In 2017 I made myself a promise. That promise was I was going to try and see as many films as I possibly could and while it’s allowed me to see some great films I might’ve missed (They’re on my other list, my nice list, along with my rules for what will go on these lists so go back and check that), it also made me see some awful movies I wish I’d not seen. Same rules from my good list apply here, and remember that these are just my opinions. If you liked these movies, great, good for you. I didn’t and I will gladly explain why I loathed them. These aren’t just films I didn’t like for silly reasons, these are films I never wish to see again in my life and possibly even after it.

Here is my list of the Top 10 worst films of 2017.

10: The Snowman

This was a tossup between The Snowman and The Bye Bye Man. Both were pretty bad at what they set out to do but the key difference? Bye Bye Man at least made me laugh at it, at least it was so bad that it swung around to become entertaining again. The Snowman is an uncomfortable awkward horrible movie that didn’t even get finished being made before they slammed it out and hoped to make their money back. I’m sorry, finish your movie. Your sets were houses and snow, you can’t rent those places for another few weeks to get the final shots you need to make the story coherent? Then don’t release your movie.

The main character is bad, the writing is bad, the effects are bad, the set design is bad. Everything is bad and it should feel bad because it certainly made ME feel bad. This films only redeeming factor is that it bombed so badly that we’re never going to have to pretend to tolerate Harry Hole ever again which is just a godsend because I never want Michael Fassbender to make another film this awful again, your looks will only save you for so long Fassbender so go back and make a good film now and we’ll pretend this never happened.

9: Chris Brown: Welcome To My Life

Look, I know it’s probably not fair to rank a movie as one of the worst of the year merely because it’s about Chris Brown and believe me, that’s not it. Tempting as it is to just throw him on the worst list because I truly hate the man, it’s surprisingly not the reason it’s here. It’s possible for me to hate an artist with a blinding passion and yet still enjoy a piece of work talking about them. No, my problem with this movie is it takes his brutal assault on his girlfriend and passes it off as a mistake. It tries to suggest he’s the next Michael Jackson and that his repeated explosions of anger and disgusting reprehensible behaviour are somehow justifiable and sorry, they’re not.

Chris Brown almost beat his girlfriend to death, that’s just a statement of fact and if you want me to feel bad for him because he didn’t have a childhood because he was busy being famous… sorry, no, I have no time to deal with your pathetic non-problems. No one forced him to be famous, he made that choice on his own and he then chose to punch and bite a woman who dared to get upset that he was cheating on her (A detail of that night I learned from this film…. so now I can hate him even more) You beat someone almost to death and now your music video company has the nerve to release this puff piece of a film that tries to make out that you’re the victim? Yeah, this was made by his music video label… cos, ya know, propaganda is a fun thing to make between music videos for substandard songs. Oh, and I mention this in the review but I am just going to repeat the fact that Rihanna is never interviewed in this movie because why should we hear the victims side of the story? No, sorry, not having it. In a year where victims of abuse are finally being heard, hearing a perpetrator of violence excuse their behavior like this disgusts me. The fact he still get’s work disgusts me, everything about this movie just flat out disgusts me.

8: Fifty Shades Darker

The most un-erotic erotic thriller that I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing. If Christian Grey were not rich, he would be in prison. The movie shows him explicitly as a stalker and it’s played off as charming. They show that he clearly knows nothing of actual BDSM and is just a flat out sadist with no real care for anyone. He treats his partner like she was property and she lets him because… I don’t know why. I genuinely don’t know. Is it because he’s pretty? Is that the message? Pretty men can treat women like property and get away with it because of some reasons? No, sorry, not going with that. I barely tolerate that trope in romantic comedies where at very least the jerk changes his ways before he get’s the girl, I promise you that Christian didn’t change shit and I look forward, in horror, to the final film where he will still be a creepy stalker who is lucky enough to have a pretty face and more cash than Scrooge McDuck!

Even if all we focus on was the sex stuff, this film would be atrocious because it’s not sexy, barely seems consensual, certainly is coerced by a man who believes he can just buy people to do as he wishes. Even on those merits alone, this film would be bad but then we throw in the rape plot, the plot about Grey’s old dominant, the plot about Grey’s old submissive, that stupid helicopter crash. This film is badly made, badly written and a bad indication of what people view as sexy. Go watch actual porn with actual people actually having actual BDSM sex, it will be better for you than this tripe and at very least everyone in those porn films consented!

7: Beauty & The Beast

Officially the second highest grossing film of 2017 (Thanks, Last Jedi), this film is objectively bad and I do not get the praise that it got from everyone. Let’s just start with the obvious, Emma Watson can’t sing. She just can’t and stop defending her attempt because it was bad and it should be called bad, and it was bad AFTER the obnoxious autotune that was repeatedly used to try and get her to hit the notes. Just get a goddamn singer and have her dub the voice in, it’s not even remotely difficult to do so why make the film suffer because you can’t be bothered to hire one more person. The sets were large and admittedly impressive, but the colour palette they used was so monochromatic that I swear they had the Beast change jackets in one scene just so he’d blend into the background.

