Ravenous (1999)

Dir: Antonia Bird

Boring, pretentious twaddle about a party of travelers in 1840s California who run out of food and resort to cannibalism. A similar story is presented in a far more believable, moving and interesting way in Trey Parker's "Alferd Packer : The Musical!" and that should tell you all you need to know. For one, this film expects the viewer - without sufficient set-up - to swallow the fact that eating human flesh turns you into an invincible superhuman. Even if you can deal with that ol' chestnut, the total lack of characterisation or emotional core remains tough to digest. It's just one of those insufferable movies that thinks it's being awfully clever but fails to even spell "Nietzsche" correctly when quoting him on the film's epigram. Nice going, guys. The occasional attempt at black comedy also fails to satisfy. You'll just feel empty inside after this one. See? It's so depressingly bad, I can't even be bothered to make decent food puns.

Freddy vs Jason (2003)

Dir: Ronny Yu

I'd almost recommend that you get yourself a copy of this film just so that, if you're feeling a bit jaded about horror and the direction it's taken, you can pull this wretched crap off the shelf and remember... THINGS HAVE BEEN WORSE. This coked-up abortion is an almost perfect checklist of everything wrong with the genre. An undeniable nadir. There's the total incoherence of a plot that appears to have been written by a six-year-old ("hey, so like, Freddy has lost his powers 'cos people have forgotten who he is (!) so he, like, goes into, uh, Hell, and, like, totally asks Jason to kill some kids for him"). There's the muddled tone that flies from dark and spiteful to corny slapstick so fast that it goes beyond stupid and hits downright tasteless. There's the horrible ultra-stylised rock video aesthetic that makes it so unrealistic and ugly that it's hard to even pay attention for more than 30 seconds at a time. There's the jaw-droppingly bad, 15+ minute "fight" sequence at the end (think CGI wrestling match set to bad nu-metal). It all combines to give you feeling a little like being lobotomised by mad children. Yeah, this is officially the worst film I've ever seen. I said it and I'm not taking it back.

Triangle (2009)

Dir: Christopher Smith

This film sucks more balls than opening up the airlock on an in-flight billiards tournament. Melissa George and her vapid friends disappear into some kind of paradoxical void presumably caused by their complete lack of charisma but it’s never really explained. There’s a boat involved. Actually, no, there’s a very poorly rendered CGI sea and some dire sets made to look occasionally like a boat. There’s a nod to the fact that director Christopher Smith has, at some point, watched films like “Donnie Darko” and deluded himself into thinking he could do something similar. There’s a graceless aesthetic (washed-out colours, shutter-speed fuckery) and a lot of derivative gimmickry. Even excusing the fact that the plot doesn’t make a lick of sense when you think about it, Smith doesn’t try to temper his nonsense with anything distracting like, say, characterisation. This is strictly one for those who thought his first movie, "Creep", was too challenging for them. It'll pass their time pleasantly while they’re recovering from the DIY brain surgery.

Flight of the Living Dead (2007)

Dir: Scott Thomas

Sigh. How hard can it be? Zombies. On a plane. It's almost a pre-written recipe for success. Just point the camera and go. How the fuck could you be so fucking talent-barren and stupid to fuck that one up!? I don't get it. I really don't get it, but this is one of the WORST FILMS I'VE EVER SEEN. Not even in a nice way, or a kitschy way. This is just a sad, acutely cynical money-making exercise. No thought or effort seems to have put in. The characters - even for stock stereotypes - are inconsistent, the layout of the 'set' is ridiculous, the photography's appalling, there are logic holes in the script that you could FLY a Goddamn plane through, it's painfully slow, the gore is largely CGI (bad CGI at that) and, by CHRIST, how could you screw this up!? It doesn't have to be hard. ZOMBIES on a motherfucking plane, people. Jesus. There's no hope.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

