So, we’ve made it through another year. Go ahead and pat yourselves on the back because you’ve earned it, especially after these pretty difficult twelve months. The Russia-Ukraine war, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the cost-of-living and energy crises, the Roe v. Wade overturning, Elon Musk’s purchase and tanking of Twitter, three Prime Ministers in just as many months: you guessed it, 2022 has been a pretty miserable year – and that’s even before you factor in what’s been happening in the film world. Box office numbers continued to struggle in a post-pandemic world, streamers faced a mass exodus of subscribers due to rising costs, Will Smith lost his cool at the Oscars, and to top it all off there was an embarrassment of riches (or just plain embarrassment in general) for our annual Worst of the Year list, which is where we begin our traditional look back on the most noteworthy films that held our attention, for both the right and wrong reasons.

Before we descend into the year’s most heinous entries, here’s a brief reminder of how we determine what makes it onto our list and what doesn’t: films are only eligible if they were given an original UK release between January 1st and December 31st 2022, meaning that it has to have been out in the UK between those dates in order to qualify without being released elsewhere in the world beforehand (this includes cinema, on-demand or streaming releases). This immediately excludes a number of last year’s awards contenders like Belfast, Licorice Pizza and Nightmare Alley (which were released in the United States and other territories in 2021 before their UK release the following year), as well as any other movie that might have been covered during film festivals or early advance screenings, but do not have an official UK release until next year. Needless to say, any television series or special that has been reviewed this past year will also not be included, just to keep the list’s focus entirely on film.

With all that in mind, we’re about ready to finally reveal our bottom picks for the year, and which ones turned out to be so ghastly and laughably awful that they’re impossible to ignore, no matter how hard we all seem to try. But first, here’s a list of (dis)honourable mentions, in no particular order:

• The Princess

• Where the Crawdads Sing

• Dashcam

• Luck

• Persuasion

• Goodnight Mommy

• Fisherman’s Friends: One and All

• Amsterdam

• Don’t Make Me Go

• Prey for the Devil

• The 355

• Homebound

• Morbius

• The Man from Toronto

• Texas Chainsaw Massacre

And now, our list begins properly…

15 – A MADEA HOMECOMING

Although Tyler Perry has been donning the old lady get-up for years now, it’s still perplexing to see how fascinatingly awful his Madea film series can be, and with this first entry made exclusively for Netflix, audiences worldwide had the opportunity to seek out the absolute insanity for themselves. Perry, as ever, didn’t disappoint in that regard.

From the very first scene – wherein a man is completely engulfed in flames but emerges with nary a burn mark on him – you may think you know what kind of ride you’re in for, but Perry manages to pull the rug from underneath your feet at almost every turn, but not necessarily for the better. Filled with awkward direction, uneven performances, flat editing, and writing so over-the-top you’d swear that the Dynasty writer’s room snorted a barrel’s worth of cocaine, it is a baffling experience that you know for sure is terrible, but at the same time it’s impossible to not be impressed with how badly Perry manages to screw almost everything up – and that’s even before it turns into a crossover with Mrs. Brown’s Boys (yes, really).

It was a mesmerising introduction to Madea’s wild antics for worldwide audiences, but not necessarily in any positive or sane way…

A Madea Homecoming is now available to stream on Netflix.

14 – THE INVITATION

In an alternate universe, this movie is the result of studio executives defanging Ready or Not with endless script notes, until it hardly resembles the smart and darkly funny comedy-horror we all know, and is left as a brain-dead, tonally incoherent, and worst of all unentertaining supernatural horror.

Spare a thought for poor Nathalie Emmanuel, a wholly capable actor who here is saddled with a lead character who makes far too many terrible decisions amidst the most obviously evil clan of upper-class English aristocrats you’ve ever seen. She, along with the audience, struggles to comprehend the dull and very unscary atmosphere within direction and writing that fail to find a compelling enough reason to stick around, so much so that when things take a much campier tone for the third act, any interest you may have once had has all but evaporated. Not even some pretty over-the-top villain performances can save a predictable script that does nothing interesting with its set-up, nor does it ever feel fun to watch, even in the bad sense.

