Brian Tallerico

It’s a flat-out disaster, the kind of film that its cast and crew hope gets buried as quickly as possible as they race to move on to other projects.

Wayans has always been an underrated physical comedian, and the movie works best when he’s allowed to unleash that side of his persona, but that’s too rare and not enough to rescue the rest of this comedy ceremony.

Ultimately, no one could save the script by John Whittington, who relied so completely on his concept that he failed to write jokes or characters.

Believe it or not, Action Point in 2018 feels too safe. There’s way too much plot and even the stunts that gave Knoxville concussions feel routine. It’s not unlike seeing a once-great athlete attempt a comeback. There are flashes of what once worked, but it’s also a little sad.

Whether you're new to Inside or a fan of the original, the change that Vivas and his team do make to the ending will leave you scratching your head.

It’s a wildly inconsistent film, sometimes disappointingly clunky and as superficial as the world it’s mocking, but it’s also an ambitious piece of work with unforgettable imagery and an ace ensemble.

This movie is atrocious, never making a lick of sense, wearing its “message” on its sleeve like a bad term paper, and then ending in a way that should make you angry more than eager to see if it makes any sense.

Sadly, Jones’ passion has not made it to the screen in a way that’s likely to make viewers feel the same excitement he had about the project so many years ago.

It's a PG-rated movie about a goofy genie and a dad who learns a life lesson, so the bar may be low for families looking for a bit of Hallmark-esque escapism this holiday season. But that doesn’t mean one can’t wish this was better.

The movie has an undeniable black hole at its center in the fact that it barely mentions Axl Rose, and includes no original Guns N' Roses recordings.

Genuinely inept in every way, “Scream 7” is far and away the worst of the franchise, a shallow rendering of things that worked better in other films.

The narrative outline of Self/less is a philosophical theme park, readymade for daring, complex filmmaking. And Singh and his writers never go on any of the rides.

There are moments of tenderness and honest human emotion buried in the frustrating A Long Way Down but one has to work far too hard and give far too much credit to the over-qualified cast to grab at them.

This isn’t just a mediocre movie — although it is most definitely that — it is a wasted opportunity to fulfill the promise of that opening line from 35 years ago.

By and large, "Dear Santa" feels as if someone took a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book and added some truly weird Satanic mythology.

The Possession of Michael King becomes one of the most plodding, dull exercises in horror in a very long time. The most horrific moment for this viewer came when I checked the time on my screener to realize it was only about half over.

It’s a startling misfire, a movie that fundamentally fails at almost everything it’s trying to do. Leatherface deserves better.

When does a bad, cheap horror movie becomes something more offensively horrible? When it pegs its generic nonsense on real-life tragedy and becomes exploitation. Ben Ketai’s Beneath, not to be confused with the Larry Fessenden film of the same name from last year, is the kind of mediocrity one finds on The Movie Channel on a Saturday night and pretty easily dismisses.

Addicted to Fresno is such a mean-spirited, dull and silly movie that it buries its talented cast under the weight of a horrendous script that they can’t possibly redeem.

Nothing about this inert, dull project feels like a movie. It’s a half-idea, half-heartedly filmed. Yes, it’s a kids’ movie, but kids are smarter in 2020 about their action entertainment and putting this alongside all the Marvel movies on Disney Plus feels almost mean.

This is a story that still resonates in the way we deal with war, torture, and detainment camps. It demands depth.

It’s almost a shame that the film overall isn’t better and that David Spade doesn’t give half the effort of his co-star because Lapkus is just good enough to allow one to see how this movie could have worked.

Much like “Self/Less,” Amnesiac feels like a director-for-hire gig for an artist too talented for the job.

The Scribbler never clicks into the escapist mind f**k it really needed to be to work. It can't maintain its style and never finds its substance.

A film that goes through the motions with such apathetic predictability and pure cinematic laziness that you may want to set whatever device you’re watching it on ablaze.

