The Signal Watch Presents: Worst Movies of 2024

I liked how I structured this last year, so I'll do it again here in 2024.  But broken up into Worst and Best posts.  

Here's a breakdown of the movies we watched in 2024.  

I know folks like Simon and Stuart watch many more movies per year than me, but it was a big year of movies at my house.

I'd also say - I've found the healthiest way to watch movies is not to worry about awards shows, the zeitgeist or common consensus.  Like what you like, for whatever reason you like it.  Someone will always find a reason your opinions are bad or wrong, buy... yeah?  Well, you know. That's just, like, their opinion, man.

Let's start off by being hurtful.  You can ignore my feelings or argue with about Ember Days in the comments.

The Worst Things I Saw in 2024

Despicable Me 4 - I was truly unhappy while watching this movie.  I guess things happening quickly and randomly while people yell in funny voices is what we're doing now in kids entertainment.  This is distraction fodder for kids, and that's fine.  It just felt like 90 minutes of being stuck in a Skibidi toilet at age 49.

Electric Dreams - a truly bad movie about future shock and romance and believing computers are magical, the way we did in the 1980's.  It felt like a 10 minute short stretched out to feature length, with unlikable characters and performances.

Four Musketeer's: Milady's Revenge - Boring.  Weirdly, weirdly boring.  A foretaste of the modern notion that stretching a single narrative across two movies is somehow better than just getting on with it in one movie, as this is the second half of the book The Three Musketeers and a sequel to the movie of that name.  

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - I'm sorry.  I guess when I watched the hilarious, classic 1984 movie about four guys cracking jokes while they hunted ghosts I did not think what we needed was to change this into a goofy melodrama for teens.  Badly, illogically written, with no real likable characters, this movie doesn't even fit the category of "action/ comedy".  It's just a plodding mess of stuff I've mostly already forgotten.

Godzilla (1998) -  breaking my own rule about discussing just movies I saw for the first time this year to dump on this garbage pile.  This movie continues to be terrible as a Godzilla film and as a film in general, and is maybe the apotheosis of the anti-indie stuff happening in Hollywood at the time.  This is what happens when dumb people think they're smarter than other people and will improve upon the work of their predecessors, but they're incompetent.  The only good thing about this movie is that Vicki Lewis may still be getting residuals from it.

Gymkata - this is low hanging fruit for a bad movie, but... holy cripes

I Died a Thousand Times - bad enough they remade High Sierra, but with Shelley Winters?  Bleh

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - my most controversial pick, but everything but Harrison Ford in this movie was half-assed and I'm mad they made this movie.  It feels like a punchlist of scenes and like it's trying to dupe us into passing the torch to Phoebe Waller-Bridges, who somehow is charmless and unfun, against all odds.  It feels like one of the Indy knock-off films from the 1980's, while refusing to make sense from scene to scene, including the goofy "I wish I could live in the past where people died of the common cold" ending.

Kissin' Cousins - Yikes.  Just.... yikes.  JOSH!

Late Night With the Devil - What happens when you have a great idea and a great lead and you are not good at making a movie that competently reflects your very premise.

Madame Web - (Stuart caught that I missed this!)  This is what happens when people who, somehow, in the mid 2020's, do not understand how superhero movies work, and are tasked with making superhero movies.  Mistaking "throw any @#$% against the wall, and that's good enough* with a story, plus way, waaaay overcomplicating the origin of Spidey, and refusing to show us superheroes in a superhero movie...  The entire movie *should* have been condensed to be the first act, and then what we saw in the last seconds of the movie should have been the movie.  But here we are.  The highlight of this movie was Dakota Johnson's IDGAF attitude during the press tour.  

Munster's Scary Little Christmas - I was miserable and the 1990's were a trying time

Operation Petticoat - All I remember about this movie is the premise is essentially "misogyny is fun"

Pumpkinhead - after years of not seeing this movie, I saw this movie, and I would have been fine not seeing this movie

Showgirls 2:  Penny's From Heaven - Huge bonus points for the star/ director/ writer making her own movie on Hi-8.  But I felt like I'd been tossed about like an American Tourister suit case by a gorilla by the time this rambling, exhausting movie ended.

SkyDivers  - Yes, an MST3K viewing.  But.  Ugh.

