OK, so here we are at the end of 2009, and to break my unfortunate silence recently, I’ve decided to list some thoughts on what I consider to be the best and worst movies of the decade. Since it would be wrong to to leave the year on a downer, here’s my picks for the worst of the decade (after the jump). I admit I haven’t seen some of these movies since they came out, but these were probably the biggest disappointments I’ve had all decade:

10. Van Helsing (2004)

I wanted to like Van Helsing, I really did. I liked Stephen Sommer’s previous movies a lot, especially The Mummy. Deep Rising was cheesy fun, and I even liked some parts of The Mummy Returns despite the annoying kid and its tendency to repeat bits of the original. Given that, an action-adventure featuring Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein along with a young Van Helsing ready to take them all on sounded like the movie I would want to see.

Unfortunately, Sommers really lost it on this expensive folly. It’s overlong and very silly. Richard Roxburgh is a terrible Dracula, and all the leads are quite bland. However, the real problem is the overuse of CGI. Sommers litters the screen with stupidly overdone effects, to the point that in many sequences the movie might as well have been an animated movie. Despite my love the subject and the characters, I found myself incredibly bored throughout the action sequences. A real failure, unfortunately.

9. Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

In the mid-90s, the Halloween franchise had been in a bad state. Part 5 had been rushed out just as the slasher genre was dying. Part 6 was heavily tampered with in post production, and introduced some utterly stupid plot twists (Michael Myers controlled by an evil Druidic cult?). The saviour was Wes Craven’s Scream, which breathed life back into the genre. Sensibly, Halloween: H20 simply ignored that parts 4 – 6 had never happened and picked up the story of Laurie Strode 20 years after “that night”.

Flushed with success, what do we get as the follow up? Would you believe a low grade Busta Rhymes vehicle that attempts to copy parts of The Blair Witch Project and its imitators?

The movie starts badly with an extended sequence showing Laurie Strode finally killed off by Michael Myers (apparently the only reason Jamie Lee Curtis would agree to star in another Halloween movie would to kill off the character). It’s not bad as such, but it takes a large chunk of the movie’s running time. I don’t remember exactly, how long it is, but it must be a good 20 minutes before we get to meet the main characters. When we get there,we may as well not have bothered. The characters are annoying, the plot (involving an “internet reality show” running a contest from Myers’ old house) is silly and Michael Myers is not in the movie enough. This was bad enough to kill the franchise for another 5 years before Rob Zombie came along…

I’ve not bothered with Zombie’s films yet, despite liking House Of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects quite a lot, but I don’t see how they can be worse than this (well, maybe H2 is from what I’ve heard!).

8. Ghosts of Mars (2001)

I’m a John Carpenter fanboy, and have been some for many years despite evidence of his creative failings. Even after something like the mediocre comedy Memoirs Of An Invisible Man, I knew he’d deliver when he got back to genre cinema. I love nearly all of his movies, from the classics like Halloween and The Thing to lesser, flawed attempts such as Prince Of Darkness. Then, in the mid 90s following the sublime In The Mouth Of Madness, everything started to go to pot. After the OK remake of Village Of The Damned, he made the horrible Escape From L.A. For me, his career jumped the metaphorical shark during the sequence where Snake Plissken surfs down a Hollywood street with Peter Fonda. After that, I really just wanted Carpenter to redeem himself. Vampires was OK, but then he brought us this and I lost faith for several years.

This is another of those “should have been good” films. Carpenter had always wanted to make a Western, but had become pigeon-holed in the horror & sci-fi genres. Westerns were also considered a dead genre, with occasional exceptions like Unforgiven and Open Range proving to be the exception rather than the rule. With this, Carpenter decided to meld the Western with the sci-fi/horror movies he’s best known for. The resulting story is a mess.

I don’t have a huge amount to say about this one, if I’m honest. I remember thinking the whole thing was silly, and almost shouted at the TV at one point when a character makes an utterly stupid suicidal move. It seems that the film has gained some kind of cult following in the intervening years, but it’s embarrassing to place this next to The Thing and realise they’re from the same director.

Carpenter hasn’t directed a feature film since, at least until The Ward is released next year. Fortunately, he seems to have found his feet again to some degree with his two Masters Of Horror episodes, let’s hope he can redeem himself…

7. Valentine (2001)

It’s funny to complain about Valentine here for two main reasons. First of all, I don’t think the movie was incredibly bad as such, just very blank and boring. Secondly, in all honesty I don’t remember all that much about it at all, apart from being amused at Denise Richards’ totally gratuitous pool scene (albeit less so than the average 80s movie). I was also disappointed that Australian director Jamie Blanks had made another movie similar to the bland and silly final 90 minutes of his début Urban Legend, rather than the fantastic opening 5 minutes of that film.

