The first decade of the new millennium has come to an end, and that means it is now time for film sites all over the web to begin posting their various retrospectives and lists recalling the decade that was. I generally as a rule dislike such lists because they are always so subjective. Then I said screw it and took it upon myself to do one of my own naming the ten worst horror movies of the past decade. Besides, people love bitching on the Internet about lists like this, and who am I to deny readers yet another excuse to get into pointless flame wars over personal opinions.
Of course, this list is just my personal opinion which is not legally binding … unless Proposition 304 passes. And we all pray that it will.
I set two rules when putting this list together: Only horror movies that received fairly wide theatrical releases in the United States were eligible, and no direct-to-DVD or made-for-cable films were allowed. Otherwise, I would have had a list full of cheap garbage from Thailand or it would have consisted of six Ulli Lommel serial killer flicks, two Sci-Fi Channel turds, and some no-budget pieces of crap Lionsgate and The Asylum dumped onto DVD. I chose to focus my attention on the more deserving big screen bombs, the horrors that only horrified in the sense that major Hollywood studios spent millions making and marketing them. I spent weeks looking back upon the Hollywood horrors released to multiplexes from 2000-2009, often reevaluating my own opinions on many a film until I finally narrowed the list down to what I felt were the ten most deserving of the distinction of being labeled the worst horror movies of the past ten years.
THE TEN WORST HORROR MOVIES OF THE DECADE
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Before diving headfirst into the worst list, it is time to unveil the HONORABLE MENTIONS. You might be wondering what constitutes an honorable mention when listing the worst horror movies? These are the fright flicks that definitely deserved to be ranked amongst the decade’s worst but I just could not bring myself to put them on the list because their undeniable badness proved a laugh riot. The following four honorable mentions are granted a stay of execution for being so bad they’re funny.
THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
A motion picture that will live in infamy. The movie that effectively introduced the movie-watching world to a mad German named Uwe Boll and we’ve never been the same since. Trash talking before the release about how his film was going to kick Resident Evil‘s ass – way to set the bar high there, Uwe; trash talking Internet fanboys after the release for decrying his magnum opus as an incompetent and incoherent debacle that has only the faintest ties to the plotless video game on which it is based. At least it’s lively, something that cannot be said of a few other Boll-infused snoozers. This deliriously insane mess verges so sharply into Edward D. Wood, Jr., territory on so many occasions House of the Dead may very well be Plan 9 from Outer Space for the 21st Century. Boll tried putting out a “funny version” of this film that wasn’t even 1/100th as intentionally funny as his crowning achievement was unintentionally so.
I KNOW WHO KILLED ME
Four words: non-religious identical twin stigmata. A high concept movie in the sense that everyone involved with the making of it had to have been high. In Lindsay Lohan’s case, that’s a given. What’s everyone else’s excuse? This level of jaw-dropping WTF-ness requires serious effort. You simply cannot make a movie that achieves the levels of badness that this surreal schlock does without having started out with loftier goals and without question I Know Who Killed Me was clearly a Herculean effort on the part of its makers. A perfect storm of cinema gone wrong: a tabloid fodder actress trying to change her on-screen image even though it’s her off-screen image that needs changing and an off-the-charts preposterous screenplay that not even a director created by Dr. Frankenstein from the parts of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Lamberto Bava, Tod Browning, and Brian De Palma could make into a workable film. Simply has to be seen to be believed!
THE HAPPENING
Mark Wahlberg giving the best performance in the history of cinema by an actor behaving like a man suffering from a concussion not actually playing a character suffering from a concussion; Zooey Deschanel doing the most uncanny impression of a perpetually startled lemur you will ever see; philosophical arguments in defense of the hot dog; people trying to outrun and even outsmart the wind. A loopy ecological thriller about pissed-off plants that cause people to commit suicide in the most preposterous manner possible; to think when the decade began M. Night Shyamalan was being compared to the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg.
THE WICKER MAN
If you need me to tell you why then you either haven’t seen the remake of The Wicker Man or you haven’t watched this highlight video.
