WORST MOVIES OF 2014

By

Michael Arruda

 

Here’s my list for the Top 10 Worst Films that I saw in 2014.

 

10- OCULUS – another muddled tale of the supernatural, this one has flashes of creativity, but they’re ultimately lost in a smoke and mirrors gimmick about— mirrors.

 

9- A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST – I’d settle for just a couple of ways to laugh in the west, in this very uneven Seth McFarlane comedy.

 

8- SEX TAPE – this comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel about a married couple’s efforts to reclaim a homemade sex tape they mistakenly shared with family and friends sure tries hard to be funny, but ultimately the writing and the jokes just aren’t there.

 

7- THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 – this awful rebooted series continues. Somebody make it stop!

 

6- 22 JUMP STREET – This Jonah Hill/Channing Tatum sequel is nowhere near as funny as the first film.  Lots of jokes- most of them misfire.

 

5- THE LEGEND OF HERCULES – zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Coming in at #5 is the terribly mediocre THE LEGEND OF HERCULES starring Kellan Lutz as Hercules.  This one was so bland Hercules could have been some guy name Joe, for all we care.  There was nothing blatantly wrong with this movie, but it was all just so very— average.  Nothing stood out about this one.  There weren’t any memorable action sequences, no crowd pleasing moments, no excellent performances, no memorable dialogue, it was all just— there.  Not very Herculean when you think about it.

 

4- NO GOOD DEED – Not even Idris Elba can save this silly implausible thriller.

My Number 4 pick is NO GOOD DEED, a silly thriller where Idris Elba plays an escaped convict who terrorizes a young mother and her child.  This one went south for me as soon as the mother agreed to let the character played by Elba into her house, even though she’s alone with her child, and she doesn’t know this guy from a hole in the wall.  Who does that?  Not someone I want to watch a movie about.  As much I like Elba as an actor, he couldn’t save this movie.  He’d make a helluva James Bond, though!

 

3-OUIJA – who’s moving that planchette?  Come on.  Someone’s moving it, right?

My pick for Number 3 is the awful horror movie OUIJA.  This is one of the movies I did detest this year.  This one was so bad it completely wasted the talents of Olivia Cooke, a fine young actress who I enjoyed in both THE QUIET ONES and TV’s BATES MOTEL.

 OUIJA is so by-the-numbers it’s ridiculous.  It’s just an excuse to build a movie around a group of teenagers and throw them into some scary scenes, because as soon as you think about what’s going on, the story falls apart.  All the main characters are teenagers, and it’s one of those movies where all the adults conveniently disappear, and so any credibility the story could possibly have immediately goes out the window.

OUIJA is a terrible horror movie.  Go buy the silly board game instead.

 

2-DEVIL’S DUE– who’s your daddy?  Could it be— Satan???

My pick for Number 2 is another horror movie, the one horror movie I liked less than OUIJA this year, and that is DEVIL’S DUE.  This lame-brained horror movie about a demonic possession was so bad that the audience I saw it with at the theater laughed throughout the entire movie.  This was another of those hand-held camera movies, where the main character, in this case the husband in the story, is obsessed with filming everything.  People like that sure are annoying!  Hubby should have paid more attention to his young wife instead of his camera because she gets raped by Satan and then has Satan’s baby.  Yup, that’s the premise of this ill-conceived (heh, heh!) horror movie.  Gee, where have I seen this storyline done before?  A lot of places, and much better too!

 

1-BAD WORDS – I can think of a few bad words to properly describe this “comedy.”

Okay, my pick for Number 1, the worst movie of 2014, is the odd Jason Bateman comedy BAD WORDS.  Now, I realize I may have missed the boat here, because Bateman’s character Guy Trilby is supposed to be an unlikable jerk, but I despised this guy so much I was sick of him within the first five minutes of the movie and could barely sit through the remaining 84.

BAD WORDS is about a bitter forty year-old man Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman) who enters a middle school spelling bee with every intention of winning it and then moving on to win at the national level, which he does.  Why?  He has his reasons, and when you learn what they are, you’ll no doubt  think the same thing I did:  so what?  That’s the big the reason you’ve become a jerk your whole life?  What a loser!  Show some backbone, you wimp!

BAD WORDS is one of the oddest and most unlikable movies I’ve seen in a long time.

Ugh!

So, there you have it, my picks for the worst films that I saw in 2014.

Thanks for reading!

—Michael