So why is it here? Well, for two reasons. First of all, it’s the only movie I remember seeing at the cinema in the early part of the decade and feeling really ripped off. But, more importantly, it signposts exactly where the horror genre was heading at the start of the decade, as well as where studios would have continued pushing it if The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense had not been as successful as they were.

In short: tired genre conventions with no real bite, a cast full of existing and future TV stars in bland, interchangeable roles. Although this movie was rated R in the US, I don’t remember there being much in the way of gore, pointing the way to toothless and pointless PG-13 slasher movies like Prom Night.

6. Return of The Living Dead 4: Necropolis (2005)

To be honest, I’m not sure whether the 4th or 5th film in this series is worse, but I think this one just pips the 5th one to the post. At least that one had a ridiculous “zombie Ecstasy” plot and some sequences that were enjoyable despite their badness. This one is just bad.

The “Return…” series started with a 1985 comedy horror movie directed and written by (the sadly late) Dan O’Bannon, who also helped create Alien and Dark Star. It is, to my mind, one of the better movies of the 80s with nearly-indestructible zombies and a great sense of when to be silly and when to be scary. The second movie a few years later tried unsuccessfully to retread the same ground, while Brian Yuzna’s 1993 follow-up was enjoyable if flawed. With zombies being back in vogue again, I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone resurrected the franchise.

Early signs were good. Although this was already going to be a simple direct-to-DVD set of movies (parts 4&5 were shot back-to-back in Romania with the same cast), they were being directed by Ellory Elkayem, director of the decent giant spider comedy Eight Legged Freaks. the problem is that the script sucks on numerous different levels.

The main problem is that these sequels remove the most interesting aspects of the original movie. There, the zombies were virtually indestructable. Dismembering a zombie just meant the parts would come after you, and burning them just releases more of the zombie-making toxin into the air (not good when it’s about to rain on a cemetary!). Here, a simple Romero-style shot to the head is enough to take them down. Everything else here is really generic, losing the smart mix of comedy and horror the made the original a classic, while also introducting nothing new of interest.

A waste of time, and it’s a shame to see a promising director like Elkayem (who also directed the decent DTV bug movie They Nest) sink to this level. Hopefully he’ll come back with another fun movie, but given that his newest movie is Without A Paddle 2, it might be while.

5. I Spit on Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave (2001)

I do find it a little unfair to pick on low grade independent productions when talking about things like the “worst movie of the decade”. If you pick up a straight to DVD, low budget movie, you never know what you’re going to get, of course. Look at the DVD cover, will it be the next Paranormal Activity or the next Slashers (both movies I like very much, by the way)? Even if not, the fact that an independent producer can get a film made and distributed is much more of an achievement than a supposed professional who has been in the industry for years. But, this movie was asking for it…

First of all, it’s a conceptual remake of the classic video nasty I Spit On Your Grave, as you can tell from the title. Thanks to this, I was intrigued and decided to pick it up via a grey market channel (it’s never had a UK release for reasons that will soon be obvious). Given that the director Eric Stanze has built up a decent underground reputation (I think I saw and liked his previous movie, Scrapbook, under a different title on Spanish TV, but I’m not sure if it’s the right movie), I thought I’d be in for something interesting. I was wrong.

It’s horribly acted and directed. It looks and sounds terrible, and nothing really happens for a long time. Once it does, we get rape, an extended and pointless masturbation scene, and then a bunch of pretty deviant sex acts. I’m not exactly a porno fan, but these scenes look like they were made for a particularly twisted fan of that market, and there’s little to it beyond that.

This film may look a little out of place in the company surrounding it, but this is truly the only movie that actively annoyed me due to its content rather than wasted potential or a director’s fall from grace.

4. Mother Of Tears (a.k.a. La Terza Madre; The Third Mother) (2007)

In the history of movies, few directors have experienced the highs and lows of Dario Argento. Starting as a screenwriter on various Italian projects (he co-wrote Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West), Argento soon found his way into the director’s chair. His first project, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, was a stylish and assured début, that helped lead Italian cinema into one of its heydays and crystallised one of the few home-grown Italian genres, the giallo. Over the following years, he made movies of variable overall quality and was often criticised for his threadbare characters and sometimes silly plots, but he was always daring and original. This period culminated in a brace of movies – Suspiria and Inferno – that combined the giallo with the supernatural.