This leads us to a very special DISHONORABLE MENTION. This one did not quite make the final cut but it remains worthy of special consideration. If for any reason any of the following ten worst horror movies of the decade are unable to fulfill their obligations as one of the ten worst horror movies of the past ten years, this first runner-up will be asked to step in and complete the list.
ULTRAVIOLET
This brings us to the reason you are reading this in the first place. In compiling my list I chose not to bother with a numerical countdown. Personally, I see no point in trying to put these dreadful little films in some sort of numbered list except when it comes to my choice for the single worst horror movie of the decade. Nine horrible horrors presented in no particular order leading to the one cinematic abomination that stands above and beyond all others in terms of epic fail. Without further ado…
THE TEN WORST HORROR MOVIES OF THE DECADE
The list starts on the NEXT Page
Christian Slater’s character kept telling us in dialogue and voiceover that he was searching for answers. Anyone that watches Uwe Boll’s second shot at botching a video game movie will sympathize because they too will be looking for answers that will never come. Where as House of the Dead had an Ed Wood vibe in its favor, Alone in the Dark was more like the worst movie Bruno Mattei never made. You would expect even a truly bad movie boasting monsters from another dimension, zombies, centipede-like parasites, sand worms, paranormal commando units, Christian Slater doing Matrix-style kung fu, and Stephen Dorf getting blown to kingdom come would still find a way to be entertaining to some degree, but Dr. Boll manages to bore even as he piles convolution on top of convolution on top of convolution and not even Tara Reid comically miscast as an allegedly brilliant anthropologist who cannot even correctly pronounce “New Foundland” could salvage it.
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All you can do is watch and shake your head in disgust. Is there anyone that watches John Carpenter’s original and says to themself, “If only this movie had a wisecracking black guy?” Has anyone ever watched John Carpenter’s original and thought, “Forget the ghost pirates; I want to watch a woman fall in the water and fight for her life to break free from the seaweed that entangles her?” Do you think if Debra Hill had lived to see this remake she would have leaned over to Carpenter and told him how that ghost hand coming out of the sink was so much cooler than anything he did in his version? Sadly, the producers of this remake seemed to think so.
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Scary Movie 2 was such a last-minute rush job to get a sequel into theaters to make a quick summer movie buck that you could forgive the Wayans somewhat if not for the fact that they’ve spent the decade since punishing audiences with White Chicks, Little Man, and other alleged comedies that have even prompted TheOnion.com to do a spoof story asking if America is prepared for another Wayans Brothers movie.
The art of the spoof movie officially died with Scary Movie 2 and its special brand of lazy movie spoofings and piss, puke, and poo jokes that would soon give rise to Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the duo that spent the second half of the decade gifting mankind with Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, and Disaster Movie.
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The cliche-o-rama script trots out the cat-jumping-out scare twice, adds a thunderstorm raging outside, includes the old car that won’t start routine, and still finds room to toss in a completely pointless dream sequence for good measure. Pretty pathetic that the opening five minutes of Scream made for a better remake of When a Stranger Calls than the actual 90-minute remake.
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Doom should have been a relentless, non-stop, heart-pounding action horrorfest about a lone soldier battling demons within the cramped confines of a Martian space station. Instead all we got was boring Aliens rip-off #769 with monsters that pale in comparison to their game counterparts and a script sprinkled with theological conceits that might have been interesting in the hands of a less brain dead movie, and, no, the fact that it was R-rated does not salvage it. The only person frightened by Doom was The Rock; he got so scared off appearing in R-rated action movies after this epic fail he ran screaming to Disney begging to put on pink tutus in family comedies. It takes a certain degree of filmmaking genius to make a movie based on a first-person shooter video game and end that film with a fist fight.
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Movies like Black Christmas are the reason why the horror genre gets a bad rap, why many non-genre directors will go out of their way to keep their movies from being labeled as horror, why horror movie fans get labeled as being nothing but a bunch of bloodthirsty malcontents, and why slasher films are generally perceived as being one step up from pornography in terms of social value. The 1974 original practically gave birth to the slasher movie. The 2006 remake kind of makes you wish the original had never been made because of it.
** If Paul WS Anderson had written that line it would have been “Fuck with Santa and we’ll see who shits in the stocking.”
