The Top Ten Worst Films of 2022

2022 has been a weird year, a year where we all collectively decided to pretend the pandemic was over (it’s not) and return to whatever we used to call normalcy. It’s meant watching as cinemas slowly got back into the swing of things, the cinemas have managed to stay open all year so now it’s time to go through the films I saw through 2022 and tell you which ones I thought sucked the most… because it’s the list that gets the most clicks and that’s the internet economy for you, the negative stuff gets eyes and I’m still at the point of building this thing up so I need those eyes. (but hey, prove me wrong, go read my Best Of 2022 list and make its numbers higher to prove that positivity is still lucrative(

So once again it’s time to go through the worst parts of the year in cinema and excise a ton of bile so we can hopefully start 2023 with something resembling a clean slate. A reminder that these are my opinions, because film is art and art is subjective so if you like some of these films then that’s great, wish I could see what you see in these. That means that if I put a film on here you like, it’s not a personal slight on you and I will try to explain my problem with it (so if you reply to one of the links with “Uggh, why is that on the list” I will know you didn’t read and get to post a screencap of this moment in response along with the phrase “CALLED IT”)

…Anyway, HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Honourable Mentions

Purple Hearts: A film about two people on opposite ends of the political spectrum clearly written by someone who understands neither side, Purple Hearts might be one of the more infuriating romantic films of the year purely because it could’ve actually used its core concept to make some interesting political points but instead decided to just be kind of shit.

Ambulance: For some reason people praised this film but in this house, we hate Ambulance with a passion. It’s not well filmed, Michael Bay’s obsession with the constantly moving camera is literally nausea-inducing and every time you think that the characters can’t make a stupider decision, they find a way to be even dumber. It’s another brainless Bay film but without the fun elements that used to make brainless Bay films at least slightly enjoyable.

Halloween Ends: This film is possibly the most divisive entry in the Halloween franchise, some people love it and insist that the fanbase will come around to it and others hate it. I’m more in the latter camp for the main reason that this film promised to be the final confrontation between Laurie and Michael and we ended up spending most of the time following some guy called Corey who can actually kick Michael’s ass with relative ease. Maybe this will age better, that’s why it’s just an honourable mention here, but considering what it was meant to be it’s a massive letdown.

2025 The World Enslaved By A Virus: If I had seen this film in 2021 when this was actually released then it would’ve been the top entry on that worst list. Hell, my 2021 list would’ve just been this specific film and a note saying “Compared to this piece of garbage, every other film of the year was Citizen Kane!” It’s not just incompetent, it’s hateful and full of vile disinformation that represents a disgusting mindset that exacerbated the pandemic that we’ve spent the last several years dealing with. It’s a cinematic hate crime intended to encourage an idea that has literally gotten people killed with a director I’m more than comfortable calling a pedophile because he literally dated a child for several years and on top of all that morally repugnant bullshit, it’s just a badly made movie that would get you punched in the face by any first-year film teacher. 

10) After Ever Happy

I know, I’m shocked that an entry in the After franchise would be this low on my worst list too. At this point, the franchise is something of a personal nemesis of mine and basically gets a spot on this list just for daring to continue existing. Still, every other entry in this franchise has made the list in their respective years and was usually pretty high so why does this latest movie only get the 10th spot? Well, because of the creative decision to turn meta and have Hardin write a book about his and Tessa’s relationship and call it After. That idea is so objectively stupid that it’s actually entertaining.

After Ever Happy is so bad that when I went to see it, the only other people in the cinema were riffing on the movie as it played. It’s impossible not to, you can’t help but call out every vile and abusive act Hardin does for the evil bullshit it is. If you don’t mock the film, you’re not watching it properly. The stunning thing is that there are still at least two more films in this franchise left to go… we get more After, but we can’t get Batgirl because life is unfair.

Also, the title is just stupid and I keep calling it After Ever Happily, this series can’t do anything right!

9) Deep Water

Bet you forgot this one even existed, this was Adrian Lyne’s return to the genre that he basically owned back in the 80s with films like Fatal Attraction. Seems the time off hasn’t helped because Deep Water is a deeply uninteresting, unsexy and unbelievably stupid film with bland performances by sentient blocks of wood who are there to look pretty and die in uninteresting ways. 

