I generally don't bother watching a lot of the "worst" movies of the year. That being said, sometimes movies that I really do hate slip through the cracks, which is bound to happen when you watch around 100 movies from each year. So instead of doing a traditional countdown of the worst movies of the year, I do what I call the top "ugh" movies of the year. Basically, that means the movies I found the most disappointing, overrated, over-hyped, or bad. It's an all-encompassing thing that's (almost) purely subjective, so there's (almost) no objectivity to it.
I don't remember doing one of these lists for the past year or two, but hopefully I'll be able to go back in time and fix that, but until then here are my top UGH movies of 2022!
10. Don't Worry Darling
Directed by Olivia Wilde
It's hard to talk about this movie at all without mentioning all the crap that went on around it, all the drama, and the fact that the behind the scenes story is 1000% more interesting than the movie itself, you've got a serious problem. Because when you're able to separate the movie itself from all the ridiculous controversies surrounding it, what you're ultimately left with is one of the most bland, obvious, and derivative sci/fi stories to come out since the pandemic -- maybe even longer.
9. The Outfit
Directed by Graham Moore
Almost instantly, I was totally into this movie. I loved the music, the setting, the costuming, the cramped quarters, the acting, the dialogue, you name it. But once that third act started to creep in, I began to realize there was something horribly wrong with this script. And as every minute passed, it got worse and worse, and the twists got dumber and dumber, to the point where in the final 5 minutes of the movie I was almost laughing at how much this movie fell off a cliff. For an hour, I was totally captivated, and then the rug was pulled out from under me and I felt betrayed.
8. Three Thousand Years Of Longing
Directed by George Miller
Following the awesome Mad Max movie from 2015, I was pretty hopeful for the next project of Miller's. When it was announced he would be making a movie about djinn featuring Tilda Swinton (one of the greatest actresses of her generation) and Idris Elba (one of the coolest actors of his generation), I was very much excited. But sadly his reach exceeded his grasp here, and where Mad Max had amazing special effects and never had a dull moment, the literal opposite could be said of this one. I was bored and unengaged pretty much the entire way through, and the visuals were legitimately awful.
7. Vengeance
Directed by B.J. Novak
In the past year or so I've found myself getting really into classic film noir, so seeing a new one coming out getting pretty positive reviews had me really excited. But I didn't take into account the Novak factor. The smugness of this movie on every level was borderline insufferable, the acting wasn't natural at all, the dialogue is stiff and over-written...I just didn't like it, and as time has passed I've only come to like it less and less.
6. Wendell & Wild
Directed by Henry Selick
I'm a huge fan of stop-motion animation, and Henry Selick is one of the kings of feature length stop motion, so I naturally was really excited to hear he had a new one coming out. But there was something very unfinished and annoying about this movie that I just had trouble connecting with. The animation is beautiful, but the writing, characters, motivation, etc. are all severely lacking. It felt like they were far more concerned with ticking diversity boxes within the characters than in actually giving them strong character moments or arcs. I really disliked the characters, and the ones I didn't dislike I just didn't feel like I knew, and that is a huge problem. It was just a huge letdown for me, especially after such a long wait since Coraline.
5. White Noise
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Noah Baumbach has always felt like a sort of bargain bin version of Wes Anderson to me, and while he has made some pretty great movies, I think this one really helped me to solidify that thought. It's trying to be funny and quirky in that same sort of way, but it fails. It's trying to tell an ever-shifting narrative, but it fails. The acting is awkward but not in a fun way, and I mostly just found myself irritated during it. I actually spent most of the second half of the movie stuffing a bean bag chair with shredded memory foam, and trying to clean up that disaster was less obnoxious to me than the movie was. I'm glad other people can enjoy this, but it's just not for me.
4. Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness
Directed by Sam Raimi
It feels a bit like I can't escape crappy Marvel movies. Not even a global pandemic that shut down the entire world was enough to prevent Disney from churning out more smarmy, blurry, CGI nonsense. And now we don't just have 35 movies we need to see before watching the next movie, we also have to apparently watch a bunch of shows to understand what the hell is going on with this crap. I've had enough of it, this movie is annoying, it's too much, it sucks, and I hate having to do 60 hours of homework to get what's going on with the plot of a 2-hour movie. I didn't have fun watching it, Elisabeth Olsen was TERRIBLE, and I lost interest very very quickly. I'll stick around for Spider-Man and Guardians Of The Galaxy, but I'm done with the rest of this diarrhea.
3. Elvis
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Hey, know what I don't really care about? 160-minute movies that have the attention span of TikTok videos. Baz Luhrmann is a garbage fire of a director, who seems to exist only to cause pain to people who like watching movies that don't cause epilepsy in those unfortunate enough to see them. Elvis is a person who has been covered before, there are billions of hours of footage about him and his story, so this isn't a movie that really was telling us anything new or interesting, so all it has to offer is the spectacle. And while I definitely felt like I was watching something, all I could really see was how poorly constructed the movie is. The editing and makeup are horrific, and Tom Hanks gave a very deserving Razzie-winning performance. Austin Butler was pretty solid, but I felt like I barely got to see his performance thanks to the manic presentation of the story. It was just an annoying thing to sit through, and it was way way too long.
2. The Munsters
Directed by Rob Zombie
When I first saw this movie announced I knew it would be different, likely awful, but something I didn't think I'd bother watching unless it was well-received. Then the trailer came out and I knew I had to watch it, because there is no way such a half-baked, ugly looking, stupid, cheap, and awful could really come out based on such a notable IP. Turns out it was even worse than I thought, because I assumed it would be accidentally amusing, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Everything about this movie is bad, on an objective filmmaking level, and a subjective "dear God, why is this happening to me" level. This is a terribly unfunny movie with zero redeeming qualities. It was painfully stretched, the acting (particularly from the talentless Sheri Moon Zombie) was horrible, the set design, cinematography, and lighting made me want to puke...I just couldn't stand a minute of it. I assumed there was no way anything I saw in 2022 could even come close to as bad as this, but roughly a month later I came across this next divisive piece of trash...
1. Blonde
Directed by Andrew Dominik
This is one of the most appallingly misguided, ugly, uncomfortable, inaccurate, offensive, and every other bad word you could think of to describe a movie movies as movies could possibly be. That sentence is probably horrible grammatically, but in a way I feel like that's an accurate representation of the movie itself; it went on for far too long, was filled with redundancies, loads of ugliness, and in the end probably left you puzzled and frustrated by the end of it. This is a serious contender for my least favorite movie I've ever seen. Everything about it made me angry to watch, and when you throw in the fact that it's about 3 hours long, the entire experience of sitting through this disgusting heap of vomit made me furious and sickened. This movie is so excessive and gratuitous, I got tired of nudity by the end of it. Other better writers than me have gone into great detail about how genuinely terrible this movie is, and the idea of reliving this experience any further by into those details myself has made me really infuriated, so I'm going to leave it at that. This might be the worst piece of trash I've ever sat through, and believe me when I say I've seen some horrible crap. I'm done with this one, I don't ever want to see it again, and I hope Andrew Dominik never has the opportunity to make another big budget movie again, that's how much I hate it.
Thanks for reading.
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