Happy new year! Welcome to another annum of movies, horror, and other assorted nonsense here on No But Listen – but first, before we get into that, we must put the last year behind us. As they say, first, the worst, second the best, third the one with the hairy chest (or was that just in my primary school?). Yes, it’s time to exorcise (and that comparison will make more sense as we go) the worst movies of 2023 so we can clear the deck for the cinematic excellence (I hope) we’ll enjoy in 2024. Let’s get into it!
5. Scream VI
With the chaos surrounding the newest entry into the Scream canon, it’s easy to forget something important: the last one was pretty shit. A flabby, wasteful, and ultimately inessential entry into the iconic franchise’s canon, Scream IV just didn’t have a damn thing to say about the horror genre that mattered. It’s by far the weakest movie in the series, and felt more like a cynical cash-in than the loving genre roundtable it really should be.
4. Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
The much-anticipated new entry into the Mission Impossible series, even for anoraks like our resident superfan, just wasn’t up to scratch. Killing off an iconic and brilliant character in Isla was bad enough, but director Christopher McQuarrie spent the whole movie pulling punches and dodging plot points to save for part two, leaving this one feeling flat, empty, and decidedly disappointing.
3. The Boogeyman
Maybe it’s unfair to put this movie on this list at all, but when I think of the cinema trips that have turned out to be real drags this year, The Boogeyman is top of my list. Listless, uninspired, and derivative, a great cast isn’t enough to rescue this wheezingly overdone premise from total boring drudgery. Please let this movie be the proof positive we need that not every Stephen King story needs an adaptation – and that the horror genre might be getting a little too reliant on the paint-by-numbers Family Trauma story.
2. The Pope’s Exorcist
I can put aside a lot to enjoy a movie, I really can, but I draw the line at the bizarre Catholic church apologia that completely ruined this otherwise-enjoyable horror drama. Maybe I should have known going in just how much this movie would dodge acknowledging any of the church’s real issues, but The Pope’s Exorcist took it a step further, with the full brass balls to say that none of it had been the church’s fault at all, but rather, the devil possessing and influencing innocent members of the church. Guess that makes it okay then! I still remember my eyebrows exiting off the top of my head when I first saw this scene, and The Pope’s Exorcist has been irritating me ever since.
1. The Exorcist: Believer
Sometimes, it’s hard to see where a movie went wrong. Sometimes, it’s easy. In terms of The Exorcist: Believer, the answer is simple: fucking everything. Aside from some noble attempts to rescue interesting characters from the concrete shoes of this movie, David Gordon Green’s latest assault against the horror genre is an almost astonishingly bad film. A baffling mess that picks up and drops plot points seemingly at complete random, throws stacks of pointless and unexplored characters into it’s climactic third act exorcism, and fails to capture any of the eeriness and shock value of the original, it’s a film so dreadful and so badly made that has to be seen to be believer-ed.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Imdb)
No But Listen 