Top 10 Worst Movies of 2018

Saw this as part of a triple feature alongside Hereditary and Upgrade. And while I didn't dislike anything in this movie--I like a lot of this film's; they just didn't gel. A lot of ideas featured in this movie outright had nothing to do with one another, and had no purpose even featuring in this movie.

I kind of wished the basic premise--of a hotel that houses and nurses criminals--was better polished. But instead, we are introduced to a dystopian LA; a water crisis; and rules to an establishment that we never really learn the full details of, and all get broken over the course of the movie. It felt as if the filmmakers were trying to force in some kind of commentary while simultaneously giving us a Clue/Hateful Eight type of movie. And it doesn't work because the background information has jack all to do with anything.

Ultimately, I just shrugged it off and considered it okay.

Early Man pretty much suffers from the All-or-Nothing syndrome that a lot of plots tend to suffer from, and sports films more often than not suffer the most. Yes, I did say sports film; it's about cave men challenging an advanced human civilization into a game of soccer (sorry, I meant football; the US version does call it soccer though).

The problem with All-or-Nothing stakes in stories is that, depending on the plot, we know full well what is going to happen, and 9 times out of 10, unless its some sort of pretentious artsy piece of crap, that the good guys are going to win. Similar to Space Jam, in fact; if the good guys lose, they are forced into slavery. Translation: The good guys are not going to lose.

Which is kind of why a lot of sports films tend to follow personal stakes and conflicts rather than something much more grand--and yet completely impersonal to the audience.

I do not think this film is bad. I've yet to see a genuinely bad Aardman film. But it's definitely my least favorite film of theirs and definitely their least funny. I just do not get this one.

Oh, yeah! I saw this one. I keep forgetting that I ever saw it.

My central problem with Annihilation is that it's basically a pretentious snuff film--or might as well be, except that it's boring and forgettable. I have no idea what I am supposed to gleam off of this film. It's so pretentious that it fails to leave any possible impact on me.

In other words, completely forgettable.

And here is where we begin to teeter closer to objectively bad films. Hereditary follows in a similar footsteps to that of the Exorcist, and trust me when I say that The Exorcist is probably up there for the single most overrated film of the entire 1970's bar none.

I honestly cannot stand these types of horror movies. Specifically films about possession. If I have to take a wild guess, the filmmakers pretty much have no idea what they are talking about, and presumably don't care. Hereditary at least makes the effort to try and connect mental illness to possession and exorcism. The main problem was that things like schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders were once considered demonic possessions rather than mental illnesses. This tends to affect characters like Gollum, too because while Gollum was outright based on the old-school thinking of possession, modern thinking outright sees it as schizophrenia, which makes the character more sympathetic rather than terrifying.

And considering the fact that The Visit from 2015 is about an elderly couple with mental illnesses, and they still made it creepy and unnerving, I almost thought that Hereditary was going to go a similar route. But nope; it's basically the worst traits of Rosemary's Baby meets the worst traits of The Exorcist.

I suppose in some areas, this film is comparable to another horror film that I loath in The Woods. However, the main difference between these two films is that at least the mother in Hereditary at least tried to make things right, whereas the parents in The Woods went the Lars von Trier route of becoming utterly despicable. Still, a plot contrivance still dooms this entire family, which is why this film made my list.

Honestly, I kind of enjoyed this film a little bit, especially compared to Hereditary. But let's face it; it was a mistake casting the actual guys to play themselves reenacting the real life events.

Then again, the script for much of the film is really, really bad. Like The Room levels of bad. The dialogue does not feel very natural at all, nor do any of the performances. At least the three friends have chemistry with one another in spite not being able to act.

It also suffers from the very fact that, well, they're not exactly very interesting people. This was probably better off as a documentary or a short film chronicling their European vacation and then recreating the event of the title. Because once the vacation started, I actually started liking the movie a bit. Because otherwise, their real life stories are a tedious bore to sit through, and the dialogue is some of the absolute worst I've ever heard in a movie. For about 2/3's of it.

I hate to say this, because I kind of like what they actually did on that fateful day. And I like the climatic scene a great deal.

Another film I actually kind of liked in a guilty pleasure sort of way. But the fact remains this film really jumps the shark. Particularly with Charlie Day. I found him annoying in the first Pacific Rim, but then they decided to go way overboard with him in ways I cannot even believed they attempted.

That, and they killed off the female lead of the first movie without much thought or care that they did it. All that mattered is that we buy their products, and that's it. I kind of liked it in a similar fashion that I liked the Michael Bay Transformers movies for a while. But even then, it was simply me trying hard to really love this movie.

A fundamentally flawed concept at best. It is yet another story about artificial intelligence in yet another attempt to scare us to death over the notion of technological advancement in spite the fact that it's bloody impossible.

I will at least admit that there were some fail safes in place to keep the AI from rebelling. But in all seriousness, how could we possibly program an AI with sentience and individuality. How can we program self-awareness. Yes, we have programs that can outplay the greatest chess players in the world, and can handle customer service.

But the dirty little trick is that that is all they are capable of doing. The computer program playing chess can only ever play chess. The robots that handle customer service can't respond in any other way other than how they were programmed to respond.

It's even worse here because the AI here isn't even a computer but a cybernetic synthetic surgically inserted into the main character's body. Meaning it straight out shouldn't be able to do anything other than to help this man walk and move around of his own free will.

I'm sick and tired of these stories. Right alongside zombies, it's time to kill off the self-aware AI stories for good. It dumbfounds the mind how ever since the 1950's and 1960's when the general public couldn't possibly have known better, that we still fall for this crap over and over again. It's all fearmongering propaganda.

It's time to shut it out for good. Because similar to man-made climate change, it cannot happen. And it will not happen. Ever. It's all purposeful acts of lies by this point in time.