I watch a lot of horror. There are three horror films/franchises that had been very much hyped to me, but all decidedly blew goats.
1) Insidious - The first of these movies was dumb. All subsequent films were also dumb.
2) The Conjuring - This movie was also very, very dumb.
3) It Follows - I was dumber for having watched film.
It Follows holds a special place in my heart for its awfulness. I had seen it very favorably reviewed at either Toronto or Sundance almost a full year before its release. I think I learned about it, Goodnight, Mommy and The Witch all around the same time, and was very excited for them to be released.
Of those, one was decent but predictable, one was arguably one of the greatest horror films I've ever seen, and the third culminated in some dumb children trying to trick a ghost into chasing one of them into a pool...so they can electrocute it to death by pushing in toasters. This fails when rather the ghost instead begins to throw the toasters at the children. This was the high point of the film.
I don't care if I just spoiled the movie for you. It is horrible and you have the most salient thing to know about the film is in the title. People in cake makeup follow a bunch of twits. The end.
It was like if Diablo Cody decided to make a horror movie and it sucked as much as everything else she does. I hate It Follows. I hate the random, pointless and utterly pretentious addition of an Eliot poem at random points in the film. I hate it and I will think less of you if you enjoyed it. That is all.
My problem is that I have trouble watching movies I think suck. For example, I tried watching "
Vacation" (the last year remake) last night on HBO because it just came out, and I thought what the hell. Even though I found myself laughing at bits here and there (sometimes just because it was so outrageously ridiculous), I had to turn it off after 35 minutes because I just didn't give a shit about it anymore. It was just really BAD. Really, poor Christina Applegate; she's better than this movie (which is something, considering she first found infamy as Kelly on "Married with Children".)
So I usually have a decent idea what I'll be watching and avoid the obvious trash, and I've started to more take Ebert's comment to heart (or was it Siskel? Don't remember) about how watching a terrible movie is throwing away two hours of your life needlessly and it's not worth it to lose that time when you could be doing something else.
Jupiter Ascending really sucked too, considering what it might have been if they hadn't cast Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum and actually had a decent script, and... well, redone the entire movie from scratch. Sometimes I can watch not-so-great movies (like Underworld Evolution) because there's something I still like about it despite it being a dumb movie; Jupiter Ascending had some great visual production values and three royal family folks, but I found much of it just unbearable.
Here, I just looked at my reviewed list. At the bottom:
47 Ronin: Keanu Reeves' dog of a movie. God this sucked.
The Host: Niccol can be a good director, in general... wtf happened here? I even liked the BOOK, for what it was, and the movie/script was just phoned in. I felt bad for Ronan; again, a good actress stuck in a shit movie.
Terminator 3: No. Just, no. It was like someone who had no clue about the Terminator mythos watching the earlier two movies and trying to replicate them ... badly. The only thing worth seeing is the last minute of the movie, because of the twist, and it's not worth watching the rest of the movie.
Fantastic Four (2015): Sigh. I wavered on this one (was it just MARGINALLY palatable?), and now I hate it again. I think the first hour was potentially interesting, and then it was like they had to make release and tossed all the remaining footage into a bag, shook it up, then glued it together. And the footage wasn't even good, and is missing parts of the plot.
Dream House: One of the first movies I remember that totally gave away the twist halfway through the trailer. (Terminator Genysis was another, in Trailer 3.)
These were movies I watched with hopes of them being better than projected. Nope.
There are other movies I was just disappointed in. Like "
Across the Universe" for example -- I was hoping it would actually have an interesting story, like Moulin Rouge... nope, it was really just a montage of someone's idea of Beatles covers/videos, and I didn't care at all about any of the characters. Never finished it, I only made it an hour in. The videos were actually quite gorgeous, and some of the covers were pretty cool too... but... it's not a movie.
Also, probably some wont' agree with me... I didn't like
Vanilla Sky. It didn't help I watched the original the night before. Vanilla Sky had a higher budget and a cooler soundtrack, but I felt it was very shallow and disjointed, and I felt no sympathy for Cruise's character. The components didn't really add up to something meaningful. Crowe's a good director, but his style wasn't necessarily good here. it all felt very superficial and pre-chewed.