Year in Review: Adams Top Ten Worst Films of 2014

                                    Worst 2014 Movies!!!

A year of stink.

   The year is finally over and new one is starting.  2014 we will miss you.  The year provided some great films but also a lot of really hard to watch stinkfest caught on film.  So before I write my Top 10 best I wanted to write about the crap we tried to forget we watched.  As I look back on what I watched this year I realized I saw a lot more bad films then I could even remember.  Now my top ten list might have stuff in it that I rated higher then I should have.

  So lets get this over with.

Top Five Good Actors in Bad Movies:

1. Bryan Cranston (Godzilla)

2. Shailene Woodley (Divergent)

3. Paul Bettany (Transcendence)

4. Elizabeth Banks (Walk of Shame)

5. TIE Mark Duplass (Tammy) and Paul Giamatti (Amazing Spider-man 2)

Dis-Honorable Mentions:
Draft Day, Filth, Walk of Shame, Divergent, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, See No Evil 2, A Million Ways to Die in the West, That Awkward Moment, Noah, Tusk, Godzilla and Deliver us from Evil

10. Blended

Another pairing of Adam Sandler and Drew Berrymore.  This movie doesn't even come close to the magic they shared in the The Wedding Singer or even 50 First Dates.  If it wasn't clear watching this movie Adam Sandler has lost the gift to make us laugh like the good ole Happy Madison days of old.  Hey, but he got some of his friends in this movie, so they could work this year.  I totally felt like the picture above, not that I had high hopes to begin with.

9. Rage

So, I got to watch this gem streaming on Netflix.  As I clicked on the watch button, my only thought was it cant be any worse then The Wicker Man.  So I gave this movie a shot, I really did.  Then I hit the twenty minute mark and I lost hope.  Nic Cage goes around playing Nic Cage playing Nic Cage.  The only reason its not higher is that his overacting freak outs are funny.  Might of laughed more at his freak outs then I did a comedy further up on this list.

8. The Amazing Spider-man 2

When they first announced that they were rebooting the Spider-man franchise, I was one of the few hopeful fans.  The first Amazing Spider-man movie was good, so I became hopeful for a second one.  Ill admit as well this made my Top 10 anticipated movies of 2014 list.  This movie has a lot going for it.  It has an all star cast (Jamie Foxx, Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Paul Giamatti, Dane DeHaan, Felicity Jones, and Sally Field) a new villain, and its not Spider-man 3 (or is it).  The movie is just to long and boring.  

7. The Legend of Hercules

We were given two Hercules movies this year, and only one was enjoyable.  To tell the story of Hercules you need two things, a way better actor then Kellan Lutz and you must be larger than life.  This movie had neither.  I had no idea who this actor was until my wife told me he was in the Twilight movies.  He is so forgettable in this role,  The Dwayne Johnson movie is the far better film.  There were some really laughable scenes, horrible acting as well as c.g.i     

6. Transformers 4: Age of Extinction

Now here is a movie I wanted to be good.  I'm a Mark Wahlberg fan.  But as I was sitting through this movie, which was way to long, I was bored and tired.  I felt like I've already seen this before.  They also hyped up the Dino-bots so much too.  Spoiler alert, they were only in the movie like the last ten minutes or so.  The movie is 2 hrs and 45 minutes of unnecessary explosions, bad dialogue, and characters you just don't care about.  Best part of the movie, other than Stanley Tucci, the credits.

5. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

Is it just me, or is the found footage film getting old.  I enjoyed it in the Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Chronicle, and the original Paranormal Activity.  But here we are on the fifth one in this series, and there was a reason it wasn't released near Halloween.  It has no scares and nothing really to offer the series or cinema either.  Nothing new or original.  Congrats Paranormal Activity, you are the new SAW series.

4. Transcendence

Another movie I was hopeful for that let me down.  I was really wanting to see what first time director Wally Pfister could do behind the camera.  He however bit off a little more than he could chew.  This A.I. film could of been really good but it was totally unbelievable, that I could only laugh and shake my head.  The acting wasn't even good but sub par at best.  I believe it could be that the actors either didn't understand what was happening in the movie or they didn't believe that they agreed to this movie.  How could a computer regenerate plants??? Scratches head....

