Chris At The Pictures

Note: these are based on UK release dates

10. Sinister 2 – The beigest movie ever.

Worst bit: That by technicality, I have to call it a ‘horror’ movie

Full review here

9. Jupiter Ascending – That was your last chance, Wachowskis, and you royally blew it.

Worst bit: “Bees can sense royalty”

Full review here

8. Seventh Son – Oh, great, another teen franchise based on a boo-zzzzzZZZZZZZZZZ

Worst bit: Jeff Bridges trying to speak English

Full review here

7. Taken 3 – Remember when Liam Neeson punching foreigners was fun? The film-makers didn’t.

Worst bit: Forest Whitaker’s evil rubber-band

Full review here

6. Knock Knock ­– Keanu Reeves is Nicolas Cage.

Worst bit: Eli Roth is still making films

Full review here

5. Fantastic Four – I’ve never seen a movie more determined to kill itself.

Worst bit: The spark of a good idea being snuffed out

Full review here

4. Mortdecai – Enough to make you run home and shave your whole body.

Worst bit: It’s a hard choice between Johnny Depp, Johnny Depp and Johnny bloody Depp

Full review here

3. Solace – Forgot this existed? I think the actors have, too.

Worst bit: Not sure, it probably happened while I was asleep

Full review here

2. Pixels – A corporate product wearing the freshly harvested skin of an innocent short film.

Worst bit: Too many to choose from, so just draw up a chart of every scene and throw a dart.

Full review here

1. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension 3D – I know what you’re thinking: “Really, it’s not worth getting that annoyed about, is it?”…you didn’t have to watch it.

Worst bit: Active extortion of the audience.

Full review here

Sinister 2 sees young mother Courtney (Shannyn Sossamon) and her two young sons – on the run from an abusive husband/father – move into an abandoned house out in the sticks, only to find that their place of refuge has previously seen life as the stage of brutal killings, connected in some mysterious way to the murders of the previous film. Returning character Deputy So & So (no, really, that’s his actual name, check IMDB if you don’t believe me) tracks the paranormal happenings to Courtney’s new abode as her sons fall under the influence of a sinister presence.

Well, that’s what the movie’s supposedly about, but in essence it’s 90 minutes of writer Scott Derrickson and co. turning to camera and saying ‘Kids are creepy, am I right guys!?’ That’s really all there is to it. There’s no sophistication or intelligence or even anything particularly scary, which some of you may have noticed is a problem with something marketed as ‘horror’. There’s a moment very early on in which the two boys are chasing each other through a supermarket when one turns to find the other is gone. His twin leaps up and frightens him, and that is the core of what Sinister 2 labels as scary. I am now so numb to the cattle-prod effect of a jump-scare that it’s more like being prodded awake than shocked out of my skin.

The characters of the film are also badly handled: the abusive husband is a laughable caricature, the two boys are Children of the Corn knock-offs, and whilst the mother and the deputy (who resembles Bruce Campbell just enough to make me wish I was watching Evil Dead instead) get some attempt at development, that’s not what the audience wants. The children and the ghostly apparitions that come to them in the night should be the ones we’re taught to care about and be frightened of, but the former are lazily written and the scariest feature of the latter is that the director gave their performance a thumbs-up!

But surely a well-constructed narrative could provide something for the film to hang from, right? Well, yes…if such a thing existed in the same universe as this film. I often complain about heavy exposition in genre flicks, but Sinister 2 actively withholds important information for no good reason. Then when it feels kinds enough to thrown the audience a bone, said fragments designed to explain the logic and motivations of the hauntings are compressed into a five-minute sequence with a paranormal investigator who fiddles with a scary radio before disappearing forever.

There is at least some light at the end of the long, dimly-lit tunnel once you realise that as uninspired and dull as Sinister 2 is, it doesn’t set out to be actively offensive and – with any luck – will be forgotten in seconds. And hey, at least it wasn’t found-footage!

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Quite possibly the worst thing a film can do to you is betray you. Now I know that sounds like hyperbole, but despite the large and varied prejudices aimed at Fantastic Four – Marvel’s latest re-working of their classic comic book series – I entered the cinema truly wanting to be the dissident, the lone voice who found something of a gem within a troubled eventuality. Alas, my hopes were slowly but surely turned to ash as a laborious and suffocated production dragged itself across the screen.

The story will be somewhat familiar to anyone who knows the original comic, but for those who don’t: aspiring scientist Reed Richards (Miles Teller) creates a device capable of inter-dimensional travel and is hired by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey in permanent motivational speech mode) to help develop the machine for NASA. Richards and his companions Johnny Storm, Victor Von Doom and childhood friend Ben Grimm (Michael B. Jordan, Toby Kebbell and Jamie Bell respectively) take a journey to another dimension but are ravaged by cosmic radiation, as is Franklin’s daughter Sue (Kate Mara) when the capsule returns to Earth. Whilst Victor is left behind, the remaining four friends wrestle with strange and powerful new abilities.

The tiny spark of a good idea that I wanted to be much larger manifests itself here in two forms: for one, the opening thirty minutes is mostly character building; developing the dynamic between the young scientists and exuding an Interstellar-like ‘shoot for the moon’ attitude, a hope that extraordinary discovery is just beyond the horizon. Weirdly, the second is a complete clash with this wide-eyed optimism, and appears when the group return from the alien world. Their new powers – far from wowing them or enthusing them to reach for new heights – hurt and traumatise our young heroes, presenting their mutations as a Croenenbergian body horror nightmare.

Sadly, the compromised nature of the film (supposed falling out between the director and the studio, extensive re-shoots, re-workings of the script to name but a few) means that any initial promise is cruelly snuffed out. This is surely a case of the ‘making of’ being a more interesting, exciting and funny final product than the joyless feature it produced.

While at least Teller and Jordan appear to be enjoying themselves, everyone else on screen slips into a stupor by the 40-minute mark, so the promised depth of character and narrative plods to a standstill. One can only imagine how/if the original second half might have saved the project, but for now we’re dealt a clear point where Trank’s film ends and the studio re-shoots begin. The final act is rushed forcibly into empty and unfulfilling action sequences with lumpen dialogue, a cliché villain and super-powers that are arbitrarily introduced when required for the plot and never properly explained.

So those who come for the story will be bored, those who come for action will feel cheated, and God only knows how lovers of the comic must be feeling. I’m never usually lenient on comic fans when it comes to film adaptations (believing that a movie has to stand up on its own terms), but this is something else. Fantastic Four was a chance to heal a wound in Marvel’s movie history, a delicate operation that unfortunately fumbled the scalpel and lobotomised the patient.