(10) Blacklight
It is, of course, extremely easy to look down on Liam Neeson, who has once again proven that, like Fleming Fartland, he is completely stuck in that pitiful angle vault from which he is unable to get out, but on the other hand, he has sat there completely and held on its own. Today, it is almost impossible for us here at the editorial office to take in the fact that the Irishman studied theater in Dublin and was once nominated for an Oscar for his brilliant role as Oskar in Schindler’s List. Since the success of Taken, there has been an inflation, to say the least, in the number of films where he arms himself to go in search of someone who has violated his moral code or kidnapped someone close to him, and Blacklight is no exception, but it does not stop there, it also belongs to the absolute bottom layer in the tired series of action films he has appeared in in recent years. The previous films have at least had some kind of tension and were full of action scenes but here even that element shines with its absence and in the name of honesty, what are we going to do with Liam Neeson. No, it is now our collective wish that he actually does what he promised he would do back in 2019, after Cold Pursuit. That is, he stops doing action movies completely. Thanks in advance.
(9) Texas Chainsaw Massacre
While we should be used to the film companies doing more modern interpretations of our beloved horror icons sucking, it’s still hard not to look forward to them once they stand on the doorstep and want to enter. We’ve seen it with Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead and many others. Now it happened again for Leatherface (who had several movies before that were also lousy). However, this Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie was something completely new. It was like a demonstration of how to make a disaster movie. When Leatherface stood there peering up through the cornfield and was supposed to look nasty, he just looked laughable. Completely impossible to take seriously. Only when we write about the film do we get provoked. No more Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
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(8) Hellraiser
After the success of the now ancient but still terrifyingly effective original film, the Hellraiser series has steadily gotten worse and we fans who love The Hellbound Heart have had to endure a lot with the nine sequels that have been presented. David Bruckner’s remake was going to be a fresh start and the advance talk was so promising. Yes, even Clive Barker himself was said to be involved in a corner and with The Weinstein Company out of the picture, this couldn’t be anything but good, right? We hoped so and crossed our fingers until the end, yes even the trailer of the film looked almost promising. But no, because when Bruckner’s shiny new version landed, it was on the stomach with a resounding “oof”. Because even though the Cenobites themselves, as well as many of the effects, were actually admirable and captured the feel of the source material well, the film’s script and characters were so insanely lousy that we almost imploded with rage. Rarely have we been so exasperated by missed potential, and Bruckner also seemed to completely lack any kind of understanding or insight into what actually made the original film so brilliant. Hellraiser was a brutal disappointment and one of the absolute most painful movie experiences of the year. A study in frustration and misery.
(7) Moonfall
Roland Emmerich’s penchant for destruction on a global scale has dogged him throughout his career and most of us on the editorial staff have some kind of childish love for at least one of his many and often absurdly silly disaster reels. For a long time, Moonfall looked like it could be another in the line of his entertaining and violently stupid films. But what quickly became clear when we had the opportunity to sit down with the spectacle was how literally Emmerich seemed to have taken the concept of disaster this time. Amateur acting, human drama that was so numbingly boring we wanted to rip the hair out of our scalps, cheesy special effects and an ever-present, unfunny greenscreen feel. Roland’s usual passion was blown away and the only joy we felt during Moonfall was when the credits finally rolled and we could breathe a sigh of relief. It was downright impressive how horribly messed up Moonfall was and how you manage to screw up such a fun concept on paper in this way is something we will never really understand. The Moon fiasco may well have been the last nail in the coffin for the old thief who was not only one of the worst films of the year by far but one of the biggest turkeys in many years.
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(6) The 355
20th Century Fox boss Simon Kinberg was instrumental in the creation of Deadpool, X-Men: First Class, and Logan (among others), which naturally makes him a highly respected master of the superhero genre. However, it was as a producer, that. When he decided to change jobs and start directing… That’s when everything happened. X-Men: Dark Phoenix is firmly in place as the worst movie of 2019 and January flop The 355 as 2022’s sixth most loathsome, lavish blockbuster. The downright gruesome spy thriller about a bunch of, to say the least, deadly female mega-agents cost close to SEK 800 million to make and only managed to rake in just over a third of its production budget in cinema revenue, and for our part, it was never particularly difficult to understand why. Partly, the script was lousy. The characters were laughable and the acting horrible, but it was Kinberg’s clumsy, often clueless character direction and the clumsy action sequences that mostly botched scene after scene.