It’s not as abrasively awful as the worst of Netflix/Madison projects (“The Ridiculous Six” still holds the standard), it’s just forgettable. It’s akin to a mediocre sitcom you might catch on network TV on a Monday night. You won't hate the experience of watching it, but you’ll forget you saw it before it’s even over.

A few sequences of classic T&J comedy aren’t nearly enough to make up for the dull plotting and flat characters in this soulless product, one that will fail equally for adults who grew up on Tom and Jerry, and their kids who have never heard of these characters.

It will work best for those lamenting the cancellation of the Comedy Central hit that spawned it, but probably not much for anyone else.

That’s all you’ll get in Death of Me, a movie that takes a fresh idea and decides that the best way to present it is through tropes and clichés from better films.

Only the commitment from the always-solid Michael Ealy saves it from being one of the worst movies of the year, although just barely.

A cheapo “Seven” knock-off that one would be tempted to suggest is beneath the talents of everyone involved, but they knew what they were getting into when they read it.

While this kind of manipulative melodrama is often easy to dismiss, what makes The Starling even more frustrating is the amount of talented people who got sucked into its spin cycle of sadness.

Only the really strong cast, including great chemistry between the leads, keeps Playing It Cool from totally derailing.

Sporadically, one can see the movie that Slender Man could have been, but it disappears like the title character’s victims.

To be fair, the slow burn does eventually catch fire and there’s lots of screaming and heavy breathing and dark tunnels and running and what-not. The relatively tense final half-hour is clearly the reason that very smart producer Jason Blum thought this would be a solid follow-up to “Paranormal Activity.” It’s that first hour that is the reason it took six years to (barely) get released.

The first act of Cabin Fever: Patient Zero is so defiantly stupid that I imagine most who rent it or struggle through it in a theater won’t care that there’s actually some material in the final act that clicks, mostly due to some incredibly strong makeup work.

Despite a premise rife with potential dark humor, there’s too little edge in Let’s Be Cops. Director/co-writer Luke Greenfield chose wacky over witty and the result is a film with no sense of danger, no reason to care and not enough laughs to make the sitcomish handling of a strong premise forgivable.

It’s a film with alternating shots of Katie Holmes looking scared and the doll looking creepy. Rinse and repeat. And it becomes so tediously boring that your mind will wander.

Great hero stories leave the viewer feeling inspired by the potential within the human condition. This one will just leave you depressed.

Feels like it probably began life as a one-act play, set almost entirely in Lucy’s living room and with a small cast of characters. It has that feeling of a piece that needed a bit more workshopping to discern its purpose and, like a lot of independent cinema that feels like it has theatrical origins, never becomes convincingly cinematic.

A gaudy, overstuffed piece of blockbuster trash.

Hitman: Agent 47 is aggressively awful, the kind of film that rubs its lackadaisical screenwriting, dull filmmaking and boring characters in your face, almost daring you to ask the theater operator for your money back.

An incoherent blob.

If it sounds like a fun idea for a ‘90s-style slasher pic, it is, but the execution is something else altogether. For a good HOUR, Thriller is the kind of flat, dull teen drama that even The CW would pass on.

It turns out the creators of this cash grab are aggressively unwilling to go much of anywhere at all.

Man Down is a bad film, but it’s made even worse by the taste it will leave in your mouth regarding its silly handling of a very serious issue.

From the very beginning, this is an incoherent mess.

Nightlight is a perfect example of a film with interesting ideas that are totally smothered by poor execution.

The truth is that even if one sets aside all potential moral arguments about the very existence of "Songbird," it's still just really bad. If you're going to make a movie this exploitative and gross, you really have to make it better to disguise the smell of it all.

Bad movies are common. Shockingly bad movies, ones that are so incompetently conceived and executed as to force one to question how they got made, are less so, despite what Angry Film Twitter might have you believe. Safelight is a jaw-droppingly bad movie, a film that doesn’t have characters or a plot.

Nothing that works about the games has been adapted intact in this ugly, boring, truly inept piece of filmmaking, a movie that was mostly shot years ago and should have been shelved even longer. Like, maybe forever.