The annoying thing is that the core idea of the film, that being a cuckolded husband who kills the men his wife sleeps with, is so gloriously cheesy that it should make for a really fun erotic thriller. Maybe the real cuckolds are the audience who sat and watched this film and got entertainment blue balls out of it… I’m kidding, no one watched this expecting anything entertaining. Hell, you had to look back up to the header above this paragraph to even remember the name of the film I’m talking about, didn’t you? 

8) Morbius

Any film that bombs at the cinema twice deserves a spot on every worst list, it’s the prize this film earned for being so undeniably bad. This film literally got memed back into cinemas where it failed to even break the top 10 during its heavily promoted re-release, that’s hilarious… it’s also the only funny thing about Morbius. Badly paced, poorly written, a god-awful lead performance (Can we finally stop pretending Jared Leto is a good actor? His only good performance was in House of Gucci and that’s because it was so awful that it’s a delight to watch) and the most piss-weak attempt at world-building that’s been tried since The Mummy thought it could launch the Dark Universe, Morbius is just a bad time.

If we were to be generous, maybe Matt Smith is good enough to salvage a few scenes here and there but the rest of the film is so bad that you’re better off just watching compilations of Matt Smith’s bits on YouTube than suffering through the few hours of boredom that is Morbius. This is why Sony needs to just step back and let Marvel handle its characters because so far Sony’s not exactly got a great reputation here.

7) Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s timeline is one of the most convoluted in horror history, which is why it was theoretically smart of them to copy the recent trend that the 2018 Halloween film began and make a legacy sequel that acts as a follow-up to the original with the main character returning for one final go against their iconic villain… except this film is absolutely awful, follows some horrifically unlikeable main characters, doesn’t even take place in the right location and makes a mockery of the returning heroine Sally Hardesty (who is played by a different actress since we sadly lost Marilyn Burns in 2014).

If you were to be kind to this film, the Bus sequence is very enjoyable in how over the top the gore is but there’s no tension to be found here. If this is meant to follow on from the original, everything got a severe downgrade in the decades between. In a year that will go down as one of the best in horror history, this is one of the worst entries in a franchise somewhat known for having terrible sequels

6) Moonfall

Roland Emmerich returns to play his greatest hits, seemingly unaware that other people have figured out how to do big over-the-top action films that are actually worth watching. Moonfall isn’t just stupid, it’s brainless. One of the dumbest ideas with some of the worst acting that’s ever been put in one of Roland’s films, which is saying a lot considering every other film the man has ever made. It’s a film that’s not only unrepentantly stupid, but it seems to be under the impression that it’s actually smart and interesting which it’s not.

The truly annoying thing about Moonfall is that, theoretically, this could’ve been a fun movie with some creative visuals that could make for a fun popcorn flick but we don’t get that here. No, Moonfall is content to be completely brainless and worst of all, forgettable. I don’t know how Roland Emmerich keeps funding his films, but the fact he somehow gets funding is proof that we don’t live in a meritocracy and that we need to abolish capitalism as a concept.

5) Jurassic World Dominion

One of the most legendary films of all time that shouldn’t have spawned a franchise was Jurassic Park, and in this hopefully final sequel we get absolute confirmation that this franchise should’ve gone extinct years ago. It’s cute how they tried to combine the original cast of the Jurassic Park franchise with the cast of the Jurassic World franchise but they do it in such a way that turns everyone into boring one-note characters who we don’t give a damn about in a story that’s so convoluted that it becomes incredibly stupid.

Perhaps the worst part of this is that the film before this, while also not great, ended with all the dinosaurs escaping and suggesting we might have to deal with an actual Jurassic World but instead we just play the hits in a badly made film that was so universally panned that it seemingly made the director realise that this franchise should’ve stopped before it began… you know you’ve messed up when you basically have to admit that almost half of the films you’ve made shouldn’t actually exist!

4) Pinocchio

In a moment of perfect balance, there’s a Pinocchio film on both the best and the worst list. Disney needs to stop hurting itself with these god-awful remakes of its original classic films. Pinocchio is one of the most beloved films of the early Disney era, its main song “When You Wish Upon A Star” is literally the theme tune for the Disney company as a whole, the central character is one of the most instantly loveable characters to ever be created by Disney and the remake takes all of that and surgically removes any semblance of charm.