(5) Me Time
There are plenty of iconic comedies that are 50% or maybe even more improvised humor. Anchorman is one of those where Ferrell and director McKay let the cameras roll while the actors just “riffed” on everything they could think of and then tried to piece together something that made sense on the cutting board. Then, of course, there are even more examples of when this did not work at all and where improvised buddy comedy mostly failed, as in the downright reprehensible Me Time, which was released on Netflix this summer. Kevin Hart and Marky-Mark goofed around trying to top each other’s awkward attempts at humor in a movie so pointlessly flat it felt like time stood still.
(4) Jurassic World Dominion
It was nothing short of a tragedy to see what happened to Spielberg’s wondrous dinosaur dream now that the franchise has reached its sixth film and we were left speechless by its ugliness. Of course, we expected Dominion to be no better than its botched predecessor, but none of us expected so much concentrated ugliness in what felt like an eternity to get through. It hurt our heads every time the cartoonish characters opened their mouths and we were stunned every other minute that such disaster scripts even get the green light today. The magic of the dinosaurs was not only gone, it was directly tarnished in today’s contentless blockbuster format and the whole thing feels so deeply ineptly told that we refuse to believe anything other than that the filmmakers were just playing an expensive prank on the world on the big screen. Never have we loved the idea of extinct giant fossils as much as we did after being exposed to this messy, incomprehensible, ugly, reprehensible and insultingly brainless sequel.
(3) Halloween Ends
Finally, David Gordon Green’s desecration of the classic film franchise came to an end, and it was just as impossibly rotten as we first suspected it would be. The classic characters remained unrecognizable, and even the rousing final confrontation between Myers and Strode failed to convey anything but a soporific yawn. No, it was downright sad how incompetently and tragically mismanaged this otherwise classic film series has been in the hands of Green, and Halloween Ends is also a fitting end to what has been a fundamental failure from start to finish. Because this last and concluding part was lousy. Really reprehensible uncommitted jerks who couldn’t bring themselves to engage on any level and who also had the guts to reduce one of the film world’s most iconic characters to a rambling, gagging pensioner. Halloween Ends was two hours of torture, a strangely lousy horror film that not only managed the feat of being some of the most uninspired trash we’ve seen this year, but also by far the worst Halloween movie ever produced. May David Gordon Green never, ever get the chance to touch another classic horror film franchise.
(2) Morbius
Sony has hardly managed to manage their characters based on Spider-Man well. Both Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage have been lousy movies through and through, but none of us expected it to get worse. It evidently could. Because when Sony unleashed the vampire villain Morbius, it became clear that they could do even worse and we still wonder if they even care one iota about their characters. The script in Morbius was among the worst we’ve seen in a long time and when we got to see the fifty-first battle in slow motion in a row, we wanted to turn the crap off. May there be an end to these reprehensible movies and Sony handing over the rights to Disney because this is not enough. Far from.
WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR 2022:
(1) Black Adam
Of course, we think that everyone is relatively in agreement that the superhero genre has not been doing very well in terms of quality since Marvel rounded off its 23-film long story about the Avengers with Endgame. A lot of pure garbage has been rolled out and the most hyped of them all was undoubtedly Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s perpetual project about Superman’s nemesis wearing the black suit. Black Adam stepped into the picture in 2022 alongside big-name DC heroes (NOTE! Irony) such as Hawkman, Doctor Fate, Cyclone and Atom Smasher in a film so stripped of a coherent, interesting storyline and meaningfully motivated characters that nothing else in the high-budget quagmire came close it seen as concentrated wretchedness. The Rock refused a wig to mimic the cartoon character. He refused to paint Adam’s typically pointy comic book ears and forced DC to sign into his contract that the evil Adam would no longer be so evil, but more of a misunderstood anti-hero. The end result was a viscous, yellow-tinted, iron-ugly super-geg that annoyed the crap out of us in the editorial office. That Black Adam has already been shut down at home at DC says it all. This is the worst movie of 2022.