Ponderous and dull, “History of Evil” is the kind of script that plays with hot-button ideas instead of having a single thing to say about them.

The most impressive thing about Pierre Morel’s film is how it takes two actors as generally likable as John Cena and Alison Brie and makes them such bland avatars for actual people that they fade into the dull background of action-comedy noise this “movie” tries to achieve.

The characters are bland, the dialogue is atrocious, the action is mediocre, and even the heist is a boring bust.

A dull retread of ideas explored more interestingly in other films and TV shows. Even the always-welcome Stanley Tucci can’t add any flair to a movie that feels so much like a relative of John Krasinski’s 2018 smash hit that one has to wonder if Netflix didn’t try to convince the producers to rename it “A Quiet Paradox.”

I thought of one of Roger Ebert’s most famous quotes while watching Cold Blood: “No good film is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” I think he’d understand what I mean when I say that Cold Blood feels like the longest movie of the year.

There may one day be a great movie made about John Gotti. This one ain’t it.

Pretend it’s not a “true story” and it’s still a shallow representation of sports, parenthood, and comedy, with almost no laughs.

On paper, it feels like a can’t-miss, especially when one considers how much it plays with themes that Van Sant has often - brilliantly explored before. Movies don’t exist on paper. And this one’s a mess.

Great actors wander in and out of a scene, some of them get shot, some just disappear, and the move trudges onward. At least it pauses briefly to address Vince Vaughn’s ridiculous haircut.

Pay the Ghost, out in very limited release today, is a new low for Nicolas Cage. Just when you thought he couldn’t get any more apathetic about a role, he pops up in this lazy, boring retread of “Insidious” that even his most diehard fans should ignore.

The Cobbler is almost fascinatingly awful enough to recommend. If one subscribes to the theory that you can learn as much from a bad movie as from a good one, this one’s a master class in what not to do.

Almost every female character is there to be screwed or to screw the guys over. Or both. This is how Sandler’s brand has always portrayed their female characters, but it’s just increasingly depressing.

It doesn’t help that the plotting and tone of “Duchess” are so exaggeratedly stupid that the whole thing plays almost like a parody of Ritchie instead of an homage, one that goes on for what feels like forever – it’s overlong at nearly two hours, and I swear to you it feels twice as long.

When did these very funny and undeniably talented TV actors know that Search Party was a disaster?

Once you get past the horrifically casual racist stereotypes, non-existent character depth, incoherent plotting, clichéd dialogue, and baffling editing, what’s perhaps most insulting is how numbingly boring the whole affair ended up. If you’re going to make a movie this lazily, at least try to make it fun!

No one expects The Babysitter: Killer Queen to be anything other than your basic escapist entertainment, but it fails even at this modest goal. It's a defiantly stupid movie, with references so bizarrely dated that it verges on fascinating.

There are so many themes that could be unpacked through the details of the true story of The Watcher, but Murphy and his team don’t trust the facts, adding more and more ridiculous twists with every episode, until the whole thing collapses under any suspension of disbelief.

Luke Greenfield’s atrocious Playdate is a remarkably stupid movie that thinks you’re remarkably stupid too.

Truly dreadful...Replicas is completely ludicrous on a dozen or so levels, but it depressingly avoids the camp or style needed to make an implausible story work as pure entertainment. We’ll go with your goofy story, filmmakers, if you give us a cinematic reason to do so. Replicas never does. Not even remotely.

The third chapter is better than the middle one by virtue of having at least a few new ideas and one less CGI wild boar, but it’s still a shapeless mess, a movie that might have worked as the final act of one film.

Fred Durst’s The Fanatic hates fans. It hates actors. It hates tourists, shop owners, and servants. It really, really hates autistic people. And it hates you. It’s a movie that thinks you’re an idiot, someone who won’t see through its shallow provocations, illogical behavior, and vile misanthropy.

The film has no flow, no rhythm, and absolutely no reason to be 119 minutes. And then there’s the broad racism and misogyny of the piece.

