21 Crappy Movies Streaming On Netflix You Should Stay Far, Far Away From
By Nico Lang
There are a lot of great and interesting films on Neftlix that will change your life. They will expand your mind and teach you how to feel things you don’t know how to feel. However, these movies are not those movies.
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1. The Dictator
Do you like incessant rape jokes? How about watching Sacha Baron Cohen slum it while ruining everything you liked about Borat in a painfully unfunny movie that again wastes the lovely Anna Faris? If you want to laugh, just watch The House Bunny instead. It’s a lot better than you remember. Can Anna Faris have a career now?
2. One for the Money
The worst movie Katherine Heigl has ever made in a career filled with bad movies, this movie makes the beach read books they’re based on look like masterpieces. Nothing in this movie (which looks like it was filmed from inside of an anus) is funny, interesting or clever, and it sounds like Heigl learned her Jersey accent from a Bravo show. When it comes to Jersey girls, stick with Marisa Tomei.
3. A Little Bit of Heaven
What the fuck happened to Kate Hudson? Once a promising actress, her career got progressively more grim, moving from Almost Famous to How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days to winding up in Fools’ Gold and dreck like this. A Little Bit of Heaven scored a whopping 14 on Metacritic, despite co-starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Kathy Bates, who at least has the next American Horror Story season to look forward to. Kate Hudson just has the bargain bin.
4. A Haunted House
White Chicks somehow ended up a cult classic, which I’ll never understand, but A Haunted House is inarguably awful, only saved from being the worst spoof movie of this year by the abysmal Scary Movie 5, the latest installment of the franchise the Wayans’ helped start. Scary Movie — while vulgar — at least had balls, truly committed to pushing the gross-out envelope. A Haunted House is just stale gay jokes that wouldn’t have felt fresh in their In Living Color days.
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5. What to Expect When You’re Expecting
If you hate yourself, you should absolutely watch this movie. Combining a bunch of actors you don’t like that much — including Rodrigo Santoro, Jennifer Lopez, Brooklyn Decker and Matthew Morrison — the movie casts famous people in bulk, hoping we’ll find something you like. Even the presence of Anna Kendrick wasn’t enough to make me care. No amount of alcohol on a plan could have made me give a shit.
6. Mean Girls 2
Did you know this exists? You do now. Do not go to there. I repeat: Desist. Drop the computer. I know you love Mean Girls. We all love Mean Girls, but nothing could make wasting your time on this worth it.
7. Elizabethtown
Cameron Crowe has made some bad movies (and his new one, Deep Tiki, doesn’t sound any more promising), but this is by far his low point, one of the most irritating and grating films I’ve ever seen. Orlando Bloom is a bland rich guy of the Jerry Maguire variety, and Kirsten Dunst is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who teaches him life lessons. There was a rumor floating around that her character was an angel , which is the only way her existence makes any fucking sense, but trust me. You’ll wish you were dead.
8. Love, Wedding, Marriage
This currently has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and to date, it’s one of two movies I’ve never finished. Starring Mandy Moore and Kellan Lutz, everything about this movie is generic and unbelievable — from a universe where they make sense as a couple to Moore having a PhD from Berkeley. Moore used to have promise (see: Saved), but after years of being put in crap, she seems to have unlearned how to act.
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9. Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Witness Protection
One of the most ludicrous titles in movie history, this movie was a cheap way to grab cash, enlisting Tom Arnold and Denise Richards to help Tyler Perry waste your time. It also includes Eugene Levy and Everybody Loves Raymond’s delightful Doris Roberts, which just makes me feel sad for them. Denise Richards, though, I never feel bad for Denise Richards.
10. Atlas Shrugged
Based on the Ayn Rand book everyone loves to hate, critics had it out for this movie before it ever debuted, a movie that they ran out of money filming, and the directors and producers helped the hate by giving us a shitty movie. The best thing about it isn’t Taylor Schilling’s wooden performance or the bizarre cinematography, but the late Roger Ebert’s total trashing of the film, to date one of his funniest reviews ever.