It wasted great actors and a great story, somehow creating plot holes that weren’t in the original (Hey Belle, you wanna get to your Papa quickly? Why not get that magical book that the Beast used to take you to your birth home and use that to get your Papa and then get to safety… seriously, how was that not called out right away in a preview screening?). They didn’t even do a good version of the title song. You had freaking Audra McDonald in the cast, you can’t get her to sing the biggest song in the movie? I promise you, no one would care that it wasn’t Mrs Potts singing if you’d let Audra belt that number out, maybe then the movie might’ve had something interesting about it that wasn’t a discount version of the original movie.

Also, Disney? If you’re going to try and be progressive and have a gay character, I’m going to need him to have something more than one awkward gay joke right at the end of the picture. That was the biggest let down of them all… the first gay character in a Disney film my aching ass, you barely even got a questioning character in there. You just made a very bad joke of a film that was inexplicably popular… basically, somehow a less awful version of Maleficent (Yeah, that’s right, Maleficent is an awful film. Fight me)

6: The Emoji Movie

Yeah, the movie that was so bad I actively tried to fix it is only number 6… because it’s so bland and basic that it doesn’t deserve the “honour” of being anywhere in the upper end of this list. Not only is this film a cheap corporate cash grab with more advertising in it than the Superbowl, but it’s bad at it. Story elements are just straight up stolen from better movies, it’s filled stupid jokes that do not work and it’s just a wasting of a potentially good idea. Maybe not great, but good.

It’s a movie that thinks it can just skate by on bright colours and that’s it, forgetting basic elements of story, comedy and decent animation that doesn’t look like absolute nightmarish crap. If you want to abuse your child in a legal manner that won’t get child services called on you, take them to see The Emoji Movie. You’re welcome… you monster.

5: My Cousin Rachel

Who wants to watch a period romantic drama about cousin fucking? You do? Well, first of all, seek therapy, then watch My Cousin Rachel. Any film where the plot literally revolves around cousin fucking should be on this list, but that wouldn’t be enough to get it to the upper end. This film is also poorly shot, has people behaving in ways no human ever would and a love triangle made up entirely of cousins… and wants you to take it seriously because this movie hates you and wants to punish you for handing it money.

The worst part about this film (You know, besides the plot being entirely about cousin fucking) is just how stupid the main character is. He is sad about his cousins’ death, he thinks that his cousins’ wife (Who is also his cousin’s cousin, because of reasons) killed his cousin and so he decides to sleep with his cousins’ wife (Who is also his cousin, because of reasons) and leave her everything in the will… the sentence I just wrote makes more sense than the actual movie, I promise you. This movie thinks it’s good, and that’s just precious because it’s a pretentious awful piece of excrement that needs to be flushed.

4: The Mummy

The start, and possibly the end, of the Dark Universe. This movie had everything riding on it and decided, intentionally, to ruin everything to make sure no one would ever consider making the Dark Universe an actual thing. An unlikeable main character, a boring supporting cast, uninspired action scenes, a barely passable villain. When the highlight of your movie is Russell Crowe putting on a bad cockney accent, you have failed at movie. When the only thing that the internet talks about is “Was that really Tom Cruises ass?” or “Guys, check out this trailer where they messed up the sound”, then you have failed abysmally at the very concept of celluloid.

Somehow this film forgot that most of what made the 90’s version of this story work was the likability of the main cast and just how cheesy it was… so why not take out all that cheese and pick a main actor who people have grown to actively despise? Why not replace the fun over the top plot with a cheap knockoff that includes a rip-off from American Werewolf In London? Why not just spend hours upon hours sucking the life out of the audience and expecting them to come back for more? Great plan Universal, I see this Dark Universe is going to go well.

3: mother!

This film angers me the more I think about everything surrounding it. It’s not clever, it’s pretentious. It’s not a brilliant dissection of religion, it’s a paint by numbers retelling of Adam and Eve with a weird earth metaphor thrown in because Aronofsky wants you to know that he can do metaphor. When the film isn’t being boring and basic, it’s just being stupid and hateful. Jennifer Lawrence called this movie, I’m not even kidding here “incredibly feminist”. No, it’s not a feminist movie. I know I’m a white male and I probably can’t judge but I’m pretty confident that when your main character is a woman who is abused by her husband, used for nothing other than breeding and is beaten almost to death by her husband’s male followers… your film isn’t feminist, your film is probably the most horrifically sexist movie I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen I Spit On Your Grave and Irreversible so I have a high bar for horribly sexist films. Hell, I’ll go one step further, I Spit On Your Grave and Irreversible are actually more feminist than mother! because at least in those films, the people who harmed the main female character are subject to extreme vengeance for what they did!