Unfortunately, Argento started to self-destruct sometime in the mid-80s. Although fans disagree, I consider the 1985 movie Phenomena (a.k.a. Creepers) to be the real start of this (which I’ll review at a later date). Following the effective Terror At the Opera, Argento fell into tired repeats of what he’d already tried before, gradually showing less and less of the audacious flair he showed for the first 15 years of his career. The mainstream Italian exploitation industry also drew to a close, leaving Argento and others struggling to finance projects. The effect of this showed. His version of The Phantom of The Opera is almost unwatchably bad and The Card Player is bland to the point of looking like an ITV series.

So expectations were low (but hopes were high) when this, the “third part” in a conceptual trilogy following Suspiria and Inferno, was announced. Would Argento regain the heights of the prime of his career with this movie, which reunited him with ex-wife Daria Nicolodi, who wrote the first two movies. Sadly, this was truly a product of 2007’s Argento rather than 1977’s version.

The movie lacks style and is flat-looking. Asia Argento stars and gives the worst performance of her career with some horrible dialogue. The gore scenes are very silly and look like an out-take from a half-assed Lucio Fulci fan film. The use of CGI is absolutely atrocious, and the finale would look bad on a PS1 game.

Sadly, as I mentioned in my Frightfest review, Argento’s next movie (Giallo) would be just as bad. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the benefit of watching Mother Of Tears with a like-minded audience to help take away the pain…

3. The Wicker Man (2006)

Although I spend a lot of time complaining about Hollywood’s recent trend of remaking every movie from the 1970s and 80s, I’m not completely opposed to remakes. Two of my favourite movies of all time – Carpenter’s The Thing and Cronenberg’s The Fly – are remakes. Although I’m normally of the belief that remaking a classic is just asking for trouble, I did like recent remakes of Dawn Of The Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and I’m even half-optimistic about the Nightmare On Elm Street remake.

However, for every decent remake, there’s 10 that are worthless. At the bottom of the barrel, there are movies that are not only bad movies in their own right, but seem to have missed every single thing that made the original movies work. On top of that, there are movies that are so unique, so of their time and so memorable that even considering a remake is a fair dumb thing to do. The Wicker Man is a prime example of this.

It sounded promising when the director chosen was Neil LaBute, an indie director who had made interesting movies like In The Company of Men and Nurse Betty. LaBute had announced that his remake would take a totally different view of the cult-on-an-island theme, with a matriarchal society being the focus (a good move, since even Christopher Lee cites the original as his favourite role).

So what could go wrong? Well, first off the script is rubbish. The original movie had a realistic and strong plot in between its musical weirdness. Edward Woodward played a devout Catholic policeman sent to a remote Scottish island. The isolated pagan community presented was totally plausible for such a place, and Woodward’s devoutness (which would turn out to be his undoing in more ways than one) made his actions and his staying there plausible. In the remake, we have an island off the coast of the USA, and the community present is utterly ludicrous, especially when it’s revealed that they regularly go back to the mainland for education.

However, not even the poor script is a match for the glory that is Nicolas Cage. I’ve always liked Cage, and in his indie days he could really save a movie by his presence. Here, I’m not sure whether he thinks he’s in a comedy or whether there’s some footage left on the cutting room floor detailing his recent escape from a lunatic asylum. He runs around the island screaming, at one point carjacking a bicycle with a gun. In later stages, he runs around dressed as a bear, randomly assaulting the women who get in his way. It’s absolutely hilarious, and this would be one of the comedies of the decade if it weren’t for the fact that LaBute expects us to take it seriously.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at these scenes:

2. House Of The Dead (2003)

It’s hard to know which Uwe Boll atrocity to list here, but this is the one where it all began. Before this movie, Boll was merely a German director of bad action movie thrillers that went direct to DVD. However, with this movie he not only managed to get theatrical distribution but also started the trend of butchering videogame licences. He’s managed to do this for many years, butchering numerous licences (including Dungeon Siege, Alone In the Dark, Far Cry and Bloodrayne), largely thanks to a German tax loophole that allowed him to continue even when his movies failed to get distributed.

