10 Worst Horror Movies of the Aughts

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Originally, I was going to do a list of the 10 worst movies of the past decade, but as I started jotting down titles, a pattern emerged. Most of the films were horror entries. I think this has to do with the fact that I’ll see pretty much anything in the genre. This also used to be true of action films — I actually saw the dreadful Chris Klein version of “Rollerball” theatrically — but I’ve become more discriminating in recent years. At any rate, I decided to just do a list of the 10 worst horror films released during the aughts.

As a genre, horror is ugly and uncommercial. Successful horror films are almost always happy accidents. Even the franchise starters were intended to be one-offs made by directors with aspirations of moving on to bigger and better material. No filmmaker wants to be pidgeonholed as a guy who only does scare flicks. Well, nowadays you find some sociopaths out there who do, and their output is dogshit.

So why do I like horror movies if many of them are bilge? Well, when I find that occasional diamond in the rough, like “28 Days Later” or “Shaun of the Dead” or “The Descent” or “The Mist” or “Paranormal Activity,” I instantly forget about pretty much all of the flotsam on my list below. The genre is so diverse and so full of potential. There are tons of places horror can go that other genres shy away from. But it can also go wrong, and a lot of the time, that’s what happens.

For fun, I decided that each movie on the list should represent a different sub-genre of horror. Otherwise, I’d have too many Rob Zombie movies and/or too many plain ol’ zombie movies on here. Now we’ve got a little bit of everything. Without further ado, prepare to be frightened by some staggering levels of cinematic incompetence, the scariest thing out there.

Underworld (“Matrix” knockoff)

Remember when every single stinking movie aped “The Matrix?” Chief among the offenders is Len Wiseman’s “Underworld,” an unrepentant “Matrix” lookalike that pits leather-clad vampires against leather-clad werewolves in a wire-fu fight to the finish. The film also takes a page from “Romeo and Juliet” — unfortunately not the bit about the protags dying at the end — and has the lycan-loathing vampire Selina (Kate Beckinsale) fall in love with a werewolf-bitten blank slate (Scott Speedman). The only thing good about this movie is its trailer, and the only thing good about the trailer is the Agent Provocateur song, “Red Tape,” which I have on my iPod (“Hey-ya, hey, hey, yawww!”).

House of the Dead (video game adaptation)

Director Uwe Boll’s exploded onto the scene as the absolute worst filmmaker of his (or anyone’s) generation with this dismal big-screen version of the arcade shooter. Abandoning the pistol-packing “X-Files” approach of the game entirely, the film is about a group of kids who attend a rave on an island teeming with zombies. The level of ineptitude on display is somewhat staggering. This film, too, aspires to be like the “Matrix,” riffing on the whole back-bending bullet-time effect, but the ultra-low-budget means the camera simply goes around the characters as they move at half-speed. Even worse, Boll’s cheapjack bullet-time gimmick is repeated endlessly. What’s truly amazing about this film, beyond how it almost seems to be shitty on purpose, is that it got Boll more work.

Halloween (remake)

The aughts were the decade of the pointless remake, and none is more unnecessary than Rob Zombie’s attempt to top John Carpenter with the 2007 version of “Halloween.” Zombie somehow managed to lens a “Halloween” film that’s more ungood than any of the sequels. Giving Michael Myers a crummy childhood is the first of Zombie’s countless lunkheaded moves. The character is supposed to be the embodiment of evil, not the product of an abusive household. That the film also lacks any chills or atmosphere, what Carpenter’s version has in spades, makes the exercise all the more insufferable. Zombie’s unnatural and unspeakable dialogue is pure punishment to listen to. His shrill, real-life wife Sheri Moon especially grates on the eardrums. Dig this, there’s a 3-hour making-of documentary on the film’s DVD that sadomasochists must put on an endless loop during S&M sessions.

Blade Trinity (comic book movie)

As an unapologetic fan of the first two “Blade” films, I honestly couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I caught this movie in theaters. Written and directed by David S. Goyer, a nice enough guy, it misses the mark in every conceivable way. The promise of seeing Blade face off against the granddaddy of all vampires, Count Dracula, is completely wasted. The Reapers in movie two are infinitely scarier than that goon from “Prison Break.” Blade’s given two youngish sidekicks, Abagail Whistler (Jessical Biel) and Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds), who hardly bring a level of badassery that would warrant the spinoff film they were supposed to anchor in the event “Blade Trinity” was a hit. This is hardly the worst movie on this list, but it is probably the one that I found most disappointing overall.

