The Top 10 Worst Films of 2013

Hoo boy…this list was…rough.  I’m still not even sure I’m COMPLETELY happy with it, because there were so many awful films made in 2013.  Most were in the horror category, but I didn’t want a whole horror list; I stayed away from remakes, because on par, they are the dredge of Hollywood, and were unnecessary to begin with (although you will see them in my Honorable Mentions portions…trust that); and a nice number of them were meant to be “prestige films”, but fell with a resounding thud. 

So it took some soul searching (and tough criteria) to pull together this list...but I finally did it.  I’d say “enjoy”, but…if you’ve seen any of these films, you know that was the word farthest from your minds.  I’m also giving one great big ol’ blanket SPOILER ALERT now…because within each review, there may be some.  Not because I want to spoil movies for you…but so you know WHY I disliked these films so much.  So tread carefully.

So without further ado…

10. August: Osage County

Yeah.  I said it.  What?  It was bad.  REALLY bad.  Like…a Tyler Perry movie with white people bad.  No amount of Meryl Streep was going to save this dreck.  First of all, it’s billed as a “comedy”.  Last time I checked, incest, possible statutory rape, adultery, and attacking and verbally abusing mothers and children, aren’t topics that lead to deep belly laughing.  Second of all…that “ending”.  Or, lack thereof.  All of the above things that I just stated?  Get absolutely no resolution.  None whatsoever.  Put the real tragedy?  This ridiculously talented cast were wasted by playing either stereotypical characters…or getting no real character development at all.  It should have been called “August: WTF County”. 

9. Inisidious 2/The Last Exorcism 2

I’m kind of cheating here…but it’s my list, and I do what I want!  But seriously, the only reason for the “cheat” is because these two are piss poor sequels to two films that were far more superior.  “Insidious 2” was basically a complete retread of the first film…same beats and same types of scares.  But because you knew what was coming, it made the film seem drawn out and dull.  The worst thing about the whole affair?  A third one is now in the works.  As for “The Last Exorcism 2”…yeah, okay, the first one won’t ever been seen as a classic or anything, but despite the terrible ending, it kept us interested and wanting to know what was going on at this small farm.  The sequel, however, might as well have been put into the Drama category, because nothing much happens its entire run time until the last fifteen minutes.  It’s about a girl re-adjusting to society after being held hostage.  It’s  “Martha Marcy May Marlene: The Possession”…but the possession doesn’t happen until the very end!  So the movie ends where the movie really should have started, which would have been a much more fun film!  So these two films get a big fat “F” for FAIL.

8. The Purge

The other original horror film this year that had a lot of promise behind its premise, but wound up being a complete clunker.  First off, the characters were so annoying, you were praying the villains would make it inside and slaughter them quickly, so we could get out of the theater sooner and go about the rest of our day.  The son let the man the villains were after into the house, because he didn’t believe in The Purge, so…he should have been the first to die for stupidity.  Then, the daughter let her boyfriend hide out in the house when The Purge happens because he wants to “win her father over”, since her father disliked him.  Care to guess the real reason why the boyfriend wanted to stay in?  Yeah…  Then, when the fit hits the shan, the characters take off in opposite directions of the house to hide.  (*Quick Set-Up Note: You need to realize this two story house is nice-sized, but not a mansion…so people could quite easily be found under normal situations).  Murder, mayhem, and loud screaming ensue…but no one hiding in other areas of the house ever hear these things.  Conveniently.  At one point, the daughter runs into her mother and brother, upset by how things went down between the father and the boyfriend, and…RUNS OFF CRYING…apologizing for what happened.  Um…stay with the family, dumb ass!  Safety in numbers! 

Second, thanks to casting, you knew a character that wasn’t seen outside of the first 10 minutes of the movie was going to make another appearance somewhere to help save the main family.  Unfortunately, there’s an “out of left field twist”: this person, and several of the neighbors, come to the aid of the hunted family… to kill the family themselves (!!!!)…because the husband charged a lot of money to install Purge security systems in the neighbors’ homes to keep out bad people (!!!!).  The family quickly gets the upper hand on the neighbors…and the wife decides that enough murder has happened for the night.  They’re going to ride out the last couple of hours staring at each other in the dining room…with a gun pointed at the neighbors…you know, just in case.  The film ends with the sun coming up, the neighbors leaving, and the family trying to pull together the pieces of their now messed up lives.  Nevermind the fact that these neighbors will come back NEXT YEAR TO TRY TO KILL YOU AGAIN.  So yeah, this movie was a hot mess.  Avoid it like The Plague.

