2025 has been another one of those years where it feels like everything is going wrong; we’ve had a lot of those lately. It’s just one hard hit after another, and there’s no real end in sight. Personally, this year I ended up leaving the job that caused me to not do this properly last year (long story but hey, maybe employers shouldn’t treat their employees like shit!), which meant I was able to actually catch up on films at a more reasonable pace and… I don’t know, maybe I just got worse taste but this year it was actually kind of hard to find 10 worst films to put on a list because everything I saw was either good or better… but don’t worry, I found 10 pieces of shit, let’s scream about them to get the bile out. The rules for these lists are back in the Best one (go read it, I picked some wild ones this year)
But first, HONOURABLE MENTIONS!
Back In Action: Cameron Diaz came out of retirement for this… Jamie Foxx used this film to celebrate being alive after a medical scare… you forgot this thing came out at all, didn’t you? A forgettable, unfunny piece of action slop that wastes so many exceptional talents that it should be criminal. Fingers crossed that Cameron Diaz doesn’t go back into retirement after this shit, she should get the chance to go out on top.
Fountain Of Youth: Brainless Indiana Jones knockoff that somehow makes John Krasinski unlikable… every year, this worst list will just have one movie where an endlessly lovable actor is turned into a jerk for no good reason.
Until Dawn: A muddled mess of ideas thrown together to attempt to recreate the free choice gameplay of its source material that just never works on any level.
Love Hurts: You’d think a film starring two Oscar winners would at least be interesting. No, this film is just a reminder that even the limitless charm of people like Ke Huy Quan and Ariana Debose has its limits.
This Film Tried To Kill Me Award: The Moment Trailer – Every single year, I give out an award for the film with the worst strobe lights because, as an epileptic, I find the fact that people still use this dangerous visual effect to be a disconcerting thing. Every year, a full-length feature film inevitably uses it and doesn’t warn the audience about it, meaning it’s inevitably going to cause people to have a seizure and, at best, ruin their week, at worst, kill them. People die from seizures, it’s a serious thing and should be called out. This year’s award goes to a trailer for The Moment, a film that doesn’t come out until next year, but I will not be seeing that film based entirely on what the trailer shows.
The strobes begin with the A24 title drop and don’t stop. My head was aching by the 15-second mark, and by the end, I’m stunned that they even managed to finish editing it without the editor falling off their chair and swallowing their tongue. This trailer earns the award because trailers are designed to be shown in front of other films, to be shared widely and quickly. The fans of Charlie XCX who will watch this trailer are young, they might not know they’re epileptic until this trailer. Their Brat Summer is going to turn into a Seizure Winter and they do not deserve that.
And now, THE LIST PROPER!
10) A Minecraft Movie
Yeah, yeah, the highest-grossing film of the year, THE meme of the year is on this list. I get that a lot of people liked it and I’m sorry, but it’s just not a good film. The story is bland, the characters are annoying, and it fails to capture the fun of the game. Sure, it played directly to its audience in a way no other film has this year, but its audience deserved better than this. You had a review proof setup, you could’ve tried harder.
9) The Electric State
This film cost $320 million… honestly wasting that much money on a film that has no theatrical release and therefore no real way to earn its budget back should put you on here for pure business reasons but it helps that the film itself is a bland flavourless piece of garbage that genuinely makes me wonder if the Russo brothers are good film makers or were just blessed with great material from the Marvel corporation. Hell, you know how I know this film belongs on this worst list? It came out in March, it cost the same to make as almost the entire Best Picture lineup at the Oscars this year, and you probably forgot what it even was (if you even watched it, and I don’t blame you for pointedly avoiding it).
8) Playdate
Alan Ritchson deserved better than this. Half-assed action comedy made by people who can’t film action, can’t write a joke and don’t have an ass. The concept of this film should’ve really given them a great layup to have fun. A big, silly film was almost inevitable with the idea of “The dad of the kid that my kid is on a playdate with is actually a CIA badass” and somehow this film snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Its lack of comedic content is only matched by its forgettability; it’s this year’s definition of content made to fill space on a digital shelf.
