I believe that a year in film is judged, not by its failures, but its successes. As you saw last issue, if my top 10 films of the year had not existed, there would have easily been 10 more to fill their places. Thankfully, the worst list is comprised of 10 films so offensively awful in so many ways that they have solidified their places here as irreplaceable. First here's a few that were close but didn't make the list (in no particular order): Idiocracy; Underdog; Unaccompanied Minors; Next; Flyboys; The Marine; Employee of the Month; Running With Scissors; Trust the Man; Zoom; The Quiet; Let's Go to Prison; The Good Sheppard; Sleeping Dogs Lie; The Hitcher; Alpha Dog; Happily N'Ever After; Georgia Rule; Because I Said So; Hannibal Rising; The Messengers; Even Money; Delta Farce; License to Wed; Reno 911; Shooter; Dead Silence; Premonition; The Hills Have Eyes 2; I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry; Pathfinder; Wild Hogs; Are We Done Yet?; Fay Grim; The Ultimate Gift; Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer; Hostel Part 2; Evening.

10. Broken Bridges: You hear screenwriters talk about composite characters; a person who is the amalgamation of several real life figures. Now here is a composite film, comprised of every flag waving, war supporting, tear-jerking, false sentiment stirring cliché straight from the Hallmark Greeting Card book of filmmaking. The film was produced by CMT, stars country darling Toby Keith (displaying all the dramatic range of a 2x4) and is exactly the kind of film that all the conservative American country music fans who boycotted the Dixie Chicks in Shut Up & Sing would love. Makes sense, as the film is no more than a second-rate construction of all the spare parts from a direct-to-video tearjerker. We've got the slain-in-Iraq brother, the estranged teenage daughter, the journey back home for the funeral, the estranged husband and father, the grumpy father-in-law, and in a final scene of spectacular ineptness, the main character sings a song which she has not only never heard in its finished version, but never performed before, but manages to sing it like an American Idol finalist, only to touch the heart of everyone in the room. All the rope in Texas and a tall oak tree couldn't fix this cheap feature.

9. Bratz- Here is one of the most shallow, juvenile, morally corrupt films for adolescent girls I have ever seen (and I've seen almost all the Hilary Duff movies). The film, unlike its influence Mean Girls, deals with high school in stereotypes so broad that it features an embarrassing scene in which kids line up on the first day in order to be given lunchroom seating charts based on what social group they belong to. And then there are the Bratz themselves (based on a superficial toy line), who send a message so ethically backwards that one questions what are young girls are to make of the notion that you can do anything as long as you put your mind to it, and make sure to look as good as possible in the process. There are great and inspiring films for young girls (Real Women Have Curves, Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants), but this one could prove harmful to impressionable young girls looking for role models to base themselves upon. Not only that, but the film is a technical and stylistic disaster, looking cheap and ugly, as though it should have gone straight to cable. Also note that that's Oscar winner John Voight under that huge prosthetic nose as the high school principal. For Shame.

8. Smokin' Aces- In my upcoming review for Shoot 'Em Up I muse that for roughly every one good high energy, stylistically excessive action picture like Running Scared you get two or three terrible ones. Smokin' Aces is one of the worst: an incomprehensible jumble of violence and rapid-fire editing which loses all sights of character and plot development in the mix, as a dozen or so people you won't care the least bit about wage battle over who will be the first to rub out a cheap, drug addicted Las Vegas magician and collect the reward. The pacing is unbearable, the acting delivered terribly at high intensity, and the story leaving not one solitary reason for anyone to care in the least about what is going on or why.

7. Daddy's Little Girls- Writer, Director, Actor, and all around incompetent individual Tyler Perry is back once again with another shallow, unrealistic, overly melodramatic piece of "life in the black community" fluff (his Madea's Family Reunion was my pick for the worst film of 2006). I don't know who Perry hangs around with, but does he truly believe that life is as two dimensional as it is in his films. Who does Perry believe he is touching by belittling characters and their emotional complexities such as criminality, drug addiction, and child abuse to cinematic binaries? Each character is good or monstrous, each situation either unrealistically horrible or unrealistically sentimental. A hardnosed career woman instantly changes to a saint without thought or reason, a mother steals her children from their caring father to mistreat them while living with her pimp boyfriend, etc. Daddy's Little Girls is to the black community what Bratz is to adolescent girls. Perry, over the course of three films, has proven himself an appalling writer and director because he sees life only through limited vision. His characters are stereotypes who deliver dialogue which sounds like it was lifted from the nearest soap opera; he is afraid of human complexity and abuses melodrama of only the most ham-fisted variety. When set next to great films that deal with life in a black community like Boyz N the Hood, Crooklyn, or even Roll Bounce, one can see that Tyler Perry is working at a preschool level of filmmaking at best.