The stuff that Pinocchio recreates from the original is just ugly, missing the point of the scene or just being a pale imitation of what we’ve seen before, while the new stuff adds nothing, contradicts the core message of the film or just doesn’t work. The original film had some iconic imagery that this remake can’t even come close to copying. It’s a film that’s about as wooden and empty as the puppet that gives the film its name.

3) Marmaduke

The winner for the “ugliest film made in 2022” prize would easily be Marmaduke, an atrocious-looking film that feels like some drunk university student’s first attempt at using Blender. Based purely on how shit the film looks, it deserves a spot on this list but what puts it up so high is everything else about it. From the threadbare plot to the horrific voice acting to the moments of casual racism and transphobia, the actual content of the film is despicable and should probably have caused someone reading the script to go “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t do this”.

Marmaduke is basically torture to sit through, a depressing waste of talented voice actors trying to give life to a boring film that fights against every single attempt to become interesting. The only thing that’s even remotely worth watching about this film is the Marmaduke Rap that plays over the end credits and even that is only enjoyable because it’s so awful that it loops around to become hilarious. The rest of the film is just a giant pile of dog shit.

2) Blonde

Marilyn Monroe has been through enough, let the woman rest in peace! An entire film dedicated to the worst moments of her life would be bad enough if all of those moments were real, but to make a film that blends the real horrors Marilyn went through with the fake ones that some asshole made up to be edgy is completely irresponsible. 

Despite an undeniably committed and fascinating performance by Ana De Armas, Blonde is torturous to sit through because you as the audience are forced to watch as Marilyn is put through absolute torture for no good reason other than “Well, she had a bad life so we’re showing that”, No, you’re exploiting it. I don’t care if the director says you can’t exploit her because she’s dead, this is exploitation and it’s morally reprehensible in every way.

At least in rape-revenge films, the rape victim gets to kill her attacker… Marilyn doesn’t get that, she gets her image dragged through the mud by people who don’t actually care about her (Seriously, I’m convinced the director just hates Marilyn Monroe and wanted to see her being brutally assaulted for several hours. Considering the shit he’s said about her, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility). Despite how we’ve abused her image over the years, Marilyn Monroe was a real person who lived a real life and had real trauma and real hardship and she deserved so much better than being used as the focal point for this agony porno that’s being passed off as a high-end biopic.

And speaking of agony porno… 

1) The Next 365 Days & 365 Days: This Day

Is it even remotely shocking that the absolute worst film of 2022 was going to be another entry in the 365 Days series? Those films were just designed for this exact purpose, to be put on this list in this spot. 

Sure I could’ve probably picked one of them for this spot and the other one for a lower spot on the list but they’re both such massive pieces of shit that trying to differentiate between them is pointless. Both of them were pains in the ass, both of them stink and both of them are better off flushed away and forgotten about than given a deep up-close investigation. 

Even if we ignored the absolutely vile ideas behind these films (and we won’t, but let’s pretend for a minute) they would more than earn this top spot due to their basic filmmaking. They’re not well made, poorly edited with an atrocious soundtrack and acting that’s so bad that it would make porn stars look like they deserve Oscars. At least porn stars make you believe that they really want to pay for the pizza in some alternative method, I don’t believe anyone in 365 Days even wants to be in the same room as each other. 

It’s painful to watch these people try to make this work, you can certainly tell that they think they’re making something worth seeing and it’s sad to see how wrong they were. Sure the film might have a lot of attractive people getting naked but that’s not going to be enough to counteract the rage-inducing plot that holds this film together.

But of course, the big problem with this film is the undeniable reality that this entire franchise is just the romanticisation of rape. It’s all about a woman being Stockholm syndromed into loving a mobster via repeated fucking. It’s the constant underlying reality of the situation and it’s horrific. It’s rotten to the core, failing on a moral level even before we get to all the technical ways it also sucks. We’re fortunate enough to know that this is the last pair of films in this franchise, there are no more currently planned so hopefully we never have to hear about this god-awful set of films ever again.

So that was my list of the worst films of 2022, any big ones that I missed? Well then tell me, engagement is king!