I apologize to my millions of regular readers that I had to take a couple of months off, but I will be back at it in the new year. Meanwhile, it is time to reflect on the fucking dumpster fire that was 2024. Wow. This was easily the worst year for movies in the decade that I have been doing this. I didn’t give out a single A-grade the entire year, while there were plenty of films that would have deserved the “worst of the year title” in just about any other year. Here is to things improving in 2025 because I just can’t take another year of this crap.
Edit: I forgot to add a couple of caveats when I first posted this. First, I obviously haven’t seen everything released in 2024. As of this writing, I have seen 62 films released in 2024. That excludes a lot of stuff. Second, I am only counting films that were given a theatrical release. This is for two reasons: 1. I want to support theaters and 2. The vast majority of straight-to-streaming movies are absolute garbage and, if I included them, they would dominate the worst-of list. Those companies simply don’t care about quality, nor do they pretend to. I don’t think they even deserve the attention and I would rather focus on films that people somehow thought deserved to be seen in a theater.
Without further ado…
My Top 5 Films of 2024:
5. Late Night with the Devil: I didn’t catch this in theaters, but thankfully Joe Bob Briggs featured it on his show. A highly original religious horror flick that also goes to great lengths to recreate the style of 70s late night television, this is a blast even if it goes on longer than it should have.
4. The Substance: A bit (well, maybe a lot) too on-the-nose with its messaging, but an overall fun time. This is the Barbarian of 2024; a film that takes its initial concept and takes it into surprisingly campy, over-the-top Tales from the Crypt-style horror. Also like Barbarian, the film is extremely divisive and you will either love it or hate it. Whichever camp you are in, Demi Moore gives a performance worth watching.
3. Immaculate: I usually don’t care for religious horror, but it makes a second appearance on this list. I expected little from Immaculate, but was surprised by the sheer balls of the directions that it goes in. Hell, I’m still kind of stunned by the ending. Don’t see that every day.
2. Deadpool & Wolverine: Far from perfect, but a hell of a lot of fun and a reminder that superhero movies can still actually be worth a damn. The plot is gibberish, but nobody seems to care since the movie delivers what it promises. It also almost made me care about the 20th Century Fox Marvel movies. Almost.
1. Saturday Night: The second theme this year is 70s late-night television. Didn’t see that coming. According to most sources, Saturday Night is only marginally more historically accurate than Deadpool & Wolverine, but it is a damn funny look into the chaotic hellscape that is creating a live event.
The 5 Worst Films of 2024:
I don’t usually do honorable mentions, but there were so many godawful movies this year that I had a really hard time picking the bottom five. It is stunning that the following movies avoided the cut: The Strangers: Chapter 1, Drive-Away Dolls (The Film Nurse enjoyed this one, for some reason), Madame Web, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Trap, Afraid, Night Swim and Despicable Me 4. Yeah, despite each of them making me consider nose-diving my car off of a bridge, none of them made the cut. What a glorious year it was. But here they are, the garbage amongst garbage, the worst films of 2024:
5. The Crow: Equal parts despicable and baffling, this is the biggest “what the fuck were they thinking?” moment of the year. An ironically soulless cash grab that, also ironically, was seen by almost no one.
4. Imaginary: I thought that Night Swim had at least clinched the title of “worst horror movie of the year” until this pile of nothing was released. It was still a close call with Afraid also in the mix, but Imaginary takes the cake for this year’s least bearable entry into the subgenre of horror for people too scared to watch real horror.
3. Red One: I actually think that I like Christmas less now because of this movie. This was originally intended as a straight-to-streaming release and, holy shit, can you tell. This is the anti-film; a $250 million piece of content that looks like it was shot and edited on a cell phone. That kind of budget and you had to green-screen a cemetery? Really? Couldn’t just shoot on an actual location for just one day? Fuck you.
2. Venom: The Last Dance: Speaking of anti-films, I’m convinced that this movie didn’t even have a working script. The third Venom is just a series of loosely-connected vignettes featuring characters that have fuck-all to do with anything. The plot is the laziest kind of MacGuffin-chasing horseshit and the villain never even arrives. I will repeat that last point because I believe it warrants repeating: The fucking villain never even arrives to interact with anyone. We only hear about him. In a film that is supposed to be the “final” entry in a series. Wow. Just fucking wow.
1. Megalopolis: For all of my talk about anti-film, this one hurts. Megalopolis is an epic by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time and one of the greatest casts assembled in recent years. It is also one of the most insufferable experiences that I have ever had in a movie theater. This is the film equivalent of being cornered by an asshole pseudo-intellectual and lectured for two hours about how the world should work, but they brought their notes from their freshmen philosophy class to prove their point. There were a lot of terrible films in 2024, but a gun in my fucking mouth wouldn’t make me sit through Megalopolis again.