Suffice to say, this is one RSVP that you can easily ignore…

The Invitation is now available to rent/buy on most digital platforms.

13 – THE DESPERATE HOUR

School shootings made numerous appearances in the news this year, which is already depressing enough, but to have movies like The Desperate Hour come out and add absolutely nothing to the conversation, yet still act like it’s saying something valuable, is the handful of salt to the gun wound that nobody wanted.

Director Phillip Noyce and writer Chris Sparling centred their low-stakes thriller around the touchy subject, but by putting all of the attention on Naomi Watts’s exasperated mother as she spends the entire movie running through the woods with the greatest phone battery that humans could possibly own, it feels like a grossly cheap plot device than anything else. While it’s far from the most exploitative movie about school shootings, it was still one of the more tone-deaf ones, for its overly simplistic approach to a complicated topic that requires more thought and effort than just placing it in the background in the hopes that it will carry the movie on its own. Instead, it’s a cringeworthy and cynical emotional ploy that trivialises a genuine concern to underwhelming effect, for which it never manages to recover from.

Of course, it would be better to sit through this than experience an actual school shooting, but either way you’re going to be left with a serious degree of trauma…

The Desperate Hour is now available to stream on Sky Cinema.

12 – JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION

The biggest mistake with Jurassic Park – other than genetically cloning dinosaurs to run amok in a theme park – was turning it into a franchise. To date, no sequel to Steven Spielberg’s era-defining blockbuster has even come close to recapturing what worked so well the first time, and the Jurassic World movies in particular have only drifted further and further away from genuine enjoyment and into a thin, cynical piece of nostalgia-baiting, with Dominion now being the worst of the worst (yes, even more so than the infuriating Fallen Kingdom).

It’s such an overcrowded, overstuffed, and overly mindless entry that it barely even has dinosaurs in it – yes, they may be central to the entire concept of this franchise, but the number of raptors, T-rexes et al are shockingly small in this supposedly final entry, to a point where there are far more enlarged locusts than actual prehistoric creatures. Instead, you’ll have all the worst traits of these movies – dumb characters, logic-defying science, lifeless effects – cranked up to eleven, and it is not even entertaining to sit through, since it frequently moves around from one bombastic set-piece to the next without any consistency or time for the viewer to piece together what exactly is going on.

It’s a sequel that displays all the signs of “franchise fatigue”, and the best way to put this series out of its misery would be to just let it go extinct, whilst praying that nobody tries to replicate its DNA any time soon…

Jurassic World: Dominion is now available to rent/buy on most digital platforms.

11 – THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL

Netflix’s foray into blockbuster filmmaking has produced some painfully mediocre results this year – including The Gray Man, The Adam Project, and other titles that you’ll definitely see further down this list – but director Paul Feig’s high-concept adaptation of Soman Chainani’s fantasy YA book series was just too unbearable to witness, not to mention one of the most derivative movies that you’ll see all year.

The concept alone – young aspiring heroes and villains attend a magical school where they are taught everything by quirky professors and are separated into factions based on their personalities – is enough to make J.K. Rowling speed-dial her lawyers, but neither Feig nor co-writer David Magee manage to make it feel magical or even entertaining on its own. Instead, over a far-too-long 2 ½ hour runtime, it is bogged down by endless exposition that leaves little room for its bland characters to be developed, and leaves so many questions about this universe unanswered, particularly the ones that would help make much of it make any sense whatsoever. The movie ends up pleasing almost nobody, for younger audiences will be bored still by the long running time, while older viewers will be too busy pointing out all the Harry Potter similarities rather than accepting the fantasy world being given to us here.

It’s yet another big-budget failure for Netflix, and a further sign that they really need to put more focus on making sure their stories and characters are sound rather than how much money they’ve got to work with…

The School for Good and Evil is now available to stream on Netflix.

Click here for numbers 10-6 on the list!