A lot’s been said about Boll, but I think the main reason he’s held in such contempt is the amount of utterly unnecessary changes he makes to his scripts compared to the (often excellent) storyline of the games themselves. With House Of The Dead, the game’s storyline was quite simple. Two government agents are sent to investigate mysterious goings on at the mansion owned by Dr. Curien, and end up fighting the undead creatures he has raised. Not a complex plot, with minimal characters and lots of action set-pieces. Ripe for a movie with fleshed-out characters and some decent effect, especially on the low but hardly meagre budget of $20 million, right?

Unfortunately, Boll thinks differently. We start with – sigh – a group of teenagers. they want to get to a rave being hosted on an island, but they’ve missed the boat to get them there. After getting a ride on a boat (whose captain is named Kirk), they arrive at the rave only to find it deserted. Soon after, they get attacked by zombies.

Notice the difference? Realistically, there’s only two similarities between the game and the movie. First of all there’s some dialogue at the end that suggests that one of the survivors is the son of Dr. Curien (who hasn’t been mentioned till this point and doesn’t appear in the film) and the two government agents also make an apperence in this scene. The second is the bonkers way in which game footage is incorporated into the movie’s action sequence.

Here we get one of Boll’s trademarks – utterly stupid directorial decisions that ruin any attempt to take a film seriously. Apparently, proper gore footage was shot for the action sequences, but Boll decided to edit in grainy, blocky videogame graphics (the game was first released in 1996) instead. Combined with the ludicrous plot, the overuse of bullet time for every character, the fact that these spoiled kids turn into expert marksmen the first time they handle a gun, etc.

The movie is ridiculous and barely watchable, even if you’re not familiar with the games. It’s an insult to anyone who enjoyed the games. Play House Of The Dead: Overkill on the Wii instead.

1. The Happening (2008)

I was never particularly wowed by M. Night Shyamalan. I enjoyed The Sixth Sense and thought Unbreakable was pretty underrated, but I didn’t understand the adoration often heaped on the guy. The cracks really appeared with Signs. I know a lot of people liked this movie, but for me the interesting central messages (everything happens for a reason, we are not always in control of our own destiny, etc.) were overpowered by an incredibly dumb and implausible ending. Even past that, all the messages are contradicted once you think about them for 5 seconds in light of the final twist. Similarly, The Village and Lady In The Water were OK, but generally mediocre.

However, I did hold up hope for The Happening. Word was that Shyamalan had been burned by his own arrogant comments surrounding Lady In The Water (a massive flop) and that he planned to break out of his “twist” and “family” pigeon-holes with an R rated movie. On top of that, very little about the movie was known in advance, other than it would be some kind of sci-fi disaster movie. All looked good… then the reviews came in.

I don’t like to be spoiled on movies, but let’s say that I went into this with very low expectations. What I found was a movie that’s not only utterly ridiculous, but is closer in quality to an Ed Wood movie than something made by modern professionals. In almost every scene, I was thinking “people got *paid* for this? people who so this for a living?”.

The film start with a sequence that shows both what it could have been and highlights many of the problems. We open on Central Park, and two girls sit down on a bench and talk to one another. One of the girls notices something strange about the wind and then the people around them, while her friend starts to talk strangely. Distracted, the friend reaches for a clip in her hair and proceeds to ram it into her throat.

It sounds effective, and could have been an extremely disturbing opening that promises a rollercoaster of a movie. However, the scene is very badly shot and edited. The acting is atrocious, so much so that I had to rewind it after I realised that one of the girls was actually meant to be deteriorating and becoming more confused – I couldn’t tell the difference!

The problems continue. Mark Wahlberg, our “hero”, is a biology teacher who is introduced rambling on about “acts of nature” and how scientists never know the truth about certain things (a blatant attempt to shoehorn in some Creationist propaganda – not a good thing in my book)! his performance is extremely wooden, especially if you compare him to his role in, say, The Departed. Zooey Deschanel shows up as his girlfriend, and is honestly one of the most annoying characters I’ve ever seen in a mainstream movie. She also gives an atrocious performance, acting almost comatose at points and never giving a realistic human reaction to anything. Even John Leguizamo acts subdued.

On top of all this, the plot is utterly ridiculous. Basically, all the plants in the north-eastern USA (and, yes, just that part of the country) start giving off a toxin that causes people to deteriorate mentally and then kill themselves. This does lead to some admittedly very effective kill sequences that belong in a better movie. However, in this movie, all it leads to is characters running away from the wind with no clear idea of where they’re going. The movie stops as suddenly as it started, with no explanation or reasoning other than “scientists know nothing” and ” let’s be nice to plants”.

Hopefully Shyamalan’s next film – The Last Airbender, based on someone else’s adapted script – will be better than this.

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