7. Adore

Probably the “ickiest” film of the year…right up there with “August: Osage County”…but minus the incest.  (Although it sure feels like incest).  Two middle-aged female best friends (one trapped in a boring marriage, the other a widow), decide to take up affairs with two much younger men…each others’ SONS.  Who are also best friends.  And when each woman finds out the truth?  They’re mildly upset…but because they’re getting it from two young studs…who’s to complain, really?  Right?  So they go on double dates…and retire to each others’ homes for sex.  Are you feeling dirty yet?  Yeah, I thought so.  But it gets better.  As the years go by, the sons marry other women and have families of their owns…but they can’t shake the Mom Love…and continue to sleep with the mothers.  You may not be surprised to learn things don’t end well…for the wives.  But the guys?  They remain bff’s.  And continue sleeping with each others’ moms.  A quartet of “ew”.  But hey, the heart wants what the heart wants, right?  Right?

6. Temptation

I know.  Shocker.  A Tyler Perry movie made it to the list.  And while I could technically end this section with that declaration, you need to know WHY this one made the list, over, say, “A Madea Christmas”.  It starts off with a female marriage counselor talking to another woman about saving that woman’s marriage.  So the counselor decides to tell a cautionary tale about her older sister (and by tale, I mean the entire film.  So buckle in for the ride, kids).  This sister had the perfect life…smart, attractive, met the love of her life when she was just a child.  She wants to be a marriage counselor one day, with her own firm, but she’s impatient.  See, she works at a company where Vanessa Williams is her boss (and rocking a horrendous “island” accent.)  Her co-worker?  None other than Kim Kardashian.  I’d be impatient to get the hell out of there, too.  Anyway, one day, a new client comes aboard…a young, strapping, good looking, and ridiculously rich man who…falls for our girl.  At first she pushes him away…she loves her husband after all.  But then he wines and dines her…giving her a taste of the good life…and she finally sleeps with him.

Meanwhile, Brandy (the singer) starts working with our main girl’s husband.  She’s “hiding a secret”.  See, she’s running away from an ex-husband who is possessive.  So, think a crappy version of “Sleeping With The Enemy” as a subplot.  Our main girl and the rich guy, at this point, are ramping up their love affair, as he introduces her to drugs and threesomes, and will give her the money to start her own business if he leaves her husband for him.  Well, with Kardashian and the Island Accent grating on her nerves, and being tired of the “good things come to those who wait” lifestyle, our main girl leaves her husband.  The husband, looking to rebound, tries to sleep with Brandy, but she tells him that she (dun dun DUN!!!!!) is HIV positive.  Her ex-husband gave it to her.  Have you guessed who her ex-husband is yet?  It’s our main girl’s new rich man! (Insert soap opera organ music here).  Anyway, cutting this long story short: our main girl winds up alone…with HIV; the husband marries another woman and has a child with her; Brandy still works with him and his bff; and…we realize that this entire story, we’ve never seen our main girl’s sister…the marriage counselor telling the story.  Care to guess why?  THE MARRIAGE COUNSELOR IS THE MAIN GIRL OF THE STORY!!!!!!!!!!!!  Gotcha!  This is some M. Night Shyamalan stuff right here!

Yeah.  Good ol’ Tyler Perry.

5. Safe Haven

Say what?  A Nicholas Sparks movie made the list?  Nooooo.  I can’t even be bothered to go into this one, because it follows his same formula…so you know what you’re in for.  And scarily enough, has shades of the movie right above it: a girl with an abusive ex-husband runs away to a new town to start a new life with a new identity, in hopes he doesn’t find her.  So naturally, it takes her a minute to fall in love with Josh Duhamel’s widower and his two children…but when she does, it’s fireworks city!  She even makes friends with a mysterious dark-haired woman in town.  Anyhoo…exactly what you think would happen happens: the ex finds her, a fight ensues, a house burns down, heroics are initiated to save the children from the burning house, and our protagonist ends up with a happily ever after.  Oh!  Wait!  The mysterious dark haired woman she became friends with?  The ghost of Josh Duhamel’s wife.  Turns out she only speaks to our protagonist.  And left a prophetic letter of some kind that made no sense that such a thing might happen.  It was all a bit confusing and weird.  But damned if M. Night Shyamalan wasn’t happy last year with so many movies trying to pull off crazy twists in the end.

