The Best Bad Movies Of 2016

There's bad movies and then there are BAD movies. The ones either so strangely terrible you just can't look away, or so balls-out crazy you have to give the film a little respect. This article is for the people that love the latter. So, if you're a person always on the lookout for the next The Room, here's the best bad movies of 2016. Beware, there are some spoilers below:

Continuing his string of weirdly pretentious roles, Will Smith plays an ad exec who's fallen into an extreme depression after his daughter's death. Since Smith is acting all "boo hoo, my daughter died," the other execs try to prove he's mentally unsound so they can kick him out of the company. Already, that's a pretty heartless and horrible idea, but it gets worse. To prove he's nuts, the execs hire actors to play Love, Time, and Death, to confront Smith about his erratic behavior. When Smith talks to them about Love, Time, and Death, the execs will record it, then digitally erase the actors. He'll look crazy! Or maybe you could just film his actual weird behavior that's causing the business to lose money, but Collateral Beauty isn't a place for logic.

The rest of the film has Love, Time, and Death teaching everyone lessons, and Smith reconciling with his estranged wife who gives us the shoehorned-in titular line. The wife says a nurse told her, when her daughter died, about "collateral beauty," the idea of the unexpected kindness that comes out of tragedy. It's not clear how this applies to the film, since Smith ends up giving up his lucrative career and getting back with the wife he was already happy with before his daughter died, but again, Collateral Beauty is not a place for logic.

That all sounds like a sappy, stupid mess, and it is. The fact that Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet, and Edward Norton are forced to say this trite dialogue only makes it all the better/worse. But wait, there's more! SPOILERS: It turns out the actors really were Love, Time, and Death all along! And Death was the lady that told the wife about "collateral beauty." Whoa! What a ... nonsense twist. Finally, Smith managed to make a movie with a worse ending than his suicide by jellyfish in Seven Pounds.

Kevin Spacey plays a cat. That's really all you need to know, but we'll go into more detail for the fun of it. Spacey plays a man who's too worried about work and not worried enough about family. Also, he is obsessed with building the tallest skyscraper. That really takes up a lot of the movie. Why children would possibly care about the corporate machinations behind tall buildings is a mystery, but Nine Lives wanted to add some architectural fun to a typical body-swap comedy.

Anyway, Spacey almost dies, and his mind goes into a cat called Mr. Fuzzypants. Christopher Walken is there being Walken-y. He must reconnect with his family, or he'll be trapped in the cat forever, blah blah blah. Overall, this is just a horrible scheme. Cats aren't known for their great bonding skills when they have cat brains, let alone when they're controlled by a business-driven Spacey.

The most fascinating part of this film is trying to guess why Spacey did it. Does he have gambling debts? Is he trying to fund a new film or theater project? Is he being held hostage by some cat-loving cabal? With Spacey's "sounds pissed to be here" performance, and the strange focus on business in a family film, this is, unlike Garfield, a cat comedy worth seeing.

There's an Indian director who keeps inserting himself into films and it's always terrible. No, not M. Night Shyamalan. Compared to the acting styles of documentary filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, Shyamalan looks like Brando.

It takes a certain kind of skill to make a documentary truly horrible, but D'Souza has that down pat. He's already made 2016: Obama's America, where Obama is treated like the devil incarnate, and America: Imagine the World Without Her shares stories about a successful African-American woman just after slavery that, from D'Souza's perspective, pretty much proves that racism was never really a big deal. Now he's back with his most personal story: Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party. After making illegal political contributions, D'Souza was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house. In Hillary's America, he dramatizes that time in his life, and comes to the realization that Hillary and the Democrats are just like the gang leaders and drug dealers he's now surrounded by.

For a supposed documentary, the movie contains almost no facts, and has some of the worst reenactments of all time. D'Souza, playing himself, is especially awful. When you can't believably say words you've already said in real life, you probably shouldn't act or make movies based on those impossible opinions.

Basically, Gods of Egypt is a movie about an alternate Egypt where gods walked amongst men. Also, gods are pretty tall, have blood of gold, and can shape shift into animal headed beings. In short, this is a film that tries desperately to make a compelling mythology, but completely misses the mark. But it does make a great cheesy, over CGI'ed work of action-fantasy craziness.

Gerard Butler is in it, so you know the movie will feature maximum levels of butt-kicking. If you're looking for a film with $140 million cruddy CGI that features muscle-bound dudes traveling to the underworld to fight Butler's god of darkness, you certainly can do no better than Gods of Egypt. As Alan Scherstuhl said in his Village Voice review, "As bad movies go, this one at least is all-in on its badness." What more can you really ask for?

The last, and worst, of the Gary Marshall holiday ensemble films, Mother's Day would probably be rejected from the Lifetime Network for being too sugary and sentimental. Sure, there's a star-studded cast, but the stories are so predictable, it honestly becomes funny. Julia Roberts is a successful author who gave up a child, then another story features a bride-to-be that wants to find her mom. Wonder how that could possibly connect?

The real star of this film, and what pushes it into truly terrible territory, is Julia Roberts' wig. It's the worst wig that's ever been. The fact that Roberts didn't immediately throw that rug to the ground and light it aflame is shocking. It turns out that it's an old wig from the Roberts collection — Elle found out it's the same wig from a moment in Notting Hill. Julia kept it around for some reason, so knowing she likes that wig and said yes to this script might be proof that she's either losing her sight, or her mind.

Definitely the weirdest film on the list, For the Plasma features dialogue that could have easily been penned by Tommy Wiseau. Now, this isn't badness on the level of The Room, but it has its moments. It's a story about two girls who have to watch security camera footage to look out for possible forest fires in remote Maine, but one girl has found that she can predict the stock market in the trees. Well, you can't say it's cliche. The two girls then mostly walk around, randomly get in fights, meet Japanese businessmen who want to hire them for a mysterious job, and describe beetles that live off their own poop. Nothing really makes sense or is explained, and all the acting is bizarrely monotone and strange.

But the real magic happens with the lighthouse keeper. Sporting a fake Maine accent, he pops in to check on the girls, speaking as if he was an alien that got a brief intro about the inflections of English. He tells a story about a ship being wrecked in the night, killing all its passengers, but then reprimands himself for not inviting the girls in for coffee ... coffee that, moments later, he says he doesn't have.

BOMB Magazine features an interview with the filmmakers, where they seem to believe they made some piece of art about the idea of watching and "looking beyond the narrative." Don't believe them. This is a garbage movie with no meaning that's made fascinating by its array of bad choices. And please, stick around for the lighthouse keeper. He truly shines in the most terrible way.