The Most Disappointing and Worst Movies of 2016

Here we are yet again, on the internet talking about movies. 2016, I thought, was a great year for film – though, honestly, every year has some great stuff. But every year also has some seriously fucked up, weird, terrible stuff, and that's where this post comes in.

Here's the Most Disappointing and Worst of 2016 in movies, at least according to one guy on a blog. I know I said this was a great year for movies, and we'll get to that. First we have to slog through these, though!

MOST DISAPPOINTING

These are the ones which I was looking forward to seeing, but they let me down when I actually watched them. They aren't horrible films, but I just didn't like them as much as I had hoped.

10 Cloverfield Lane

We didn't really need another Cloverfield movie so long after the first one – was there anyone really waiting anymore? I think even the biggest fans of the first one have long sinced moved on. This had some good thriller parts, but ultimately just felt tonally confused and silly, and never seemed to know where it was going, with a really bizarre about-face ending twist. Even performances by John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead couldn't save this one.

Don't Breathe

I was looking forward to this from the trailer, and it wasn't bad, with some cool twists and turns and some exciting chase scenes. But it was too long and bogged down with generic main characters, some filler in the first act and an overly dragged-out climax. This is pretty bog standard for the horror/thriller genre, but I think we've reached a point where we can expect more than just 'eh, it's okay.'

La La Land

This year's Oscar darling just didn't resonate much with me as it did with some audiences. It was pleasant eye and ear candy, and Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone deliver good performances. But I didn't gel with the musical aspects much, and the whole thing just came off as substanceless fluff. That's fine – it is what it is. But it didn't strike a chord with me much at all beyond 'that's nice.'

THE WORST MOVIES OF 2016

How much of an explanation could you possibly want for this?

5. Batman v Superman – Dawn Of Justice

What a mess this was. In DC's quest to outdo Marvel they've really just stumbled over both feet and tripped and fell. Ben Affleck and some of the others like Michael Ironside give good performances in this, and there are certain visual sights that are quite haunting and beautiful – both of which give this movie a leg up from most other Zack Snyder movies. But the story is incoherent and made it hard for anything to stick with the viewer after the credits rolled. The characters were indistinguished and for a movie about two iconic heroes fighting over different values, that's pretty lame. The action, which is the main draw, could be nice, but man am I tired of bad CGI being used to create these over the top supervillains for the climaxes – it just looks more silly than cool at this point.

4. Suicide Squad

Another DC movie, this one the victim of a severely schizophrenic editing job that basically renders it unwatchable. The fact that actors like Margot Robbie give good performances is a miracle considering how jumbled the story is and how ridiculous the plot – you'd be hard pressed to really make sense of what is going on at any point of this, or explain the logic behind these character's decisions to unleash this team of supervillains to solve their problems. It's cool to try for an offbeat, anti-hero team of characters, but why did this one have to come off like a bad high school fanfiction?

3. Hardcore Henry

There was no real story, plot or character to this – it was nothing but action, fighting and explosions the whole time. Which, I get it, sounds lame to complain about. Until you watch this movie and see how tired, boring and dead-horse-beating that can be if you stretch it out for an hour and a half with no nuance to it save for a POV camera gimmick that actually makes it even more one-dimensional. Just excruciating to sit through.

2. Passengers

A ridiculous film that I was astounded turned out as bad as it was. This had no tonal consistency at all, jumping around from a lost-in-space sci fi thriller to a romance and finally to an over the top explosion-fest action story and doing none of them very well. The central twist is that Bradley Cooper's lead character actually manipulated Jennifer Lawrence's character by waking her up from her cryo-sleep 50 years too early before they arrived on the far-away world they're traveling to, effectively ruining her life and imprisoning her on the ship with him, and lying to her about that. It should be played as a horror movie, but when she forgives him and they get back together, it would be offensively bad, were it not so plainly ludicrous and incompetent.

1. The Purge: Election Year

The thing with the Purge is that it is the most hackneyed, dull, lazy kind of social satire – it's an overblown dystopian world where in the future, we decided as a country to make all crime legal once a year due to manipulation from scheming politicians. But where it fails is that it doesn't have a realistic portrayal of human beings at its core, which I find unforgivable. This series basically says we're all just dumb sheep who have no desire or organization to fight back against corruption, which is fundamentally false in any era of real-world history. It's not a believable fiction, and at worst it's actively gross and offensive.

If this was just supposed to be a fun, campy action ride, I'd forgive that, but the condescending tone and 'look how smart we are for saying this' vibe just don't gel with me. Not to mention the action, characters, writing, directing and everything else are subpar, too. This movie sucks and it's the worst I saw all year.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

Choosing what not to watch, entertainment today, and the future of Cinema Freaks

I didn't see Batman vs Superman and that was a conscious decision that I don't regret.