4. The Counselor

You remember the first time you saw the trailer, and you were like “Ooooh.  Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Penlope Cruz, Javier Bardem, and Cameron Diaz! (Okay, maybe not her, but you get my drift).  This looks interesting!”  Then, when it was over, you were all “Wait.  What’s the movie about, though?”  Well, ladies and gentlemen, 50 minutes into the movie and I was still asking myself that exact question.  I know it had to do with some double crossings, double-double crossings, cheetahs, a gnarly beheading, and the kinkiest car sex scene to ever grace celluloid.  But outside of that?  I’d be remiss to tell you what happened in its way too long runtime.  It made “American Hustle” look easy to follow.  But hey…the film looked gorgeous, so…there’s that.

3. Baggage Claim

This movie made me want to cry for women.  It’s 2014, and THIS is the kind of romantic comedy that’s being made for them?  Then I found out it’s based on a book.  By a man.  Then it almost made sense, except that I know there had to have been some women executives at the studio who surely had to say “WTF is this you’re making, now?  Oh, HELL no.”  So the set-up is this: Paula Patton, feeling pressured that her younger sister is getting married, and her mother has been married 10 times over, decides she needs to find a man before her sister’s wedding to not only keep everyone off of her back about still being single…but hell, finding love is just the thing to do!  So how does she go about finding this man?  Her Gay Best Friend and Sassy Black Best Friend tell her to “run into” her exes, see if any of them are worthy of a rematch…and use the friendly skies to do so! (See, she’s a stewardess, and gets people from the airport to help her track these men down, etc.  Get the title now?  Nevermind everything they do is illegal, but…that’s a different story.  Also never mind the fact that it’s obvious that the man she’s going to end up with is her best friend from high school…who lives across the hall from her…with a girlfriend you see is doomed to exit the picture from scene one.

So she goes on her Flight and Dash escapades, finding none of these men have changed.  And was expecting instant marriage proposals from them hours after reconnecting with them (before something bad happens to make her realize he’s still no good for her).  Seriously.  Marriage proposals.  She also has an epiphany dream that she likes her taken best friend…halfway through the movie.  So…you know…good-bye dramatic tension.  Oh, she also runs into said best friend’s girlfriend on a flight…with another man…and decides she wants to tell her best friend.  So the second she touches down on the ground…she goes on a date with another ex.  The best friend finding this information out can wait, right?  He can wait for awhile, apparently, because days go by before she finds the time to call him and tell him what she saw…only to have the phone be swept away by the girlfriend…so he doesn’t get the chance to find this information out.  (What’s that?  She could have gone to his apartment to tell him?  Surely you jest.  That’s a smart thing to do.)  Anyway, she attends the rehearsal dinner solo, having not found one suitable man (and blowing it with her best friend for not telling him about the girlfriend debacle sooner), and has a “I am Woman, hear me roar…I don’t need a man to be happy…I need to take care of ME” moment…and ends up giving her sister an epiphany too…see, she was only marrying this guy to make her mom happy, too, so she and the guy break off the wedding.

So Paula ends up back at her apartment with Gay and Sassy, and they tell her “You go, girl!” Then one of the exes shows up in a limo, apologizing for not coming back sooner, and wants her to be with him.  But no!  She is Woman!  And tells him to go away.  She’s happy with her decision…for another minute, before she sees a package arrive from Best Friend: a declaration of love and a ticket to Paris.  Meet him at the airport, or he’s going alone.  So, being Woman…she, Gay, and Sassy quickly haul ass to the airport…and Woman ends up not alone or finding herself…but with a man.  Now everyone’s going to call her a bitch for breaking up her sister’s wedding.  And the final comic moment of the film?  Gay and Sassy, who have been at each others’ throats the entire film, are happy to have dates with a great guy that weekend…and when they show pictures of the guy to each other…they realize it’s the same guy!  And they start arguing over who gets him!  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!! Amiright?  A lady friend of mine put it best, when I described this movie to her the exact way I just did for you all, by saying “Ugh.  My ovaries hurt.”  And if I had any, mine would too.  This is probably the worst romantic comedy of all time…and that’s saying something, considering how many of them are out there starring Katherine Heigl.

