Probably more than any other genre, horror gets a bad rap for putting out a whole lot
of awful, cash-grabby movies.
It's usually made on the cheap, and there’s always potential for another sequel, especially
when your audience gets invested in a specific character or monster.
We over here at Top5Scary know how truly excellent horror films can be if done right, so it’s
a little disappointing when you see that embarrassingly bad scary flicks are still making mega-millions.
You would think these studios would have figured it out by now, but it seems like they’re
just content to make a quick buck pumping out random garbage.
Oh well, at least its something to talk about, right?
Hello horror heads and welcome back to the scariest channel on YouTube, Top5ScaryVideos.
I’m your horror host, Keegan Hughes, and today we’re gonna count down the top 5 worst
horror movies of 2019.
Before we begin, make sure to give us a big thumbs up and subscribe for more scary movie
stuff!
Alright, let's see some NONSENSE!
COMING IN AT NUMBER FIVE: IN THE TALL GRASS I really did think I would like this one going
in.
Love me some Stephen King, and the last novella that Netflix turned into a feature was pretty
good!
I think they aimed too high with this one, and fell off the wagon when they realized
it would be hard to portray a lot of the ideas on screen.
Unfortunately, it totally fell flat and left me sorely disappointed.
It’s just boring, with very little to offer the audience.
The story follows two siblings, Becky and Cal, as they drive to San Diego to give her
baby up for adoption.
They stop near a church, and hear a young lad calling for help in the tall grass.
Not wanting to abandon him, Becky and Cal wade into the blades, and immediately become
lost.
As it turns out, the grass doesn’t act like normal foliage.
It rearranges itself almost constantly, meaning getting un-lost is a very tricky task.
They find the young boy, whose name is Tobin, and soon come across his parents.
Becky’s baby daddy shows up too.
Did I mention the mysterious, ancient rock with knowledge-giving powers that tether people
to the grass?
Doesn’t sound like a terrible setup, but unfortunately it never really goes anywhere.
None of the characters are even a little bit likeable or relatable, and it never really
gets scary.
It gets violent, and it gets gross and weird, but never satisfyingly so.
The grass serves as the main location, and gets visually boring pretty quickly.
There are some neat camera tricks at the beginning that make it look like the grass is endless,
which is cool, but soon enough everything just blends together.
They have cool church and bowling-alley sets that they do nothing with, they just serve
as a place for the characters to walk around in.
On top of the meh scares and unlikeable characters, there are also some weird underlying messages.
I’m not exactly sure what this film is trying to say about Christianity and Paganism, but
there sure are a lot of incestuous and sacrifical undertones throughout.
There’s also a time-loop element that seems to reinforce some ideas about fate being unchangeable,
until they decide it's time to change it.
It also implies that Becky deserves to have her baby fed to her because she considered
giving it up.
Hmmm.
I finished this movie with very mixed feelings, and the more I think about it the less I want
to watch it again.
At least there’s a great head-crushed-like-a-watermelon scene!
NUMBER FOUR: THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA Another disappointing use of source material,
the Curse of la Llorona is the latest addition to the Conjuring universe.
Is it just me, or do all of these “side-stories” seem to fall flat?
I saw the Nun last year and I feel like it was the exact same movie.
Unless James Wan is directly involved, each new addition feels like its more concerned
with fitting in the universe and setting up for a sequel than actually making a good movie.
Don’t worry about what’s happening next time, make a good movie now!
Jump scare after jump scare, it never feels like the movie is heading towards anything.
Every scene is either a tense buildup to a quick spook, or a whole bunch of exposition.
I sure do love a whole bunch of sitting and talking followed by a ghostie jumping out
at me.
The Curse of la Llorona doesn’t even try to capitalize on the potential of the folktale
it’s based on.
La Llorona is a Mexican ghost of legend who drowned her children in a fit of rage, and
now wanders the earth searching for their corpses along the bottoms of rivers and lakes.
She often mistakes living children for her own, and drowns them.
Also known as the weeping woman, she cries alongside riverbanks to lure unsuspecting
victims to their death.
There’s a lot of creepy potential in that tale, which the movie does not capitalize
on.
They shoot it in Los Angeles, and have it play out like every other generic Hollywood
horror.
The performances were fine, and the camerawork was passable, but come on.
Nobody needs another uninspired, run-of-the-mill horror!
NUMBER THREE: ESCAPE ROOM Did someone say uninspired, run-of-the-mill
horror?
Well that’s exactly what you’re getting with this sterile nothing of a horror flick.
This one came out aaaaaaall the way back in January, so I don’t blame you if you can’t
remember anything about it.
It’s a pretty simple concept; a group of six characters are mysteriously invited to
a high-stakes escape room for a chance to win $10 000.
But there’s a secret twist!
If you fail the challenges, you DIE!
Oooooooh spooooooky.
A little late on this craze, hey Sony?
When did escape rooms hit peak popularity, two years ago?
I get that movies take time to make, sure, but was anyone honestly asking for a toned-down
puzzle horror?
I know for sure I’d rather go and do an actual escape room than watch this.
It’s sort of like SAW, but without any of the things that made SAW awesome.
Escape Room seems to pull every possible punch.
No gore, no pain, no real consequences.
Everyone dies off-screen, and for some reason nobody gets seriously injured while completing
each dangerous task.
They’ll come within inches of death, and then be totally fine once they get to the
next room.