11. W./E.
This is the best movie Madonna has directed yet, but that’s not saying much. Although the stunning and talented Andrea Riseborough does what she can as Wallis Simpson, the movie is a shallow vanity project by a woman who shouldn’t be anywhere near a camera, whether in front of it or behind it. Madonna hasn’t the slightest clue how to work with other humans, and Abbie Cornish looks confused and lost, as if she mixed the wrong pills.
12. Cosmopolis
By far the worst movie of Cronenberg’s career, Cosmopolis is so horribly pretentious and boring that it makes watching Twilight seem appealing. Clearly David Cronenberg sees something in Robert Pattinson, but I can’t fathom what it is. Pattinson is a terrible vehicle for the script, a close adaptation of DeLillo’s dense little novel, and the movie collapses around him. You can tell Cronenberg made exactly the movie he wanted to, and that’s the problem. That movie is a piece of crap.
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13. Safe Haven
Safe Haven would be completely unremarkable, if not for a wild third-act twist that’s one of the weirdest movie endings ever. Spoiler alert: It turns out that the helpful neighbor (played by the otherwise delightful Cobie Smulders) is the ghost of the hot dude’s dead ex-wife. That’s a lot more interesting than the rest of the movie, which looks like a sullen toothpaste commercial filmed in North Carolina. Hollywood needs to stop trying to make Julianne Hough happen. She’ll never happen.
14. Failure to Launch
One of the most appropriate titles in movie history, this is from the phase in Matthew McConaughey’s career where he tried to be a romcom leading man. Here, he enlisted the help of Sarah Jessica Parker, who is only interesting when she has Cynthia Nixon and Kim Cattrall around. Nothing about the movie is memorable, and I actually forgot it existed until I saw it streaming online.
15. New York, I Love You
A sad attempt to keep the Paris, Je T’aime train rolling, New York, I Love You gives you 11 mediocre movies for the price of one. Whereas the earlier film had folks like Maggie Gyllenhaal, Margo Martindale, Emily Mortimer, Alexander Payne, Juliette Binoche, Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands, here we are stuck with Rachel Bilson, Hayden Christensen, Orlando Bloom and Shia LeBeouf. If this is what we love about America, count me out.
16. Butter
Butter should have been a much better movie than it actually was, but directed by She’s Outta My League’s Jim Field Smith, the movie was cruel and heavy-handed, a comedy that mistook cardboard caricature for satire. A parody of the 2008 election, the movie cast Jennifer Garner in the Sarah Palin role, and the usually lovely actress comes off as hollow as the movie around her, a confused mess looking for a point. If you want great political satire, check out In the Loop instead.
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17. LOL
This direct-to-video release stars Miley Cyrus as Lola (whose nickname is “LOL”) and Demi Moore as her mother. I have already told you everything you need to know.
18. To the Wonder
I love Terrence Malick. I really do. But To the Wonder was fucking terrible, a movie that punished you for liking The Tree of Life. Malick gives into all his worst tendencies as a filmmaker, and the movie feels less poignant and elliptical than completely lacking substance. The film features his trademark nature shots, but in a movie this bad, it can’t help but feel like an unintentional parody.
19. Aeon Flux
After winning an Oscar for Monster (my personal favorite screen performance), Charlize Theron was on top of the world. Like Halle Berry in Catwoman, she used the lack of oxygen to sign up for Aeon Flux, a movie whose costumes looked great but that was all dressed up with nowhere to go. It promises fun female escapism, with some good butt kicking, but it’s fatally silly and boring. I know Charlize Theron has to pay those bills somehow, but you shouldn’t have to watch it.
20. An Invisible Sign
You want to cast your movie about a math genius. You have a bevy of smart actresses in Hollywood, all of whom would be great for the part. And you cast…Jessica Alba? The movie fatally thinks that intelligence equals indie girl bangs and pigtails, as if brains are a fashion statement. Alba should just stick to Neutrogena commercials.
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21. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
You know, you really could watch this. Lots of people did, and it grossed a literal fuckton of money. (I imagine that Michael Bay printed the word “FUCKTON” across his giant pile of dollar bills as he counted them.) Or you could watch Exit through the Gift Shop. Or Drive. Or Duck Soup. Or one of the many other amazing movies streaming on Netflix. Don’t settle. Your brain deserves better.