2. Getaway

Oh, “Getaway”.  Imagine if a writer wrote his very first script.  Ever.  And got someone to make it.  Based on the first draft.  That’s what you’d take away from watching this dreck.  Dialogue?  Horrendous.  Action scenes?  All of them are chase scenes, so…they get boring.  Really fast.  Acting?  Atrocious.  It baffles me that Ethan Hawke can be really great in one film, then turn around and be awful in another.  The story?  Barely have one.  So basically, Ethan Hawke is driving around town to keep his wife from being murdered…by pissing off the cops and getting them to chase him…and then cause them to get into major accidents.  That’s coupled with this dialogue: Bad Guy On Phone – Do this bad, illegal thing.  Hawke – But the cops are coming.  Bad Guy – Do it.  Hawke: But the cops!  Bad Guy – Do it, or your wife will die.  Hawke – Fine!  Then he does it.  And this happens several times…in the first 30 minutes.  Then Selena Gomez shows up, as a car thief…but wait, TWIST!...she’s not a car thief…Hawke is driving her car, which was stolen and decked out with cameras so the bad guys can see everything going on within.  Then, TWIST!, this whole thing has something to do with a robbery…involving Gomez’ dad…who’s an owner of some kind of bank or other, which isn’t a typical bank, blah blah blah.  It all gets convoluted and ridiculous.  So, in the end, everyone is saved…and the bad guy gets away.  See, the reason why he did all of this is because Hawke’s character, a race car driver who was squandering his life, needed a swift kick in the butt to get his life back on track…and he’s a huge fan of Hawke’s, so…he better live his life right, or he’ll be back!  (!!!!!!)  Yeah.  That happened.

1. Scary Movie 5

So, here’s why this movie got the distinction of Worst Film of 2013.  It wasn’t funny.  At all.  Not one. Damn. Chuckle.  When “The Starving Games” is funnier than your movie…you’ve got a problem.   While no one was clamoring for another “Scary Movie”, it would have behooved the producers to at least make it so funny, that they could prove the naysayers wrong and show that they still had what they needed to keep a franchise going.  But when you can’t even pull Anna Farris back as your lead, that should have been your clue to give up the ghost.  Bad acting, tired jokes (seriously, Snoop Dogg and pot?) and pinning your story on the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, which has already been lampooned to death, (especially in the same year’s “A Haunted House”) pretty much made this film DOA.  And the lack of audience pretty much spelled the (hopeful) death of this franchise.  Until NBC decides to turn it into a TV series.

(DIS)HONORABLE MENTIONS

The Mortal Instruments/The Host/Beautiful Creatures – I know it’s not fair to group movies together, but let’s be honest…these may be “different”, but they’re all the same: YA series that desperately wanted to be the next “The Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter”…and failed miserably.  Love triangles, CW actors, and cool magic does not make a good movie, as this trio quickly learned, after they bombed terrifically at the box office.

Texas Chainsaw 3D – Points for not rebooting a reboot of an original.  Points taken away for trying to humanize Leatherface and turn him into a tragic being…with a potentially new family.  The script was a hot mess, so…we luckily won’t be seeing another one of these anytime soon.

Carrie – A tie with “Worst Remake of the Year” with the title found directly below it.  When your movie starts off in the 90s with a grown woman not knowing she’s pregnant, and thinking it’s Cancer…you know you’re going to be in for a “treat”.  Couple that with the fact that the movie is almost a scene-by-scene remake with a non-plain looking actress playing the title role, Tommy dying from the pail-to-the-head, instead of just being knocked out, and a surprise pregnancy subplot that goes NOWHERE, and you got yourself one of the biggest headscratchers of the year.

The Evil Dead – Okay.  We’ll pretend that the main brother/sister duo are two different races…and neither are adopted.  We’ll even look away at the flagrant non-characterizations being portrayed on our screens, since the original didn’t exactly spend time building up their characters either.  But what we can’t suspend our disbelief over, is the fact that the character reading the book aloud is explicitly told not to…and does so…and CONTINUES to do so…when the bad stuff starts happening.  Couple that with the characters falling repeatedly for the “Now I’m not possessed!  Please help me!” line…right before the possessed demon shows itself again to do more bad things, and you’ve got one of the must ridiculous excuses for a remake of all time.

Great Expectations/Romeo & Juliet – Here’s a simple question we should ask ourselves: do we NEED another version of either of these two films?  Especially when they’re faithfully adapted?  The simple answer: Hell. No.  And if you are going to do another version, at least make it different enough to warrant it (i.e. Baz Luhrman’s version of R&J).

As I Lay Dying – One of James Franco’s “passion projects”.  You get the picture.

Grown Ups 2 – What do you get when you use the same jokes from the first movie, and add in a bunch of younger actors as your villains?  A retread sequel that no one was clamoring for.

The Hangover 3 – The title alone should tell you what the problem is here.  Oh, and there wasn’t a “hangover” to be found.  The end.

After Earth – Every bit as awful as the trailer made it out to be.  And…M. Night Shyamalan, for real this time!  

Special Mention:

47 Ronin - I didn't personally get to see this yet, as it's in limbo between theatrical release and DVD release, but from what I've heard...this film would make this list.  It's Keanu Reeves as a samurai, for God's sake.  At what point did this sound like a good idea...?