10 Movies I Hate That Everyone Else Seems to Love

10. Return of the Living Dead (1985)

I begin this list by loosely defining “everyone.” Not everyone loves this movie, but for some inexplicable reason this is considered a horror classic and has gone on to become a cult hit that defined a generation, albeit a very small one of the “splatterpunk” scene. Yes, that’s actually a word.

It’s your basic zombie apocalypse movie except with some of the most obnoxious characters ever conceived. Ironically, the characters are what many critics point to being the movie’s strongest attribute. Nevertheless it’s a bunch of ‘80s punks hanging around in a graveyard, obsessed with sex, leather, and chains. And that’s it. It might be good for a laugh or two, but it certainly doesn’t warrant an entire film. It’s like a basic sketch comedy scene of what-would-happen-if-zombies-and-punks-mixed.

9. Burn After Reading (2008)

While not a huge hit, this was hailed as another “masterpiece” by the masters of dark comedy, the Coen brothers. I found it to be nothing more than a ridiculously pointless movie that lacked the humor of something like The Big Lebowski.

Despite a great cast, Burn After Reading is a huge disappointment. It basically answers the question: what would happen if a couple idiots came upon a bunch of spy information? But the problem here is that everyone is an idiot, including the spy, played by the iPhoneless John Malkovich. Not a single character is relatable, or believable. While the Coen brothers typically specialize in quirky and unique characters, I was very annoyed by all of these.

This is basically a plotless movie, and it goes on for far too long. I must say, though, that there was one part that had me laughing hysterically, but that was really the only part I enjoyed of this movie. And on top of that, the ending has all the action take place offscreen. I’m not a huge fan of the Coens but this is easily my least favorite of theirs.

8. School of Rock (2003)

I remember when this came out and all my friends were talking about how great it was. I liked rock music, so I kind of wanted to see it, but for some reason I didn’t until about 2008 or so. And I was disgusted.

It’s a Jack Black movie, first of all, so that means you’ll have to put up with some over-the-top obnoxiousness. He does tone it down a bit, considering he is doing stuff he’s clearly interested, and he allows the kids to take over a bit. But if you’re like me and you hate kids, you’ll hate this movie.

The movie has no purpose other than to reference classic songs and have stupid kids play them in a much worse way. It follows your basic premise of the main character lying about something in order to get money (or a job), becomes very well respected, until it’s revealed that he lied. It’s been done hundreds of times, and in far better films.

The ending concert is a bore, and I don’t know, but there’s just something weird about seeing a ten-year-old with a Flying V trying to look cool. Or a ten-year-old drummer with spiky hair. It’s just strange. And then there’s the over-acting of Joan Cusack and one of the worst performances EVER by the guy who plays Jack Black’s best friend. Minor complaint for a film that doesn’t focus on him, but it’s just painful. As is a great deal of this movie.

7. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

I was excited to see this movie. One of the most influential horror films of all time, this helped pave the way to the slasher subgenre, but was itself extremely flawed.

It just kind of begins after some creepy narration, and before we ever get to meet the characters, they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, Texas, and getting killed off. Movies like these shouldn’t try to be too heavy on plot, but we need some kind of introduction to engage us. I guess they picked up the creepy hitchhiker to set the mood or whatever, but that’s it.

There’s like a séance or something, and then not much else happens except a few people die. Modern audiences will be disappointed at both the lack of kills and the lack of gore. I don’t care about that so much, just as long as the movie is engaging. For instance, the original Halloween is not very gory at all and does not have too many deaths, but it’s a great movie because of how well it’s paced and how everything builds up to the final couple scenes.

This movie doesn’t build up to anything, really, but has a chase at the end. And then it ends. I guess maybe it ends to give the viewer kind of an uneasy feeling like the killer is still out there, or whatever, but this was the worst part of the movie for me. It ended literally right when it was getting good. I didn’t enjoy the movie at all until about an hour and fifty minutes in, and then it ended two minutes later.

This movie left me pissed off when it ended, and that’s why it’s in this list.

6. Beetlejuice (1988)

I hate Tim Burton. While I can’t say I hate every one of his films and some of them are actually pretty good, I just hate his style. He abandons narrative conventions purely for his visual style, which is quite amazing, I’ll admit. His best films, however, have some thread of an interesting story, like Edward Scissorhands, for example.