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I could spend a week of dissecting everything wrong about a movie like this that works so hard at being twisty it even outsmarts itself periodically, and I nearly did in my spoiler-filled review of Premonition here. Go back and give my review a read if you truly want to know why Premonition earned its spot on this list.
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On Earth everyone can hear you scream, “Am I really watching teenagers getting chased through their high school by an Alien?” You can’t even blame all the problems on the studio gutting the film before its release because the gaping gaps in logic are still there. If that Predator is trying to remove all evidence of the Aliens then why is it the moment he’s spotted by a human he not only kills the guy, he leaves his skinned body hanging upside down from a tree for everyone to find? Maybe the Predator just realized nobody would notice since this was clearly the least observant town on the planet: a spaceship crashes in the woods and nobody sees or hears a thing, that spaceship is blown up in a mini-nuclear explosion and nobody saw or heard that either. You want to know the real reason why AVP-R is on this list? Because it actually made us reevaluate whether we had been too hard on Paul WS Anderson.
The list continues on the NEXT Page
More importantly, Halloween: Resurrection was the sequel that successfully did what druid cults failed to do two times over: kill the Halloween franchise so dead that producers decided there was no recourse but to start over with a straight-up remake of a horror masterpiece. Bitch and moan about Rob Zombie’s remake all you want – and I want to; without Michael Myers getting un-decapitated and then murdering Jamie Lee Curtis’ iconic character in the most unceremonious manner possible before setting off to terrorize reality internet show contestants and getting his ass handed to him by Busta Rhymes, chances are slim Rob Zombie would have been given the opportunity to skull-fuck a classic. Sure, we might have gotten more lame stabs at milking the dehydrated cow that is this franchise, like perhaps maybe Halloween vs. Hellraiser or Halloween 8: Trek or Treat with Michael Myers in space terrorizing a starship, and while they may have sucked too, odds are outright remaking John Carpenter’s classic would never have been in the cards. Who am I kidding? Platinum Dunes would have gotten their mitts on the franchise sooner or later for a reboot.
Nine down, one to go.
But before I reveal my overall choice for the decade’s biggest debacle, for every good or great horror movie that came along there were at least three that helped stink up the silver screen. Any number of which could have found their way on the ten worst list. Let’s take a moment to reflect upon some of the scary stinkers that stunk up theaters over the course of the past ten years.
Ah, the memories… So many bad memories.
And now it is time for my pick for the single worst horror movie of the past decade. I am sure it will be a controversial choice for some. I am sure there will be many that nod their head in total agreement. I thought about this list long and hard but I did not have to think too hard about this choice. Who really went into The Fog remake or Halloween: Resurrection anticipating a good movie? How could anyone you really have high expectations for Doom or When a Stranger Calls? Who actually went into any of the previous nine selections with lofty expectations (save for AVP-R, you poor misguided fanboys)? The more I thought about it the motion picture I selected for the worst horror movie of the past decade came with high expectations. It came with a mega-budget. It came with mega-hype. Its failure to deliver cannot be blamed on studio interference or lack of budget or any other excuse the previous nine choices could argue for why they turned out so bad.
My choice for the single worst horror movie of the first decade of the 21st century is…
Still not convinced? Then here are ten more reasons why Van Helsing is the worst horror movie of the past ten years.
Van Helsing’s first name is now Gabriel instead of Abraham. Sure, Abraham was a good enough name for one of our greatest Presidents and the patriarch of the Jews and Arabs, but to Sommers it was all about what sounded cool to him and Abraham just didn’t have a good enough ring to it despite being the name of the character from Bram Stoker’s novel that he based the whole god damn movie around. It’s cool though because Gabriel Van Helsing turns out to be the earthly amnesiac incarnation of the angel Gabriel. Say what?
