Close your eyes and think of the worst movie you saw in 2021. Got it? Good.
Now forget it — because we can pretty much guarantee that these were a whole lot worse.
From The Exorcist to The Devils to The Omen, the 1970s were undoubtedly a golden age for
religious horror movies. There have been a few standout additions to the subgenre since,
but most contemporary faith-based horrors fail to capture the haunting magic of the
aforementioned classics — and 2021's The Unholy is a prime example. It's the story
of a hearing-impaired girl named Alice, who, after a visit from the Virgin Mary,
finds that she has gained the ability to heal the sick. What could possibly go wrong?
"I slit their windpipes and watched the breath slowly leak out."
As it turns out: a lot. To put a long story short, The Unholy is a tale of witchcraft, deception,
creepy dolls, and, uh, journalism. Disgraced reporter Gerry Fenn accidentally released
the spirit of a witch who then possessed Alice under the guise of the Virgin Mary.
Naturally, it's up to him to save her from the clutches of the aforementioned grumpy crone.
Cricket Brown and Jeffrey Dean Morgan do their utmost to elevate a cliche-ridden script,
but the by-the-numbers plot, predictable jump scares, and substandard special effects make
The Unholy a genuinely unenjoyable experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
the majority of critics had nothing but bad things to say about this unholy misfire.
Based on the real-life crimes of the Truck Stop Killer, Midnight in the Switchgrass follows
two FBI agents, Karl Helter and his partner Rebecca Lombardi, who are hunting a serial
killer at work in Florida's underworld. When Lombardi is kidnapped by the man they're after,
Helter teams up with a state-level cop to get her back and catch the killer.
Despite featuring prominently in the promotional material, Bruce Willis appears
in precious few scenes in this movie — as is pretty much the norm with his films nowadays.
Modern Willis movies also tend to get a real hammering from the critics,
and Midnight in the Switchgrass is no exception. As The New York Times' review said:
"The atmosphere is thoroughly sleazy without being distinctive, and everything about the movie — the
emotionless line readings, the half-baked backstories — exudes a terse functionality."
When the dust had settled, this thoroughly lazy thriller was left with a damning score
of just 8% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. The only people who might gain something from
Midnight in the Switchgrass are fans of Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly. Their relationship
began on the set of the movie, but even they're under no illusions about its quality. The couple
pulled out of the premiere, and Kelly appeared to call the film "trash" in a tweet days later.
By all rights, Naked Singularity should've been one of the best movies of 2021.
Produced by Ridley Scott and featuring the likes of Olivia Cooke and John Boyega,
this unconventional comedy-drama had all the makings of a modern classic. Boyega stars as a
New York City public defender going through a moral crisis. After learning that a client is
involved in a $50 million drug deal, he decides to steal the money from right under their nose.
There are plenty of good ideas here, but sloppy execution lets Naked Singularity down.
Threads that were fully fleshed out in Sergio De La Pava's original novel go nowhere here,
and writer-director Chase Palmer doesn't seem to know what genre his adaptation belongs to.
As The New York Times puts it:
"Naked Singularity welds legal drama and science fiction into a misshapen crime caper."
When a film has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes a month on from its release, it's usually safe
to say that it's not going to be remembered as a classic. And Habit, the debut feature from
writer-director Janell Shirtcliff, probably won't be remembered by anyone but diehard fans of Bella
Thorne. The former Disney Channel actor stars as a Los Angeles socialite who pays the bills by
selling drugs for a washed-up Hollywood star. When a drug deal goes sour and some cash is stolen,
she and her hard-partying pals go on the run. Dressed as nuns, for some reason.
It really does seem like Shirtcliff woke up one day and decided that a bunch of L.A. girls beating
the hell out of a guy while dressed as nuns would look cool on camera — and then proceeded to build
an entire movie around that idea. There was some backlash to the film when it was announced,
mostly to do with the casting of Paris Jackson as Jesus. But the final product is more of a
crime against cinema than anything else. Habit tries so very hard to be edgy; so much so that
the movie's press release actually described it as being "reminiscent of early Tarantino."
"The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men."
But the plot is paper-thin, and there's next to nothing in terms of character development. Variety
deftly summed up this mercifully short film with a single sentence in its review, calling it:
"[A] candy-colored dress-up excuse for a bunch of slumming models,
rock musicians, and miscellaneous scenesters."
Where did it all go wrong for Neill Blomkamp? At one stage, the South African director was in
line to take charge of a new Alien movie, but his stock has fallen significantly in
recent years. In an interview with The Guardian, Blompkamp recently joked:
"It's possible that Ridley [Scott] watched Chappie, and he was like,
this guy can't do Alien so let's just go ahead and move on."
He was speaking to the British newspaper to promote his 2021 supernatural horror flick Demonic
which, unfortunately for Blomkamp, got panned even worse than his much-derided 2015 sci-fi flick.
Chappie and Demonic are beset by similar issues — they're just a lot more
apparent in the latter. Filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Demonic is a far more
contained movie and therefore can't always hide behind its VFX. It follows a young woman
who gets the chance to go inside the mind of her comatose serial killer mother via new technology.