The filmmaking is just annoying, obscene close-ups on actors are usually shorthand to create a feeling of claustrophobia and that is used here horribly. It’s not because that’s what the scene calls for in the story, but because Aronofsky wants you to know that he can do visual tricks with the camera too guys. Also, this movie is not weird, it’s not. About 80% of the film is a movie about the husband and wife being boring suburbanites in a house in the middle of nowhere, then there’s some weird extreme ending that’s pointless and out of place… that ending? The only interesting thing in the movie and also most infuriating thing in the movie, that’s a fun combo there

The only actor that’s in any way enjoyable is Michelle Pfieffer who is clearly having the time of her life and plays just the bitchiest Eve you’ve ever seen and it’s kind of amazing, I wanted the movie to be about her because then this might be on the good list… nope, she’s in and out of the movie pretty quickly, because we can’t have nice things because Aronofsky wants you to know that he can do biblical metaphor too guys!

The movie mother! actively hates women and its audience and the concept of decent cinema. It’s undoubtedly going to be on a few best of lists and I’m sure they have their reasons, but my reason for it being on my worst is because it’s a dumpster fire of a movie and I hate it.

2: Transformers: The Last Knight

I have stated this before, I will state it again. MICHAEL BAY DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO MAKE MOVIES. He doesn’t, I don’t care how many he’s already made, he forgot how to make them. He couldn’t pick one aspect ratio for a movie, he picked three and just changed around them willy-nilly. It went through so many cameras and so many negatives that I’m stunned the film is even close to cohesive. He somehow made Anthony Hopkins suck and that’s not easy to do, but that’s the power of Michael Bay.

The Transformers? Yeah, they look like shit. I know this isn’t news to anyone who has watched the previous films but it is now just painful and shows utter contempt by the people making this movie. I couldn’t tell you which transformer is which because none of them is distinctive or interesting. They would’ve fared better if they had just taken a photo of a toy and made it dance around poorly for 120 minutes, would’ve been more visually interesting to look at.

The story is atrociously done, it’s the basic Chosen One narrative except somehow worse. None of the dialogue works, the villain of the movie is there… I guess… maybe, I don’t even care because they were pointless as hell. Everything is pointless, everything is awful and terrible and I just want a movie where robots fight and look cool doing it, is that too much to ask? I’m not asking for much Michael Bay, just make a competent movie where two big robots with silly voices punch each other in the face a few times and maybe Mark Wahlberg says a silly line, you don’t have to do that much. Just be competent, that’s all I ask for is competence and this movie couldn’t even be bothered to do that.

I hate this film, I hate the man who ‘directed’ it, I hate the paper the script was vomited on, I hate every last thing about this piece of cinematic smegma. For most of the year, this was a shoe-in for my top spot, this was it for me and I thought there would be no way on earth I would top it… but then, like an idiot, I decided to play catch up and found the worst movie of 2017.

1: A Dog’s Purpose

5 Dead Dogs.

That’s all you need to know really. This movie is structured around the deaths of 5 dogs. When a movie has that as its main plot point then you know you’re in for some hell. This film was controversial months before it was released due to a scene appears to show a dog being thrown into a pool that it clearly didn’t want to be in. Now that turned out to be a non-issue because people doctored the footage BUT if this was the movie that resulted from that scandal then it wasn’t worth that dog getting wet.

Everything about this movie is soul-destroyingly bad. It has an awful plotline and some of the worst performances in cinema. The dogs are better actors than the leads, and I know for a fact that the leads in this movie can act when they choose too but clearly in this film they decided not to bother because they realized they were in an objectively awful film with no redemption possible so they phoned it in and cashed the check.

It tries so hard to have some grand meaning with one dog’s spirit having some major purpose, that this one dog keeps coming back to be part of some grand plan but his purpose is to bring together a couple who broke up when they were teens… that’s it, that’s why we have to sit through 5 dogs being killed for cheap emotional moments. We watch 5 dogs die, including one being brutally gunned down and bleeding to death just so Archie from Riverdale can get his dick wet when he’s in his 50’s.

Dogs dying in film is such an emotional trope that there’s literally a website warning people that a dog will die in the movie, but this movie abuses that because it has no actual emotional depth and the only way it’s going to be able to pull any emotion out of its audience is to make you watch the cute fluffy dog die! It uses the trope of the dead dog as the main way to get the audience to cry. You might remember having an emotional reaction to this film but that’s not because of the plot, it’s because THIS FILM MURDERED DOGS IN FRONT OF YOU! It got to a point that after a while I was literally screaming “Hurry up and kill the dog, you know you want too” every time they introduced a new dog because its fate was predictable and awful. When I begin actively saying “Kill it… go on… kill the damn dog” during your big attempt at an emotional reunion scene, you have royally screwed the pooch when it comes to storytelling.

This film not only didn’t deserve to get made, it didn’t have any valid reason to even begin to exist. Some people actually think this movie is charming and you’re entitled to that opinion but I’m sorry, if you are going to try and force an emotional reaction out of your audience by needlessly killing 5 dogs for a plotline so basic that even Hallmark would go “Pass”, you need to go the hell away and never be permitted near a camera again. You need to just stop trying to make movies, you need to stop everything and think about what you did because what you did was absolutely awful in every possible way.

So that was my list of 10 worst movies, are there any you saw this year that I missed? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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