7) I Know What You Did Last Summer
Halloween (2018) has a lot to answer for, but the biggest thing it has to answer for is how it essentially started a trend of legacy sequels in Horror… almost none of which have been as good as Halloween (2018) was. This year’s awful entry is I Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel to the big ’90s Scream ripoff that was so threadbare that it’s only memorable because it had one of the best casts for this kind of movie. I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) doesn’t have such a cast, it has a bunch of flash in the pans who have nothing to offer other than a body count.
It takes the leads of the original, relegates Jennifer Love Hewitt to a glorified cameo where she does absolutely nothing of substance, ruins what little character Freddie Prinze Jr had to work with and really hopes that Sarah Michelle Gellar is iconic enough to save their asses. Look, SMG is iconic in her one scene, but even Buffy can’t save this mess.
6) Hurry Up Tomorrow
At least when Prince did a vanity project, we got Purple Rain. When Michael Jackson did a vanity project, we got the music video for Smooth Criminal… The Weeknd did a vanity project and I had a nap. This is one of those films where everyone involved was clearly trying to make something exciting and cool, but forgot that their lead actor has no actual acting talent or charisma whatsoever. Everything about this film that doesn’t work can be laid right at the feet of The Weeknd, who keeps trying to act but he can’t, he just can’t. He has no emotion in his face, there is nothing there, it’s a blank slate devoid of movement and if his team actually cared about him then the next time he picked up a film script, someone would throw it into the fire and yell “No!”
5) Fear Street: Prom Queen
The Fear Street trilogy, back in 2021, was one of the best horror trilogies ever. A glorious interconnected slasher series that jumped between different eras to tell a sprawling story of a cursed town that was loaded with some amazing characters, visuals and kills… Fear Street: Prom Queen is the Temu version of that, if the thing you ordered from Temu was a bucket of liquid shit. Nothing is redeeming about Prom Queen as a film. It’s ugly, badly written, poorly acted and has exactly one kill that could be considered fun if you have low standards. It’s the kind of awful film that gets made so a company can keep an IP licence going, something you churn out because if you don’t make something soon, you have to let the owners have their property back.
4) Snow White
Disney remakes are a scourge that keep somehow making money… Ok, Snow White didn’t make money; it was actually a spectacular bomb, but it’s still emblematic of the problem at hand. Disney thought they could take the first animated film they ever made, one of the most important films in the history of the medium, do a soulless remake of it and that would just be considered OK. While Rachel Zegler does her absolute best to sell the material she has (Seriously, that woman’s voice is a miracle), it doesn’t help that she’s been given dogshit material to work with. Gal Gadot finally wore out her welcome, proving the people who said she wasn’t a good actress to be completely correct, and the film itself just looks like ass. Disney used to actually care about the films they put out, a Walt Disney Film was usually a marker of quality… not anymore, now it means “Oh, this is the latest bit of corporately mandated slop that we have to tolerate”
3) The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man
Confession time, I tend to try and avoid putting the films I see at weird film festivals on the worst list. I know it’s not objective, and for some reason, people think reviews should be objective (they literally can’t be), but my reasoning is actually quite simple: it feels unfair to put something on the worst list that’s maybe only ever going to be seen at a film festival or was made on a shoestring budget that’s so small that they can’t even afford to make a trailer that can be uploaded to Youtube. Also the weirder film festivals tend to show films that take the bigger creative swings and it will always be more interesting to take a big swing and miss than to just make the latest bit of corporate slop… yeah, all that means nothing after being subjected to an hour and a half of some fucking moron running around the streets of Toronto and throwing fake buckets of piss and shit over people.