Beetlejuice, however, is not one of these films. It’s an unfunny mishmash of colors and abstract sets, stupidly written and overacted. It actually has a good cast, including Geena Davis, Michael Keaton, and a young Winona Ryder, but the actors outstretch themselves to bring some shred of character to an otherwise flat script. I found myself hating the titular character the first time he spoke, for instance.

Eventually it’s good ghosts against bad ghosts or whatever, but really who cares? Apparently a lot of people did. This was a very popular film that brought Tim Burton into the spotlight and predated films like Batman and Edward Scissorhands, which would use his vision far better.

5. Friday Night Lights (2004)

I remember when I played football freshman year of high school. My team’s quarterback said I couldn’t play football if I didn’t like Friday Night Lights. I guess that’s why I quit at the end of the year, because I will NEVER like this movie.

This movie has so many problems. For one, it focuses on so many characters that the audience never gets a chance to really know a single one of them. Even the lead, Billy Bob Thornton, is just a face and a voice to say coachy dialogue. And Boobie is there just to get injured and kind of inspire the team because he was the best player or whatever.

On top of all this, the football scenes were filmed horribly. It was all shaky cam. And while I know this was more about how football affects everyone’s lives, it clearly was about the game itself, too, because it climaxes in the state championship. So it’s pretty important to have well-filmed and exciting sports scenes, but that is all sorely lacking here.

And my final point on this one will be a small but important one. It’s on the villainization of opponents in sports movies. Sometimes it’s used well, but it’s such a simplistic way to get the audience to support the protagonists. After Boobie is injured, two players from the opposing team are shown fistbumbing each other, implying some kind of New Orleans Saints bounty thing, or maybe just people who don’t give a shit about other people’s safety. And then in the final game, we’ve got some asshole kicking a helmet into a guy’s face and making him bleed. Of course it goes uncalled. I hate movies that do this kind of shit.

4. Batman Begins (2005)

After The Dark Knight, people have pretty much forgotten Batman Begins, but at one time it was widely thought to be the best Batman movie and among the best superhero/comic book films of all time. But that didn’t fool me. This movie sucks.

My biggest complaint here is yet again the shaky cam. In every action sequence, the camera shakes violently like the cameraman is getting his ass kicked. It’s so bad that you can’t tell what’s going on. What’s the most important thing in a movie? Being able to see what’s happening!

So this movie violates rule number one, but it also fails at its own game. Because it’s one of those origin stories, about half the film focuses on how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, which I really didn’t care about to begin with. Not only that, but we don’t learn anything about Bruce Wayne as a character. He was afraid of bats so now he tries to scare criminals by being like a bat, is virtually all I got from him. Batman and Batman Forever, flawed as they may be (Forever in particular), both managed to be far more interesting about Batman’s origins in just a few brief flashbacks.

And like many origin stories, this falls victim to having a stupid plot and antagonist after the origin is revealed. In this case, we’ve got a bad Liam Neeson (for some reason, even though he seemed pretty good in the beginning; it’s never explained well), Tom Wilkinson playing a mafia dude, and Cillian Murphy as a psychiatrist who makes people insane by spraying them with LSD or whatever. Murphy probably gets the most attention, which is another misstep by the film, because he’s the most ridiculous. Despite this movie trying to be an ultra-serious and realistic Batman film, we still have to put up with the character of Scarecrow. While his motivations are clear, the character itself is so ridiculous. And I’ll add, too, that Cillian Murphy is only good when he’s playing someone from his native Ireland, or at the very least the rest of the British isles.

Thankfully this movie is kind of forgotten, but the damage has already been done.

3. The Boondock Saints (1999)

I shouldn’t even have to say anything because this is a shitty movie and critics know it. For some reason, every dude around my age loves this movie. I don’t know. It’s just an extremely violent and vulgar Tarantino rip-off, replacing wit for the most problematic and stupid message ever put to film.

There are two Irish-Catholic brothers who go around murdering criminals. I guess we’re supposed to like them because they’re taking the law into their own hands. FALSE. While characters like Batman do the same thing, he has a strict code of ethics that doesn’t allow him to kill anyone. Here the two brothers have this one rule that they don’t kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it. Oh. So who puts them in charge of saying who deserves death and who doesn’t? If these guys were serious Catholics, they’d realize that only God has that right, and there is always potential for redemption, even for the most horrible criminals (like them). This is why this movie is so fucking offensive to me as a Catholic.

Oh but they pray in Latin when they kill someone—isn’t that cute!!!!

Done before. Samuel L. Jackson with his Ezekiel passage in Pulp Fiction.