Dracula’s offspring are born dead – not undead, actually dead. Dracula keeps his born yet unborn offspring stuffed in wasp sacks hanging around his castle until he can find the correct electrical wattage needed to bring them to life. Or would that be to make them undead? The wrong wattage either fails to reanimate them or reanimates them for only a short period of time after which they begin bursting into piles of goo like the Martians’ heads at end of Mars Attacks. Dracula commissioned the construction of Frankenstein’s Monster because the energy used to bring him to life is the perfect voltage for giving his gazillion kids life – or would that be undeath? If Dracula ever gets his hands on Frankenstein’s Monster he’s going to use the power supply contained in Frank’s Ultraman “Color Timer” of a mechanical heart to revive all of his babies that look like winged frogs with an uncanny resemblance to Dingbat from the old “Batman” cartoon series and unleash them upon mankind. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the basis for the film’s very plot.
Comprehend for a moment that Richard Roxburgh was doing all this appallingly bad overacting as the worst Dracula in recent screen memory while Stephen Sommers sat in the director’s chair nodding his head in approval. Sommers’ version of Count Dracula really is like a lame version of a vampire villain from the 1960’s Batman live-action series, while the Brides of Dracula all played by supermodels that do more silly posing than the “Power Rangers”. Multiple brides and a million kids … I never realized Dracula was Mormon.
Frankenstein’s Monster suffers from some serious mood swings depending on Stephen Sommers own mood that particular scene. “I just want to live!” “You must destroy me!” “I want to live!” “Destroy me!” “Live!” Can we get Frank some Zoloft?
The full moon causes one to transform into a werewolf yet the first werewolf seen in the movie attacks in broad daylight. If clouds cover the moon then the werewolf will turn back into a human only to turn back into a werewolf as soon as the full moon is exposed again. Using Stephen Sommers laws of lycanthropy it must really suck to be a werewolf because unless it’s a 100% clear sky you’re going to be constantly changing back and forth at a moment’s notice. On the bright side, according to Stephen Sommers version of the lunar cycle, there’s a full moon every 48 hours.
Vampires can run around in broad daylight as long as there are clouds blocking the sun. The moment the clouds move allowing the sunlight to break-thru the vampires must flee back to their castle in a matter of seconds. Fortunately, these vampires seem to be able to do about Mach 3 when flying away to escape the light of day.
A point is made to tell us that werewolves are not fast enough to catch Transylvanian horses. Mere moments later, werewolves are shown successfully outrunning Transylvanian horses.
Everyone swings from a rope at some point in this movie. Even Frankenstein’s monster comes swinging in at one point. Tarzan flicks have less rope swinging than Van Helsing. You get the sense that if Stephen Sommers ever made a movie based on Dragon’s Lair it would be two-and-a-half hours of Dirk the Daring swinging across those flaming ropes.
Stake through the heart, decapitation, sunlight, holy water, fire, and all those other ways we’ve been told for ages were how you kill Dracula are all crap. According to Stephen Sommers, the one and only way to kill Dracula is the bite of a werewolf. Why exactly is never explained, but then we’re also never given a really good explanation as to why Dracula spends so much time cavorting around with the very creatures that can kill him with a single bite. Apparently he isn’t afraid of one of his werewolf minions turning on him and biting him because he’s developed a werewolf anti-venom. He keeps that lycan antidote in a syringe stashed inside of a glass orb filled with acid up in a far off hard to reach tower of his castle – you know, for convenience. Van Helsing then quite conveniently gets transformed into a werewolf bigger than Sasquatch for the climactic CGI sumo wrestling contest with “Beast Wars” Dracula. At no time during this struggle does Drac ever attempt to fly at Mach 3 up to the tower to get his life-saving serum nor does he bother ordering one of his Oompah Loompahs dressed like Jawas on their way to a Quiet Riot concert to go fetch it for him.
And finally, after having spent the past two hours watching Kate Beckinsale barely escape encounters with werewolves and vampires, narrowly survive all manner of leaps and falls and multi-story rope swinging, what finally leads to the death of her character? Beckinsale is killed when werewolf Van Helsing in an uncontrollable frenzy tackles her onto a psychiatrist’s couch. I do believe this marks the first time in cinematic history that getting sacked on a sofa killed a major character in a motion picture. Let me repeat this one last time just to put the exclamation point on why Van Helsing is the worst horror movie of the past decade:
KATE BECKINSALE DIES BECAUSE A WEREWOLF TACKLED HER ONTO A CUSHIONED LOVESEAT!