One by one the young folks slowly but surely succumb to the smelly murderer… to be fair you do get to see the murderer but that’s neither here nor there because the smell is the main thing.

The end is when it all really offensively stupid though. Up until now it’s just been a silly little clichéd horror film… but then… but then… somehow… inexplicably it turns out that no-one has been murdered at all! There never was a murderer! All the kids were just in a car crash and the ones that died, died in the car crash in the manner of their “murders”. What?? What!? What!!

(1/10)

That’s it.

Am I wrong? Do you feel some of these films deserve more credit than I’m giving them? Alternatively are there films that you think are far worse that should be on here? Let me know, I always welcome comment. 😉