(Posted: 18 December 2012)

Well another year down the shitter. Nobody has learned anything, nobody is a better person for it and I'm pretty sure the world isn't going to end. As disappointing as that is. Where does that leave us? Same place we've been for the past 4 years except we decided to change some things up with our end of the year wrap up. While 2012 managed to turn out more than a few excellent titles that you'll see in our 'Best of', there were still more than a few floaters circling the bowl. Instead of regulating ourselves only to one title like we've done in the past, we decided to take that list up to 13. Why 13? Why not! We debated about what movie was truly the worst until we decided that there were just too many to choose from. From that, we just listed off movies that deserved to be on the list without question and through that method we landed on 13 titles. That number felt right. It felt good. Nothing was forced in there and we didn't feel the need to take anything out to make room for something else.

But if enough of my bullarky. Let's get to the list!

Directed by Mikkel Nørgaard

I kept hearing how funny and how great this movie was so I figured I'd scope it out. Why not? It could be, but it wasn't. I was actually amazed to see the movie get so much attention and praise since it's the American low-brow comedy but with a Danish accent. I have a feeling if the movie would have been released as "American Pie Presents: Klown" or "American Pie Presents: Tour de Fisse" that not a single fuck would have been given. It's very typical in it's characters, premise, setup and eventual punchlines with a horrendously tacked on sympathetic ending that, somehow, redeems the shitty characters. But watch out for that last minute wacky ending!
Directed by Douglas Buck, Buddy Giovinazzo, David Gregory, Karim Hussain, Jeremy Kasten, Tom Savini, Richard Stanley

A very hyped anthology that I had a fair share of expections of myself, featuring such names as Tom Savini, Karim Hussain, Douglas Buck, to name a few. Sadly, it never managed to reach its full potential and instead offered mostly medicore-to-boring segments. Coming from some names that are highly regarded names in horror (and especially underground horror) it was a let down to see that this was just another anthology. I'd even find myself rewatching "Three Faces of Terror" before this one.

Directed by David Brooks

Some of the stressful and perhaps scariest movies are those that fill you up with realistic panic. Movies like "Eden Lake", "Ils" or even "The Strangers" all managed to take you out of your comfort zone and give you human monsters that you can't figure out. "ATM" on the other hand, takes that concept and makes it more unreal than zombies simply because such stupidity is not believable. This had the same potential as the above mentioned titles, but it couldn't even muster up enough suspense to make a single hair stand up. Although it successfully managed to lower my eye-lids.


Directed by Colin Theys

Zombies, do we need 'em? Yeah, because there are so many fantastic classics. And "Remains" knows that, since it tries to steal every little thing that worked, except it doesn't know why they worked or how to execute them. What little it tried to do differently showed the same lack of care, and was possibly thought up by a couple of 14 year olds.


Directed by Maksim Dyachuk

Granted, this offers some entertainment because it is SO stupid. It's one of those movies you watch alone, and realize how much you would've wanted a friend next to you to spew hate with. And a few laughs. This is a total CGI-fest not far from the SyFy channel, and I suppose the only good thing about it is that the director made most of it himself. That's always neat - but that doesn't make it good.


Directed by Joseph Kahn

Another movie that had a lot of hype built around it about how good, clever and gory it was. You know what this movie really was? Awful. That's what it was. The director used his background in MTV and music video to create an over-stylized, hyper version of "Scream" with about 80% more stupidity involved. Often touted as being clever for its "meta" based storyline of self-aware and references to horror movies and teenage culture. "Detention" is nothing more than another junk movie that decided to throw everything at the audience hoping that something would stick. Except nothing did. It's another movie were people call it brilliant because, supposedly, "it has something to say" yet openly ignore that it is a sloppy mess.


Directed by Daniel Lehmussaari

Swedish zombie movies don't have the best track record, and "Svart Död" doesn't help. Sure, it's better than "Die Zombiejäger", but that doesn't really mean a lot. "Svart Död" could have been a pretty decent, albeit unoriginal, zombie movie hadn't it been for the shitty characters AND actors, the writing (a ton of bad comedy and terrible dialogue), less-than-mediocre make-up and having less gore than expected. It's far from being good, but it could've been alright. But it's not.


Directed by Kelly Smith

It's just another mainstream horror movie that doesn't understand how idiotic it is. Its unoriginality and attempts at twists was the last straw - it didn't even manage to be an okay slasher. The slasher genre is filled with so many poor attempts, HOW COULD IT FAIL SO HARD!? I guess we will never know, and I hope not too many of you give this a shot.


Directed by Lucio A. Rojas & Cristian Toledo

I watched this one under the name "Blind Death", but this seems to be the more common title. Original, eh? Indeed. ANOTHER ZOMBIE FLICK!? This just shows how shitty that genre is nowadays. This is filled to the top with terrible effects and a solid dose of boredom. It's simply a bad, boring movie. It doesn't offer anything good at all and most people watching it were probably tricked by some publicity stunt, or just love zombie movies enough to watch them all.


Directed by Joe Smalley & Tess Smalley

We bashed this in our Mockumentary list and we are here to bash it again because the movie is just that awful. The people behind the movie had no idea what they were doing or how to make a mockumentary/found-footage movie and it shows. It never made up its mind on what it was  or what it wanted to do so it constantly switches from a standard movie based narrative to a POV "raw footage" style. It's so illogical and poorly made that it is both laughable and frustrating with an ending that is so idiotic that it is mind blowing.


Directed by Sid Bennett

Other than making me hate dinosaurs for a bit over an hour, this is one of the worst attempts at a mockumentary that I have ever seen. They didn't seem to understand what that genre is. They shouldn't have used the concept if they had no intentions of following the simple rules of "POV" - you can't switch angle to a non-existing camera! The ending might fuck the genre over even harder. Nothing is good about this movie, and I hope the filmmakers never make another movie.


Directed by Joe Raffa

A prime example of what not to do with your movie. They tried to build an entire movie around the single idea of a massacre at a real-world haunted house attraction. And in attempting to build an entire movie for a single moment, it failed miserably. Big surprise. There were a lot of things wrong with movie, all the way down to the acting, but the worst part was the overly convoluted story that was filled with plot holes, inconsistencies, sub-plots that went no where and no real flow for the main story. This is what happens when people focus on only one aspect of the movie and let everything else fall by the wayside.





Directed by Lars-Erik Lie

This is one of those movies that seem more like an attempt at making SOMETHING than actually making a movie. It's just extremely cheap, with low production values overall. You quickly lose interest because you realize that what you are watching is on par with some teenager's backyard production. The entire budget seems to have been thrown at the end, where they actually managed to throw in some blood and nudity. But to sit through this entire thing for some blood and boobs? No thanks, I can watch any random movie that has that, and be in for a more entertaining ride. The filmmakers most likely learned a lot from making the movie, so maybe they can make a watchable movie in the future. For now, it's just a bad attempt that happened to get distribution.

Now please hold on tight for our Best of 2012, which will be posted around New Years!


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Best of 2012
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