It’s really weird.
Plus, most of the big plot points don’t make any sense.
There’s a scene where a small, college-aged girl is exposed to poison gas, passes out,
and then wakes up with enough strength to kill two grown men.
The big-bad is never even close to fully explained, all we get to know is that they’re rich
people who like to watch others suffer.
What’s new?
How do they manage all of this, let alone clean it up in the 12-hour span it takes for
the police to investigate?
Why do the main characters even show up?
If I got a mysterious puzzle box in the mail, I’d return to sender no questions asked.
They even give up on having a real ending in favour of sequel bait!
I guess that paid off though, because we can look forward to Escape Room 2: Electric Boogaloo
coming to theatres late 2020.
Oh joy.
NUMBER TWO: MA This tweet is about the only good thing to
come from MA. https://twitter.com/pattymo/status/1155304452338978822
That’s it.
Seriously though, I love Octavia Spencer.
She is great in just about every role she’s ever taken.
And MA is no exception!
Her performance is about the only salvageable thing in the 99 minute runtime.
The rest of MA is DUMB dumb.
Like, the director Tate Taylor just wanted to make something “really fucked up” and
here we are.
Plus, Octavia wanted a lead role.
First of all, the movie isn’t scary.
The whole thing just plays as weird and awkward until the last 10 minutes when everything
goes crazy and a whole bunch of gore is introduced.
The teen actors just look super uncomfortable the whole time, and not because Ma is threatening
them!
They keep doing scenes with “facetime” calls and other cool, hip, modern teen trends,
and it always comes across forced.
Even the party scenes were stilted.
Everyone’s always just standing around, bobbing their heads and saying dumb stuff.
“Bro this is so sick, wow! uHhhhhh” We know that party scenes can be fun, a million
teen movies and TV shows have done it before.
Why does this have to induce schadenfreude!
Why!
There’s barely a story, too, and it’s all revealed through flashbacks.
Soooo many flashbacks.
If you can’t tell a story without flashing back a million times, maybe reconsider your
subject matter.
It’s revealed that one of the teens’ dads embarassed Ma at a party when they were in
high school, and she’s never come to terms with it.
She uses the teens to eventually get back at him, and causes all sorts of trouble in
the meantime.
In the end, it’s just laughably bad, and not in a good way.
NUMBER ONE: COUNTDOWN As soon as I saw the trailer for this I knew
it would be ATROCIOUS.
I remember noticing that they changed their online campaign after it hit theatres, where
instead of showing footage from the movie, they had one of those night-vision cameras
at a screening and were showing people jumping in their seats.
No quotes from reviews, no plot details, just “look at how scared these audience members
are!”
Not a good sign.
The whole marketing campaign for this movie was embarassing.
The tagline is literally “DEATH?
THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT.”
What year is it?
2009?
How are you going to rip off an ad for the IPHONE ONE?
This never really had a chance, did it?
A low-budget schlockfest released just in time for the annual Halloween cash-grab.
Producers are shameless, eh?
Countdown is about an app that once downloaded will tell you how much time you have until
you die.
It sets up some Final Destination-style deaths, but never actually follows through with a
cool kill.
They cop out of a lot of potentially sweet kills by sending a spooky demon after people
if they avoid their initial blood-letting.
This is just one example of how they half-ass literally everything in this movie.
The scares are all boring.
The comedy is bad.
There are like 10 “main” characters, and we focus on none of them.
They all have names like Evan, and Derek, and Jordan and it’s honestly a miracle that
the actors didn’t mix their lines up with each other.
There’s even a priest named Father John, just in case you though they weren’t being
lazy and derivative enough.
They even introduce a character like halfway through with no context, and just expect the
audience to care about them!
There are plenty of really lame pop-culture references, and a subplot that provides some
really ham-fisted social commentary, all amounting to a whole lot of nothing.
I especially like the bit where they go to a phone repair kiosk and attempt to hack the
cursed demon app.
It’s just a whole bunch of really stupid techno-horror, along the same lines as “Unfriended.”
OUTRO: Phew, wasn’t that a whole lot of fun?
The worst horror movies of 2019, all in a list, just for you.
Do you agree with my ranking?
Are there any movies that I missed?
Let me know down in the comments.
Speaking of comments, let’s take a quick look at some of yours from last time!
Purple Squirrel says “Do what you want cuz a pirate lives free, you are a pirate”
Great, now I’ve gotta go listen to the Lil John Cooking by the Book remix.
I know what’s gonna be stuck in my head all day.
Taimi Ruiz asks “What is that ring you are wearing?
You move your hands too much for me to pause and see it.
Not sure why it’s become a curiosity but year.”
I actually forgot my rings on my dresser today, so I can’t show you up close!
Sorry!
But the silver one is apollo’s raven, and the brass one is a compass rose.
Next time I’ll try to slow down!
Adorable Nurse says “Guillermo del Toro MY MAN”
Always glad to see another Guillermo fan in the comments!
Kalillita Dub says “Great Content” No, you’re great content!
Aheira Miles says “I know I’m going to sound like a broken record, but you’re getting
better every episode.
Like it like it” Thanks Aheira!
I’m still getting used to being on camera like this, my previous experience talking
horror was on college radio!
I really appreciate all the love I’m getting in the comments, and I’ll do my best to
keep improving!
And with that, we can call this video to a close!
I’ll see you next time, and as always, Thanks for watching!