St. Elmo's Fire - Gen X, we have some explaining to do.  If this is our Big Chill, the Boomers had us beat by a country mile for ensemble movies about people during a transitionary phase.  Sexist beyond belief with characters you want to toss into a woodchipper, this movie is not something I'd ever suggest someone watch to understand anyone but stupid rich kids whose parents got them into Georgetown in 1982.

War of the Gargantuas - If 60 minutes of people screaming in monster suits is your thing, I have a movie for you.  The single worst Toho movie I've ever watched.  Amazing.

Honorable Mention - Ember Days

Look, this was made on a shoestring budget by a writer/ director/ actor, and I applaud people chasing their dreams.  It takes real work to write a movie, find sets, costumes, actors, and get people to show up.  Let alone get those scenes in the can, and then edit them.

But sometimes those dreams are goofy visions that needed some re-work, and for the movie to feature things like characters, motivations, intelligible dialog and a plot that makes sense or someone might care about.  Always show your script to someone you don't know before shooting your movie.

My suspicion is that two of the actors playing main characters ran out of time and had to leave, because the two characters disappear without explanation for the back 1/3rd of the movie.  They are also the only two who can deliver lines without cringing at their own dialog and are *also* the only two people in the movie who don't seem to be part of the writer/ director's patchouli-stenched polycule.  But if you are a white-lady with dreads and a utilikilt, you stood a strong chance of having a starring role in this movie.

Ostensibly about Deities living like modern humans, it's mostly nerds in cosplay gear toting fake machineguns in a war between the Winter folk and Summer folk, whatever that means, and it's unclear why any of it matters - despite the fact every line is purple prose delivered in ways that would have made Stan and Jack blush.

 

Worst Movie of 2024:  The Mummy (2017)

In a year of watching too many movies, it's hard to watch this movie and not get a little mad at everyone involved.  

We all know this was the movie that started and ended Universal's post-Avengers concept of a "Dark Universe".  I am definitely including Universal's hilarious hubris when it came to announcing a *full slate of movies with major stars* as part of the demerits associated with this film's ranking.  After all, this movie is why none of the rest of it could happen and actors flexed their pay-or-play contracts to collect millions for showing up for a photo-shoot once.

This trainwreck was penned by some of those star 2010's writers who made large, not-great movies during that era, and was directed by Alex Kurtzman who had done 3 things before this, including an episode of Alias, but for reasons beyond my imagining took this on and was the Kevin Feige of Universal's Monster Mash.

The Mummy from 1932 is an un-scary, somewhat plodding movie that is notable mostly for Zita Johann's gigantic eyes and sassy demeanor.  Plus, Karloff being a player, if a bit dusty.  But a lot of mummy movies have come and gone since then, including Universal and Hammer films, and some are okay.  The 1999 Mummy is a rollicking adventure with kid-friendly chills that spawned some deeply substandard sequels.

I am unsure why Universal went all in on The Mummy as the first monster movie, but I suspect the answer to much of what went wrong is summed up in Tom Cruise.  And in 2024, you are not allowed to point out that Tom Cruise doesn't always know what he's doing, but sometimes that is true.  But this hokey movie feels like multiple, un-affiliated scripts thrown in a blender and stapled together to make the worst possible version of all of those films at once.  

Cruise is badly cast as a rogueish treasure hunter/ military guy, and is never believable as the character he's playing.  Our titular Mummy has about four lines in the whole movie, is easily captured, and is basically borrowing ideas and FX from the 1999 movie.  Russell Crowe's Dr. Jekyll is a bad idea from jump, and our lead female is best described as "a blonde lady".  

I wasn't even miserable watching the movie - I was simply dumb-founded, as scene after scene happened, and you could see what they were thinking, but they weren't... good at what they were doing.  If there were supposed to be any chills to the movie, I didn't see them beyond a single scene in the movie, and I don't know that just having a gray palette for everything in the movie counts.  

At the end of the day, you can feel Cruise's actiony fingerprints all over this movie, and you kind of wonder what they originally wanted to do before Tom got involved and made this into MI: Mummy Lady.  

It may not even be the worst movie this year, but it is the one that made me the maddest while watching, as hundreds of millions were spent on such a half-baked effort.

By the way, The Dark Universe has not been forgotten and is now a land in their latest theme park, Epic Universe.  And, to be honest, the theme park looks far better considered than anything that happens in this movie.