2023 feels like the first year in a while where things can somewhat come back to normal, which is to say that it still sucked but we could actually go outside every now and then. Of course just because we decided the plague was over doesn’t mean the world didn’t almost explode, indeed several wars have been going on all year which has put a deep divide through the world and there’s also the constant lingering threat that next year might have America deciding to put a known fascist back in the most powerful position on earth for funsies… so, of course, my way to deal with this and several other bits of bile is to unleash them in list form about films I didn’t like.
Honestly, this year’s worst list was a lot harder because there wasn’t anything that leapt out as particularly horrific, there isn’t a Loqueesha-level nightmare to deal with because most of the films that made the shortlist for worst are just kind of bland. Still, this list is the popular one (that’s why these still exist, they get double the views of the positive lists) so here we go. The rules are back on the best list (which you should go read because there’s a lot of fun happy entries over there) but the key thing to remember is that there might be some films here that you like and that’s fine, we don’t have to like the same films but just remember that me hating a film you like is not a personal attack… that being said
Honourable Mentions
Magic Mike’s Last Dance: Magic Mike’s Last Dance fails because the movie before it dared to suggest that maybe this franchise understood why we were here. Let’s be blunt, it’s a film about male strippers so all you should need is to have a couple of attractive people tell a few jokes and do a few routines, it should be easy and fun which Magic Mike XXL absolutely was. Last Dance is a glorified advertisement for the Magic Mike live show and has no energy whatsoever. Even Magic Mike doesn’t want to be part of this show, that’s how boring it is. I’m glad this is the last dance because no one needs an encore.
80 For Brady: The way we treat our elderly legends is horrific. Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Rita Moreno are too good to be in this cinematic blowjob for Tom Brady. They are absolute icons, legends who deserve to be given the best material on the planet and they were thrown this unfunny saccharine piece of crap.
Old Dads: Have you seen that clip of alleged comic Karen Morgan saying something to the effect of “Gen Z doesn’t know how to write a check, they don’t know how to address an envelope or read cursive”? Old Dads is basically an hour and a half of that exact joke but with even more smug bullshit. The only reason this isn’t on the list properly is something came by at the last minute to knock it off the list.
Five Nights At Freddy’s: Sure the film itself was fine enough, probably about as middle of the road as you could get but god damn did it love to throw in a strobe every chance it could get. Sure, the reasoning might be to try and hide the movements of the robotic dolls, doesn’t make it any less headache-inducing whenever you’re trying to keep up with a film and suddenly the lights are strobing like nothing else. Of all the films this year that continue to use the strobing effect, this is the one that stuck out as being the biggest problem… especially considering the audience for this film is mostly going to be kids, an audience that might not know they have epilepsy and are more likely to have a seizure because of this crap.
AND NOW, THE LIST
10) Insidious: The Red Door
This might be the most predictable film of the entire year, if you’ve seen any film in the Insidious franchise before then you can call what’s happening. Every jumpscare can be seen a mile off, every surprise reveal is something we’ve seen before, it all just feels like it’s been done to death and by the end you kind of want to die a little. It’s so predictable that when I tweeted that I was about to watch it I added the joke “I see a red door and I want to paint it black”… and that’s how the film ends, the red door is painted black. That’s how predictable it is, you can literally call the ending of the film out before you even start watching it.
9) Rebel Moon: Part One
Rebel Moon is the reminder that Zach Snyder’s got exactly one mode of operation and it’s “What if the thing that’s aimed at families, but it was dark and gritty and someone could get raped at any minute?”. With the DC universe now destroyed, Snyder has moved on and has set his sights on being the cinematic equivalent of that stall in the mall that sells dolls that look suspiciously like Han and Leia that’re in a container labeled Star Fights. It’s a cheap knockoff of something great with the personality turned down to 0 and the edge lord levels turned up high as they can go.
It’s not fun to look at, every shot feels like it was assembled from dried-out dog turds judging from the colour palette they’ve chosen and the shitty editing makes it hard to follow (that’s assuming you want to follow what’s going on since everything is dull and exhausting and bad). Cap it all off with the knowledge that this film is getting a director’s cut next year, there’s a real chance this might be the first film I’ll be able to put on the worst list two years in a row and holy crap I can’t believe that’s a thing that’s actually possible!
8) Beautiful Disaster
Some people say that superhero movies are what’s ruining cinema but those people have not forced themselves to suffer through the aftermath of the 50 Shades franchise, which makes up films like Beautiful Disaster and another film that comes up later on this list. Beautiful Disaster has the tiny advantage of one semi-likable lead but it’s still an uninteresting spin on the bad-boy-turned-good storyline that forgets to give us an actual bad boy to work with. We have to keep being told about how our main characters behave because the film can’t be bothered to show us. After all, it’s a badly written piece of crap. It’s a film that can’t pick a plot idea (choosing to alternate between half a dozen reasons for the main couple to stick together), it can’t pick a tone to work with and can’t even be sleazy enough to be enjoyable. Failing at everything is an option that this film went with, which made for a disaster I can’t even jokingly call beautiful. The funniest thing is that this somehow has a sequel coming next year… pray for me.
7) The Exorcist: Believer
HOLLYWOOD, STOP MAKING EXORCIST FILMS! YOU ARE NOT GOOD AT IT! YOU HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO PULL THIS FRANCHISE OFF SINCE THE FIRST ONE!