3. Tammy

How many times have I said that I feel bad for the actors involved in these movies?  Well heres another crap-fest.  It made me want to put a bag over my head too.  Lets just say that the marketing campaign for this movie sucks.  They put the one maybe funny scene in the trailer, so when they finally show that scene, you don't even laugh.  I was literally like why is she doing that.  It makes no sense.  Melissa McCarthy, I'm sorry but I'm tired of your same old stick.  Your trying to be funny and its not working anymore.  I couldnt believe they got Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Mark Duplass, Toni Collette, and Sandra Oh in this crap.  Least funny comedy this year, hands down.

2. Oculus

Another movie that could of been good.  Only problem is that dumb.  They never explained why or even how this so called evil mirror was doing what it was doing.  It has an interesting concept, that I just couldn't get around.  Maybe I just didn't understand what this movie wanted me to believe or not to.  The only reason that this isn't number one is that there is one really cool scene with a light bulb and that their was a worse film then this. 

1. Leprechaun: Origins

 With a name like that, it was a pretty easy choice for the number one spot.  This movie was made by WWE studios.  The only reason I even watched it was that they had a wrestler in that I thought we would be cool to see in the movie.  I was wrong.  The leprechaun looked horrible, and it had none of what made the original film a cult favorite.  Filled with trying to scare instead of actually doing anything else.  The characters were stupid and generic horror film cliques.  Okay, I know it was a straight to video movie but still its my worst!  Im glad its over!!!  I also want to apologize to my wife for making her sit through this crap!


Wow, that was incredibly painful!  Im glad I got it out the way so I could be uplifted to write the best of 2014 very soon.  I plan on having that out by mid-January.  Got a couple movies I need to see first (Foxcatcher, Selma).

    Heres hoping 2015 will be a good year at the movie!!!  Thank you reading and check out our other articles at almostsideways.com

Adam Daly

Oculus (2014) Review

Directed by 

Mike Flanagan

            Demonic possessions take many forms in the movies.  From Chucky dolls (Child’s Play) to videotapes (The Ring) to cars (Christine), cinematic demons show little discrimination for what material form they choose to manifest themselves through. 

            In Mike Flanagan’s Oculus, the object providing a medium for demons to haunt innocent victims is an antique mirror, and this leads to the first major problem with the movie: The fact that a mirror serves as the object of possession proves ultimately rather incidental.  It may as well have been a chandelier or window or toenail clippers or a toilet seat cover.  Demons possessed Chucky in order to communicate with the other characters in the movie, while in The Ring, characters who watched the video died shortly afterwards.   In other words, those demons were purposeful in selecting their channels for interacting with the real world.  In Oculus, it is not as though the characters enter the mirror and are transformed into an altered and distorted state.  That would demand a higher degree of originality and creativity that this movie simply doesn’t have.  No, sorry to say, the mirror is just your typical run-of-the-mill possessed object – you know, the ones that kill people and turn off the lights and cause everyone else around the main characters to call them crazy. 

As for the mirror itself, it looks innocent enough – not unlike one found in a backroom of a secondhand pawn shop.  But somehow unbeknownst to nearly every character in Oculus, it actually carries a long and ominous history of owners who have gone crazy and killed themselves and others (it’s pretty remarkable how comprehensive and detailed this history is, but I’ll try to suspend my disbelief).  As the film opens, we are introduced to a pair of grown siblings who have been separated for a considerable amount of time as a result of being traumatized by the mirror as kids: Kaylie (Karen Gillan), who has devoted much of her young adult life to tracking down the mirror through auction houses, and Tim (Brenton Thwaites), who is just being released from a prolonged stay at a mental institution.  Their deceased parents fell victim to the mirror when Kaylie and Tim were pre-adolescents, and now that they have found the mirror once again, they have vowed to show the world its supernatural sinister power.