Haute Tension (foreign film)

This film was released Stateside as “High Tension,” but I saw the French version, something I like to call “Haughty Tension.” Whatever its name is, “Tension” was supposed to be a return-to-form for the genre, something that many fans lamented had become too meta and self-reflexive for its own good. Director Alexandre Aja, who sucks by the way, starts things off nicely with a nifty decapitation-via-armoire. But he completely loses me with the film’s nonsensical final moments. Here’s the ending: the Final Girl turns out to be the Killer! What the shit?! In the context of the film, it does not work at all and retroactively makes the rest of the movie stupid because you realize you’ve spend the past 80 minutes being jerked around. Boycott France indeed.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (sequel)

On the set of a music video way back in 2002, I was talking to the director’s sister and asked her if she was an actress because she looked familiar to me. She told me that she was in “Blair Witch 2,” and without missing a beat, I said, “That’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.” I typically have a filter for potentially embarrassing comments like that. However, sometimes things slip through. She fortunately was dissatisfied with the finished product as well, so I didn’t end up with too much egg on my face. Still, when it comes to the aggressively stupid “Blair Witch 2,” a movie that bolloxes up its fairly straightforward sequel potential, one can’t say enough bad things about it. The franchise gets lost up its own ass in the very first sequel. Movie two abandons the mockumentary style of the original. In fact, the original “Blair Witch Project” is a movie-within-the-movie that all the characters in “Book of Shadows” are big fans of. And so, they go into the woods, where their bodies start stacking up.

I Know Who Killed Me (torture porn)

A cult is building around Lindsay Lohan’s last theatrically-released picture, a deliriously stupid thriller about a chick who investigates the kidnapping the mutilation of her long-lost twin sister. The movie is a bizarre hybrid of “Saw” and “The Bionic Woman,” as LiLo loses an arm and a leg at one point during the film and then gets highly-sophisticated prosthetic limbs. Like, we’re talking RoboCop cybernetics here, folks. This was supposed to be Linday’s big departure from Disney fare, as in the film, she swings around a stripper pole and shows some side-boob during a sex scene. But the dizzying incoherence of the plot makes it virtually impossible to follow. Oddly enough, it turns out that neither twin is killed in the movie, so even the title doesn’t make any damn sense.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (mockumentary)

This one has a fanbase, so I might catch some flack for calling it a pile. Nonetheless, I found myself actively hating this movie, a fake documentary about a slasher named Leslie Vernon. Taking a cue from “Man Bites Dog,” a small film crew actually follows around a sociopath as he goes on a killing spree. It’s more or less another metatexual bit of bullshit that smooshes together “Scream” and “The Blair Witch Project.” “Leslie Vernon” has a few clever moments, like his elation at the discovery that he has his own “Ahab,” a character obsessed with tracking him down. But the film feels more like it’s ticking off a checklist of genre conventions rather than doing anything unique or interesting with them. It also bitches out in its final third when the camera crew grows a conscience and tries to stop Vernon. A predictable bore, the film even telegraphs its final scare, and that sort of defeats the purpose of having one.

Deadgirl (indie)

I caught a midnight of this turd before it went direct-to-video. It’s a deadly dull film about a couple high school losers who find an zombie-like woman chained up in the basement of an abandoned booby hatch. One of the hormone-driven young men decides to have sex with her repeatedly over the course of several days. Horror films generally ask a lot of the viewer in terms of suspension of disbelief, but this is on a whole ‘nother level. The student film production values and rapey characters make this a real endurance test for the viewer. I strongly considered walking out several times. I didn’t because I knew the filmmakers were in attendance and wanted to avoid hurting their feelings. What a dinkus I am.

Diary of the Dead (zombie movie)

George A. Romero limply tries to modernize his zombie allegory for the YouTube generation with the fourth sequel to “Night of the Living Dead.” Apparently, Romero can only get financing for these types of pictures now, but one has to wonder why. He’s lost his touch. “Land of the Dead” was painfully middle-of-the-road, and that flick had a budget. This is a guerilla-style cheapie — and another “Blair Witch” found footage effort — about a group of film students who document the zombie apocalypse. As shambling as the zombies themselves, the movie looks and sounds like an old man who’s still trying to be hip, and that’s pretty much all that can be said about Romero these days.

There you have it, the 10 weakest horror movies of the early-2000s. It looks like 2010 will get off to a strong start with “Daybreakers” and “Legion” in January. But again, I’ve been fooled before.

-Brad Lohan

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