PHOENIX (AZFamily) — You may think that the movies you’ll find on a “Worst of the Year” list would consist of primarily lazy, unoriginal fare … and you’d be right! Even the movies here that are original ideas are completely uninspired. Well, you could say they are inspired in a way: inspired by other movies to the point where they’re total rip-offs! What else do you expect from the worst movies of the year? Certainly not several Oscar winners!
Let’s get to it!
Pete Davidson in THE HOME.(Courtesy of Roadside Attractions)
The Home is a horror movie starring Pete Davidson. I think that says it all.
(L-R) Lindsay Lohan as Anna Coleman and Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman in Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY.(Glen Wilson | Glen Wilson)
Freakier Friday is a movie so forgettable that the only thing I can remember about it is that it looked like a Neutrogena commercial. A perfect example of how painfully generic these legacy sequels can be (and that’s not the only one on this list), it’s a mindless, soulless, and desperate exercise in attempting to exploit the nostalgia of millennials. They try to jazz up the formula by making this a quadruple body swap endeavor, but that only served to make the movie more confusing, and worse, more annoying. The cast and crew of Freakier Friday were clearly having fun, but I wasn’t.
Michelle Dockery as Madolyn and Mark Wahlberg as Daryl in Flight Risk.(Courtesy of Lionsgate)
In Flight Risk, Mark Wahlberg’s character asks, “Y’all need a pilot?” What he should have asked is if they all needed a decent script. When the entirety of your movie is confined to a small aircraft, you need more than just a decent script. You need a clever script, a creative script, and Jared Rosenberg’s script isn’t it. You also need a good lead actor, and Mark Wahlberg, once again, isn’t it. His bald cap (I still don’t believe that’s a real shaved head) and hokey Southern accent are definitely something, though. If Flight Risk was your only choice of entertainment on a flight, you’d be begging for a parachute.
John Malkovich(Anna Kooris)
Opus is another one of those movies where a bunch of lower-class people attend a rich person’s lavish estate on an island and surprise, surprise! The rich people are evil cultish figures who have brought the commonfolk here to abuse them, kill them, sacrifice them, or whatever! Either way, it’s never good for our lead characters, and rarely good for us audience members. Opus attempts to be a critique of our modern society’s obsession with celebrity worship but doesn’t tell you anything you haven’t already heard or show you anything you haven’t already seen. This subgenre of film really needs to be put to bed because it’s the same movie every single time.
(L-R) Robert De Niro as Vito Genovese and Robert De Niro as Frank Costello in Warner Bros. Pictures “THE ALTO KNIGHTS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.(© 2025 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)
2025 was the year of actors playing two roles, with at least five movies this year featuring stars acting opposite themselves. Most of these movies have pretty good reasons to justify this (twins, clones), but there’s literally no reason for Robert de Niro to be portraying two separate, totally unrelated characters in The Alto Knights. To be fair, de Niro did a pretty good job in this one, but he was stuck in a movie that had no idea what it was trying to do. It’s a confusing mess of a movie filled with confusing, messy choices. Where Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece The Irishman was an introspective rumination of the mobster life, The Alto Knights is more like an old man rambling on and on about the glory days as he gradually snoozes off to sleep.
Side note: I saw Opus and The Alto Knights back-to-back on the same day, so it’s quite fitting for them to be right next to each other here. When do we get a buddy comedy starring Robert de Niro and Ayo Edebiri?
Madelaine Petsch as Maya in The Strangers — Chapter 2. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate(Lionsgate)
I try my hardest to not use the term “nothing happens” when critiquing a movie, but if any movie deserves those words, it’s The Strangers – Chapter 2. I never watched The Strangers: Chapter 1 (notice how they couldn’t even keep the titling consistent?!), but from what I understand, I kinda already did back in 2008 with the original! While watching Chapter 2, I didn’t feel like I missed much from the first chapter and when it was all over, I still feel like I didn’t miss anything. It is quite possibly the least eventful slasher movie ever made and there’s still one more chapter to go! I doubt I’ll bother, because the only reason to go see The Strangers – Chapter 3 is by applying the same logic they use when choosing their victims: just because.
The Fisherman in Columbia Pictures I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.(Matt Kennedy)
Legacy sequels are often pretty lame and desperate attempts to drum up some nostalgia bucks, but they can sometimes be good. The 2022 Scream film is such an example, and as far as I’m concerned, officially put a dagger into the subgenre with its razor-sharp commentary. How fitting for I Know What You Did Last Summer, which was originally produced to capitalize off Scream, to get a legacy sequel of its own. Living up to its 1997 inspiration, I Know What You Did Last Summer misses the point of Scream entirely, giving us a generic slasher flick without any clever commentary. Unlike its original counterpart, though, this new I Know What You Did Last Summer is the epitome of pathetic. A slasher so lacking in suspense and scares that you could probably give a toddler a camera and have them run around a backyard at night, and you’d get something scarier than this.
And don’t even get me started with that dialogue…
When people say, “Hollywood has no new ideas anymore,” they’re referring to movies like Jurassic World Rebirth. There’s not one original bone in this movie’s fossilized body; every single piece raided from better movies that are actually creative. If you told me Jurassic World Rebirth was a test to gauge if audiences would be okay with watching movies made completely by generative AI, I’d believe it. Even Scarlett Johansson knew what kind of dreck she was in, phoning her performance in through a tin can connected to a string. It’s up there with Dakota Johnson in Madame Web for a performance so bad, it has to be on purpose. I think it’s time for dinosaurs to go extinct again as they’ve more than worn out their welcome.
(from left) Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan) and King (Marshawn “Beastmode” Lynch) in Love Hurts, directed by Jonathan Eusebio.(Allen Fraser/Universal Pictures)
It’s never fun watching two recent Academy Award winners being forced to act in trash right after winning the crowning achievement of their career, but Love Hurts may be the worst offender yet. The fact that Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose starred in a movie this dreadful hot off the heels of their Oscar wins is nothing short of an insult to both of them. Thankfully, Everything Everywhere All at Once and West Side Story will stand the test of time while Love Hurts rightfully falls by the wayside. If that’s not enough, Love Hurts is also an insult to action movie junkies, giving us one of the most incomprehensible and unpleasant action films in recent memory.
Maddie Hasson in BONE LAKE.(Bleecker Street)
What happens when a small crew of filmmakers and actors go out to a house in the middle of the woods to shoot a horror movie on a small budget? Well, you get The Evil Dead, one of the greatest horror movies ever made!
But you also get movies like Bone Lake, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s a movie you’ve probably never heard of until now. Well, now you have, and now you know to avoid it! An exercise in tastelessness horrendously lacking in any sort of filmmaking skill or craftsmanship, the people who made this movie had NO idea what they were doing. The ones left to pick up the pieces are the poor actors, none of whom are good, but when their own filmmakers don’t even understand their own movie, what can they really do? Bone Lake presents itself as a movie that’s wanting to push the envelope, yet it can’t even write a simple letter.
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