 At least that’s what Kaylie wants to do.  Tim’s many years of psychotherapy have convinced him that the tragic events of the past were simply the result of all-too-human malice, and as a result, he spends much of the first half of Oculus functioning as the conscientious skeptic pitted against Kaylie’s firmly committed truth-seeker.  In a strange way, the movie bears resemblance to The Butterfly Effect (which also featured a lead character named Kaylie): The horrible things which transpired in the past are framed through the present-day perspectives of the grown characters.  This leads to an interesting but ultimately pointless strategy by writer-director Flanagan: Instead of structuring the narrative in discrete flashback and present-day units, events of the past and present are shown as fluid, meaning that on occasion pre-teen Tim and grownup Tim share the same space within the frame (it would have been nice to see the two versions of Tim have a conversation with one another like the witty diner scene in Looper, but the movie is too concerned with boo! moments than Kafkaesque self-inquiry). 

I call this strategy pointless because it doesn’t really reveal anything important or identifiable in the ways in which the mirror haunts Kaylie and Tim.  After seeing Oculus, I can definitively state that the most effed-up thing the mirror does to its victims is make them think they are using a particular object for a specific purpose, but in fact it turns out to be a completely different object.  For example, a character thinks that he or she is biting into an apple when – Whoops! – it turns out to be a lightbulb.  But this only happens two or three times.  Nearby plants die, the power goes out and the phone lines go down.  Yada yada yada.  And yes, demons are unleashed through the mirror, but they do little except for scream and run around clumsily.  They’re not too unlike the zombies in Zombieland.

Anyway, the real thrust of Kaylie’s experiment is to prove definitively to Tim and the rest of the world that her father (Rory Cochrane) wasn’t a sadistic psycho who randomly killed his wife (Katee Sackhoff) shortly after moving her and young Kaylie and Tim into a new house.  She wants to show that the mirror was the thing that convinced him to do it.  That’s fine and dandy, except (A) How Kaylie is able to get ahold of the mirror without anyone else knowing the backstory of her relationship to it is completely implausible, (B) She doesn’t seem to realize that messing around with the mirror won’t bring her parents back to life or meaningfully exonerate her father, and (C) The damage has already been done – her parents are dead and her brother’s spent his teenage years institutionalized.  And then there’s the fundamental (and unanswered) question of why as kids Kaylie and Tim were impervious to the powers of the mirror in the first place.  Of course, you’re not supposed to ask these questions of logic during a horror movie like Oculus.  But that doesn’t absolve the movie of a responsibility to uphold the intelligence of its audience, which it fails to do particularly during its final half.  Malevolent things happen for no reason which is of course bad for the characters, but it’s bad for the movie when the audience stops seeking to locate a reasonable explanation and simply chalks it up to “demons are really bad and all-powerful.”

 Oculus has two initial strengths working for it.  One is the mirror itself – a fertile and creatively rich object which could be used in a variety of primordial ways to freak the characters (and audiences) out.  The other is the Moulder-and-Skully-like dynamic between Kaylie and Tim.  But somehow, neither of these strengths ever really materialize.  Worse yet, the movie isn’t even all that scary.  Because we know the supernatural power of the mirror from the onset, witnessing its sensational effects is never really that shocking.  And because the movie emphasizes that the mirror distorts reality, we soon sense the manipulative ways in which the screenplay selectively chooses to merge and divide the real-world from illusion when most convenient.  

Once upon a time, there was a movie called Candyman which also featured a demon using a mirror to channel its evil prowess.  In that movie, Virginia Madsen played a graduate student (getting her degree in folk studies, not horticulture) who is told to look into the mirror and say Candyman’s name five times.  Then, a Lionel Richie-looking demon would become unleashed and put the poor souls at Cabrini-Green out of their misery.  That was a movie which worked not only because it used mirrors better but because it more closely adhered to a proscribed set of rules.  Oculus doesn’t use rules, which makes for bloody chaos.  Instead, a movie should have been made about someone giving the antique mirror as a gag gift to Billy Bob Thornton.  At least then there would have been some legitimate terror. 

Rating: 2 stars