Every shot was filmed like the cameraman was ashamed to be in the same zip code, and it sounds like the boom mic was being run over. There isn’t a single moment of the film that’s interesting or funny, it’s just the one idea hammered over and over again with no artistic merit. Gross-out humour is a tough thing to pull off, it really is… but you have to actually try to pull it off, and the only thing that this film tries is “My patience”
2) War of the Worlds
War of the Worlds (2025) became infamous because of how bad it was, it was a goddamn meme that this adaptation of the HG Wells classic story was one of the worst things Amazon had done that didn’t involve torturing their fulfilment staff. It’s almost like they had a checklist of things that could upset people, from the unforgivably bad acting to the obscene product placement for Amazon to the script that felt like it was made up on the fly.
Every element of the film is almost clinically designed to suck, and that would be more than enough to put it on this list, but then it came out that the film used actual war footage and edited in the spaceships, so there’s a chance that this could technically be a snuff film, and it got a release on one of the major streamers… It’s awful, it’s a completely pathetic excuse for a film that wastes the smart setup and uses images of actual pain and suffering to tell its silly story. How dare it, how dare they even try this shit… speaking of “How dare they”
1) Emilia Pérez
This film got 13 Oscar nominations. Just think about that for a second, 13. The highest any film has ever gotten is 14 nominations, this film tied with Gone with the Wind, From Here to Eternity, Mary Poppins, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Forrest Gump, Shakespeare in Love, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Chicago, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Shape of Water and Oppenheimer to have the second most Oscar nominations in the 97 year history of the Oscars. Now, you can look at that list and say you don’t like any of those films but it’s pretty hard to deny that they aren’t all at least good, several great and a huge number of them are actual classics that are the benchmark for certain elements of cinema… and then there’s Emilia Pérez, a garbage film made by garbage people that somehow snuck its way into the history books.
For a film that’s a musical, this film sucks as a musical. None of the songs are good, they don’t advance the plot, no one in the film can actually sing worth a damn (even Selena Gomez sucks, and singing is meant to be the thing she does as a career), and every single musical number feels out of place. It’s a film that doesn’t want to be a musical, but someone forced it to try so it’s phoning it in. The Vaginaplasty song is funny because it’s so bad that it loops around to become hilarious, but “Funny” is not the same as “Good”. The song it won an Oscar for is also bad, the fact that this song won multiple awards has me wondering if any other songs existed in the last year, because no way could you listen to any of these songs and think “Yeah, that deserves an award” unless that award was shaped like a raspberry!
The acting is also just not good, at best. Maybe one actress is giving a performance worth a damn, and it’s the problematic cast member that tanked this film’s Oscar hopes. The one who won the Oscar delivered a performance that can best be described as “Contractually obligated” and everyone else was just kind of there. It has nothing to offer. If this is everyone trying to make a good film, then they failed so abysmally that it should haunt them.
But that’s just the actual film quality, throw in how this film embraces transmedicalism, was written by a guy who never spoke to a trans person or knew anything about Mexico, had music written by someone who didn’t know the language she was writing music in and had to get it translated (and sung by performers with horrible Spanish pronunciation)… everything about this film was bad, every single element just did not work and it should’ve just been swept into the pile of bad forgettable musicals… but for some reason it became a critical darling and an Awards season mainstay. Wicked lost the Golden Globe to this piece of shit, that’s a crime in some countries. In a year where we had some truly great works of art, we also had this nonsense.
For more on why this film sucks, I highly suggest watching the videos by Council of Geeks and Jessie Gender, two trans YouTubers who can really go into so much more detail on the problems this film had than I ever could. It’s bad enough that you need supplemental material to really emphasise how shit this thing is.
And that’s it, that’s my worst of 2025 list. Any films you saw that you hated, let me know so we can get the bile out and start 2026 on a fresh note. Any films on my list you disagree with? Cool, convince me they’re good… nicely, I’m totally happy to delete rude comments if I need to and sometimes people make good arguments for films I hated.
Movie Meister Reviews 