Dir: Marcus Nispel

Insufferable and vapid remake of the 1973 film which replaces anything of interest with generic, overcooked stalk-n-slash fodder. Teens in a van get stranded in a fairly nondescript location (they don't even try to make it look like Texas) and, one by one, they're hacked to bits by a lummox in a mask. The script here is one-dimensional and dismal. They even give Leatherface a lame back story in which he gets bullied at school for having a skin disease. Most shockingly of all, they unmask him (sacrilege!) and, uncannily, he's a deadringer for Stephen King! The whole film is so dull and unengaging that even the chase scenes feel like they're moving in slow motion. The set design is flat and unoriginal. The lighting makes everything feel washed out and gives the film a sterile atmosphere. The gore, whilst squishy and unpleasant, is needlessly cruel and this humourless mean streak running through everything feels more puerile than shocking. A perpetually braless Jessica Biel is the only thing at all appealing here. Everything else made me want just smash up the video case, take all the tape out and wear it on my face like a mask of celluloid. It'd be much better use of my time than actually watching the wretched thing.

Broken (2006)

Dir: Adam Mason

A woman (Nadja Brand) wakes up in a coffin, with a razor blade sewn into her intestines. Once it's removed, she finds herself chained up in a wood and kept prisoner by unnamed man who proceeds to torture her, physically and mentally, until she is, as the title suggests, broken. If 90+ minutes of women screaming and being abused sounds like your idea of fun then, for Christ's sake, don't encourage these sad tendencies by watching films like this, get yourself some help! Even ignoring the questionable subject matter (and the fact that it never actually leads to any substantial denouement), the film is bad bad bad. It's under-scripted (it plays like a 10 minute short dragged painfully into 99), it's over-directed, it's abysmally shot on graceless digital video, it's slow, it's repetitive, it's riddled with continuity errors, it displays no attention to detail and it's completely illogical (ie: how is Brand's make-up so immaculately applied after 40 days of being tortured in a forest?). This is horror made exclusively by and for mentally stunted sociopaths and represents the absolute nadir of the genre for the rest of us. Avoid at all costs. I'm serious.

Calvaire (The Ordeal) (2004)

Dir: Fabrice Du Welz

Listen? Do you hear that? That hollow, scratching sound? Fingernails on wood? Ah yes. You do, because here, folks, we are truly, desperately scraping the very bottom of the barrel. The plot of "Calvaire" involves a travelling cabaret singer whose van breaks down in the countryside during bad weather. He is obliged to accept the hospitality of a weirdo innkeeper named 'Paul Bartel' (a clumsy and perplexingly lateral reference) and next thing you know, he gets brained by a car battery, wakes up in a dress, tied to a chair and being given a curious new haircut. From thereon, we're forced to endure about an hour's worth of torture and the obligatory, obviously thwarted escape attempts. I don't know about you, but I'm way beyond bored of mindless sadism and people being tied to chairs now. This one offers nothing new. In fact, what little story there is becomes so pointless, incoherent and ridiculous that I wanted to throw a brick through my TV screen. How on Earth they expect the viewer, after sitting through such a slow, excruciating movie to somehow believe in such a clichéd, far-fetched primary-school level 'twist' ending is beyond me. Even a cameo from an unrecognisable Brigitte Lahaie doesn't save it. Who is funding this nonsense? MAKE IT STOP.

Seed of Chucky (2004)

Dir: Don Mancini

A joke taken too far can be one of the most torturous things to have to endure, as proven with "Seed of Chucky", the fifth "Child's Play" film. Watching it makes you feel like checking into a Slovakian hostel just to get some relief from the agony. In this, Chucky and Tiffany, the killer dolls, find their long-lost androgyne child (named Glen/Glenda - geddit?) and head to Hollywood where a film is being made about them. This provides ample excuse for almost non-stop awkward self-reference and a total lack of coherent plot. In fact, the script is so appalling that even at an ultra-lean 82 minutes (which includes a prolonged end credits sequence where all the 'highlights' of the movie get revisited), it draaaaaaags and feels like an epic. There are about five 'false endings' thrown in as further padding and, if that's not still bad enough for you to avoid this movie at all costs, just ask me about calibre of humour (ie: Chucky blowing up Britney Spears and giggling "Oops, I did it again!" to himself). With CGI dolls, CGI gore and (God save us all) CGI sets for some of the scenes, the movie plays like a cross between "Corpse Bride", "New Nightmare" and "Scream 3", which is to say TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE!