I don’t have a Worst Ten Movie list because, unlike professional critics, I don’t have to see every movie. I did see over 190 first-run movies this year, but I try REALLY, REALLY HARD to avoid the bad movies. So my worst movie going experience is usually either 1) on an airline flight when I see a movie that I normally wouldn’t; 2) a hyped art film that disastrously falls on its face and/or really pisses me off (The White Ribbon); or 3) something I find on cable TV while channel surfing (Paul Blart: Mall Cop). But usually, the culprit finds its way aboard a long airline flight. Not this year.
In the purely disappointing category, I was underwhelmed by the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, Pedro Almodovar’s I’m So Excited and The World’s End with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. I was expecting much more from those filmmakers.
Of course, Only God Forgives (from the director and star of Drive, which I really liked) was a red-hot mess – but I had caught wind of the buzz before I saw it, so I really wasn’t surprised. Same with The Great Gatsby, which I could tell was a stinker from the trailer. And I did walk out of the French film Rich Is the Wolf; it’s about a wife who watches hours of video of her husband to figure how and why he went missing – but after 40 minutes, I realized that I didn’t care what happened to him or whether she would find out.
Notwithstanding all of the above, the clearly worst film that I saw in 2013 – and I’m talking epically, horrifically terrible – was Calvin Lee Reeder’s The Rambler. It’s a disjointed collection of shock pieces that turns from a tribute to David Lynch to an homage to Rob Zombie (if David Lynch and Rob Zombie were bad filmmakers). In the low (I must say LOWEST) point, the Dermot Mulroney character dreams that he is strapped to a bed when a dummy dressed like an old hag plunges through the window above his head and vomits what looks like yellow paint on to his face and into his mouth. It is an extended vomit scene – 58 seconds (I timed it).
Finally, I re-watched the 1980 epic Heaven’s Gate, which had been the subject of much critical re-assessment this year – and it’s still epically bad.