I hate that that makes me sound like some kind of pretentious idiot – like, really, do I deserve accolades and applause for that courageous decision? No. I made a Facebook post on my personal account about it the day the movie came out, and I felt like it could be interpreted in that way. But really I just wanted to talk about the choices we now have and the incredibly stupid concept of 'hate-watching.'

I've been thinking about art, and about how we have access to so much art now. We can stream any number of movies through Netflix and Amazon Prime. There are Redboxes where you can stick a credit card in and a real live DVD plops out like gumballs from a fucking toy machine in a K-Mart when I was a kid. There are indie theaters and showcases playing crazy, different movies that I couldn't pass up on as a fan of film.

I just think we should have some discernment over what we watch. I bash movies on this site and for years I talked about the terrible state of horror movies and movies in general – overblown sentiments, perhaps, but the intent was genuine. I saw the sheer overload of crap coming out and I had some things to say about it. But I never really tortured myself doing the reviews for Cinema Freaks, as pretty much everything I chose was left-of-center and something I thought would be fun to spotlight – I was never like 'hey, let's review this Uwe Boll movie' or some shit like that. You should never choose easy targets. Never something that the jokes 'write themselves' for.

And if I saw Batman vs Superman, a movie that I figured I would not enjoy, based on Zack Snyder's involvement and my dislike of Man of Steel, what would I be doing then? Sure, I could have made a review of it, gotten some funny jokes in, but then what? I still would've paid my $10 to see the thing in theaters. I thought, how can I really complain about a movie being bad if I'm still contributing my money to the system that helps make these movies. That seems hypocritical to me, and actually counterproductive at that. I paid money to see a movie, then I bash it and rage against the hollow absence of meaning and the commercial mindset that produced it. But more will keep coming out just like it and worse. What's the point? I just didn't see BvS. It was easier that way, and poor box office returning sales have vindicated me in that.

We have choices in what we take in as art now. I don't have to waste my $10 going to see a movie I don't think I'll enjoy. It isn't my critical imperative. I don't consider myself a critic of movies as some sort of title – it has always seemed so weird to me to have a professional job and have people only see you because you have opinions on movies. It seems kind of presumptuous and pretentious. Rather I think the general public just needs to be more critical. Like what you like, who cares about what it is, but spend some time talking about it and analyzing things, even if just a little bit. Don't accept things because 'it's a dumb movie, turn your brain off.' Talk about it, no matter what it is. That's what I want to do with anyone I see movies with.

Instead of going to see a movie I didn't think I'd enjoy, I'd rather spend my money seeing films like Green Room or The Family Fang, both of which were playing down at my local indie theater here. I'd rather see those movies. And maybe I'll see Batman vs Superman and it won't be as bad as I thought sometime. I don't know. It's not a priority.

(I also didn't see, and have zero plans to see, the 11/22/63 miniseries – if only because that book is one of my favorites and a very personal thing to me. I couldn't stand to re-read it again and have a possibly mediocre TV series and the images of some other people in my head for those characters. So it goes. Choose what you watch. There's no critical imperative about that.)

I do plan to keep reviewing movies for Cinema Freaks, too. But in recent years, as my reviews got longer and more detailed and I began to put more time into them than the immature splatterings of the early years, I started to think about some things. I was making my way into professional life. I had real professional writing jobs that took up lots of time out of my day. I started doing stand-up comedy – which I wouldn't have done if not for this blog – about a year ago, and I was having more fun doing that, going out and meeting people, than shacked up inside at night hammering away at a review when I had nothing else to do. It became a question of priority. I will do more Cinema Freaks reviews, though maybe they'll be more sporadic now – might be better in the long run. It might do something to ensure better quality reviews in the future. And I'm avoiding from now on any large declarations or quasi-personal attacks against directors. That's passe and immature – the stuff of misplaced rage of a younger mind. So, from here out, jokes. More jokes and observances and critiques not of petty minutiae but of the larger qualities of a work.

A large majority of the movies I've talked about here were really insane, bad movies that my friends and I made fun of and had fun doing it. It is fun to make fun of movies. I don't think anyone would deny that. That's why Mystery Science Theater and Nostalgia Critic got so popular. People love watching terrible movies being torn to shreds. Who knows why? Maybe it's some kind of schadenfraude. We just find it cathartic, maybe. Or maybe it's the even simpler answer – it's fun to mock what is absurd and different. Maybe we're all high-school bullies with a hive mind inside.

So there'll be more Cinema Freaks. We might be slower, but we're still around.

Cinema Freaks is dead. Long live Cinema Freaks. I can't promise that we won't go and hate-watch The Purge 3 this summer.