Some will dismiss it by saying it’s so ineffective as to never really aggravate critical faculties, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a complete waste of time and talent as well.

Sure, I was never bored, but this movie makes zero sense, and contains some shockingly bad filmmaking, acting, writing ... pretty much everything. It is remarkably grisly and violent, containing a body count that tops the double digits, and almost all of the victims of its quality kills see their insides before they die.

The only crime here is cinematic. It’s not often one sees a film as vile, ugly, and deeply incompetent as Olivier Megaton’s The Last Days of American Crime.

A well-intentioned disaster, only slightly redeemed by a committed performance by Sean Bean, whose talent proves nowhere near enough to make this manipulative tripe more digestible.

Worst of all, nothing in The Final Project has any personality.

To say that Future World borrows liberally from George Miller’s milieu would be an understatement.

Give me a silly movie that knows it’s dumb on a hot summer day every year. This isn’t that. It’s so much dumber than it thinks it is.

There are bad movies, there are really bad movies, and then there’s “Lumina,” a film so breathtaking in its overall incompetence that one starts to wonder if it’s not intentionally so in the hope of being the next “The Room” or “Birdemic.”

Joe Dirt 2 is wildly inconsistent, often feeling like it was slapped together quickly before someone changed their mind and put a stop payment on the financing check.

It’s an alternately quirky and intense flick that never quite lives up to its potential, but contains a twist or two you’re unlikely to see coming, and could appeal to viewers who miss the days of unpretentious B-movie glory that Orion once symbolized.

The film looks like a rushed production that a few friends got together and made over a weekend. Performances range from tolerable to horrendous, and the script needed at least another rewrite to figure out what it was trying to say, and, preferably, buff out a ridiculous twist ending that would make M. Night Shyamalan go “nah.”

The end of Eli subverts the majority of Eli, making it kind of like a cheap game. It’s not as damaging as the ridiculous final scene of “Fractured,” but I was left with a similar bad taste in my mouth.

When Day of the Dead: Bloodline, a promised retelling of one of Romero’s classic “Dead” films came across my radar, I thought, “That might be a fun way to start the new year.” It’s not.

Malevolent is far from perfect — it kind of sabotages a solid first hour with a clunky, tone-changing climax more likely to leave you queasy than scared — but it’s still better than A) a lot of theatrically-released horror films and B) a lot of Netflix original films.

It’s a film filled with half-hearted ideas and thin characters, all in the service of a story that wallows in its trauma in a manner that gives it little purpose.

The Empty Man draws comparisons to junky studio fare like “The Bye Bye Man” and “Slender Man” but this is a far more ambitious and accomplished piece of work than its reputation.

It’s easy to see why even Blum wanted to forget The Gallows: Act II. It may be his company’s worst film.

Kenny Sailors may have invented the jump shot, but the film about him pays him a great honor by being about so much more.

It has a reasonably strong lead performance for micro-budget horror, but writer/director Jeffrey Reddick can’t come through with the thrills, resorting to cheap jump scares to hide shoddy editing, low-grade cinematography, and the kind of clunky storytelling that’s more reminiscent of a Creepypasta tale than a feature film.

William Brent Bell’s Separation is an atrocious piece of work, a movie that fails as both a domestic drama and as a horror flick, and really feels like the kind of thing that everyone involved is going to have to discuss in therapy someday to get to the bottom of why it was even made in the first place.

Ultimately, For Madmen Only is essential for comedy fans and historians. It’s something that anyone interested in theater as a career or even anyone who does improv comedy on the weekends should check out on VOD.

An improvised thriller should feel dangerous and unpredictable, putting viewers in the shoes of a man operating on instinct, but My Son often feels the exact opposite, a thriller that’s as routine as they come.

It’s a powerful piece of work that details how communities on the edge of lawlessness and poverty were overwhelmed by drugs in the ‘80s and ‘90s, leading to cycles of addiction and violence that can become impossible to escape. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s a moving one.