6) Ghosted
How the hell do you make Chris Evans unlikable? I don’t know, but Ghosted did. An unfunny boring rom-com that had the perfect cast, writers and director to make something good, Ghosted is mostly just depressing because you could see how a version of this film could work, but everyone seemed to make the active choice to be completely shit at their jobs and produce this piece of content that got spat out as though we’re meant to adore it just because of who is in it. Much like the honourable mention for 80 For Brady, the stars of this film deserve better than this piece of crap.
5) Elevator Game
Wanna watch a bunch of annoying cunts go up and down in an elevator for 90 minutes? Neither did I, but that’s what Elevator Game made me do. This is what happens when you take a half-decent idea for a short film and throw it in the taffy puller until you get something approaching an hour and a half. The horrible padding to get the runtime up to feature length would kill any tension if indeed there was the possibility for any considering what the film is trying to do. Take the stairs, it’s more interesting than this thing could ever possibly be.
4) Skinamarink
Yeah, this thing was insanely popular and beloved this year… why? WHY? I’ve seen art projects made by pretentious uni students that were more cohesive and interesting than this. A glorified slideshow with occasional voice-over is not that scary or interesting. If you got something out of this then good for you, please tell me your secret because I just got angrier and angrier as I watched this thing because a film this basic and boring getting mainstream attention feels like a crime. Someone owed someone favours to get this onto a streaming service, that’s the only explanation I have.
3) Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey
If there is anyone on the planet who should’ve gotten a kick out of a “Killer Winnie The Pooh” movie, it’s me. Children’s properties being turned into a horror film for adults is the kind of hilarious weirdness I crave (Look at number 8 on my best list for confirmation of that) so for this film to fail so hard that I actively hated it says a lot about how much they missed the mark. It’s not a killer Winnie the Pooh movie as we were promised, it’s just a generic home invasion movie with some unconvincing masks on the main characters. There was stupid fun potential here and maybe it was just a budget problem that weighed everything down, but it feels like it was mostly just the desperation to be the first one to make this joke that led to this failing abysmally. Maybe we’ll be lucky and the inevitable Steamboat Willie horror movie we’ll get once that enters the public domain will actually have some fun with the new toy it’s been given.
2) After Everything
Anyone who has followed my work here knows I hate the After franchise, it’s my nemesis and every entry makes this end-of-year list almost by default. After Everything is no exception to this because once again, we get to see Hardin Scott prove why he’s the worst by spending an hour and a half with him going to apologise to an old girlfriend for making and distributing a sex tape of the two of them without her consent… a literal crime in many places and this film is about how Hardin is very sorry about it and how the girl in question ends up being fine with it. By the way, the main character of the franchise (Tessa) is barely in this film because why should we give a shit about her? She turns up at the end so she can marry Hardin and breed with him and we can prove that he’s grown without actually showing growth.
After Everything can’t even be as upsettingly funny as the previous film, choosing to stick to the Hardin Scott redemption storyline even though it’s made very clear that he doesn’t deserve any of it. The fortunate thing for everyone involved is that, as far as we know, this is the last film of the franchise so it can go off and die like it should’ve years ago. Because of that fact, it was tempting to put After Everything in the top spot for the year, a symbolic head-on-a-pike to warn the franchise to stay dead but there was another film this year that seemingly killed a franchise and really, it deserves the honour of being shat on in the top spot.
1) The Flash
For DC to put so much effort into getting this film out despite them having to know they had a hot piece of garbage on their hands should be enough to disqualify the entire board of that company from being allowed to run anything. You wanna see a film that fails from start to finish, a film that needed to succeed to save a company? The Flash is that film, an utter failure that gets worse the more you think about it. From the absolutely awful-looking visual effects to the disastrous script that feels like it was assembled from 40 different drafts (because it probably was) to a cast who look like they’re there under threat of execution, there isn’t a single element of the film that works… and that’s BEFORE you throw in the bullshit around Warner Brothers and Ezra Miller.
Remember, this movie was meant to be a way for Warner Brothers to reset the DC cinematic timeline and try to get things back on track so they could actually compete with Marvel, that’s the only reason to tell the Flashpoint story at all but they failed so spectacularly that everything has to be scrapped and start from scratch again. It’s kind of spectacular how badly they fucked every element of this up, they literally got Michael Keaton to come back and don the Batman cowl again and even that wasn’t enough to make this film worthwhile. The WB are lucky that they had Barbie to basically carry them this year or else David Zaslav would be in a parking lot giving handjobs for cash in order to make rent (just kidding, billionaires never have to worry about that kind of bullshit, they can just fail horribly forever and never see consequences because we live in hell!)
Probably the biggest reason this film is up here though is one single sequence, the scene where they show previous iterations of several characters including an uncanny valley version of Christopher Reeve. In a year where actors went on strike for months to fight to keep their faces from being used after they die, here was a film that showed why that was so awful. It’s grave robbing for nostalgia points, pure and simple and it added nothing of value to the film. Not only is this film technically bad, but it’s morally repugnant because it decided that just throwing in a couple of long-dead faces would be enough to make up for bad storytelling. I’m glad this era of the DC cinematic universe is over. If it means we never see a film like The Flash again then it can’t go away fast enough.
And that was all the worst films I saw this year, what was the worst thing that you went through this year in a cinema? Let’s see if you can’t find something worse than what I found.
Movie Meister Reviews 
4 thoughts on “The Top Ten Worst Films of 2023”