Oh, a gun accidentally goes off in a normal conversation scene, splattering a cat’s brains all over the wall.

Done before. Pulp Fiction again, this time with a human, making it a hell of a lot funnier actually.

They escape and then it’s showed in flashback how they escaped! It’s being nonlinear!

Done before. Every Quentin Tarantino movie ever.

And Willem Dafoe’s in it. Now seeing as how he’s from my hometown, I’m inclined to like him a lot. And he’s done some flat-out amazing performances in movies like Platoon and Antichrist, but here he plays such a stupid character who cross-dresses for some reason and screams out some of the dumbest lines ever written.

This movie is not just not good. It’s terrible.

2. Dazed and Confused (1993)

The soundtrack is all this movie has going for it. It begins in what feels not like a plot but like just an introduction to the main and supporting characters. And then ten minutes in, it hits you: this is the entire movie. People going around acting like idiots, being unlikable, and doing drugs and drinking.

The characters just about all suck. Slater is good for a laugh or two, the Jewish guy from Saving Private Ryan and his John Denver lookalike friend are alright, despite Denver having a creepy pedophilic obsession with a freshman—one of the many problematic messages in this movie, in terms of morals—and the main guy Pink Floyd is somewhat relatable and not an asshole. That’s as big a compliment any of the characters can get for this piece of shit. The main freshman, played by a young Tim Lincecum, is cocky sack of shit who I want to punch in the face every time he’s on screen. The guy who wears the overalls is an annoying sack of shit, and I literally found myself groaning whenever he was in a scene. Matthew McConaughey delivers his inexplicably classic line, but is far too creepy to be found funny, really. And Ben Affleck manages to be more of an asshole in this movie than he is in real life, somehow.

But the characters are the least of this movie’s problems. This movie has no plot. It’s just a movie about people getting drunk and high, with absolutely ZERO consequences. I might have found myself caring about something if there was a threat of them getting caught or busted, but probably not even then. I don’t give a shit if this movie “captures the 70s really well,” as everyone says it does, because it’s just a stupid, pointless movie. Nothing happens and this movie makes no effort to make me care about any of the characters or about anything that happens.

1. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

I hate this movie more than life itself. While I can’t say I love any of the Potter movies, I consider myself a bit of a fan of the series, liking all the movies except for this one and Azkaban, ironically the two considered by many critics to be among the best.

I hate the style of this movie. The direction is just off. One can look back at the first two films and complain how they’re two kiddy and stuff, but let’s face it: it’s a story about a boy who was 11 and 12 and it’s a story about magic and stuff that appeals to kids. Starting with the third, they took a much darker tone, and the series suffered briefly as a consequence, in my opinion.

My biggest complaint about the Potter series is that there are so many awkward moments. They exist in I think all of the movies, perhaps the exception being the last, which I’ve only seen once, so I can’t be sure. But it’s never more prevalent than in this film. The humor is still quite childish, but it sticks out like a sore thumb because this movie isn’t trying to be for kids. It’s PG-13, for Christ’s sake!

Now if you don’t know what I mean about awkward moments, I’ll do my best to describe a few, but there’s no way I can make you squirm and cringe the way I did while watching this movie. There’s one part where Ron is forced to dance with Professor McGonagall because he was talking or something. The entire Quidditch World Cup scene is just strange, how it’s painfully blunt in its foreshadowing of the importance of Viktor Krum and in its having the Weasley twins have to tell the audience which team is which, when we can clearly tell who’s Irish and who’s Bulgarian, and then in its tease to show you the game only to not show one second of the goddamn game (in hindsight probably not a bad idea, considering the Quidditch scenes started sucking after the second movie). The girl students from France or whatever with their stupid entrance trying to look like sex objects, and the Russian guy students quite literally announcing to all of Hogwarts upon their entrance that they’re evil. Then there’s that scene where Snape kind of pushes on Harry and Ron’s heads and they make noises of pain, and I’m just like “that doesn’t actually hurt at all.” There’s Filch running for some reason like he’s got shit in his pants. There’s the guy that looks like Hitler, who I find myself laughing at whenever I see him. There’s that pointless scene of when they eat the crackers or something that make them make animal noises. And that’s only scratching the surface.

All these awkward moments make the film into such an indescribably uncomfortable viewing experience. All the good moments like the dragon scene are completely overshadowed by glimpses of Neville dancing by himself and a stupid fucking wizard rock band. That people like this movie simply astounds me.