I wish it was a little more ambitious and had some more meat on its bones regarding internet culture and shared spaces, but it’s undeniably entertaining, which is more than I can say about some of the times I’ve rented homes myself.

Outpost only succeeds if we are invested in Kate’s trajectory and ultimate fate, and I never was.

I'll admit to caring less and less about the plot of The Big 4, which makes its 141-minute runtime a bit much. But all is forgiven when it finally takes off, which it does with enough rhythm to get you from the intense prologue to the insane final half-hour, during which Tjahjanto pulls out all the stops.

There are some disappointing choices in the film's directing, but Castillo's performance should make a lot of those easy to overlook for anyone who stumbles upon this one in their streaming algorithm.

Eklund wastes little time getting to “the good stuff” as the film’s slasher works his way through the employees at the camp and the people who have come there to learn about the power of positive thinking.

Sometimes, the work of an artist being unpacked by that artist’s relative can lead to bland hagiography, but Nicky’s daughter Sara uses her personal angle to an advantage, never hiding her love and admiration, making it easier for us to feel the same.

Like the title that goes on a bit longer than it needs to, the filmmakers here have a habit of underlining and emphasizing elements of their story that would have been more powerful without a more subtle approach. But this is still a remarkably moving piece of work, a documentary that understands that a diner can’t save your life, but that doesn’t make it any less essential to it.

Bad River gains a cumulative power in the way it consistently counters these tragedies with moving interviews with the proud, vibrant people who have refused to leave, illustrating the courage of resistance that takes place across generations. If it's sometimes like a movie that’s trying to tell a few too many stories at once, it’s hard to blame it. There are so many stories that need to be heard.

There is absolutely zero tension in “You Can’t Run Forever.” It all feels like a lark, a project that would completely dissolve if not for the Oscar winner at its center.

Chime is yet another reminder that Kurosawa is one of the world’s masters when it comes to unpacking the remarkably fragile line between good and evil.

Vigilante justice has taken a new form in an era of internet mobs, but Ryoo hasn’t made a simple cautionary tale about online justice—he’s crafted a film that’s wildly entertaining but also has a great deal on its mind about how far we should be willing to go to balance the scales. Is there such a thing as good murder?

This film is still catnip for horror fans and may even give those who don’t love “TCM” yet further appreciation of one of the most influential films ever made, of any genre.

Cognetti’s skill with found footage does him no favors here, as this flick is laden with awful dialogue, worse performances, dumb plotting, and a truly inane ending. Set your horror GPS to a different location.

Coming in under 90 minutes and with little narrative fat, “Zero” is a worthy successor to “Saloum,” a reminder of a rising talent on the international action scene who blends his knowledge of his homeland with a deep appreciation of the history of action filmmaking.

Despite some solid low-budget make-up work and decent central performances, “Monster Island” doesn’t have enough meat on its bones, somehow feeling narratively inert even at just 83 minutes.

The Occupant is a strangely frustrating movie. It stays engaging through the sheer force of a committed performance that anchors every single scene of the film, but it’s also so hard to get your arms around narratively (or even thematically) that it pushes you away.

Ultimately, it feels like Cognetti has lost sight of what people loved about the first movie.

Take an ordinary family in the Hollywood Hills and throw both a wildfire and a menacing pack of killing machines at them and you have “Coyotes,” a movie that frustrates more than it thrills, never quite finding the right tone for the most harrowing night in the lives of its characters.

It’s a messy movie that produces frustration instead of fear, and its nods to commentary on gender roles and the need to become and stay beautiful feel shallow and insincere.

It feels both remarkably simple and complex at the same time, a vision on which we can place our own interpretations of what it all means instead of being force-fed superficial messages.

Admittedly, “Noah Kahan: Out of Body” will play better to fans of the subject’s music, but it works as well as it does because it refuses to just be fan service, choosing instead to really capture the complexity of how fame doesn’t alleviate things like anxiety, sometimes even feeding that internal beast.