6. Norbit- My second love after film and literature is the art of stand-up comedy. So it is with unsettling fascination that I watch Norbit, a film starring Eddie Murphy. And I get to wondering, how could one of the freshest and most funny young comedians of the 80s not only star in, but produce and co-write a film of such unbearable awfulness; such offensiveness; such humoulessness? Did Murphy, whose previous performance in Dreamgirls got him an Oscar nomination, really think that this crap could possibly ever be funny no matter how many characters he played? How could a man who was once so sharp and so amusing be so negligent of good taste, especially directly after proving what a good actor he can be with the best role of his career? What puzzling questions a film like Norbit raises, and even worse, what unfortunate conclusions it seems to offer.

5. The Grudge 2- Here's a personal anecdote. I'm a mild tracker of the happenings of the internet movie blogs on IMDB.com. One thing that I constantly notice is that, whenever a Japanese horror film is remade in America, many bloggers go on a rampage about Hollywood's desire to Americanize and ruin great foreign films. After seeing the truly awful, incomprehensible first Grudge film a few years back, I took it upon myself to see the original Japanese version Ju-On to see if there is justification in this complaint. To my surprise the original was even less scary, even less coherent, and even worse than its American remake. I told my story to tell you that no Grudge film, no matter what language, will ever be worth the time and effort they expect of their audience, but heck, you could tell that from watching any isolated five minutes from this film, it's just as terrible as the rest.

4. Night of the Living Dead 3-D- Here is the senseless desecration of a cult masterpiece. I don't care if it's a remake, an homage, a whatever; the film reeks of amateurism around every corner. It is overly gory, adds new characters and developments to support its absurd new plot (Barb finds herself holed up in the house of a bunch of stoned hippies) and disperses with all the juicy social commentary that made the original such a great film. There is even a strange pastiche to the original film as the hippies watch it on TV before having their house attacked by zombies. My question is, if you just finished watching a film in which a woman named Barb is attacked by zombies in a rural farm house and then a woman named Barb shows up at your rural farm house claiming to have been attacked by zombies, wouldn't you maybe catch some irony? Apparently everyone working on this film was too inept to either.

3. The Covenant- Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips has a theory that acting is one of the last things to ever go wrong with a movie. After you see the Covenant, you'll be convinced it must have been one of the first. Bad enough, the story of a group of brothers with special vampireish powers doesn't follow any logical, coherent plotline, but the acting from the young, pretty-boy cast is the worst of the year; it might be the worst of the decade. Leading man Stephen Strait doesn't have the slightest bit of charisma even though we can see him struggle under the strain of reciting illogical dialogue as if he actually takes the role seriously, and Sebastian Stan plays absolutely every note of the villain wrong. Some actors don't realize that there is a thin line between evil and parody, and Stan flies so far over the top without restraint or control that it embodies that worst kind of acting: that kind that seems to announce itself as acting. It's as if he's winking to the audience, "Look at me, I'm being evil." This guy would be excessive on a high school stage. Even though he seems to be having the time of his life, his lack of control for the craft single handedly ruins a film that would have still been terrible without him.

2. Epic Movie- This is the worst spoof I have ever seen! Never before have I seen a film so devoid of humour. There is not one laugh here, not one clever line, not only itty bitty mercy giggle. It's easily the worst comedy I have ever seen. It's makers must know nothing about the art of comedy. They're apparently so clueless that they didn't even realize that they weren't parodying epic movies at all, but rather contemporary blockbusters like the Chronicles of Narnia, Pirates of the Caribbean and the Da Vinci Code. But why do these films need parody, they are good films and what results is not clever jokes but characters who never reach beyond mere impersonation. When Jack Sparrow shows up he performs an embarrassing rap song. But so what, it's just a guy dressed as Sparrow rapping, which is especially uninspired seeing as the original captain was already such a great parody. And what's with that climactic fight scene with Fred Willard where every time he does a karate move we can see that the film has switched to a young Asian body double who clearly looks nothing like Willard? This is obviously intentional, but why would anyone find it funny? Is using a poor body double and then exposing it inherently funny? That question may be too rhetorical to even answer; nothing about Epic Movie is inherently funny.

1. Saw 3- Saw 3 is a cold, dark, ugly, vile, repulsive, grotesque, misogynistic pile of crap. Here is proof that the MPAA will never give an NC-17 rating for violence. The film goes way over the top, degrading itself to the cruel depths of offensively violent. Rarely am I ever disturbed or offended by violence, but Saw 3 presents violence of such ugliness and depravity simply for the sake of showing off for the camera that I condone every moment of it. Never once does the film take responsibility for what it shows us. It has no insight into the nature of the evil that it deals with and instead presents a poorly thought out social memorandum: the Jigsaw Killer only tortures those who do not respect life. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy if I ever saw one. It takes with one hand what it gives with the other. Who tell me, respects life less than a man who kidnaps, tortures, and brutally murders unsuspecting victims? The philosophy is as ugly as the final product. And then Saw 3 offers us a cruel and saddening social commentary on ourselves, making me wonder who is worse: the filmmakers who were coldhearted enough to make such a cruel, vile film and pass it off as entertainment, or the millions of people who consume and are themselves entertained by these Saw films? How depressing.