When she enters the simulation, however, she finds a demon, and it turns out that her mother
was possessed, and that the whole experiment is being overseen by a Vatican black-ops unit.
If this all sounds a little out there, that's because it is.
What's worse is that the director seems unwilling to fully commit to the bonkers premise.
As Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com put it:
"Demonic feels like a film made by someone who's scared of his own ideas and his own limitations."
People who saw Romeo Must Die back in 2000 probably thought they'd never see the day
that an even worse contemporary retelling of Romeo and Juliet could hit cineplexes, but on July 16th,
2021, that's exactly what happened. Die in a Gunfight stars Diego Boneta and Alexandra
Daddario as Romeo and Juliet — or, actually, Ben and Mary, two star-crossed lovers from powerful
families that have been at war since the 1860s. Their families are determined to keep them apart,
but as you've almost certainly figured out by now, they disregard the long-running feud and
follow their hearts instead. Vikings star Travis Fimmel also shows up as a
typically intense hitman, and the film is narrated by Billy Crudup for some reason.
Upon seeing it, it becomes clear why this movie spent over a decade in development hell.
Zac Efron was all set to star in and produce Die in a Gunfight in 2010.
Variety later claimed that Josh Hutcherson and Kaya Scodelario had agreed to play Ben and Mary,
but that also fell through. Would any of these actors have been able to save
the movie? Boneta and Daddario don't exactly shine, though their characters are so thinly
written that it's little wonder so many actors passed on the project beforehand.
They certainly weren't helped by director Collin Schiffli, who opts for action movie clichés and
excessive neon lighting over any meaningful exploration of the protagonists' characters.
If you've already forgotten about the 2019 animated feature The Addams Family,
you're not alone. Despite boasting an impressive voice cast, including Oscar
Isaac and Charlize Theron as Gomez and Morticia, the kid-friendly reboot of the classic property
wasn't exactly a hit with the critics — though low production costs meant it was
still able to turn a healthy profit. A second film was announced pretty much immediately,
and the A-list voice cast all signed on to reprise their roles. Unfortunately,
their combined talents were not enough to save this flat and equally forgettable follow-up.
The Addams Family 2 is the kind of film that could only be enjoyed by an
Addams — because it's torture. This painfully unfunny sequel follows the titular family on a
campervan trip organized by Gomez, who fears the Addams clan isn't as tight-knit as it once was.
Detective Pikachu scribes Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit were among the numerous writers who
contributed to the script, which is nevertheless paper thin, extremely light on laughs,
and nowhere near kooky enough for longtime Addams Family fans. Empire Magazine said of the film:
"Ironically, given the mantra for its main characters is about embracing the weird, The
Addams Family 2 does little that is out-there or different, delivering a safe, stale 93 minutes."
The Halloween franchise got a fresh start in 2018 when a brand new installment blew up the
box office and scored rave reviews. This new Halloween ignored all the films that
had followed 1978's Halloween and continued the story of Laurie Strode decades later.
The critics loved it, too... though the same cannot be said of 2021's Halloween Kills,
the shockingly bland second entry in a planned sequel trilogy.
Halloween Kills begins immediately after the conclusion of the previous film, in which
Laurie locked escaped killer Michael Myers in the basement of her house and set it ablaze.
It soon becomes clear that responding firefighters released him, and he's coming for Laurie once
again. But here's what seemed to annoy people: Towards the end of the movie, Myers is set upon
by an angry mob, taking a beating that no mortal man could survive. Yet he does. After being shot
and stabbed multiple times, Michael gets up and proceeds to slaughter the now-terrified townsfolk.
This ending caused confusion and disappointment in equal measure,
seemingly confirming that Michael Myers draws power from supernatural sources.
Previous Halloween sequels have taken this path, and the original did actually hint at it.
"I killed him." "But you can't kill the boogeyman."
But nobody expected this movie to follow suit. Making Michael truly
immortal was a major cop-out that only served to set up the final installment.
As such, Halloween Kills is a pointless stepping stone of a movie,
doing nothing to advance the overarching story — and failing to deliver any real scares, either.
Sometimes, something that works perfectly on stage just doesn't make the same impact on screen.
This is certainly the case with Dear Evan Hansen, the story of a high school loner who
gets swept up in a lie after a classmate dies by suicide. On the advice of his therapist,
Evan writes letters to himself, some of which mention his crush, Zoe. Connor, Zoe's brother,
snatches one of his letters before taking his own life, which leads everyone to assume the letter is
Connor's last missive to Evan. Instead of coming clean, Evan manufactures a fake friendship between
him and Connor, putting his parents' minds at ease and allowing him to get closer to Zoe.
It's not easy to get behind a character who would do such a thing, though Ben Platt made
it possible on Broadway. He reprises the title role in the 2021 film adaptation,
which keeps the tunes but lacks the offbeat charm. Without an audience to feed off of,
Platt's performance falls flat. As far as the music is concerned, the songs don't
have the same impact as they did on stage. As the Chicago-Sun Times review pointed out:
"Upbeat tunes and a heavy storyline about teen suicide make a cringey combo."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).