Pan and Slam

by Jason Koenigsberg

Before we celebrate the best of 2015, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the worst of the worst. These five films are truly terrible and not in the guilty pleasure or remote curiosity kind of way. Nowhere in these films lies any semblance of a good movie that was butchered in post production or lost in studio manipulation. These movies are absolutely terrible and we would be better off if they never existed. Let’s start with the worst of the worst to get it out of the way…

1. The Ridiculous 6  (directed by Frank Coraci)

Adam Sandler has made a lot of very bad movies this century, however none of them have been as stunningly bad and astoundingly unfunny as his poor attempt at a western with The Ridiculous 6. I could barely make it through this on Netflix, it is a toxic and ill-conceived mess. So many talented actors contributed to such a waste. Let us hope this is the nadir for Adam Sandler and he can somehow find a way to be funny in movies again. 

2. 50 Shades of Grey (directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson)

Overproduced and extremely boring, this is one of the least sexy erotic movies of all time. The two stars were wooden, no perverted pun intended. They were so bland and had zero on screen chemistry. The dialogue is preposterous, the sets are silly and kinky sex has never looked so mundane. 

3. Southpaw (directed by Antoine Fuqua)

Another movie that is a real shame because it wasted a good performance from the talented Jake Gyllenhaal. His follow up to his career best performance in 2014’s Nightcrawler is a paint by numbers sports picture that is as manipulative as it is predictable. This was my biggest disappointment at the movies in 2015. 

4. Get Hard (directed by Etan Cohen)

Will Ferrell used to make funny movies, and I have no doubt that one day he will be funny again, but this was not a promising sign. Kevin Hart on the other hand has never made a funny movie and that makes me ask, two questions: Was Eddie Murphy really that great during his heyday? and, Were comedies that much better overall during the ’80’s and ’90’s? Either way even mediocre Eddie Murphy movies are better than this. The more I think about it, the more I realize it was an insipid waste of everyones time involved especially the audience. 

5. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (directed by Spike Lee)

That is not a typo that is really the title. This past December Spike Lee gave us his best movie in almost a decade with the intelligent and subversive Chi-Raq, however back in January of 2015 he gave us Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, one of the absolute worst films of his career. I can forgive, but not forget this this terrible misconceived “vampire” movie.